"The only claim for harm here is money; the only penalty is loss of income. That's not what chilling effects claims are about. The criterion was that the law have a "deterrent effect" on freedom of expression. That doesn't exist here."
This is not just a question of just loss of revenue it is legally narrowing the audience for m rated games.
Publishers must have their company's best interests in mind (by law if it is publicly traded). So when development houses come with ideas for M rated games there is an undue scrutiny put on it by the publishers. Then if it gets past the publishers there is extra scrutiny put on it by retailers on weather or not they want to carry a game with extra legal baggage attached to it.
Lamont v. Postmaster General, 381 U.S. 301, 85 S.Ct. 1493 (1965). That case invalidated a Federal law that required postal patrons receiving "communist political propaganda" to specifically authorize the delivery of each such piece of mail, and my personal favorite example of chilling effect.
This is one that was ruled as unconstitutional because it added the extra layer of confirmation on the recipients' part. It didn't stop the author from publishing or the consumers from getting the product in anyway, it just stated that recipients' must confirm that they actually want the product. The case at hand in Lamont v. Postmaster General didn't have a direct impact on the publications of "communist political propaganda". They could still publish anything they wanted. It had a deterrent effect on the people who receive the material.
So if we look at what laws like these are proposing to do to games, we see that it is much more drastic then just asking for a confirmation. These proposed laws are legally limiting the distribution of a product from certain audiences all together. Legally limiting the audience that can play a game, the distribution of the game, and the effects that that will have on the industry is very much having a "deterrent effect" publishers and retailers thus infringing on the freedom of speech for developers.
How is that different the other industries? Most musicians only have 1 or two good albums in them as well that doesn't stop the music industry from saying who made the music. You don't buy sony/bmg Gfunk 2000, you buy Outcast -Stankonia. To a lesser extent the movie industry awards the people who make good movies behind the scenes as well. I guarantee you can name more directors then you can name game designers
The game industry is just like the music and movie industry. They all have high washout rates; however that doesn't stop them from promoting their shining people.
It's just not in publishers best interest to let the developers become known. Once people get their names known then they can't treat them like crap anymore. For fear of if the designer jumping ship the public will follow the name over the brand.
Yeah know when I read "there workers work 80+ hours and only pays them for 40" I see two problems.
One that the employees aren't being paid for the time they work. This one they have been working on for a few months apparently. We see people on here defending it all the time, but there are just as many if not more people who say they are still just doing it under the radar.
Then there is the second problem of making their employees work 80+ hours in the first place. This is a problem that I haven't seen EA make too much of an honest effort at. A lot of people have the idea that "hey their getting paid to work 80 hours a week why should they complain?" Well when you are working on your 5th crunch of the year what you get paid stops to matter. There is always talk of trying to make the hours less but the action did not follow.
Maybe they got better. I worked for EA for 3 years (stopped about a year and a half ago) and even though I have had opportunities I do not want to go back because the treatment of employees while I was there was just terrible and from the employees that I know stayed there I didn't expect them to do anything more then a public image campaign to get hide of the problems.
But this all or nothing approach is silly and stinks of NRA tactics. Yes, the NRA is effective, but I don't want to be like them. Reasonable adults compromise. I would like to compromise some and get these politicos off our backs before they do something truly draconian, like ban red blood, or any blood for that matter.
The ESRB was the compromise. It was created the first time the government came after video games. This was meeting them half way. If you keep moving back the line in the sand eventually you won't have any ground to stand on.
- Allow ESRB raters to choose the spots of the game they will examine.
They already do that. They have a system in place that requites developers to provide a tape of every thing that falls under their categories. Leaving it to them to disclose the information voluntarily. After the game is released the ESRB is given a full copy of the game that they can review however they like.
This type of system should sound familiar. The tax system works like this. You Don't have tax auditors coming to everyone's house before they submit asking the tax payer to show them though their taxes and financial records. The taxes get submitted and the tax office decides after the fact weather or not more detail is needed (an audit)
- Fine stores whose clerks don't card for MA+ games. This isn't fascist, it's simply obeying the law.
