This is ridiculous. You really think that Apple has created zero-emission, 100 mpg auto fuel?
You're insane. Seriously, you need help. I'm a veteran of the OS/2 advocacy wars (a bystander, really - I used to us OS/2, but when I saw it was a religion rather than an OS, I backed away slowly), and I've seen the same reality distortion lens.
Look, it's "ad hominem" because it is, in fact, the people that give me a creepy feeling. It's not controversial that there's a broad-based fan community that enthusiastically promotes Apple products. This isn't a claim that Apple is either good or bad - in general, I think their designs are OK - but just as "even though you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they aren't out to get you," just because Apple makes decent products that fill a need doesn't mean that there isn't a disturbing enthusiasm among its consumers.
I mean, there's a couple brands of coffee, orange juice, and shoes that I regularly buy, but I don't go around breathlessly extolling them, wearing items of clothing that advertising those brands - my shoes are non-self-advertising, or respond defensively to criticisms of them. It's creepy. Like I've said elsewhere, fannism is a kind of cultural servitude, a deference and admiration for a producer as brand that far exceeds the utility of the objects that producer creates. I find it sad.
If you can't see fanboism, it's probably because you've drank so much Kool-Aid, you're swimming in it. You also see it with Nintendo - and I buy a lot of Nintendo products, as a matter of fact - and it's just as disturbing.
iPhone, and Apple articles in general, attract fans (and anti-fans), rather than nerds/geeks. The difference between tech-fans and geeks is the difference between religionists and mystics. Fandom is, at the end of the day, a dependent relationship of admiration and respect for the cultural authority of some producer or another. That's antithetical to the nerd distance from the "marketed product" and the interest on how it could work and what could be done with it.
I'll admit it: I think fannishness of any stripe is a kind of cultural servitude.
My Peruvian relatives go to Cuba for many kinds of treatment (they're not quite the elite, but they're doing well enough that, um, half of the family has been able to move to the US. The rest are struggling a bit, but can save enough to go to Cuba if needed.) They have to pay for their care, because they aren't citizens of Cuba, but it is still reasonable, particularly for some otherwise expensive techniques (heart surgery for one relative, some serious orthopedics for another.)
However, for emergency care, I actually was quite well taken care of in Peru, last time I went there and needed it. And I received that care from an ambulance, without anyone checking either my passport or whether I had the means to pay for something fancy. Latin America is, I'll admit, kind of "2 and 1/2" World rather than 3rd World proper, but still, I've had worse medical experiences in the US - both without and with insurance - than I did in Peru.
If I could live in Peru and commute to the US for my career, I would. Sadly, the mileage is a little extreme.
Grinding isn't skill. Grinding is brute time expenditure, and so is farming.
So it's deep pockets versus "deep clock." You have a lot of spare time. Others don't. Some people without spare time may actually be excellent players: attentive, well-organized, good planners, excellent reflexes, and communication skills. They just don't have time to grind.
Is it fair that some people have more money? Well, is it fair that some people have more time?
Could a game legitimately insist that you not allow your little brother or your girlfriend to play your character?
Here's the thing: there are all sorts of reasons to do things in a virtual world. I could send you a magic imaginary sword because you're my friend, because you're my girlfriend, because I owe you a favor, because I owe you 10 bucks and we agree to write off the debt if I send you my magic sword, because I like the name you chose for your character, and on and on. What that a priori hostility on RMT really is, is a claim that there are certain reasons you cannot send people your magic imaginary sword.
I think that's ultimately the problem: really, as long as the software supports something (that is, sending something to someone) it becomes none of anyone else's business what our motivations are. As long as it is possible to send gold to someone without a game-enforced quid-pro-quo, it really should be no one's business why the gold is sent.
Tragedies don't exist in space. They exist in minds. A tragedy is a tragedy become of the perspective we have on a series of events and its protagonists. The pain of the protagonists is real, but our framing of that pain - as tragic, as just, as comic, as absurd, as pathetic, as brute fact - is another story. This is true for the invasion of Iraq, the holocaust, the invasion of Lebanon, the fall of the USSR, the colonization of the Americas (talk about wildly divergent framing), for someone's unemployment, for infidelity (one person's betrayal is another person's self-discovery), and so on.
