Could someone explain to me how on earth you can rape someone in a virtual world? I mean, you can send people explicit messages (the equivalent of a shady figure sidling up next to a real life woman in an alleyway and talking dirty for a few seconds until she wanders off unharmed), animate your avatar in their general vicinity (like if the aforementioned shady figure started vigorously humping the air a meter away from the helpless victim, who is still free to wander off unharmed), or trick them into allowing you to animate their avatars, which they can cancel at any time (Mr. Shady Figure offers a hug, the woman accepts, he tries to cop a feel, she says no, and he immediately stops and can't touch her anymore).
I'm not seeing any rape here.
Even assuming that there is such a thing as "virtual rape", it leaves no scars. Avatars don't really have the concept of virginity -- having someone's e-peen clip through your avatar's bum doesn't change anything, physically or otherwise -- and if you identify so strongly with a pixelated version of yourself that a few naughty words or an animation that you can easily walk away from is enough to cause "trauma", you need help. Seriously, if you think you've been e-raped, and you honestly feel that it was a "traumatic" experience, gtfo the internet. You need sunshine, fresh air, something to get you back into reality. If a kid drew a couple of stick figures having sex and labelled one of them as you, that wouldn't be rape, would it? Of course not. That's what Second Life is. Imaginary. A world where rape can't happen. So stop treating it like it's equivalent to the real world -- it just trivializes the suffering of all the real rape victims out there.
Also, if you accept a sexually explicit animation from someone and don't stop it before anything happens, you can always change avatars to something weird like a squirrel or something and gross out the "rapist". It's hard to grief anyone with a sense of humour, so they'll leave you alone.
I play SL... it's a sandbox game. I log on, I chat, and I goof off with prims and scripts... much like any multiplayer game that allows user-generated content. Oh, and don't pretend that Second Life is the first in its genre. Text-based games allowed similar user input/creativity back in the early days of the internet.
It is indeed very much like IRC or other chat services, but what keeps me there is the ability to build stuff. I'm a creative person, so... being able to walk around in the shape of an octopus or even an Atari joystick (I have a habit of making inanimate objects, resizing them, and using them as avatars) makes the game fun for me.
I don't know if they have an official position on it, but you may find this interesting: they have instructions for Linux/Unix users on http://www.cbc.ca/listen/ (the site for listening to CBC Radio online), and they specifically mention testing it with Gentoo and FreeBSD. They also have a couple of audio streams (the EST versions of CBC Radio One and Two) in Ogg Vorbis and seem to be encouraging people to try the format.
Unlike many, I don't actually hate Jack Thompson -- if anything, I pity him. He's trying to do what he thinks is right, even at the cost of his own career, and I gotta admit that that takes balls. However, I do strongly disagree with his methods. Writing caustic, barely-coherent letters to judges and insulting young children on the internet is typically not an advised course of action when you're trying to effect social or legal change. His conduct has been undeniably unprofessional, and for this reason, I hope he gets disbarred.
One thing that we should keep in mind, however, is that crazy old coots like Jack typically don't vanish the moment they lose their jobs (see: Fred Phelps). He'll have a lot more free time all of a sudden, and I expect he will continue to portray himself as a martyr -- a man who sacrificed his own career to protect America's children (and all that drivel). Sure, he won't be as dangerous when he can't blindly sue anything that moves, but I expect that the media will still view him as the resident expert on video game violence.
That's basically how the Petz games handled it;) They censored all mating behind a big heart, and the game didn't show kittens/puppies being born either. My point is that it's a feature that fans of the genre have long known and loved, so Nintendogs seemed more like a step back than anything. Sure, it demonstrated the capabilities of the DS in a slightly unusual and perhaps even innovative manner, but as a game, it didn't bring anything new to the table.
Yeah, and the other Petz games too. I was also rather fond of the Creatures series when I was younger.
