The whole study is fundamentally flawed in that it doesn't seem to distinguish or identify between different types of "violence". It seems to use such a broad definition of violence as to include what I would call conflict or competition, but not necessarily violence. It fails to take into account the grade or realism of violence, and lumps it altogether as a single universal constant, rather than a subjective scaleable value.
By their standards it would seem like one minute of thumb restling out of 2 minutes of gameplay would be rated as 50% violent whereas 1 minute of shooting a guy in the face with blood splatter effects and visceral gurgling sound effects out of 10 minutes of total gameplay would only be rated as 10% violent. It's a flawed system of measurement which completely fails to take into account all the factors involved in what a normal, average, discerning, human being would normally use to define "violence".
Even when it measures relative deaths per minute, it doesn't seem to care exactly what is dieing. Apparently a goomba or a turtle from mario, or a plant monster, or even a ghost, is measured exactly the same as a poor defensless civilian grandmother from GTA. It also doesn't seem to care about the method used in killing; whether it be bopping on the head, causing it to instantly dissappear, or to light a person on fire and watch him burn to death screaming. Burning someone to death usually takes a little while, so you might actually get a lower violence rating if you kill people exclusively with flamethrowers.
The relative levels of education involved in this debate in this case is just another misleading factor. Just because the person who conducted the study has a Harvard Phd doesn't mean she has a clue. Her study may very reliably and accurately measure the level of something in videogames, it certainly isn't what most people would call violence. And whatever it measures, it certainly doesn't seem to be anything useful.
I don't want to know how fast my (hypothetical) kid is driving 99% of the time. It's not my business, it's really not, unless he gets hurt, hurts someone else, damages MY property or gets in trouble with the police. I don't care what he does until something happens. THAT'S when I spring into dad-mode. THAT'S when I start to ask questions and yell and devise new and cunning punishments. Until then, it's up to him what he does. Hopefully I'd've raised him smarter than to put himself and his passengers into danger, and I'll assume I did until he proves me wrong.
It's called trust. Remember that?
So basically you (or hypothetical parents who use this strategy) have set up your child-rearing strategy around the philosophy that it's okay to do whatever you like, and it's only wrong if you get caught. Your entire strategy is to teach the child not to avoid bad/irresponsible/dangerous/stupid behavior, but to be more creative in hiding it. Sure it's important to trust your child, but it's more important to show that you care what they do even when it doesn't affect you.
If you only start caring once you hear about things, that says you only care enough not to have to be bothered by it again. Trust should be earned by proven responsible behavior, not granted for free until it is revoked for stupid behavior. By the time you find out, it's usually already too late: your child has already learned that it is "ok" to be stupid, and it is just "not ok" for daddy to find out.
Fortunately for children, you can start earning trust from an early age, because by the time they reach driving age, a responsible parent should have a good idea of what sort of a person their child is, and how much they can be trusted on the road. Then again, I've known too many parents who refuse to believe they've raised a troublemaker. Then again, they subscribed to the exact philosophy shown above.
I've seen some Japanese phones that have apparently had this ability for quite some time now, I was absolutely amazed when a friend showed me one that even OCR'd english text out of a snapshot!
And there's a company called Grabba that makes commercial bar-code scanning solutions out of PDAs and PDA-phones (among other things). A friend of mine works there... interesting stuff; they also sell a dock thing that a PDA can clip into, which gives it a camera so you don't need to use a mobile phone. Popular with inventory/warehouse type applications, it also does 2D barcodes as well.
Yeah, I first heard about this technology already being in wide-spread use in Japan 3 years ago, so it's been in public use there for much longer than that. They have those 2D barcodes placed in all sorts of public spaces such as train stations, where people can scan useful information about the area right into their cellphones. So seeing as how I heard about this so many years ago, it must have been adopted enough years prior to that for it to have reached that level of saturation.
It's really quite embarrassing how far behind in cell-phone technology (among many other things at this point) the US is when we can hear about something like this and have absolutely no idea how old the tech is.
Well the real time part is obvious (as in, not turn based), so the real issue is the difference between strategy and tactics.
To oversimplify it, a military strategy includes all the logistics of war, including the acquisition and allocation of resources, management of supplies, as well as the global movement and positioning of troops.
