Do you think the interactivity of game violence makes it different than violence on television, which is passive?
Of course, as you actually grow neural pathways called dendrites that enable you to perform more easily the physical acts of violence.
Um...I'm not a neurologist, but doesn't that have to do with muscle memory for things like learning to ride a bike? Or, for example, learning how to move your mouth to make certain syllables? I mean, even if you did play a game long enough for your brain to be hard-wired like this, it seems like those pathways would dead-end if there wasn't a controller in your hand.
I believe you'll get your fill of logical objections, but I have some philosophical ones for you.
Why is your belief in a literal bible a "problem" with evolution theory? Regardless of whether either idea is true, any person's beliefs against them don't make them any more or less problematic. If you're willing to believe that there is a fundamental and divine TRUTH to the world, surely that is greater than the beliefs of any man? I was under the impression that religious men should seek out this truth as a natural extension of their desire to understand and be closer to God.
Believe me, I pity you for having to reconcile two concepts that seem irreconcilable to you. It must seem like a great imposition that so many people promote science without any regard to the sacred. But that doesn't mean that the science is flawed, or that it truly negates your religious beliefs. If you look more carefully into the claims of the evolutionary theory, you'll find that many a striking parallel exists between the current theory of the planet's development and the first chapter of Genesis. For example, they agree that animals lived in the sea before they lived on land.
(On a more esoteric note, did you know that there are two words for "day" in Latin? In Genesis, the word used for the days of Creation can mean a day, a week, a season, a historical period, or any other length of time. A different word offers the definition of a specific 24-hour day. This is something that most people don't know because they deal exclusively with English translations of the Bible, or not at all.) In any case, the two stories are not so oppositional as you might think, but seeing this takes a willingness to understand the concept before dismissing it as mere "bunk."
Finally, consider carefully the statement:
It takes more faith to believe in what man thinks he knows versus having faith in the One Creator.
Why should the truth be indicated by how difficult it is to have faith in it? You seem to claim that science is false simply because it is harder to maintain in the mind than religious faith. This idea is disturbing to me, since it implies that, contrary to what most religions preach, God really wants us to do what is easiest as opposed to, for example, what is right. Does the Bible which you take so literally really promote this? (It was easier for the Samaritan to leave the traveller for dead.)
I will grant that believing in the many half-discovered disciplines of science is much harder than being devout, but I do not think that means what you think it means.
Here's a list of each article and the exact sentence that made want to stop reading. Just for reference, I tried reading these as if I was reading any other piece of journalism or opinion in a paper or online publication, and yes, I am an English major.
From A Rape in Cyberspace "A good many months ago -- let's say about halfway between the first time you heard the words information superhighway and the first time you wished you never had --"
I stuttered before I even finished this sentence, as, for one, it has a very snooty "I know more about the Internet than you, you unwashed thing" ring to it. But I was more annoyed that Dibbell was hamming up his already captivating and empathy-inducing story of virtual rape with this cheesy noir hyperbole.
From Posessing Barbie ""I have a confession to make." typed BabyDoll."
I confess, I was really looking for a quick way out of this one. Any "real" journalist, or heck, let's say creative writer, should check punctuation before they publish something. People wonder why the rest of the world doesn't take NGJ seriously. Maybe it's the shitty sub-par editing?
From Dreaming in an empty room
"And . . . to a certain deeper extent, creepy as hell."
The ellipsis in this sentence totally blew me away. Not only is it in completely the wrong place, but Tim felt he needed to expand it with extra spaces. Call me crazy, but if I'm reading an article and I see an ellipsis with extra spaces, there had better be something great after it. As you can see, there isn't. It's a horrible stew of a sentence, flailingly trying to piece together bits of common idiom into a coherent thought. Also, for God's sake, Tim, capitalize your title so it looks like one!
From Shoot Club: Saving Private Donny "When it came time to make a man jump on a banana, he pronounced it 'gay' and put the controller down."
At first, this seems like a normal, slightly stilted sentence. Nothing a little bit more editing couldn't fix. But you should know that until this point in the narrative, it was all in present tense. In fact, Tom returns to present tense for the rest of the paragraph. I would make fun of him for it, but I just can't find anything else to say.
From ZangbandTK: Confessions of a Dungeon Hack "Plain, though no-one would ever say that to her face for fear of her tearing off their arm and using it as a particularly bloody stole."
Is it a fragment? Is it a run-on? Is it a poor choice of voices? Is it an adverb obstructing the flow of expression? Holy shit, batman! It's all four rolled into one! At this point I should clarify that what I'm objecting to here isn't writing that's wrong in a technical sense. We're all adults here, and I feel we can use sentence fragments as we please.
What I'm objecting to here is writing that is aesthetically bad. Seriously, try reading this without feeling nauseous. Maybe if you're a native German speaker, you're used to seeing long strings of similar-looking words. I envy you, because this makes me woozy.
From The Great Scam "You would then sell these pebbles for approximately the same price that an illiterate slave would have received for an ounce of cotton."
Okay, so technically this isn't the first sentence in the article that doesn't make sense, but I was so incredulous over his line about this being a story of "the worst of the human condition," I read longer than I should have. I think the objection here is obvious: it makes no sense. On top of that, it's belligerent, whiny, and exaggerative. It belongs on a slashdot thread about P2P, not in one of the supposedly "best" articles in New Gaming Journalism.
From Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time "What games communicate convincingly is the now."
Actually, this was a fairly decent article except for the tightly-pa
The Great Scam doesn't even look like creative writing to me. Specifically, it looks like a slashdot rant. I quote,
"You would then sell these pebbles for approximately the same price that an illiterate slave would have received for an ounce of cotton."
Come on. I mean, I know about hyperbole, but this doesn't even make sense. At least slashsons check their idioms before they post, if only for fear of being ridiculed.
Creating games with very well-developed moral messages is a challenge. More to the point - it is an extra challenge over the challenges of putting together a good game in the first place. It involves working the philosophy into the engine and the gameplay - a task far beyond the kind of "morality infusion" that movies get. In a film, all you have to do is have a character say, "Killing is wrong." In a game if, for example, you tell the player "killing is wrong" and then reward him for being a generally nasty guy (as is the case in Fable and every single other game that has tried to implement a "morality system" for figuring out if the player's character is good or bad), well gee, the morality there kind of seems like lip service, doesn't it?
What Richard Gariott described is a real instance of morality in a game - your actions determine what happens. No one is going to punish you for being bad or reward you for being good, it's just you and your actions. You can claim that the game "forced" you to do it, but if you play the game over you'll find that you actually can take a moral high ground. The problem with interactive morality is though, it's very hard to see if you're not actually playing the game.
Video games are very high concept, complex, and abstract works of art. But, at present they are more like architecture than poetry or painting. Their first priority is to build an interesting structure for interaction. (See, for instance, the wonderful Katamari Damacy, which uses a real-ish context as icing on the interactive cake.) Morality is often meaningless in these situations simply because the game is so much girders and drywall - that is, so much code and interaction - that the engine itself is the game. You could make the game "about" anything - just like you can make a version of Tetris that is "about" Monty Python or the Parting of the Red Sea, but it's still Tetris. Real-world morality finds itself wandering into the picture when someone sees an engine-based game like the original DOOM and thinks that it somehow means shooting people. In most cases they will never realize that the meaning of the game is in reality the interface itself.
Of course, I would love to see some more deep philosophy in games, as well as better writing in games in general. I myself am a fan of storytelling games (i.e. Grim Fandango, Shadow of Destiny), which are much heavier on the morals because they are nearly identical to film. But I also want to see more games like Katamari Damacy that know they're pure interaction and ignore the morality issue completely in favor of interesting gameplay. I think there's room in the market for both.
I overheard this conversation in my local Target while I was trying to find something to spend a gift card on.
Girl: Um....What about this one?
Mother: Diabolo? Isn't that a devil game? Why don't you get a book with your money instead? All these games are too violent.
Girl: But I want a game! Oh, I like this one, mommy! (Picking up a copy of Roller Coaster Tycoon.)
Mother: (sarcastic) Are you sure? But you don't kill anybody in this one. (Puts RCT back on the shelf, picks up a copy of Spider-Man 2.) How about this one? You can kill this guy on the box here.
Similarly, when my boyfriend showed his mother the gameplay in Animal Crossing, she said, "I bet nobody really plays this game. It doesn't have any shooting." It's a sad thing when the parents are so convinced that video games are bad, they go after the violent games because they can't think of games having any other appeal. Geesh.
Re:Bad reviews on Vampire: Bloodlines the cause?
on
Troika Games Closes
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· Score: 1
Um... the game didn't crash the computer. He just said it "crashed to desktop." The program ended abruptly and exited to the desktop. That happens all the time.
The point is not that "child abuse does not exist." I don't know where you got that idea, although I admit - it is an attractive Straw Man.
The point is, just because someone has been accused (or even convicted) of child pornography, under the current laws that doesn't mean that they definitely molested someone incapable of consent, and then distributed photos of it (which the subject was also unable to consent to). What I have just described is a criminal and despicable act. BUT:
The original poster's point is that the arbitrary nature of the law doesn't fit the reality. An underage person can consent to have sex on camera with as much (or more) knowledge of the consequences as an adult can. And those who are legally adults can still be taken sexual advantage of. Thus it would seem that the requisite of age is ill-fitting to the purpose of preventing a truly ghastly crime.
Of course, there are corner cases in every legal situation, but if you're convicted of child porn in the US, you lose many rights you would have otherwise retained - not to mention, you are publically registered as a sex offender, leading to harassment and censure from people like you who aren't even willing to understand the circumstances of a charge, who see red at the sight of the words "child pornography" and can't be bothered to think about it any further.
That was a personal insult, just so you know what one looks like from now on.
So many of the anti-child abuse and anti-child porn laws are propelled through the lawmaking process simply because the crime they attempt to prevent is so horrendous. I'm all for erring on the side of caution when a snap decision has to be made, but it is our duty as citizens to ask whether the law we practice on a span of years actually prevents these ghastly crimes, and whether it hurts people who, while perhaps not morally flawless, did not commit the ultimate crime of child molestation.
I might point out that most of the U.S. has a strong stigma against discussing abuse. This is not just because the abused fear the abusers, although that is often stated as the cause for such silence. Many organizations which could otherwise provide support for the abused (schools, churches, Boy/Girl Scouts, etc.) feel that those subjects are completely inappropriate, and therefore will simply stop speaking to someone if they choose to admit to being ANY party, abuser or abused.