I won't deny that Nintendogs is a fun, well-designed game, but the virtual life genre is freakin' old, and most features that are now considered innovative in Nintendogs have been present in PC games for at least a decade. In previous pet-related virtual life games, I have seen voice recognition (albeit in a very primitive form) as well as pet training/feeding/petting. When Nintendogs was announced, I was actually disappointed to discover that it did not even include breeding, a feature that the Petz and Creatures series both incorporated back in the late 90s.
Forget GTA, someone needs to set this man on Furcadia. At first glance, the game appears geared toward children with its bright colourful graphics and friendly mascot... until you get into the adult area. "Age play" seems to be a common fetish around there, and many members advertise both an IC and OOC age of under 18. Sure, there's a content filter, but it can be circumvented by merely editing the plaintext settings file, and any child can install the game and play for free without his or her parent even knowing.
I have nothing against it (or the furry community) myself, mind you, but I would LOVE to see Jack Thompson vs. the furries. No matter what, the internet would win.
Quite honestly, I think that taking a person's internet access away sometimes makes the problem worse. If you confiscate his router and don't give him anything better to do, all you're doing is affirming his belief that life without internet sucks. Seriously, if someone took your router and left you with nothing to do but stare at the walls and watch mindless TV, would you really find it easier to stop using whatever you were addicted to, or would you take the experience as proof that you were justified in sticking with your chosen addiction? If you were a kid, would you act out until mommy gave the router back? I know I certainly would.
You know, in many ways, it's not really about kicking a habit, it's just about finding a "better" way to fill time. Think about it this way: summer vacation may be a wonderful time in any kid's life, but it can also be extremely boring. All of a sudden, the kids have all this time to fill, and what do they do? Cries of boredom ring out throughout the neighbourhood, and parents mobilize to send their children to summer camps, swimming pools, sports events, and all kinds of other activities. This is how parents need to deal with excessive gaming, not by cutting kids off cold turkey and expecting them to entertain themselves.
P.S. Family BBQs don't count unless the kid actually enjoys them. If he's only presented with alternatives that he hates, he'll go straight back to the game.
Interestingly, I'm a girl in real life, and since I don't act super-girly unless I'm really bored and actually want free crap for my character (which is pretty rare, especially since I can't keep the cute persona up very long), people often assume I'm male. My male friends, on the other hand, know exactly what the average gamer guy expects a girl to sound like, so they roleplay it to the max. Needless to say, they get guys fawning all over their female avatars with no questions asked.
As a rule of thumb, if a person says they're female and acts normal, they probably are. If, on the other hand, they act sickeningly cute and helpful and otherwise girly, it's typically a safe bet that you're dealing with one or more of the following: a man, a pre-teen girl, or a really fat/ugly girl who acts cute on the internet to get the attention she so desperately needs.
In that example, the restaurant is at fault -- however, if those erotic items were walled up and forgotten in a section of the building where without special tools and a hell of a lot of luck, nobody could find them, I don't think anyone would hold it against them.
I think a better analogy would be if somebody wrote a horrificly violent book, perhaps even a comic, and some joker decided to scribble crude pornographic drawings in the margins in invisible ink. Now let's assume that in order to make this ink visible, you had to go out and get something at a store that sold or prominantly displayed actual pornography. Would the invisible drawings themselves, which would never ever be found under normal circumstances, make the product dangerous and pornographic, purely because a child could conceivably reveal them if he/she already had access to purveyors of pornography or even friends who could just as easily scribble naughty images themselves?
I notice that you make the common assumption that a person would spontaneously stop avoiding dates, start socializing, start studying, sleep more, etc. if he or she could only quit that evil WoW game.
I quit playing a few months ago because my interests shifted to other genres, but instead of staying up late playing World of Warcraft, I now lose sleep (and large portions of my life) to games such as Sims 2, Monkey Island, and Grim Fandango. The fact of the matter is that a lot of us just happen to enjoy "wasting" a large amount of our free time on fun but useless activities -- I used to stay up all night reading too, and I was up until 1am last night practicing guitar -- so there's no point vilifying any particular game. If you're going to blame anything, blame your friend's lack of self-control, and remember that even if he does quit, there's a good chance that he'll find something else (perhaps something even more damaging) to waste just as much time on.