This creates an issue of prior restraint and chilling effect.
If the stores are under legal obligation to have extra scrutiny over M rated games then stores that carry these games are put under pressure to not carry them at all (why risk it). There are plenty of stores that do not carry the majority of M rated game at this point already (I'll give you a hint is starts with a W ands ends will almart), how do you think they will react when there is now the threat of financial reproductions in case an accident happens. That pressure inhibits the freedom of speech that dame developers have because now if they make an M rated game it is very possible that they can not release it to a substantial portion of the market.
Also if there is this extra importance put on the high ratings then games that are rated M or even high level T games would take longer to get their rating then games that are E and low T since they will have to go through games with a fine tooth comb due to the difference in legal status. How do you think publishers will react when it takes an extra few weeks to get their product on the market if it has a high rating?
No he just made a very valid point. The M rating that you seem to have such a problem with is not to designate pornography. There is a separate rating built into the system to specify things that are too sexual. It is the AO rating.
There is no need to add extra laws to the system over video games because the issue of pornography in games would already be held by the normal laws that cover all pornography.
Well I guess that depends on what you consider the hot coffee scene.
If you are talking about two naked characters having sex on screen then yes it did require additional content. If you are talking about dry humping between a full clothed man and a partially modeled woman (they didn't even finish texturing her) then yeah that was on the disk and could be accessed with a running memory hacking program
Re:'Game Designer' AKA Former EB Sales Clerk
on
Why Do Games Sell?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You have got to be kidding. You can't know anything about the game industry if you think that designer positions are useless. That's like saying that programmers are useless. Design is a very important step in making the game and ultimately determines if the game is any good or not. Tell me have you heard of the names Sid Meier, Shigeru Miyamoto, Hideo Kojima, Warren Spector, or Will Wright. If these names aren't familiar to you, you have absolutely no business in telling anyone about making video games and what is wrong with it. They are game designers. Are these the development's leeches you were talking about?
Btw designer and producer are different positions designers make decisions about the games, producers make decisions about the business. In fact each is just a category for positions. There is level designer, character designer, sound designer, game designer and others. Producers are used in every facet of the game high level producers are watching the budget of a game and making planning on the development timeframe, milestones and manage the mid producers. Mid level producers are enforcing the milestones communicated between departments and aid and manage the lower producers. Low level producers handle asset management, database entry, some bug fixes, and general gofer work around the office. All of these positions are absolutely necessary in big budget games.
If you are talking money wise the number one issue in game development is marketing distribution and licensing not staff.
Actually yes it is. Enabling network connectivity isn't a cheap endeavor as far as performance is concerned but a loot of the problems with networking games has more to do with fixing errors and hiccups in the network itself. It's more of a challenge in stress (that of the programmers) then it is a challenge in hardware
However having 2-4 viewports on one screen can have serious repercussions on performance. That is 4 controls being controlled by one system, 4 places in the game world to compute the 3d sound for, 4 graphic pipelines running at the same time all running on one system. Having split screen and high quality graphics really is a performance challenge
So if playing a certain sex of a character influences your identification with the character more then race then shouldn't the sex of playable characters should be ambiguous as well? It would just help with people being able to relate to their characters more if every one, male or female, can think that they share a sex with the character.
There is a big difference though. The USA Triathlon requires a membership to compete in their races that costs $40 for two or three year increments.