This was even more true in decades past, when current child molesters would have been kids.
Someone I went to high school with was convicted of distributing child pornography. The "child porn" in question involved a 16-year-old - that's legally a minor, but arguably she was old enough to consent. Also, the guy was only 19 or 20 himself - barely out of school.
I moonlighted for a local paper at the time, and after a little consideration of the actual details of the case, the front page writer who was handling the story decided that presenting it to the public as a "Kiddie Porn Case" would be unethical. She decided to refer to the offense as an "indecency charge".
A few days later, the competing local paper came out with a big headline: "[LASTNAME] CONVICTED OF CHILD PORN". The story was just too juicy to bother handling ethically, I guess.
Granted, the guy did some very cruel things with the photos once he had them. They should have pinned him with libel and defamation of character - the whole incident made life unbearable for the girl. I'm not saying he should've gotten away scot free, but calling him a pedophile completely misses the point.
Although he's said he doesn't intend to sue anybody, I find it highly unlikely that he has noble intentions in filing a trademark he clearly has no rights to.
I suspect, however, that his true purpose in filing the trademark is to give himself some clout in taking down other online sales of MAME arcade machines. As he himself mentioned, he has been trying to take down a lot of Ebay auctions of "illegal" MAME cabinet sales. The only problem is, you can't take down Ebay auctions unless you are the actual copyright holder. My guess is that he's trying to get the trademark so he can pass himself off as a legitimate "owner" to companies like Ebay. I doubt he really had lawsuits in mind.
I sent Ebay a letter about his copyright holder status, which you can read here if you like.
I sent Ebay a nice little letter about this guy. If you've ever tried to communicate with Ebay to get an auction taken down, you know that they only let you request to have auctions cancelled if you're the actual copyright holder of something that's being pirated. Read on...
Dear Ebay:
Recently, a man named David Foley, CEO of an arcade machine maker called UltraCade, has requested that a number of Ebay auctions of arcade cabinets loaded with the Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) be taken down because they violate his copyrights.
As you know, your policy specifically states that requests of this kind should only be made by the copyright holder. Mr. Foley does not hold the copyright to any of the software his company sells - he is merely a liscensee. Nor does he hold the copyright to the MAME name or logo. Nor does he hold any patent on the design of arcade cabinets or the electronics inside.
Knowing this, I would closely examine any request he may make in the future to remove Ebay auctions on the grounds that they violate his "copyrights," since he holds none.
Sincerely yours, ---me---
It's not that I'm saying his claim about MAME only being used for illegal software isn't valid (although it isn't). I'm just saying that he doesn't have the right (by Ebay's rules) to restrict this theoretical copyright infringement when he doesn't own the copyright to anything involved in the auction. Hmm...maybe Ebay noticed, so now he's filing the MAME trademark to legitimize himself. What a plan!
I believe the whole "Jon Stewart to replace Dan Rather" joke came from a clip on the Daily Show where they reported that CBS was looking at all sorts of replacements for Rather, including "Douchebag McJokenstein" - show image of JS here.
I doubt CBS would ever consider Stewart for that kind of position. I'm also pretty sure he'd make fun of them for offering.
I heard a few years back that they used systems like that to do data mining - figure out where people stopped the longest, which products they went for first, which coupons they used the most, etc.
Supposedly they used the data to reorganize the store. More likely they would sell the demographics back to various manufacturers who pay good money for market data.
Yeah...for some reason the self-checkout machines at Wal-Mart are a lot more sensitive and less user-friendly than the ones used in most grocery stores. I don't know why this is, except maybe these machines were cooked up specifically for W-M and didn't go through the usual level of quality assurance.
On the other hand, the machine also knows the dimensions of every piece of inventory, so if something is too big to put in the bagging area, the machine tells you to just put it back in the cart. I don't know how useful this is, but it seems really cool to me.
They have these at the Albertson's in my home town, and the prices there are quite reasonable. I doubt these systems put much cash strain on a store beyond what you usually need to run one, what with tracking customer purchases and tying it all into inventory and such. I bet it's a steal compared to all those checkers they used to employ. (Seriously, I've been there at times when there was only one checker, and she was overseeing the self-check.)
Is that possible? I mean, as I understand it the DS processes the code differently depending on where you choose to load from, the DS slot or the GBA cart. Am I wrong?
I think that game companies have finally figured out how to tap into the fact that most of us take the recommendations of friends far more seriously than those of professional reviewers. Halo 2 in particular had it's fans so worked up about the game, the only question people could ask me after the preview event (at the end of a certain ARG) was whether it was, and I quote, "totally awesome."
You just made me think of something here. The reason that games tend to get inflated review scores (i.e. 70% for a mediocre game) may very well be that, as consumers, we consider ourselves too good for everything but, say, the top 20% of games. This makes perfect sense, given that we have a scant amount of money to spend on gaming every month. Since most games are in the same stratospheric price range already, we'd rather get the most bang for our buck.
(This is opposed to the silly idea that a rating below 7/10 is to be taken as "crap." There's a difference between "crap" and "probably not worth the money.") No wonder everyone is shooting to get their game rated at least an 8.5 these days.