The question is, given these divergent framings, how do we deal with each other in a space of discourse? Some of the responses to that problem are now characterized as an excess of consideration, "political correctness." Which I think is a shame, because it leads to the collapse of the possibility of respect outside of very closed communities. At the same time, calls for "respect" are also power plays: demanding that we respect the sacrifices of (our) soldiers is a way of muting protest and deflecting the critique of their behavior. Likewise, antiwar activists can also be selective - and just as maudlin - in their selection of the space of the tragic.
Your sources are a little dated. You may want to catch up on some of the most recent literature about, for example, prairie dogs.
It looks like, in their calls identifying prey, they do transformations and tenses. And really, the jury is still out on a lot of animal cognition: you really shouldn't be too quick to call it done and dusted.
There is a body of research that indicates that many types of animals do pass knowledge from one generation to another, evolve it, and even have systems of communication that have transformative grammars (prairie dogs is the most recent example.) Importantly, different populations within the same species will develop and communicate different behaviors, calls, etc. And there are definitely non-human primates (chimps, especially) that use tools, "experiment" with them, and communicate their discoveries to each other.
Humans are a type of animal, full stop. There are features that seem to be unique to humans, yes. But those are still animal things: there are other animal-things that are unique to other species, or limited to subsets of animals, as well.
I'm reminded of something Kurt Vonnegut wrote: "Question: What is the white stuff in bird poop? Answer: That is bird poop, too."
Class difference is not necessarily class warfare. Class is a reality (at least, as much of one as any other social phenomenon.)
Some people seem to panic when class-based analysis is undertaken of a phenomenon in which they are involved - they assume that there's some judgment or discrimination being made, as if observing that the incoming class of Harvard has a distinctly different background than an incoming class at a community college, or that a NASCAR fan is different from an experimental theater enthusiast in ways that extend beyond mere preferences. It makes people uncomfortable in a way that even talk of race and gender does not.
Class is not money, nor is it education, though money and education can predict class. There's a crude formula that helps: the working class thinks class is about money; the bourgeois (nowadays, probably better to say "middle- to upper middle classes") think it is about education, and that the aristocracy (or, where not applicable, old money: at least 3 generations of not having to work, of being able to "live off of capital" in multiple senses of the phrase) think it is about taste and habits. And the thing is, all of them are right: money will vouchsafe the education, and the education is a prerequisite - though by no means adequate - for cementing the social habits and practices by which the "gentry" recognize each other.
But that's a very crude and general approach - more interesting to me are class fractions, the differences between, say, technical professional classes (practically white-collar working class, like IT) and, say, the class of people who attend B-schools (middle to upper-middle class, and aspiring to be in a situation where their kids might not have to work, except as a "character building" exercise.)
While the empirical data is dated, I highly recommend Pierre Bourdieu's "Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste" for an illustration of how tastes and preferences map rather nicely onto co-factors such as educational status of parents, distance from metropoles, income, etc.
Um, those links don't say the things you say they do.
His "defense" of RMT was more like a set of observations about legal status and producer response. And his site is a (dated) guide on how to make money. Does he have RMT ties? No more than ZAM does, apparently. And the "getting rid of IGE" is something of an exaggeration: their owner seems to have transfered ownership of IGE to another founder of IGE, but the ties are still clearly strong (the owner of Alliance Media is obviously friendly with, and worked with, the founder/again owner of IGE.)
You shouldn't keep thinking like a fan. It's a slavish way of thinking. "It is not enough to blame: one must diagnose."
The databases that I am talking about are the game-driven ones: items, jobs, quests, crafting, etc. The stuff that is more the stuff of Thotbot, but which is part of every major game site. It reveals a lot of the mechanics, and particularly where supply isn't meeting demand, or where opportunities for (in-game) profit are.