Not necessarily, because if scientists are involved, there's the possibility of either carefully selecting sperm that lacks whatever defect the father might have or outright modifying it. This might actually be a good way to reduce the incidence of infertility in the population by fixing defects rather than letting mostly infertile fathers conceive through dumb luck. I'm not sure if making us all more fertile is a good thing, but it's interesting to consider.
Re:Cash2india is far more relevant than Google...
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eBay Bans Google Payments
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I find it more amusing that they specifically allow Canadian Tire Money...
Now I'm starting to wish I had more of that stuff. Paying for an expensive ebay auction entirely in Canadian Tire Money would be a whole new kind of awesome.
Actually, casual players will shell out, but you have to give them the right incentive. Whereas hardcore players will grind for hours to get exactly what they want out of a game (buying and playing through expansions as needed), casual players typically don't want to put in that kind of time or effort and will pay real money for "shortcuts" in the form of in-game money, items, or frivolous extras.
Seriously, which demographic do you think Rare is counting on to buy pinata sweaters on Xbox Live?
There was an article on CNN not all that long ago about this issue. I found it particularly interesting because it contains quotes from people in the US anime/manga industry who claim that the activities of fansubbers actually make their lives easier.
There were hints and walkthroughs back in the day, they just weren't free -- in fact, this was part of the business model for many old adventure games and was thus part of the reason why some of them were so difficult to complete without any outside help. Personally, I don't mind easily-accessible hints, if only because I play adventure games for the story and the humour more than the puzzles themselves. Sure, I'd rather play through a game on my own, but sometimes I just don't notice that the third pixel from the left is a bit different from the others, and I'd rather get a hint from UHS or some similar site than manually test every pixel and combination of actions until I finally give up on the game.
I'm actually surprised that they didn't do this sooner. There are a hell of a lot of unsecured wireless networks in any city, and it's not like the cops are peeking into anything that isn't incredibly public already. As an experiment, I once spent an entire bus ride home repeatedly scanning for wireless networks on my DS. Most of the ones I found were unprotected, including one which even had the word "secure" (written in l33t, no less) as part of its name. Unfortunately, all of the networks with particularly interesting or creative names were secure, including one called "No free internet for you", and another with the particularly clever moniker of "I steal credit card numbers." Gotta wonder what the cops would think of that one...
Dude, the Politics section is designated by an American flag at the top of the screen and FAQ specifically says "this section is for news relevant to United States government politics. It was created primarily to cover the 2004 US Presidential Election, but today exists for occasional stories that fit the bill." I don't see the point in making it American-only (I'm Canadian, by the way), but that's how it's designated for now.
I would, however, prefer if it was explicitly for international politics. As I mentioned before, new copyright laws in any given country could easily affect the RIAA's tactics... and vise versa.
Well, until we get a separate International Politics section, I think this is probably the best spot for it. Also, you may want to keep in mind that any success by Canadian pro-copyright groups will be held up as an example by the RIAA in their next court battle. If the RIAA can point north and say "Hey look, the Canadian music industry profits went up by 0.00000000001% last year! I bet it's because their pro-copyright groups get government support! *hinthint*", what are the odds that they won't take advantage of the situation?
I was a biology student for a year and a half before I switched into computer science, and I took a second year ecology class that dealt with this issue. We were indeed shown the hockey stick graph, and then it was put in the context of the past few millenia. Indeed, Earth has been much warmer in the past, the carbon dioxide levels have been considerably higher, and the global climate tends to go in cycles. However, the rate of the most recent temperature increase is unprecedented. This seems to indicate that although we may not be the only factor, it's a pretty damn big coincidence that everything started changing so fast right in the middle of the industrial revolution.
Does it really matter, though? I'd like everyone to cut down on pollution whether it'll help global warming or not -- isn't breathable air for the next generation a wee bit more important than some CEO's paycheque or some politician's pet project? Does it really become less important because those pollutants might not be causing global climate change?