Tactics just refers to the specific maneuvering and commanding of troops engaged in combat.
So basically, how you command your units at your base, and where you choose to send your troops to engage in combat (such as which enemy locations or strongholds to attack first, etc.) are your strategy; and how you command your troops once they are in battle are your tactics.
So an RTS will include such elements as gathering resources, and then spending those resources on building structures and recruiting troops and units as a core element of the gameplay. A tactics game will focus mainly on how you micromanage your troops in battle, and leave the logistical elements such as recruiting or resource gathering either as secondary or completely separate.
A good example of the difference between tactics and strategy is seen in the Rome: Total War. They have a turn-based strategy portion of the game where you build structures in your cities, recruit your soldiers and move your armies around the world map. Then when a battle starts it switches over to a Real Time Tactics game, where all you are concerned with is ordering your troops around the battle map to win the encounter. When the battle is resolved it switches back to the world map and the strategy portion of the game.
I generally prefer tactics to strategy, as real time strategy is a bit unrealistic (building entire cities in the same time frame as it takes to fight a battle is just unrealistic to me), but the Total War mechanism of breaking those two elements apart works perfectly for me. It allows the strategy to take place over a time frame of months to years (as it should) and the tactics portion to take place over a matter of minutes to hours (as it should). I'm curious to see how this PC adaptation of Warhammer worked it out, as I enjoy a good RTT (and there aren't many).
I didn't see anything about this mentioned, but does this mean they plan to accept usb keyboards and mouses as valid input devices? That would actually be a good idea, enabling traditionally PC gaming experiences to be brought to the console without awkward interface issues. Too bad all the other issues with the company and console have pretty much turned me off to the PS3 right now, and considering I already have a PC that's also kind of moot.f
Technically, you're not paying for anything. Google News is free and offers what they deem to be newsworthy. If they don't wish to post hate-speach and anti-ethnic propoganda as news, that's pretty much their perrogative as a private company. You can argue about the quality of what they do choose to post as news, but in the end the very worst you can get is what you paid for.
While most of the arguments are centered on the idea that the Horde is not really evil, and that those sorts of distinctions in the game are only a matter of perspective, there is a basic point a lot of people are missing. The thing is that the Western Caucasian cultures are depicted in the Alliance races as being human, while the "foreign" races are depicted as not-human. The good vs evil dichotomy isn't even necessary to paint a negative connotation by depicting Rastafarians as (albeit misunderstood) Trolls as opposed to misunderstood or different colored humans. I don't blame Blizzard for having placed cultural elements into the various races to give them more depth and feeling, but the problem people can have is in their interpretation of those choices.
Say the game was instead based in an Asian setting, and the humans had a Japanese or Chinese cultural template, and classes ran along kung-fu masters and Samurai archetypes, and the costumes and architecture were based on those designs. Then say that the orc equivalents were based on the Western Imperialist era culture, who believe that it is their duty to bring "civilization" to these savage nations. Or say the Humans were based on the Arabian and Persian cultures from the periods of the crusades, and the Horde armies were invading from the west, believing they are reclaiming what they see as their own ancestral holy land, or liberating their persecuted bretheren living in those areas (or insert your own justification). This paints a very different connotation on the cultures, and although the game could make various justifications for the behavior on both sides to remove the idea that any one side is inherently evil, the perspective on which side is human automatically invites a certain interpretation.
Again though, I'm not blaming Blizzard for building off of a very successful franchise that was itself based on fairly prevalent fantasy themes. I applaud them for actually repainting the historically "evil" races as sympathetic. The problem lies in the original fantasy setting all these sorts of games are based off of, and the natural and inevitable outcome of having any non-human races in a setting based on human cultures or stereotypes.
Actually, I wouldn't mind playing a couple of those games I mentioned; I'm tired of Fantasy games that are constantly set in the Tolkien based European Medieval period anyway. One or two is enough, but all of them?
You wouldn't need to connect the controller to the DS; you could just connect using Wi-Fi. Possibly awesome.
Actually, I'm pretty sure this isn't too far off the mark. Given Nintendo's affinity for perriferal functionality and connectivity between their consoles and hand-helds, I think wifi connectivity between the DS and the Revolution is almost a given. If anything, they're working on some even more intricate useability between the DS and the Revolution. Perhaps all games will have required features that can only be accessed by the DS, or there will be more multiplayer experiences a la FF Crystal Chronicles which require each player be using their own DS. It might even be that all DS games can be displayed on your TV through the Revolution.