I don't have a big stake on the RMT question myself. The fact that there is the possibility for interesting contradictions, and that people with very different views on the topic are interdependent, is intriguing.
My understanding is that Blizzard leases with you the right to play with their "toys", that Blizzard, rather than the player, owns the character, and that the items within the game are not considered goods as such, any more than the score of a baseball game is a salable good.
I do not find this completely convincing, myself, but it is consistent in its way.
they wanted to make sure that the site was as far removed from the IGE portion of the company as possible
What does this mean? That they have desks at the opposite corners of the building?
Ultimately, "owned" is "owned." What RMT operations want isn't just ad space: it's insight into the mechanics of the games and the players' behavior in those games, to design both services that they can sell (such as power leveling) and to determine mechanisms for generating in-game money (farming spaces, high-value quests, and such.) If the owners of ZAM have the ability to data-mine those databases - and I am inclined to believe they do - then they are getting a lot of value from the situation. That IGE was "sold off" - perhaps for as little as a dollar - means nothing if the owners of Affinity (including Brock) still have a substantial interest in it, and if the relationships are such that they will be able to mine that data.
There is a clouded and byzantine set of relationships between fans (who I now think of as a hybrid between consumers, who get their identity from what they buy, and the authoritarian subject, that is, the personality/cultural type that is inclined to seek out and respect authority figures) and player, game makers, "3rd party" game industries (which include IGE, Zam.com, etc.) and the content of both games and game-sites themselves. I see a present-day morality epic in the making.
If the people who are here illegally are stealing jobs from you, that means you're probably working at the lowest economic rung, and you've got other things to worry about.
Now, if you're a computer professional, it may be the people who are here legally, yet are willing to work for half of what you're accustomed to earning, that you have to worry about.
I'd say that sitting on your hands when the victims are largely non-white or foreign and the injustices are huge, while taking action when the victim is middle-class, white, and the system quickly rectifies itself, is a bigger problem. What happened in PA was not tyranny.
In light of the number of detainees from the war on "terror" and the Iraq occupation who are held for months, even after they've been determined to be completely innocent, and the number of people who have been released after decades in prison who were convicted by overzealous prosecutors only to be exonerated by DNA evidence, I'd say anguish over a 26 hour detention and a dropped charge is very, very overwrought.
Soggy biscuit, cummy biscuit, limp biscuit or ooky cookie is a male masturbation game reportedly played in typically teenage male-oriented groups. The participants stand around a biscuit masturbating until ejaculating onto it; the last person to do so must eat the biscuit.[1] It is thought to have originated in Australia sometime in the 1960s.[1]
That's pretty much describes almost every MMO I've encountered.
Even the chess "meta-game" is more of a game than an MMO is. There is a simple, agreed-upon metric for what counts as points and how they are earned. In MMOs, there is nothing of the sort. The incentives for playing, the rewards, and the metrics are various and undefined. There is no "top player" in WoW, nor is their a tournament system. The closest you can come to that is the level of the character.
In WoW, is it wrong to level your girlfriend's character? People do it all the time. In fact, people do things in-game for out-of-game motivations all the time, without batting an eye.
MMOs aren't classical games: they are too open. The "separateness" of a game, the sense that they occur in a little bubble, as it were, depended on them having straightforward beginnings and endings, a simple mechanic, players in the same space, an agreed-upon win state, and so forth.
The gap between a computer-based, networked, massively-multiplayer virtual world and the games of chess and rugby is unfathomably huge, and the difference in the relationship between time and leisure is one of the consequences of that difference. The "magic circle" idea just doesn't work... MMOs do not have a simple "win" state, the rules are not enforced socially, but by software, the "game" continues even when you aren't playing, etc. etc. I'm reluctant to really call it a game at all. As Raph Koster said, "It's a service. Not a game. It's a world. Not a game. It's a community. Not a game. Anyone who says, 'it's just a game' is missing the point."
Slashdot Mirror
Extending freedom requires a restriction on the ability to restrict freedom. What could be clearer?