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Could someone explain to me how on earth you can rape someone in a virtual world? I mean, you can send people explicit messages (the equivalent of a shady figure sidling up next to a real life woman in an alleyway and talking dirty for a few seconds until she wanders off unharmed), animate your avatar in their general vicinity (like if the aforementioned shady figure started vigorously humping the air a meter away from the helpless victim, who is still free to wander off unharmed), or trick them into allowing you to animate their avatars, which they can cancel at any time (Mr. Shady Figure offers a hug, the woman accepts, he tries to cop a feel, she says no, and he immediately stops and can't touch her anymore).
I'm not seeing any rape here.
Even assuming that there is such a thing as "virtual rape", it leaves no scars. Avatars don't really have the concept of virginity -- having someone's e-peen clip through your avatar's bum doesn't change anything, physically or otherwise -- and if you identify so strongly with a pixelated version of yourself that a few naughty words or an animation that you can easily walk away from is enough to cause "trauma", you need help. Seriously, if you think you've been e-raped, and you honestly feel that it was a "traumatic" experience, gtfo the internet. You need sunshine, fresh air, something to get you back into reality. If a kid drew a couple of stick figures having sex and labelled one of them as you, that wouldn't be rape, would it? Of course not. That's what Second Life is. Imaginary. A world where rape can't happen. So stop treating it like it's equivalent to the real world -- it just trivializes the suffering of all the real rape victims out there.
Also, if you accept a sexually explicit animation from someone and don't stop it before anything happens, you can always change avatars to something weird like a squirrel or something and gross out the "rapist". It's hard to grief anyone with a sense of humour, so they'll leave you alone.
I play SL... it's a sandbox game. I log on, I chat, and I goof off with prims and scripts... much like any multiplayer game that allows user-generated content. Oh, and don't pretend that Second Life is the first in its genre. Text-based games allowed similar user input/creativity back in the early days of the internet.
Actually, there is a Linux client, although it's still in alpha. There is also a MacOS client, and as far as I know, it runs just fine.
It is indeed very much like IRC or other chat services, but what keeps me there is the ability to build stuff. I'm a creative person, so... being able to walk around in the shape of an octopus or even an Atari joystick (I have a habit of making inanimate objects, resizing them, and using them as avatars) makes the game fun for me.
I don't know if they have an official position on it, but you may find this interesting: they have instructions for Linux/Unix users on http://www.cbc.ca/listen/ (the site for listening to CBC Radio online), and they specifically mention testing it with Gentoo and FreeBSD. They also have a couple of audio streams (the EST versions of CBC Radio One and Two) in Ogg Vorbis and seem to be encouraging people to try the format.
Unlike many, I don't actually hate Jack Thompson -- if anything, I pity him. He's trying to do what he thinks is right, even at the cost of his own career, and I gotta admit that that takes balls. However, I do strongly disagree with his methods. Writing caustic, barely-coherent letters to judges and insulting young children on the internet is typically not an advised course of action when you're trying to effect social or legal change. His conduct has been undeniably unprofessional, and for this reason, I hope he gets disbarred.
One thing that we should keep in mind, however, is that crazy old coots like Jack typically don't vanish the moment they lose their jobs (see: Fred Phelps). He'll have a lot more free time all of a sudden, and I expect he will continue to portray himself as a martyr -- a man who sacrificed his own career to protect America's children (and all that drivel). Sure, he won't be as dangerous when he can't blindly sue anything that moves, but I expect that the media will still view him as the resident expert on video game violence.
That's basically how the Petz games handled it ;) They censored all mating behind a big heart, and the game didn't show kittens/puppies being born either. My point is that it's a feature that fans of the genre have long known and loved, so Nintendogs seemed more like a step back than anything. Sure, it demonstrated the capabilities of the DS in a slightly unusual and perhaps even innovative manner, but as a game, it didn't bring anything new to the table.
Yeah, and the other Petz games too. I was also rather fond of the Creatures series when I was younger.
I won't deny that Nintendogs is a fun, well-designed game, but the virtual life genre is freakin' old, and most features that are now considered innovative in Nintendogs have been present in PC games for at least a decade. In previous pet-related virtual life games, I have seen voice recognition (albeit in a very primitive form) as well as pet training/feeding/petting. When Nintendogs was announced, I was actually disappointed to discover that it did not even include breeding, a feature that the Petz and Creatures series both incorporated back in the late 90s.