Just for the record, in my opinion Tycho and Gabe are the only media people whose opinions on games are worth heeding.
As someone who owns both systems, I can tell you that, even though their respective bits of hardware may be comparable, the Cube has some very distinct performance advantages. Most notably:
Load Times. The Cube is so fast reading and writing all it's media, that sometimes you'll blink and miss a load screen. Some games (like Donkey Konga) save every two minutes or so, but you never even see a save screen. The practical upshot is Metroid Prime's ability to stream the next area as you approach the door, resulting in no load times at all - which RE4 apparently imitates. Compare this to, for example, Simpsons Road Rage for the PS2, where you often have to wait 45 seconds to retry a 20 second time trial. Obviously, this is also a problem with the game software - you should never have to reload the entire game environment to replay a single level. But it still takes 45 seconds to load! That's about 5 seconds more than it takes my computer to boot up.
Full-Screen Antialiasing. The Cube has it, the PS2 doesn't. This means when I pop in a simple-looking "kiddy game" like Wind Waker, what I see on the screen are smooth edges. Even if the characters had only a few polys, the whole thing would look smooth because of the antialiasing. Compare this to Shadow Hearts for the PS2. Everything looks like it was bluescreened together - jagged edges everywhere. I'm sure game developers could write a bit of code to simulate antialiasing on the PS2, but on the Cube they don't have to - it makes the graphics smooth for you. This, by the way, is one of the reasons it's so damn hard to pick the zombies out of the background in a Resident Evil game.
Also, Resident Evil 0 (and also the original I think) used a 1-second full screen video loop as the background for every room in the game. This allowed all of the poly-pushing power to be put into the character models and other movable objects. This is possible on the Cube because it has a powerful 2-D engine native to the system. (I would guess that this particular technique isn't too hard to do on the Cube, because Baten Kaitos uses it also.) Guess what? The PS2 doesn't have this. It's not that it can't be done on the PS2, it's that, as a developer, you'd most likely end up having to write the graphics modules for it yourself.
I don't know much about memory buffers and poly- or texture-pushing capacities, and I'm not really sure if these differences have anything to do with the hardware itself. They could very well be optimisations in the Cube's compiler, or flaws in the PS2's OS. I do have both systems though, and just from playing both of them (a lot!) I know that there are some areas where the Cube just takes the cake. It's not too far fetched to say that RE4 exemplifies them.
Yes. And if it's a religious ceremony, then what precludes people who believe in the sacredness of gay marriages from performing them? Or is freedom of religion just a figure of speech?
I think it could be argued that the judge still did say that public morality isn't a legitimate state interest. He also says that the protection of rights are a state interest, and that, as an illegitimate interest, the enforcement of public morality loses. Or he could have meant simply that privacy rights protection is a much higher priority. In any case, the interpretation is not nearly as extreme as you make it out to be.
That Supreme Court case held that sexually obscene material was NOT Speech, and as thus could be regulated by the several States.
Here's the thing I never understood - if it's not speech, how can it have a deleterous effect on society? How can it's message corrupt people if there is no message? We shouldn't buy into the ridiculous notion that you can say something, you can print it, and people can be offended but it isn't speech. Rather, when we look at rulings like this, we should see them for what they really are - declarations that this certain speech is not protected speech. Once you understand that this is what the ruling says, realizing it's unconstitutionality is plenary.
If the current ruling stands - and I believe it will because, unlike the not-speech argument, it is rooted in reality - Miller v. California would be effectively overturned. Using the ruling that would be overturned to prove that the current ruling is invalid is silly. It's like saying that you can't abolish slavery because it's legal.
Note to Neil: I know that, since I wrote not one but two posts in response to yours, it might seem like I don't like you. Although you've given me plenty of your personal info and opinions, and in theory I could just hate you on those terms, I want you to know that I don't dislike you, Neil. I just think you've said some things that, closely examined, are rather dumb. I hope you won't hold that against me.
Are you familiar with Lawrence v. Texas at all? The innately private nature of the act was a major sticking point - in essence, the sodomy law was unenforceable unless police infringed on citizens' right to privacy. This was exemplified in Lawrence's case, in which Lawrence and his partner were arrested after a neighbor called in to report the sounds of gunfire coming from Lawrence's apartment. (There were no shots fired, by the way.) Want some proof that privacy was the top issue? You linked to the court opinion that starts out:
Liberty protects the person from unwarranted government intrusions into a dwelling or other private places. In our tradition the State is not omnipresent in the home. And there are other spheres of our lives and existence, outside the home, where the State should not be a dominant presence. Freedom extends beyond spatial bounds. Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct. The instant case involves liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions.
In other words, legislating sexual thought and practice is a violation of privacy. I hate to have to explain this, but: Porn is innately private in the same way - perhaps even more so since it may be used by an individual without involving anyone else. The only way to enforce an anti-pornography law is to infringe on privacy rights en masse without warrant. I don't think the interpretation here is "too broad" at all, sir. I think it is spot on.
Also, I might add that, as a "future law student," you still have time to get good at research before you take the Bar Exam. I suggest you apply yourself to that.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you think the interactivity of game violence makes it different than violence on television, which is passive?
