Wordscraper allows users to arbitrarily construct a board because the sole purpose of Wordscraper is to allow people to play Scrabble while at the same time getting around the copyright problem with copying a standard Scrabble game board/rules/whatever.
I hate Hasbro and its heavy-handedness, but come on. If you're going to participate in law-skirting antics, be honest about what you're doing and why you're doing it. But doh! Can't be honest or else you're defeating your law-evading purpose.
Not that I want to see Hasbro and their lawyers dominate, but I think a sensible legal argument could be put together that, yes of course, the huge 95+% predominance of Scrabble board clones that will be on evidence on Wordscraper in a month or two months will be entirely Wordscraper's fault - it's its very purpose!
This issue that Slashdot keeps harping on is the one thing that makes me embarrassed to read this site or recommend it to other adults I know, because it's so out of touch with reality, and because it's pursued with such blinding religious fervor.
The editors here really need to get past their one-size-fits-all videogame content boosterism and stop being shills for the industry. Rockstar: "mature audience". Give me a fucking break. The vast majority of violent videogame players are in the 8-28 bracket, not that mature, and very impressionable. Rockstar strokes their customers' egos with their PR statements like this - good for business.
Slashdot, usually wise to the ways of the technology industry, should know better.
The mass of evidence still favors the link. http://www.apa.org/science/psa/sb-anderson.html answers some of the present study's objections. One study using somewhat different methodology doesn't suddenly invalidate the bulk of research - that's not the way statistics works.
Also, Dr. Olson doesn't strike me as completely impartial, based on the tone of her writing. It's one thing to point out how you believe your study is superior; another to impute biased motivations to other researchers (e.g. "the most-published researchers have built their careers around media violence"). Clearly to me she's to some degree part of the political war here.
Here's another example of this kind of reasoning:
On the topic of gaming violence, Slashdot overwhelmingly publishes items that scoff at the idea of a link between gaming and violent behavior, as opposed to items that support a link. Gee, I wonder why that is?....because the Slashdot readership is generally 12-35 year old males with a strong interest in computers and playing video games, the exact hormone-engorged demographic the violent crap is marketed to?
In the early 90s I briefly helped administer a text-based scrabble server (ScrabbleMOO), which was run straightly, just for fun, with a no-caving-in-to-corporate-bs attitude, but I was soon run off the project by a couple people with a different philosophy; one was a rather un-self-conscious programmer who wanted to control every aspect of the project he could, and the other was a lawyer who happened to be a scrabble expert, who ended up acting as a kind of legal Rasputin. Together they changed the ethos of the project to live in fear of the corporate legal world. The name was changed to something generic, the word "Scrabble" was carefully shunned and "crossword game" substituted everywhere. The board was no longer a given but had to be constructed, by every new player, from a menu of board sizes and bonus tiles. This was all in an ASCII interface so artwork wasn't much of an issue.
The devotion to appeasing legal standards resulted in comical contradictions and hypocrisy, to my mind. Player-constructed boards had to be "validated" against an unpublished standard, which was unsurprisingly the regulation Scrabble board that all the other players were using. The facade was thin as veneer and nothing I would conscionably stomach, but all this was done in the name of longevity and lying low and surviving any legal challenges.
The mutated project didn't draw anything close to the numbers that Scrabulous does, so probably escaped legal challenge for that reason alone, though if I remember correctly the trademark holders had scared off other small hobbyist projects using the Scrabble name, even in those early days before the web.
Others here have pointed out that the Internet Scrabble Club (isc.ro) offers a much better interface for the serious player than does Scrabulous. Several years back, one of the ISC admins told me that a short way into their project that they had actually gone out of their way to contact Mattel and/or Hasbro for permission. They were ignored, so they proceeded, and the server still thrives. And ISC allows free play and is ad-free, but charges about $30 annual for subscription for additional playing features.
My feeling is that if you're going to make a hobbyist implementation of a game you like, but you jump through ridiculously transparent contortions to avoid legal hassles, don't bother because it doesn't exactly show personal integrity. I'm all for sticking it to corporatism and using their own rules against them, but doing it for the issues that seriously matter and being forthright about what you're doing.