Then again, it could be all of the above, or nothing like any of this. Trying to anticipate Nintendo's strategy can be like shooting in the dark at times.
now IANAL but I believe there might be legitimate reasons for Hasbro pursuing this course of action beyond what most previous posters seem to believe. I could be wrong but I seem to recall that there are some conditions in copyright law that requires that you actively defend your copyrights in order to keep them (although perhaps I have remembered incorrectly and this might just apply to patents or something). If a copyright holder does not actively defend the IP, they run a serious risk of losing it to public domain.
Here we have a case where someone is clearly using the Risk name and brand to promote his own service without any authorization or liscencing from Hasbro. If he had used a different title from the start, how many people would have even taken interest to begin with? He sold the idea on the name "Risk". So now, even if Hasbro didn't mind or thought it was a good idea, the very least they can do is demonstrate that they attempted to defend their copyright legally (whether their case holds much water or not). So even if they lose the case, they get to show that they didn't let this "offense" slide and can keep control of their property. Perhaps there are less aggressive or more tactful ways of doing this if they actually support this guy's idea. But let's not forget that he went ahead without their permission to begin with.
Now plenty of people have already suggested plenty of ways around this legally for the "offender" in question which doesn't put Hasbro's property at risk. I'm really on his side, but I think people might be unfairly assuming Hasbro are just taking shortsighted legal action. Sometimes the law may leave a company no choice but to be letigious (as infuriating as it may be for the rest of us).
But again, I'm not sure about the specifics of copyrite law in this area, so maybe someone else who knows more could comment on this?
Actually, I had put the line breaks in when I was writing it. For some reason when I posted it all showed up as one paragraph. Not sure why, and for some reason I can't go back to edit the line breaks back in.
Well while everyone is either wet-your-pants excited or disgusted with this new design, people are forgetting the golden rule of consoles, and that is that a console is only as good as its games. Say what you want about any console from any company, the success of it will almost always entirely depend on the ability of its game titles to make innovative use of its innovative design. This could be the most incredible idea to hit gaming in years, but unless there are games that come out that make good use of this idea, there won't be much to show for it.
With this completely revolutionary system, Nintendo will have basically 0 portability to and from competing consoles, which in turn might scare away most 3rd party developers. And the ones that do take a shot at it will invariably make a few misses before we really start getting games that tap into the full potential of this new system, and even start showing us stuff that even we haven't thought of yet. Just look at the DS and see how it didn't really start hitting its stride till the games came out that made you say "wow, that really is a good idea...and I must have one". A year or two after launch, once the novelty has worn off and all the initial concept proof games are boring (fishing may be fun, but is hardly a particularly deep and moving narrative experience like a more complete game), the Revolution will only succeeed if it has a good library of innovative, fun, and popular games to support its sales.
I for one am both hopeful and skeptical, but I am willing to believe that Nintendo can provide us with something new that will invariably be adopted in some way or another by the other follow-the-leader competitors. It will be an interesting next few years of gaming, and I am rooting for the success of this idea. But it won't be this design or technology that takes this system to the promised land, it will always be the games.
They mention in tfa the one where if you poke characters repeatedly in the game they get increasingly agitated (which they for some reason fail to mention persisted in other Blizzard games such as Starcraft for some reason), but they didn't mention the exploding sheep easter egg? If you poked the critters that wandered around on the levels eventually they'd moan something ("Baaramyou"?)and explode. Similar exploding critters also in Starcraft. Anyway, the list is obviously incomplete, but I'm not sure what their criterion was for the eggs that did make the list. I seem to recall the exploding sheep egg being pretty well known back in my Warcraft days.