Of course, as you actually grow neural pathways called dendrites that enable you to perform more easily the physical acts of violence.
Um...I'm not a neurologist, but doesn't that have to do with muscle memory for things like learning to ride a bike? Or, for example, learning how to move your mouth to make certain syllables? I mean, even if you did play a game long enough for your brain to be hard-wired like this, it seems like those pathways would dead-end if there wasn't a controller in your hand.
I believe you'll get your fill of logical objections, but I have some philosophical ones for you.
Why is your belief in a literal bible a "problem" with evolution theory? Regardless of whether either idea is true, any person's beliefs against them don't make them any more or less problematic. If you're willing to believe that there is a fundamental and divine TRUTH to the world, surely that is greater than the beliefs of any man? I was under the impression that religious men should seek out this truth as a natural extension of their desire to understand and be closer to God.
Believe me, I pity you for having to reconcile two concepts that seem irreconcilable to you. It must seem like a great imposition that so many people promote science without any regard to the sacred. But that doesn't mean that the science is flawed, or that it truly negates your religious beliefs. If you look more carefully into the claims of the evolutionary theory, you'll find that many a striking parallel exists between the current theory of the planet's development and the first chapter of Genesis. For example, they agree that animals lived in the sea before they lived on land.
(On a more esoteric note, did you know that there are two words for "day" in Latin? In Genesis, the word used for the days of Creation can mean a day, a week, a season, a historical period, or any other length of time. A different word offers the definition of a specific 24-hour day. This is something that most people don't know because they deal exclusively with English translations of the Bible, or not at all.) In any case, the two stories are not so oppositional as you might think, but seeing this takes a willingness to understand the concept before dismissing it as mere "bunk."
Finally, consider carefully the statement:
It takes more faith to believe in what man thinks he knows versus having faith in the One Creator.
Why should the truth be indicated by how difficult it is to have faith in it? You seem to claim that science is false simply because it is harder to maintain in the mind than religious faith. This idea is disturbing to me, since it implies that, contrary to what most religions preach, God really wants us to do what is easiest as opposed to, for example, what is right. Does the Bible which you take so literally really promote this? (It was easier for the Samaritan to leave the traveller for dead.)
I will grant that believing in the many half-discovered disciplines of science is much harder than being devout, but I do not think that means what you think it means.
Here's a list of each article and the exact sentence that made want to stop reading. Just for reference, I tried reading these as if I was reading any other piece of journalism or opinion in a paper or online publication, and yes, I am an English major.
From A Rape in Cyberspace
"A good many months ago -- let's say about halfway between the first time you heard the words information superhighway and the first time you wished you never had --"
I stuttered before I even finished this sentence, as, for one, it has a very snooty "I know more about the Internet than you, you unwashed thing" ring to it. But I was more annoyed that Dibbell was hamming up his already captivating and empathy-inducing story of virtual rape with this cheesy noir hyperbole.
From Posessing Barbie
""I have a confession to make." typed BabyDoll."
I confess, I was really looking for a quick way out of this one. Any "real" journalist, or heck, let's say creative writer, should check punctuation before they publish something. People wonder why the rest of the world doesn't take NGJ seriously. Maybe it's the shitty sub-par editing?
From Dreaming in an empty room
"And . . . to a certain deeper extent, creepy as hell."
The ellipsis in this sentence totally blew me away. Not only is it in completely the wrong place, but Tim felt he needed to expand it with extra spaces. Call me crazy, but if I'm reading an article and I see an ellipsis with extra spaces, there had better be something great after it. As you can see, there isn't. It's a horrible stew of a sentence, flailingly trying to piece together bits of common idiom into a coherent thought. Also, for God's sake, Tim, capitalize your title so it looks like one!
From Shoot Club: Saving Private Donny
"When it came time to make a man jump on a banana, he pronounced it 'gay' and put the controller down."
At first, this seems like a normal, slightly stilted sentence. Nothing a little bit more editing couldn't fix. But you should know that until this point in the narrative, it was all in present tense. In fact, Tom returns to present tense for the rest of the paragraph. I would make fun of him for it, but I just can't find anything else to say.
From ZangbandTK: Confessions of a Dungeon Hack
"Plain, though no-one would ever say that to her face for fear of her tearing off their arm and using it as a particularly bloody stole."
Is it a fragment? Is it a run-on? Is it a poor choice of voices? Is it an adverb obstructing the flow of expression? Holy shit, batman! It's all four rolled into one! At this point I should clarify that what I'm objecting to here isn't writing that's wrong in a technical sense. We're all adults here, and I feel we can use sentence fragments as we please.
What I'm objecting to here is writing that is aesthetically bad. Seriously, try reading this without feeling nauseous. Maybe if you're a native German speaker, you're used to seeing long strings of similar-looking words. I envy you, because this makes me woozy.
From The Great Scam
"You would then sell these pebbles for approximately the same price that an illiterate slave would have received for an ounce of cotton."
Okay, so technically this isn't the first sentence in the article that doesn't make sense, but I was so incredulous over his line about this being a story of "the worst of the human condition," I read longer than I should have. I think the objection here is obvious: it makes no sense. On top of that, it's belligerent, whiny, and exaggerative. It belongs on a slashdot thread about P2P, not in one of the supposedly "best" articles in New Gaming Journalism.
From Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
"What games communicate convincingly is the now."
Actually, this was a fairly decent article except for the tightly-pa
The Great Scam doesn't even look like creative writing to me. Specifically, it looks like a slashdot rant. I quote,
"You would then sell these pebbles for approximately the same price that an illiterate slave would have received for an ounce of cotton."
Come on. I mean, I know about hyperbole, but this doesn't even make sense. At least slashsons check their idioms before they post, if only for fear of being ridiculed.
Creating games with very well-developed moral messages is a challenge. More to the point - it is an extra challenge over the challenges of putting together a good game in the first place. It involves working the philosophy into the engine and the gameplay - a task far beyond the kind of "morality infusion" that movies get. In a film, all you have to do is have a character say, "Killing is wrong." In a game if, for example, you tell the player "killing is wrong" and then reward him for being a generally nasty guy (as is the case in Fable and every single other game that has tried to implement a "morality system" for figuring out if the player's character is good or bad), well gee, the morality there kind of seems like lip service, doesn't it?
What Richard Gariott described is a real instance of morality in a game - your actions determine what happens. No one is going to punish you for being bad or reward you for being good, it's just you and your actions. You can claim that the game "forced" you to do it, but if you play the game over you'll find that you actually can take a moral high ground. The problem with interactive morality is though, it's very hard to see if you're not actually playing the game.
Video games are very high concept, complex, and abstract works of art. But, at present they are more like architecture than poetry or painting. Their first priority is to build an interesting structure for interaction. (See, for instance, the wonderful Katamari Damacy, which uses a real-ish context as icing on the interactive cake.) Morality is often meaningless in these situations simply because the game is so much girders and drywall - that is, so much code and interaction - that the engine itself is the game. You could make the game "about" anything - just like you can make a version of Tetris that is "about" Monty Python or the Parting of the Red Sea, but it's still Tetris. Real-world morality finds itself wandering into the picture when someone sees an engine-based game like the original DOOM and thinks that it somehow means shooting people. In most cases they will never realize that the meaning of the game is in reality the interface itself.
Of course, I would love to see some more deep philosophy in games, as well as better writing in games in general. I myself am a fan of storytelling games (i.e. Grim Fandango, Shadow of Destiny), which are much heavier on the morals because they are nearly identical to film. But I also want to see more games like Katamari Damacy that know they're pure interaction and ignore the morality issue completely in favor of interesting gameplay. I think there's room in the market for both.
I overheard this conversation in my local Target while I was trying to find something to spend a gift card on.
Girl: Um....What about this one?
Mother: Diabolo? Isn't that a devil game? Why don't you get a book with your money instead? All these games are too violent.
Girl: But I want a game! Oh, I like this one, mommy! (Picking up a copy of Roller Coaster Tycoon.)
Mother: (sarcastic) Are you sure? But you don't kill anybody in this one. (Puts RCT back on the shelf, picks up a copy of Spider-Man 2.) How about this one? You can kill this guy on the box here.
Similarly, when my boyfriend showed his mother the gameplay in Animal Crossing, she said, "I bet nobody really plays this game. It doesn't have any shooting." It's a sad thing when the parents are so convinced that video games are bad, they go after the violent games because they can't think of games having any other appeal. Geesh.
Um... the game didn't crash the computer. He just said it "crashed to desktop." The program ended abruptly and exited to the desktop. That happens all the time.
The point is not that "child abuse does not exist." I don't know where you got that idea, although I admit - it is an attractive Straw Man.
The point is, just because someone has been accused (or even convicted) of child pornography, under the current laws that doesn't mean that they definitely molested someone incapable of consent, and then distributed photos of it (which the subject was also unable to consent to). What I have just described is a criminal and despicable act. BUT:
The original poster's point is that the arbitrary nature of the law doesn't fit the reality. An underage person can consent to have sex on camera with as much (or more) knowledge of the consequences as an adult can. And those who are legally adults can still be taken sexual advantage of. Thus it would seem that the requisite of age is ill-fitting to the purpose of preventing a truly ghastly crime.
Of course, there are corner cases in every legal situation, but if you're convicted of child porn in the US, you lose many rights you would have otherwise retained - not to mention, you are publically registered as a sex offender, leading to harassment and censure from people like you who aren't even willing to understand the circumstances of a charge, who see red at the sight of the words "child pornography" and can't be bothered to think about it any further.
That was a personal insult, just so you know what one looks like from now on.
So many of the anti-child abuse and anti-child porn laws are propelled through the lawmaking process simply because the crime they attempt to prevent is so horrendous. I'm all for erring on the side of caution when a snap decision has to be made, but it is our duty as citizens to ask whether the law we practice on a span of years actually prevents these ghastly crimes, and whether it hurts people who, while perhaps not morally flawless, did not commit the ultimate crime of child molestation.
I might point out that most of the U.S. has a strong stigma against discussing abuse. This is not just because the abused fear the abusers, although that is often stated as the cause for such silence. Many organizations which could otherwise provide support for the abused (schools, churches, Boy/Girl Scouts, etc.) feel that those subjects are completely inappropriate, and therefore will simply stop speaking to someone if they choose to admit to being ANY party, abuser or abused.