Forget GTA, someone needs to set this man on Furcadia. At first glance, the game appears geared toward children with its bright colourful graphics and friendly mascot... until you get into the adult area. "Age play" seems to be a common fetish around there, and many members advertise both an IC and OOC age of under 18. Sure, there's a content filter, but it can be circumvented by merely editing the plaintext settings file, and any child can install the game and play for free without his or her parent even knowing.
I have nothing against it (or the furry community) myself, mind you, but I would LOVE to see Jack Thompson vs. the furries. No matter what, the internet would win.
Quite honestly, I think that taking a person's internet access away sometimes makes the problem worse. If you confiscate his router and don't give him anything better to do, all you're doing is affirming his belief that life without internet sucks. Seriously, if someone took your router and left you with nothing to do but stare at the walls and watch mindless TV, would you really find it easier to stop using whatever you were addicted to, or would you take the experience as proof that you were justified in sticking with your chosen addiction? If you were a kid, would you act out until mommy gave the router back? I know I certainly would.
You know, in many ways, it's not really about kicking a habit, it's just about finding a "better" way to fill time. Think about it this way: summer vacation may be a wonderful time in any kid's life, but it can also be extremely boring. All of a sudden, the kids have all this time to fill, and what do they do? Cries of boredom ring out throughout the neighbourhood, and parents mobilize to send their children to summer camps, swimming pools, sports events, and all kinds of other activities. This is how parents need to deal with excessive gaming, not by cutting kids off cold turkey and expecting them to entertain themselves.
P.S. Family BBQs don't count unless the kid actually enjoys them. If he's only presented with alternatives that he hates, he'll go straight back to the game.
Or Vancouver, Canada -- it rained for a month straight this past winter. Literally.
Interestingly, I'm a girl in real life, and since I don't act super-girly unless I'm really bored and actually want free crap for my character (which is pretty rare, especially since I can't keep the cute persona up very long), people often assume I'm male. My male friends, on the other hand, know exactly what the average gamer guy expects a girl to sound like, so they roleplay it to the max. Needless to say, they get guys fawning all over their female avatars with no questions asked.
As a rule of thumb, if a person says they're female and acts normal, they probably are. If, on the other hand, they act sickeningly cute and helpful and otherwise girly, it's typically a safe bet that you're dealing with one or more of the following: a man, a pre-teen girl, or a really fat/ugly girl who acts cute on the internet to get the attention she so desperately needs.
In that example, the restaurant is at fault -- however, if those erotic items were walled up and forgotten in a section of the building where without special tools and a hell of a lot of luck, nobody could find them, I don't think anyone would hold it against them.
I think a better analogy would be if somebody wrote a horrificly violent book, perhaps even a comic, and some joker decided to scribble crude pornographic drawings in the margins in invisible ink. Now let's assume that in order to make this ink visible, you had to go out and get something at a store that sold or prominantly displayed actual pornography. Would the invisible drawings themselves, which would never ever be found under normal circumstances, make the product dangerous and pornographic, purely because a child could conceivably reveal them if he/she already had access to purveyors of pornography or even friends who could just as easily scribble naughty images themselves?
I notice that you make the common assumption that a person would spontaneously stop avoiding dates, start socializing, start studying, sleep more, etc. if he or she could only quit that evil WoW game.
I quit playing a few months ago because my interests shifted to other genres, but instead of staying up late playing World of Warcraft, I now lose sleep (and large portions of my life) to games such as Sims 2, Monkey Island, and Grim Fandango. The fact of the matter is that a lot of us just happen to enjoy "wasting" a large amount of our free time on fun but useless activities -- I used to stay up all night reading too, and I was up until 1am last night practicing guitar -- so there's no point vilifying any particular game. If you're going to blame anything, blame your friend's lack of self-control, and remember that even if he does quit, there's a good chance that he'll find something else (perhaps something even more damaging) to waste just as much time on.