First problem is assuming that people with "most knowledge" all get their paychecks from fields and organizations that have a vested interest in space boosterism. "Significant knowledge" and "objective viewpoints" are just as important to the discussion. These include many experts and thinkers available in fields which deal with future planning and balancing available resources - you know, things like planetary science, biology, economics, social policy, government, and demographics. Space exploration is only one gee-whiz thing we can lavish our limited resources on. How about getting our global problems under control on Earth before billions die from overcrowding?
These "games" produced by the military, just like the commercial violent shooters, are marketed at boys and others not so discriminating, designed to get their adrenaline pumping and hearts pounding through repeated acts of simulated murder (oh excuse me, "team cohesiveness"). The goal might be martial indoctrination and pumped-up bravado rather than profit, but it's the same mechanism. Shooting those projectiles feels good, makes you feel really POWERFUL, a really glorious extension of that fist you have.
Watch as this message gets modded low for "trolling" or "off-topic" instead of high for "insightful" or "interesting".
...focusing on more anal retentives with computers and their nitpicky projects to organize the details of their lives to the nth degree.
My partner and I have several hundred books around the house, if not a thousand, spread across several bookshelves, tables, and boxes. We keep the important ones in ready places, less important ones on the shelves - but still not that hard to find - and we pull others out of the boxes as we need them. Pretty simple. Sure, every now and then I'd like to know exactly where a certain book is and I have to do a little digging. But the mini-library-of-congress is overkill for the vast majority of even avid readers with modest means living in modest houses of finite space.
I think the payoff for people such as the OP here is mainly psychological satisfaction in the control, the process of organizing, rather than a rational analysis of time spent on the project vs. the calculable payoff in time saved, etc. I am familiar with the excessive organizer type, and I'm scarred from the experience.
This article is a good example of one with mainly political/social content, rather than technical - only on the latter do I ever bother reading the user comments on slashdot, with exceptions such as this one which I usually regret.
Should an article such as this one come up which questions the slashdot cult of violent video game virtue, one shouldn't expect nuanced, objective, thoughtful responses from a variety of viewpoints. It's always: shout down, ridicule, and debase the critic.
Use your heads. No matter how much you may like something personally, and no matter how much it may sometimes come under attack from people with agendas which you don't like (such as perhaps religious fundies), there can STILL BE valid criticisms of it from a societal perspective.
I'm 42. I still like video games, and used to play many of them. I'm very liberal politically, an atheist, and I didn't "turn into my dad" or into a fundie the older I got. I simply see that the huge obsession our society has with violence, in all the aspects we use it for entertainment, does of course have a broad effect on our psychological landscape, and thus can influence the thinking and behavior of individuals, and shapes the parameters of how we view the world. It surely influences our societal attitudes towards warfare - and here I particularly mean American attitudes.
Instead of rabidly defending the right to guiltlessly play whatever violent trash that game companies produce - targeted mainly at hormone-driven teens - I encourage people here to debate a bigger picture.
A more cogent reason to censor the comics is that the US has been an invading, occupying, murdering presence in the Islamic region for many years, as well as an uneven-handed supporter of the Israeli state also terrorizing the region, so that wisdom dictates here that forbearance trumps the right of some well-fed American cartoonist to practice an abstract right to harass these people further. Not that I expect the media to do the wise thing.
The judge, old dear that I'm sure he is, is not taking the entire current cultural context into account. I doubt many people think that children shouldn't understand what violence is and why it is bad. There are many ways to teach this to children. But unrestricted exposure to the kind of gratuitous violence present in the video game industry today is not healthy for anyone's psyche, *including* adults, and doesn't teach morally or even inform - it entertains, it pumps up people's violence-adrenaline as they perform very realistic mock frags and decapitations and disembowelments and shootings and knifings of human beings.
I'm about as anti-censorship as you can get. I'm not sure that censorship is the best answer here. I suspect that a society that values this stuff must be coaxed to change.
To the claim that research shows no increased propensity to violence after exposure to violent video games: bullshit. I've seen mixed results, some definitely favoring the unwanted conclusion. Many psychologists think it is a problem. It's a difficult problem to study. Psychologist does not usually equal rabid religious censoring fundie. People tend to quote the results they want to see and ignore the rest.