This was even more true in decades past, when current child molesters would have been kids.
Someone I went to high school with was convicted of distributing child pornography. The "child porn" in question involved a 16-year-old - that's legally a minor, but arguably she was old enough to consent. Also, the guy was only 19 or 20 himself - barely out of school.
I moonlighted for a local paper at the time, and after a little consideration of the actual details of the case, the front page writer who was handling the story decided that presenting it to the public as a "Kiddie Porn Case" would be unethical. She decided to refer to the offense as an "indecency charge".
A few days later, the competing local paper came out with a big headline: "[LASTNAME] CONVICTED OF CHILD PORN". The story was just too juicy to bother handling ethically, I guess.
Granted, the guy did some very cruel things with the photos once he had them. They should have pinned him with libel and defamation of character - the whole incident made life unbearable for the girl. I'm not saying he should've gotten away scot free, but calling him a pedophile completely misses the point.
Although he's said he doesn't intend to sue anybody, I find it highly unlikely that he has noble intentions in filing a trademark he clearly has no rights to.
I suspect, however, that his true purpose in filing the trademark is to give himself some clout in taking down other online sales of MAME arcade machines. As he himself mentioned, he has been trying to take down a lot of Ebay auctions of "illegal" MAME cabinet sales. The only problem is, you can't take down Ebay auctions unless you are the actual copyright holder. My guess is that he's trying to get the trademark so he can pass himself off as a legitimate "owner" to companies like Ebay. I doubt he really had lawsuits in mind.
I sent Ebay a letter about his copyright holder status, which you can read here if you like.
I sent Ebay a nice little letter about this guy. If you've ever tried to communicate with Ebay to get an auction taken down, you know that they only let you request to have auctions cancelled if you're the actual copyright holder of something that's being pirated. Read on...
Dear Ebay:
Recently, a man named David Foley, CEO of an arcade machine maker called UltraCade, has requested that a number of Ebay auctions of arcade cabinets loaded with the Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) be taken down because they violate his copyrights.
As you know, your policy specifically states that requests of this kind should only be made by the copyright holder. Mr. Foley does not hold the copyright to any of the software his company sells - he is merely a liscensee. Nor does he hold the copyright to the MAME name or logo. Nor does he hold any patent on the design of arcade cabinets or the electronics inside.
Knowing this, I would closely examine any request he may make in the future to remove Ebay auctions on the grounds that they violate his "copyrights," since he holds none.
Sincerely yours,
---me---
It's not that I'm saying his claim about MAME only being used for illegal software isn't valid (although it isn't). I'm just saying that he doesn't have the right (by Ebay's rules) to restrict this theoretical copyright infringement when he doesn't own the copyright to anything involved in the auction. Hmm...maybe Ebay noticed, so now he's filing the MAME trademark to legitimize himself. What a plan!
I believe the whole "Jon Stewart to replace Dan Rather" joke came from a clip on the Daily Show where they reported that CBS was looking at all sorts of replacements for Rather, including "Douchebag McJokenstein" - show image of JS here.
I doubt CBS would ever consider Stewart for that kind of position. I'm also pretty sure he'd make fun of them for offering.
I heard a few years back that they used systems like that to do data mining - figure out where people stopped the longest, which products they went for first, which coupons they used the most, etc.
Supposedly they used the data to reorganize the store. More likely they would sell the demographics back to various manufacturers who pay good money for market data.
Yeah...for some reason the self-checkout machines at Wal-Mart are a lot more sensitive and less user-friendly than the ones used in most grocery stores. I don't know why this is, except maybe these machines were cooked up specifically for W-M and didn't go through the usual level of quality assurance.
On the other hand, the machine also knows the dimensions of every piece of inventory, so if something is too big to put in the bagging area, the machine tells you to just put it back in the cart. I don't know how useful this is, but it seems really cool to me.
They have these at the Albertson's in my home town, and the prices there are quite reasonable. I doubt these systems put much cash strain on a store beyond what you usually need to run one, what with tracking customer purchases and tying it all into inventory and such. I bet it's a steal compared to all those checkers they used to employ. (Seriously, I've been there at times when there was only one checker, and she was overseeing the self-check.)
Is that possible? I mean, as I understand it the DS processes the code differently depending on where you choose to load from, the DS slot or the GBA cart. Am I wrong?
I think that game companies have finally figured out how to tap into the fact that most of us take the recommendations of friends far more seriously than those of professional reviewers. Halo 2 in particular had it's fans so worked up about the game, the only question people could ask me after the preview event (at the end of a certain ARG) was whether it was, and I quote, "totally awesome."
You just made me think of something here. The reason that games tend to get inflated review scores (i.e. 70% for a mediocre game) may very well be that, as consumers, we consider ourselves too good for everything but, say, the top 20% of games. This makes perfect sense, given that we have a scant amount of money to spend on gaming every month. Since most games are in the same stratospheric price range already, we'd rather get the most bang for our buck.
(This is opposed to the silly idea that a rating below 7/10 is to be taken as "crap." There's a difference between "crap" and "probably not worth the money.") No wonder everyone is shooting to get their game rated at least an 8.5 these days.
Just for the record, in my opinion Tycho and Gabe are the only media people whose opinions on games are worth heeding.