I'm glad the jury was able to see through this bullshit defense pretty quickly (one hour deliberation is fast for most juries, especially in criminal court), and I only hope this follows through with the suits being filed by the family against the company and retail outlets. All the attention on violence caused by video games is actually part of what is promoting all the violence that mimics videogames. Clearly unbalanced youngsters see all the attention it gets, and that there is a whole army of people out there willing to put the blame on someone else, and then reach the rather logical conclusion that they can get away with murder if they just do it in the fashion of their favorite videogames. Now of course this is a worst case scenario and I'm sure in most cases this kind of reasoning would come after the crime rather than before, but even still. Allowing people to get off on the defense that "X (where X = anything but me) made me do it" is a slipery slope which sets the precedence for whole mountains of bullshit where people otherwise normal (or at the very least not insane) people are not required to take responsibility for their own actions, whether it be getting fat off of fast foods, hurting yourself because you're too dumb to know that coffee is hot (nice irony that we've come back full circle on that), or murdering people because you feel like it and just happen to be one of the millions of americans who likes to play videogames.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole study is fundamentally flawed in that it doesn't seem to distinguish or identify between different types of "violence". It seems to use such a broad definition of violence as to include what I would call conflict or competition, but not necessarily violence. It fails to take into account the grade or realism of violence, and lumps it altogether as a single universal constant, rather than a subjective scaleable value.
By their standards it would seem like one minute of thumb restling out of 2 minutes of gameplay would be rated as 50% violent whereas 1 minute of shooting a guy in the face with blood splatter effects and visceral gurgling sound effects out of 10 minutes of total gameplay would only be rated as 10% violent. It's a flawed system of measurement which completely fails to take into account all the factors involved in what a normal, average, discerning, human being would normally use to define "violence".
Even when it measures relative deaths per minute, it doesn't seem to care exactly what is dieing. Apparently a goomba or a turtle from mario, or a plant monster, or even a ghost, is measured exactly the same as a poor defensless civilian grandmother from GTA. It also doesn't seem to care about the method used in killing; whether it be bopping on the head, causing it to instantly dissappear, or to light a person on fire and watch him burn to death screaming. Burning someone to death usually takes a little while, so you might actually get a lower violence rating if you kill people exclusively with flamethrowers.
The relative levels of education involved in this debate in this case is just another misleading factor. Just because the person who conducted the study has a Harvard Phd doesn't mean she has a clue. Her study may very reliably and accurately measure the level of something in videogames, it certainly isn't what most people would call violence. And whatever it measures, it certainly doesn't seem to be anything useful.
and improving National Security
So basically you (or hypothetical parents who use this strategy) have set up your child-rearing strategy around the philosophy that it's okay to do whatever you like, and it's only wrong if you get caught. Your entire strategy is to teach the child not to avoid bad/irresponsible/dangerous/stupid behavior, but to be more creative in hiding it. Sure it's important to trust your child, but it's more important to show that you care what they do even when it doesn't affect you.
If you only start caring once you hear about things, that says you only care enough not to have to be bothered by it again. Trust should be earned by proven responsible behavior, not granted for free until it is revoked for stupid behavior. By the time you find out, it's usually already too late: your child has already learned that it is "ok" to be stupid, and it is just "not ok" for daddy to find out.
Fortunately for children, you can start earning trust from an early age, because by the time they reach driving age, a responsible parent should have a good idea of what sort of a person their child is, and how much they can be trusted on the road. Then again, I've known too many parents who refuse to believe they've raised a troublemaker. Then again, they subscribed to the exact philosophy shown above.
It's really quite embarrassing how far behind in cell-phone technology (among many other things at this point) the US is when we can hear about something like this and have absolutely no idea how old the tech is.
Well the real time part is obvious (as in, not turn based), so the real issue is the difference between strategy and tactics.
To oversimplify it, a military strategy includes all the logistics of war, including the acquisition and allocation of resources, management of supplies, as well as the global movement and positioning of troops.
Tactics just refers to the specific maneuvering and commanding of troops engaged in combat.
So basically, how you command your units at your base, and where you choose to send your troops to engage in combat (such as which enemy locations or strongholds to attack first, etc.) are your strategy; and how you command your troops once they are in battle are your tactics.
So an RTS will include such elements as gathering resources, and then spending those resources on building structures and recruiting troops and units as a core element of the gameplay. A tactics game will focus mainly on how you micromanage your troops in battle, and leave the logistical elements such as recruiting or resource gathering either as secondary or completely separate.
A good example of the difference between tactics and strategy is seen in the Rome: Total War. They have a turn-based strategy portion of the game where you build structures in your cities, recruit your soldiers and move your armies around the world map. Then when a battle starts it switches over to a Real Time Tactics game, where all you are concerned with is ordering your troops around the battle map to win the encounter. When the battle is resolved it switches back to the world map and the strategy portion of the game.