In short, there are more important aspects to this problem than the fiercely-protected, unbridled devotion to your joysticks that many of you seem to have, and the childhood libertarian fantasy crap has got to give way sometime too.
I think you missed his point about learning humility in the experience of defeat. Education is all well and good, but there's plenty of well-educated people who have been unable to find good work in their chosen fields. Believing that it's just a matter of getting the right high-end skills and selling yourself well (everything's for sale in our world) is a reflection of often unfounded faith in our economic system. But it doesn't work out so nicely for so many people, even ones who live by The Rules.
Modern US capitalism and the government policies which serve the corporations screw lots of people, every day, in many ways. When one is successful, especially earlier in life, one tends to believe the success is a result of their own good character, intelligence, effort, whatever. The longer you live, the more you learn how quickly things can change, and how significant the externalities are.
The obvious response is that some areas are a lot more dangerous than others. Our federal tax $$$ are being spent right now to provide emergency assistance to people who, collectively, chose charm over common sense and safety.
There's no shortage of head-in-the-sand around the world when it comes to population and urban planning, but the Gulf Coast and south Atlantic coast are magnets for stupidity. Come on, just about every year there's at least one major hit.
I survive by working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. My income is below the US national average.
What's my secret? I don't live to spend, and I didn't create other human creatures I have to support. Those are optional things in life, you know.
If you have to work 60 hours per week, in what sounds like mid- to upper-level IT, to "survive", you've probably made your own bed, unless you had some really bad luck. Funny how people's definitions of survival are diffferent.
Btw, everyone's infrastructure is subsidized to a large degree.
"The problem, [IBM researcher] Russell said, is that there are only certain types of tasks that humans are good at doing simultaneously. Cooking and talking on the phone go together fine, as does walking and chewing gum..."...so cell and IM and email interruptions in the office are bad for PRODUCTIVITY, but cell in the car is just dandy for DRIVING.
Slashdot Mirror
the boogeron. I found one in my nose this morning.
Yay for the DOD.
Wordscraper allows users to arbitrarily construct a board because the sole purpose of Wordscraper is to allow people to play Scrabble while at the same time getting around the copyright problem with copying a standard Scrabble game board/rules/whatever.
I hate Hasbro and its heavy-handedness, but come on. If you're going to participate in law-skirting antics, be honest about what you're doing and why you're doing it. But doh! Can't be honest or else you're defeating your law-evading purpose.
Not that I want to see Hasbro and their lawyers dominate, but I think a sensible legal argument could be put together that, yes of course, the huge 95+% predominance of Scrabble board clones that will be on evidence on Wordscraper in a month or two months will be entirely Wordscraper's fault - it's its very purpose!
This issue that Slashdot keeps harping on is the one thing that makes me embarrassed to read this site or recommend it to other adults I know, because it's so out of touch with reality, and because it's pursued with such blinding religious fervor.
The editors here really need to get past their one-size-fits-all videogame content boosterism and stop being shills for the industry. Rockstar: "mature audience". Give me a fucking break. The vast majority of violent videogame players are in the 8-28 bracket, not that mature, and very impressionable. Rockstar strokes their customers' egos with their PR statements like this - good for business.
Slashdot, usually wise to the ways of the technology industry, should know better.
The mass of evidence still favors the link. http://www.apa.org/science/psa/sb-anderson.html answers some of the present study's objections. One study using somewhat different methodology doesn't suddenly invalidate the bulk of research - that's not the way statistics works.
Also, Dr. Olson doesn't strike me as completely impartial, based on the tone of her writing. It's one thing to point out how you believe your study is superior; another to impute biased motivations to other researchers (e.g. "the most-published researchers have built their careers around media violence"). Clearly to me she's to some degree part of the political war here.
Here's another example of this kind of reasoning:
On the topic of gaming violence, Slashdot overwhelmingly publishes items that scoff at the idea of a link between gaming and violent behavior, as opposed to items that support a link. Gee, I wonder why that is?....because the Slashdot readership is generally 12-35 year old males with a strong interest in computers and playing video games, the exact hormone-engorged demographic the violent crap is marketed to?