Is a schoolyard "freer" if a bully is allowed to beat up whomever they wish?
This is ridiculous. You really think that Apple has created zero-emission, 100 mpg auto fuel?
You're insane. Seriously, you need help. I'm a veteran of the OS/2 advocacy wars (a bystander, really - I used to us OS/2, but when I saw it was a religion rather than an OS, I backed away slowly), and I've seen the same reality distortion lens.
Maybe Apple has "Techron." Oh boy! Techron!
Did I hit a nerve?
Look, it's "ad hominem" because it is, in fact, the people that give me a creepy feeling. It's not controversial that there's a broad-based fan community that enthusiastically promotes Apple products. This isn't a claim that Apple is either good or bad - in general, I think their designs are OK - but just as "even though you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they aren't out to get you," just because Apple makes decent products that fill a need doesn't mean that there isn't a disturbing enthusiasm among its consumers.
I mean, there's a couple brands of coffee, orange juice, and shoes that I regularly buy, but I don't go around breathlessly extolling them, wearing items of clothing that advertising those brands - my shoes are non-self-advertising, or respond defensively to criticisms of them. It's creepy. Like I've said elsewhere, fannism is a kind of cultural servitude, a deference and admiration for a producer as brand that far exceeds the utility of the objects that producer creates. I find it sad.
If you can't see fanboism, it's probably because you've drank so much Kool-Aid, you're swimming in it. You also see it with Nintendo - and I buy a lot of Nintendo products, as a matter of fact - and it's just as disturbing.
Apple has a fan base that exceeds that of the Commodore and OS/2. And I get the same creepy feeling from the Apple fans that I did from the others.
iPhone, and Apple articles in general, attract fans (and anti-fans), rather than nerds/geeks. The difference between tech-fans and geeks is the difference between religionists and mystics. Fandom is, at the end of the day, a dependent relationship of admiration and respect for the cultural authority of some producer or another. That's antithetical to the nerd distance from the "marketed product" and the interest on how it could work and what could be done with it.
I'll admit it: I think fannishness of any stripe is a kind of cultural servitude.
My Peruvian relatives go to Cuba for many kinds of treatment (they're not quite the elite, but they're doing well enough that, um, half of the family has been able to move to the US. The rest are struggling a bit, but can save enough to go to Cuba if needed.) They have to pay for their care, because they aren't citizens of Cuba, but it is still reasonable, particularly for some otherwise expensive techniques (heart surgery for one relative, some serious orthopedics for another.)
However, for emergency care, I actually was quite well taken care of in Peru, last time I went there and needed it. And I received that care from an ambulance, without anyone checking either my passport or whether I had the means to pay for something fancy. Latin America is, I'll admit, kind of "2 and 1/2" World rather than 3rd World proper, but still, I've had worse medical experiences in the US - both without and with insurance - than I did in Peru.
If I could live in Peru and commute to the US for my career, I would. Sadly, the mileage is a little extreme.
They're probably you're best investment for a fixed short term, but for the long run, stick with more aggressive investments.
Grinding isn't skill. Grinding is brute time expenditure, and so is farming.
So it's deep pockets versus "deep clock." You have a lot of spare time. Others don't. Some people without spare time may actually be excellent players: attentive, well-organized, good planners, excellent reflexes, and communication skills. They just don't have time to grind.
Is it fair that some people have more money? Well, is it fair that some people have more time?
Could a game legitimately insist that you not allow your little brother or your girlfriend to play your character?
Here's the thing: there are all sorts of reasons to do things in a virtual world. I could send you a magic imaginary sword because you're my friend, because you're my girlfriend, because I owe you a favor, because I owe you 10 bucks and we agree to write off the debt if I send you my magic sword, because I like the name you chose for your character, and on and on. What that a priori hostility on RMT really is, is a claim that there are certain reasons you cannot send people your magic imaginary sword.
I think that's ultimately the problem: really, as long as the software supports something (that is, sending something to someone) it becomes none of anyone else's business what our motivations are. As long as it is possible to send gold to someone without a game-enforced quid-pro-quo, it really should be no one's business why the gold is sent.