I generally prefer tactics to strategy, as real time strategy is a bit unrealistic (building entire cities in the same time frame as it takes to fight a battle is just unrealistic to me), but the Total War mechanism of breaking those two elements apart works perfectly for me. It allows the strategy to take place over a time frame of months to years (as it should) and the tactics portion to take place over a matter of minutes to hours (as it should). I'm curious to see how this PC adaptation of Warhammer worked it out, as I enjoy a good RTT (and there aren't many).
We don't call them Ministries over here. In America it would be the Department of Propoganda and Reassurance, or PR Department.
I didn't see anything about this mentioned, but does this mean they plan to accept usb keyboards and mouses as valid input devices? That would actually be a good idea, enabling traditionally PC gaming experiences to be brought to the console without awkward interface issues. Too bad all the other issues with the company and console have pretty much turned me off to the PS3 right now, and considering I already have a PC that's also kind of moot.f
Technically, you're not paying for anything. Google News is free and offers what they deem to be newsworthy. If they don't wish to post hate-speach and anti-ethnic propoganda as news, that's pretty much their perrogative as a private company. You can argue about the quality of what they do choose to post as news, but in the end the very worst you can get is what you paid for.
While most of the arguments are centered on the idea that the Horde is not really evil, and that those sorts of distinctions in the game are only a matter of perspective, there is a basic point a lot of people are missing. The thing is that the Western Caucasian cultures are depicted in the Alliance races as being human, while the "foreign" races are depicted as not-human. The good vs evil dichotomy isn't even necessary to paint a negative connotation by depicting Rastafarians as (albeit misunderstood) Trolls as opposed to misunderstood or different colored humans. I don't blame Blizzard for having placed cultural elements into the various races to give them more depth and feeling, but the problem people can have is in their interpretation of those choices.
Say the game was instead based in an Asian setting, and the humans had a Japanese or Chinese cultural template, and classes ran along kung-fu masters and Samurai archetypes, and the costumes and architecture were based on those designs. Then say that the orc equivalents were based on the Western Imperialist era culture, who believe that it is their duty to bring "civilization" to these savage nations. Or say the Humans were based on the Arabian and Persian cultures from the periods of the crusades, and the Horde armies were invading from the west, believing they are reclaiming what they see as their own ancestral holy land, or liberating their persecuted bretheren living in those areas (or insert your own justification). This paints a very different connotation on the cultures, and although the game could make various justifications for the behavior on both sides to remove the idea that any one side is inherently evil, the perspective on which side is human automatically invites a certain interpretation.
Again though, I'm not blaming Blizzard for building off of a very successful franchise that was itself based on fairly prevalent fantasy themes. I applaud them for actually repainting the historically "evil" races as sympathetic. The problem lies in the original fantasy setting all these sorts of games are based off of, and the natural and inevitable outcome of having any non-human races in a setting based on human cultures or stereotypes.
Actually, I wouldn't mind playing a couple of those games I mentioned; I'm tired of Fantasy games that are constantly set in the Tolkien based European Medieval period anyway. One or two is enough, but all of them?
Gives a whole new meaning to the word "formulaic".
You wouldn't need to connect the controller to the DS; you could just connect using Wi-Fi. Possibly awesome.
Actually, I'm pretty sure this isn't too far off the mark. Given Nintendo's affinity for perriferal functionality and connectivity between their consoles and hand-helds, I think wifi connectivity between the DS and the Revolution is almost a given. If anything, they're working on some even more intricate useability between the DS and the Revolution. Perhaps all games will have required features that can only be accessed by the DS, or there will be more multiplayer experiences a la FF Crystal Chronicles which require each player be using their own DS. It might even be that all DS games can be displayed on your TV through the Revolution.
Then again, it could be all of the above, or nothing like any of this. Trying to anticipate Nintendo's strategy can be like shooting in the dark at times.
now IANAL but I believe there might be legitimate reasons for Hasbro pursuing this course of action beyond what most previous posters seem to believe. I could be wrong but I seem to recall that there are some conditions in copyright law that requires that you actively defend your copyrights in order to keep them (although perhaps I have remembered incorrectly and this might just apply to patents or something). If a copyright holder does not actively defend the IP, they run a serious risk of losing it to public domain.