You think you got it bad? :)
Not necessarily, because if scientists are involved, there's the possibility of either carefully selecting sperm that lacks whatever defect the father might have or outright modifying it. This might actually be a good way to reduce the incidence of infertility in the population by fixing defects rather than letting mostly infertile fathers conceive through dumb luck. I'm not sure if making us all more fertile is a good thing, but it's interesting to consider.
I find it more amusing that they specifically allow Canadian Tire Money...
Now I'm starting to wish I had more of that stuff. Paying for an expensive ebay auction entirely in Canadian Tire Money would be a whole new kind of awesome.
Actually, casual players will shell out, but you have to give them the right incentive. Whereas hardcore players will grind for hours to get exactly what they want out of a game (buying and playing through expansions as needed), casual players typically don't want to put in that kind of time or effort and will pay real money for "shortcuts" in the form of in-game money, items, or frivolous extras.
Seriously, which demographic do you think Rare is counting on to buy pinata sweaters on Xbox Live?
There was an article on CNN not all that long ago about this issue. I found it particularly interesting because it contains quotes from people in the US anime/manga industry who claim that the activities of fansubbers actually make their lives easier.
There were hints and walkthroughs back in the day, they just weren't free -- in fact, this was part of the business model for many old adventure games and was thus part of the reason why some of them were so difficult to complete without any outside help. Personally, I don't mind easily-accessible hints, if only because I play adventure games for the story and the humour more than the puzzles themselves. Sure, I'd rather play through a game on my own, but sometimes I just don't notice that the third pixel from the left is a bit different from the others, and I'd rather get a hint from UHS or some similar site than manually test every pixel and combination of actions until I finally give up on the game.
I'm actually surprised that they didn't do this sooner. There are a hell of a lot of unsecured wireless networks in any city, and it's not like the cops are peeking into anything that isn't incredibly public already. As an experiment, I once spent an entire bus ride home repeatedly scanning for wireless networks on my DS. Most of the ones I found were unprotected, including one which even had the word "secure" (written in l33t, no less) as part of its name. Unfortunately, all of the networks with particularly interesting or creative names were secure, including one called "No free internet for you", and another with the particularly clever moniker of "I steal credit card numbers." Gotta wonder what the cops would think of that one...
Dude, the Politics section is designated by an American flag at the top of the screen and FAQ specifically says "this section is for news relevant to United States government politics. It was created primarily to cover the 2004 US Presidential Election, but today exists for occasional stories that fit the bill." I don't see the point in making it American-only (I'm Canadian, by the way), but that's how it's designated for now.
I would, however, prefer if it was explicitly for international politics. As I mentioned before, new copyright laws in any given country could easily affect the RIAA's tactics... and vise versa.
Well, until we get a separate International Politics section, I think this is probably the best spot for it. Also, you may want to keep in mind that any success by Canadian pro-copyright groups will be held up as an example by the RIAA in their next court battle. If the RIAA can point north and say "Hey look, the Canadian music industry profits went up by 0.00000000001% last year! I bet it's because their pro-copyright groups get government support! *hinthint*", what are the odds that they won't take advantage of the situation?
Careful there... I can think of at least one other company that has that philosophy. It's taken a decade, and Duke Nukem Forever still isn't "done." ;)
I was a biology student for a year and a half before I switched into computer science, and I took a second year ecology class that dealt with this issue. We were indeed shown the hockey stick graph, and then it was put in the context of the past few millenia. Indeed, Earth has been much warmer in the past, the carbon dioxide levels have been considerably higher, and the global climate tends to go in cycles. However, the rate of the most recent temperature increase is unprecedented. This seems to indicate that although we may not be the only factor, it's a pretty damn big coincidence that everything started changing so fast right in the middle of the industrial revolution.
Does it really matter, though? I'd like everyone to cut down on pollution whether it'll help global warming or not -- isn't breathable air for the next generation a wee bit more important than some CEO's paycheque or some politician's pet project? Does it really become less important because those pollutants might not be causing global climate change?