Tragedies don't exist in space. They exist in minds. A tragedy is a tragedy become of the perspective we have on a series of events and its protagonists. The pain of the protagonists is real, but our framing of that pain - as tragic, as just, as comic, as absurd, as pathetic, as brute fact - is another story. This is true for the invasion of Iraq, the holocaust, the invasion of Lebanon, the fall of the USSR, the colonization of the Americas (talk about wildly divergent framing), for someone's unemployment, for infidelity (one person's betrayal is another person's self-discovery), and so on.
The question is, given these divergent framings, how do we deal with each other in a space of discourse? Some of the responses to that problem are now characterized as an excess of consideration, "political correctness." Which I think is a shame, because it leads to the collapse of the possibility of respect outside of very closed communities. At the same time, calls for "respect" are also power plays: demanding that we respect the sacrifices of (our) soldiers is a way of muting protest and deflecting the critique of their behavior. Likewise, antiwar activists can also be selective - and just as maudlin - in their selection of the space of the tragic.
Your sources are a little dated. You may want to catch up on some of the most recent literature about, for example, prairie dogs.
It looks like, in their calls identifying prey, they do transformations and tenses. And really, the jury is still out on a lot of animal cognition: you really shouldn't be too quick to call it done and dusted.
There is a body of research that indicates that many types of animals do pass knowledge from one generation to another, evolve it, and even have systems of communication that have transformative grammars (prairie dogs is the most recent example.) Importantly, different populations within the same species will develop and communicate different behaviors, calls, etc. And there are definitely non-human primates (chimps, especially) that use tools, "experiment" with them, and communicate their discoveries to each other.
Humans are a type of animal, full stop. There are features that seem to be unique to humans, yes. But those are still animal things: there are other animal-things that are unique to other species, or limited to subsets of animals, as well.
I'm reminded of something Kurt Vonnegut wrote: "Question: What is the white stuff in bird poop? Answer: That is bird poop, too."
Class difference is not necessarily class warfare. Class is a reality (at least, as much of one as any other social phenomenon.)
Some people seem to panic when class-based analysis is undertaken of a phenomenon in which they are involved - they assume that there's some judgment or discrimination being made, as if observing that the incoming class of Harvard has a distinctly different background than an incoming class at a community college, or that a NASCAR fan is different from an experimental theater enthusiast in ways that extend beyond mere preferences. It makes people uncomfortable in a way that even talk of race and gender does not.
Class is not money, nor is it education, though money and education can predict class. There's a crude formula that helps: the working class thinks class is about money; the bourgeois (nowadays, probably better to say "middle- to upper middle classes") think it is about education, and that the aristocracy (or, where not applicable, old money: at least 3 generations of not having to work, of being able to "live off of capital" in multiple senses of the phrase) think it is about taste and habits. And the thing is, all of them are right: money will vouchsafe the education, and the education is a prerequisite - though by no means adequate - for cementing the social habits and practices by which the "gentry" recognize each other.
But that's a very crude and general approach - more interesting to me are class fractions, the differences between, say, technical professional classes (practically white-collar working class, like IT) and, say, the class of people who attend B-schools (middle to upper-middle class, and aspiring to be in a situation where their kids might not have to work, except as a "character building" exercise.)
While the empirical data is dated, I highly recommend Pierre Bourdieu's "Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste" for an illustration of how tastes and preferences map rather nicely onto co-factors such as educational status of parents, distance from metropoles, income, etc.
Um, those links don't say the things you say they do.
His "defense" of RMT was more like a set of observations about legal status and producer response. And his site is a (dated) guide on how to make money. Does he have RMT ties? No more than ZAM does, apparently. And the "getting rid of IGE" is something of an exaggeration: their owner seems to have transfered ownership of IGE to another founder of IGE, but the ties are still clearly strong (the owner of Alliance Media is obviously friendly with, and worked with, the founder/again owner of IGE.)