In the early 90s I briefly helped administer a text-based scrabble server (ScrabbleMOO), which was run straightly, just for fun, with a no-caving-in-to-corporate-bs attitude, but I was soon run off the project by a couple people with a different philosophy; one was a rather un-self-conscious programmer who wanted to control every aspect of the project he could, and the other was a lawyer who happened to be a scrabble expert, who ended up acting as a kind of legal Rasputin. Together they changed the ethos of the project to live in fear of the corporate legal world. The name was changed to something generic, the word "Scrabble" was carefully shunned and "crossword game" substituted everywhere. The board was no longer a given but had to be constructed, by every new player, from a menu of board sizes and bonus tiles. This was all in an ASCII interface so artwork wasn't much of an issue.
The devotion to appeasing legal standards resulted in comical contradictions and hypocrisy, to my mind. Player-constructed boards had to be "validated" against an unpublished standard, which was unsurprisingly the regulation Scrabble board that all the other players were using. The facade was thin as veneer and nothing I would conscionably stomach, but all this was done in the name of longevity and lying low and surviving any legal challenges.
The mutated project didn't draw anything close to the numbers that Scrabulous does, so probably escaped legal challenge for that reason alone, though if I remember correctly the trademark holders had scared off other small hobbyist projects using the Scrabble name, even in those early days before the web.
Others here have pointed out that the Internet Scrabble Club (isc.ro) offers a much better interface for the serious player than does Scrabulous. Several years back, one of the ISC admins told me that a short way into their project that they had actually gone out of their way to contact Mattel and/or Hasbro for permission. They were ignored, so they proceeded, and the server still thrives. And ISC allows free play and is ad-free, but charges about $30 annual for subscription for additional playing features.
My feeling is that if you're going to make a hobbyist implementation of a game you like, but you jump through ridiculously transparent contortions to avoid legal hassles, don't bother because it doesn't exactly show personal integrity. I'm all for sticking it to corporatism and using their own rules against them, but doing it for the issues that seriously matter and being forthright about what you're doing.
First problem is assuming that people with "most knowledge" all get their paychecks from fields and organizations that have a vested interest in space boosterism. "Significant knowledge" and "objective viewpoints" are just as important to the discussion. These include many experts and thinkers available in fields which deal with future planning and balancing available resources - you know, things like planetary science, biology, economics, social policy, government, and demographics. Space exploration is only one gee-whiz thing we can lavish our limited resources on. How about getting our global problems under control on Earth before billions die from overcrowding?
These "games" produced by the military, just like the commercial violent shooters, are marketed at boys and others not so discriminating, designed to get their adrenaline pumping and hearts pounding through repeated acts of simulated murder (oh excuse me, "team cohesiveness"). The goal might be martial indoctrination and pumped-up bravado rather than profit, but it's the same mechanism. Shooting those projectiles feels good, makes you feel really POWERFUL, a really glorious extension of that fist you have.
Watch as this message gets modded low for "trolling" or "off-topic" instead of high for "insightful" or "interesting".
...focusing on more anal retentives with computers and their nitpicky projects to organize the details of their lives to the nth degree.
My partner and I have several hundred books around the house, if not a thousand, spread across several bookshelves, tables, and boxes. We keep the important ones in ready places, less important ones on the shelves - but still not that hard to find - and we pull others out of the boxes as we need them. Pretty simple. Sure, every now and then I'd like to know exactly where a certain book is and I have to do a little digging. But the mini-library-of-congress is overkill for the vast majority of even avid readers with modest means living in modest houses of finite space.
I think the payoff for people such as the OP here is mainly psychological satisfaction in the control, the process of organizing, rather than a rational analysis of time spent on the project vs. the calculable payoff in time saved, etc. I am familiar with the excessive organizer type, and I'm scarred from the experience.
This article is a good example of one with mainly political/social content, rather than technical - only on the latter do I ever bother reading the user comments on slashdot, with exceptions such as this one which I usually regret.
Should an article such as this one come up which questions the slashdot cult of violent video game virtue, one shouldn't expect nuanced, objective, thoughtful responses from a variety of viewpoints.