Okay, mainly just Tycho.
As someone who owns both systems, I can tell you that, even though their respective bits of hardware may be comparable, the Cube has some very distinct performance advantages. Most notably:
Load Times. The Cube is so fast reading and writing all it's media, that sometimes you'll blink and miss a load screen. Some games (like Donkey Konga) save every two minutes or so, but you never even see a save screen. The practical upshot is Metroid Prime's ability to stream the next area as you approach the door, resulting in no load times at all - which RE4 apparently imitates. Compare this to, for example, Simpsons Road Rage for the PS2, where you often have to wait 45 seconds to retry a 20 second time trial. Obviously, this is also a problem with the game software - you should never have to reload the entire game environment to replay a single level. But it still takes 45 seconds to load! That's about 5 seconds more than it takes my computer to boot up.
Full-Screen Antialiasing. The Cube has it, the PS2 doesn't. This means when I pop in a simple-looking "kiddy game" like Wind Waker, what I see on the screen are smooth edges. Even if the characters had only a few polys, the whole thing would look smooth because of the antialiasing. Compare this to Shadow Hearts for the PS2. Everything looks like it was bluescreened together - jagged edges everywhere. I'm sure game developers could write a bit of code to simulate antialiasing on the PS2, but on the Cube they don't have to - it makes the graphics smooth for you. This, by the way, is one of the reasons it's so damn hard to pick the zombies out of the background in a Resident Evil game.
Also, Resident Evil 0 (and also the original I think) used a 1-second full screen video loop as the background for every room in the game. This allowed all of the poly-pushing power to be put into the character models and other movable objects. This is possible on the Cube because it has a powerful 2-D engine native to the system. (I would guess that this particular technique isn't too hard to do on the Cube, because Baten Kaitos uses it also.) Guess what? The PS2 doesn't have this. It's not that it can't be done on the PS2, it's that, as a developer, you'd most likely end up having to write the graphics modules for it yourself.
I don't know much about memory buffers and poly- or texture-pushing capacities, and I'm not really sure if these differences have anything to do with the hardware itself. They could very well be optimisations in the Cube's compiler, or flaws in the PS2's OS. I do have both systems though, and just from playing both of them (a lot!) I know that there are some areas where the Cube just takes the cake. It's not too far fetched to say that RE4 exemplifies them.
marriage licenses issued in one state constitutionally HAVE to be recognized in all states.
A popular myth without a drop of truth to be squeezed from it. For one, there is no marriage law in the Constitution.
Yes. And if it's a religious ceremony, then what precludes people who believe in the sacredness of gay marriages from performing them? Or is freedom of religion just a figure of speech?
I think it could be argued that the judge still did say that public morality isn't a legitimate state interest. He also says that the protection of rights are a state interest, and that, as an illegitimate interest, the enforcement of public morality loses. Or he could have meant simply that privacy rights protection is a much higher priority. In any case, the interpretation is not nearly as extreme as you make it out to be.
That Supreme Court case held that sexually obscene material was NOT Speech, and as thus could be regulated by the several States.
Here's the thing I never understood - if it's not speech, how can it have a deleterous effect on society? How can it's message corrupt people if there is no message? We shouldn't buy into the ridiculous notion that you can say something, you can print it, and people can be offended but it isn't speech. Rather, when we look at rulings like this, we should see them for what they really are - declarations that this certain speech is not protected speech. Once you understand that this is what the ruling says, realizing it's unconstitutionality is plenary.
If the current ruling stands - and I believe it will because, unlike the not-speech argument, it is rooted in reality - Miller v. California would be effectively overturned. Using the ruling that would be overturned to prove that the current ruling is invalid is silly. It's like saying that you can't abolish slavery because it's legal.
Note to Neil: I know that, since I wrote not one but two posts in response to yours, it might seem like I don't like you. Although you've given me plenty of your personal info and opinions, and in theory I could just hate you on those terms, I want you to know that I don't dislike you, Neil. I just think you've said some things that, closely examined, are rather dumb. I hope you won't hold that against me.
Are you familiar with Lawrence v. Texas at all? The innately private nature of the act was a major sticking point - in essence, the sodomy law was unenforceable unless police infringed on citizens' right to privacy. This was exemplified in Lawrence's case, in which Lawrence and his partner were arrested after a neighbor called in to report the sounds of gunfire coming from Lawrence's apartment. (There were no shots fired, by the way.) Want some proof that privacy was the top issue? You linked to the court opinion that starts out:
Liberty protects the person from unwarranted government intrusions into a dwelling or other private places. In our tradition the State is not omnipresent in the home. And there are other spheres of our lives and existence, outside the home, where the State should not be a dominant presence. Freedom extends beyond spatial bounds. Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct. The instant case involves liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions.
In other words, legislating sexual thought and practice is a violation of privacy. I hate to have to explain this, but: Porn is innately private in the same way - perhaps even more so since it may be used by an individual without involving anyone else. The only way to enforce an anti-pornography law is to infringe on privacy rights en masse without warrant. I don't think the interpretation here is "too broad" at all, sir. I think it is spot on.
Also, I might add that, as a "future law student," you still have time to get good at research before you take the Bar Exam. I suggest you apply yourself to that.