You shouldn't keep thinking like a fan. It's a slavish way of thinking. "It is not enough to blame: one must diagnose."
The databases that I am talking about are the game-driven ones: items, jobs, quests, crafting, etc. The stuff that is more the stuff of Thotbot, but which is part of every major game site. It reveals a lot of the mechanics, and particularly where supply isn't meeting demand, or where opportunities for (in-game) profit are.
I don't have a big stake on the RMT question myself. The fact that there is the possibility for interesting contradictions, and that people with very different views on the topic are interdependent, is intriguing.
My understanding is that Blizzard leases with you the right to play with their "toys", that Blizzard, rather than the player, owns the character, and that the items within the game are not considered goods as such, any more than the score of a baseball game is a salable good.
I do not find this completely convincing, myself, but it is consistent in its way.
they wanted to make sure that the site was as far removed from the IGE portion of the company as possible
What does this mean? That they have desks at the opposite corners of the building?
Ultimately, "owned" is "owned." What RMT operations want isn't just ad space: it's insight into the mechanics of the games and the players' behavior in those games, to design both services that they can sell (such as power leveling) and to determine mechanisms for generating in-game money (farming spaces, high-value quests, and such.) If the owners of ZAM have the ability to data-mine those databases - and I am inclined to believe they do - then they are getting a lot of value from the situation. That IGE was "sold off" - perhaps for as little as a dollar - means nothing if the owners of Affinity (including Brock) still have a substantial interest in it, and if the relationships are such that they will be able to mine that data.
There is a clouded and byzantine set of relationships between fans (who I now think of as a hybrid between consumers, who get their identity from what they buy, and the authoritarian subject, that is, the personality/cultural type that is inclined to seek out and respect authority figures) and player, game makers, "3rd party" game industries (which include IGE, Zam.com, etc.) and the content of both games and game-sites themselves. I see a present-day morality epic in the making.
If the people who are here illegally are stealing jobs from you, that means you're probably working at the lowest economic rung, and you've got other things to worry about.
Now, if you're a computer professional, it may be the people who are here legally, yet are willing to work for half of what you're accustomed to earning, that you have to worry about.
I'd say that sitting on your hands when the victims are largely non-white or foreign and the injustices are huge, while taking action when the victim is middle-class, white, and the system quickly rectifies itself, is a bigger problem. What happened in PA was not tyranny.
In light of the number of detainees from the war on "terror" and the Iraq occupation who are held for months, even after they've been determined to be completely innocent, and the number of people who have been released after decades in prison who were convicted by overzealous prosecutors only to be exonerated by DNA evidence, I'd say anguish over a 26 hour detention and a dropped charge is very, very overwrought.
The behavior of the US is still a bigger problem than hyperbole.
That's pretty much describes almost every MMO I've encountered.
Even the chess "meta-game" is more of a game than an MMO is. There is a simple, agreed-upon metric for what counts as points and how they are earned. In MMOs, there is nothing of the sort. The incentives for playing, the rewards, and the metrics are various and undefined. There is no "top player" in WoW, nor is their a tournament system. The closest you can come to that is the level of the character.
In WoW, is it wrong to level your girlfriend's character? People do it all the time. In fact, people do things in-game for out-of-game motivations all the time, without batting an eye.
MMOs aren't classical games: they are too open. The "separateness" of a game, the sense that they occur in a little bubble, as it were, depended on them having straightforward beginnings and endings, a simple mechanic, players in the same space, an agreed-upon win state, and so forth.
The gap between a computer-based, networked, massively-multiplayer virtual world and the games of chess and rugby is unfathomably huge, and the difference in the relationship between time and leisure is one of the consequences of that difference. The "magic circle" idea just doesn't work... MMOs do not have a simple "win" state, the rules are not enforced socially, but by software, the "game" continues even when you aren't playing, etc. etc. I'm reluctant to really call it a game at all. As Raph Koster said, "It's a service. Not a game. It's a world. Not a game. It's a community. Not a game. Anyone who says, 'it's just a game' is missing the point."