It's always: shout down, ridicule, and debase the critic.
Use your heads. No matter how much you may like something personally, and no matter how much it may sometimes come under attack from people with agendas which you don't like (such as perhaps religious fundies), there can STILL BE valid criticisms of it from a societal perspective.
I'm 42. I still like video games, and used to play many of them. I'm very liberal politically, an atheist, and I didn't "turn into my dad" or into a fundie the older I got. I simply see that the huge obsession our society has with violence, in all the aspects we use it for entertainment, does of course have a broad effect on our psychological landscape, and thus can influence the thinking and behavior of individuals, and shapes the parameters of how we view the world. It surely influences our societal attitudes towards warfare - and here I particularly mean American attitudes.
Instead of rabidly defending the right to guiltlessly play whatever violent trash that game companies produce - targeted mainly at hormone-driven teens - I encourage people here to debate a bigger picture.
A more cogent reason to censor the comics is that the US has been an invading, occupying, murdering presence in the Islamic region for many years, as well as an uneven-handed supporter of the Israeli state also terrorizing the region, so that wisdom dictates here that forbearance trumps the right of some well-fed American cartoonist to practice an abstract right to harass these people further. Not that I expect the media to do the wise thing.
The judge, old dear that I'm sure he is, is not taking the entire current cultural context into account. I doubt many people think that children shouldn't understand what violence is and why it is bad. There are many ways to teach this to children. But unrestricted exposure to the kind of gratuitous violence present in the video game industry today is not healthy for anyone's psyche, *including* adults, and doesn't teach morally or even inform - it entertains, it pumps up people's violence-adrenaline as they perform very realistic mock frags and decapitations and disembowelments and shootings and knifings of human beings.
I'm about as anti-censorship as you can get. I'm not sure that censorship is the best answer here. I suspect that a society that values this stuff must be coaxed to change.
To the claim that research shows no increased propensity to violence after exposure to violent video games: bullshit. I've seen mixed results, some definitely favoring the unwanted conclusion. Many psychologists think it is a problem. It's a difficult problem to study. Psychologist does not usually equal rabid religious censoring fundie. People tend to quote the results they want to see and ignore the rest.
In short, there are more important aspects to this problem than the fiercely-protected, unbridled devotion to your joysticks that many of you seem to have, and the childhood libertarian fantasy crap has got to give way sometime too.
Go ahead, mod me down. I don't give a shit.
Slashdot has ads? For some reason, I've never seen them.
vhemt.org
I think you missed his point about learning humility in the experience of defeat. Education is all well and good, but there's plenty of well-educated people who have been unable to find good work in their chosen fields. Believing that it's just a matter of getting the right high-end skills and selling yourself well (everything's for sale in our world) is a reflection of often unfounded faith in our economic system. But it doesn't work out so nicely for so many people, even ones who live by The Rules.
Modern US capitalism and the government policies which serve the corporations screw lots of people, every day, in many ways. When one is successful, especially earlier in life, one tends to believe the success is a result of their own good character, intelligence, effort, whatever. The longer you live, the more you learn how quickly things can change, and how significant the externalities are.
The obvious response is that some areas are a lot more dangerous than others. Our federal tax $$$ are being spent right now to provide emergency assistance to people who, collectively, chose charm over common sense and safety.
There's no shortage of head-in-the-sand around the world when it comes to population and urban planning, but the Gulf Coast and south Atlantic coast are magnets for stupidity. Come on, just about every year there's at least one major hit.
I survive by working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. My income is below the US national average.
What's my secret? I don't live to spend, and I didn't create other human creatures I have to support. Those are optional things in life, you know.
If you have to work 60 hours per week, in what sounds like mid- to upper-level IT, to "survive", you've probably made your own bed, unless you had some really bad luck. Funny how people's definitions of survival are diffferent.
Btw, everyone's infrastructure is subsidized to a large degree.
"The problem, [IBM researcher] Russell said, is that there are only certain types of tasks that humans are good at doing simultaneously. Cooking and talking on the phone go together fine, as does walking and chewing gum..." ...so cell and IM and email interruptions in the office are bad for PRODUCTIVITY, but cell in the car is just dandy for DRIVING.