Here we have a case where someone is clearly using the Risk name and brand to promote his own service without any authorization or liscencing from Hasbro. If he had used a different title from the start, how many people would have even taken interest to begin with? He sold the idea on the name "Risk". So now, even if Hasbro didn't mind or thought it was a good idea, the very least they can do is demonstrate that they attempted to defend their copyright legally (whether their case holds much water or not). So even if they lose the case, they get to show that they didn't let this "offense" slide and can keep control of their property. Perhaps there are less aggressive or more tactful ways of doing this if they actually support this guy's idea. But let's not forget that he went ahead without their permission to begin with.
Now plenty of people have already suggested plenty of ways around this legally for the "offender" in question which doesn't put Hasbro's property at risk. I'm really on his side, but I think people might be unfairly assuming Hasbro are just taking shortsighted legal action. Sometimes the law may leave a company no choice but to be letigious (as infuriating as it may be for the rest of us).
But again, I'm not sure about the specifics of copyrite law in this area, so maybe someone else who knows more could comment on this?
Actually, I had put the line breaks in when I was writing it. For some reason when I posted it all showed up as one paragraph. Not sure why, and for some reason I can't go back to edit the line breaks back in.
Well while everyone is either wet-your-pants excited or disgusted with this new design, people are forgetting the golden rule of consoles, and that is that a console is only as good as its games. Say what you want about any console from any company, the success of it will almost always entirely depend on the ability of its game titles to make innovative use of its innovative design. This could be the most incredible idea to hit gaming in years, but unless there are games that come out that make good use of this idea, there won't be much to show for it. With this completely revolutionary system, Nintendo will have basically 0 portability to and from competing consoles, which in turn might scare away most 3rd party developers. And the ones that do take a shot at it will invariably make a few misses before we really start getting games that tap into the full potential of this new system, and even start showing us stuff that even we haven't thought of yet. Just look at the DS and see how it didn't really start hitting its stride till the games came out that made you say "wow, that really is a good idea...and I must have one". A year or two after launch, once the novelty has worn off and all the initial concept proof games are boring (fishing may be fun, but is hardly a particularly deep and moving narrative experience like a more complete game), the Revolution will only succeeed if it has a good library of innovative, fun, and popular games to support its sales. I for one am both hopeful and skeptical, but I am willing to believe that Nintendo can provide us with something new that will invariably be adopted in some way or another by the other follow-the-leader competitors. It will be an interesting next few years of gaming, and I am rooting for the success of this idea. But it won't be this design or technology that takes this system to the promised land, it will always be the games.
They mention in tfa the one where if you poke characters repeatedly in the game they get increasingly agitated (which they for some reason fail to mention persisted in other Blizzard games such as Starcraft for some reason), but they didn't mention the exploding sheep easter egg? If you poked the critters that wandered around on the levels eventually they'd moan something ("Baaramyou"?)and explode. Similar exploding critters also in Starcraft. Anyway, the list is obviously incomplete, but I'm not sure what their criterion was for the eggs that did make the list. I seem to recall the exploding sheep egg being pretty well known back in my Warcraft days.
I'm glad the jury was able to see through this bullshit defense pretty quickly (one hour deliberation is fast for most juries, especially in criminal court), and I only hope this follows through with the suits being filed by the family against the company and retail outlets. All the attention on violence caused by video games is actually part of what is promoting all the violence that mimics videogames. Clearly unbalanced youngsters see all the attention it gets, and that there is a whole army of people out there willing to put the blame on someone else, and then reach the rather logical conclusion that they can get away with murder if they just do it in the fashion of their favorite videogames. Now of course this is a worst case scenario and I'm sure in most cases this kind of reasoning would come after the crime rather than before, but even still. Allowing people to get off on the defense that "X (where X = anything but me) made me do it" is a slipery slope which sets the precedence for whole mountains of bullshit where people otherwise normal (or at the very least not insane) people are not required to take responsibility for their own actions, whether it be getting fat off of fast foods, hurting yourself because you're too dumb to know that coffee is hot (nice irony that we've come back full circle on that), or murdering people because you feel like it and just happen to be one of the millions of americans who likes to play videogames.