To quote from the article I linked that you obviously did not read
"Does our company really need to pay tens of thousands of dollars in order to present awards to our own games?" Seth Killian Capcom Entertainment Inc
Also you don't have write in votes to get a runner to compete in a triathlon. In this case let's look at what happened in last years awards
"For last year's awards, so many voting members of the AIAS were upset that Resident Evil 4 was completely left off the list for awards consideration, that the members themselves wrote in the game. Upon seeing the results of the write-in votes, Capcom Entertainment was contacted by the AIAS and told that the game would still not be eligible for any awards unless the company joined the organization. Our company was told, in essence, "Pay to play," a sentiment echoed in the quote from the AIAS representative." Seth Killian Capcom Entertainment Inc
So according to Seth they pretty much said "hey we would like to give you an award. Pay us tens of thousands of dollars to do it please." Quite an interesting racket they are running there.
The AIAS awards are just an advertising platform and have very little to do with actually awarding the best games. In order to even be nominated you must shill out money to The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. Oh but don't take my work on it. Capcom is saying the same thing.
If no one buys new then there will be no used games on the market as well.
There is a reason why it is so hard to find copies of sleeper hits. It's because customers didn't know about them when they were new and by the time customers heard the word of mouth it is too late all the new copies have been removed from the shelf and only a small finite number of used copies are in circulation.
I really have no problem with selling used games; I have a problem with the way used games are being sold at the detriment of new games.
Eventually in a games life there is no reason for retailers to buy new copies because they won't sell anymore. However right now you have a market where the only way you can get a new game is by getting a preorder because that is the only new stock that they will carry. Once all the preorders are filled retailers rely on the used game to be returned to sell the game. You're not waiting a couple months for a games price to go down, you're waiting a couple months for someone to return the one they preordered.
This kind of practice and the idea of only buying used games are seriously just destroying sleeper hits, independent, low budget, and scarcely marketed games (basically everything that doesn't get preorders).
Daler Mehndi (the artist that performed "Tunak Tunak Tun") is from India. So I would say that has little to do with Iraq and the surrounding nations. That is unless your definition of "that part of the world" extends beyond the reach of the Middle East, 3 countries over from Iraq (roughly the distance from Mexico to Canada), into south Asia.
Every game has bugs. There is not a game on the market that can't be crashed or broken in some way. That is a fact. No game is finished to the degree that the creators would like it. There always comes a point in polishing and fixing where you have to say close enough and send it out.
I freeze the game at least once in just about every game I play. I seem to have a knack for it (perhaps it is the QA experience kicking in) I would take a game with a few bugs and a freeze over a game that crashes relatively often any day.
I completely disagree. I thought the game was very well made and entertaining. There were only a few times that I was caught off guard by a bug of some kind (game froze for me once) but for me at least a few bugs and one freeze for the entirety of a game is pretty good.
I thought the game play was fairly engaging and that there was some decent social commentary being made.
Now if you thought you were buying a grand theft auto where you get to run around killing people stealing cars and doing al kinds of violent and illegal acts then yeah your gona be disappointed, because it wasn't that type of game. This really was just about school yard fighting gone out of control and I liked that.
My biggest complaint is that there wasn't enough variety in the missions that you got.
Just because minors can buy the games does not mean that control was taken away from the parent. The parent is still in charge of the minor.
This is the same as the parents having the control on weather their kids go to the park or not. Sure the park exists and the kids have all legal rights to walk into a park but that doesn't mean that the parents can't tell there kids that they can't go. There doesn't have to be a bouncer outside of all parks to make sure that you are not a minor or you have your parent's permission to be there. The fact that the kid is there means that they have the parent's permission explicitly or they have permission from the parents through apathy / negligence.
Same as it is for video games; if a minor buys a video game they either have the parent's permission explicitly or they have permission from the parents through apathy / negligence.
The parent can still decide whether their children have the games, they decide that when they let their child go shopping for them, when there child brings it into the home, when their child is playing the game, and many other situations.
This isn't a case of parents loosing a tool; it's the case of parents not being given an unnecessary and harmful tool.
Really was Battle for middle earth the first to do this? I am extremely familiar with battle for middle earth and I never really thought of their cavalry as revolutionary. This seems like such an obvious idea that it had to be somewhere before. Oh wait. It was Command and Conquer: Tiberian Dawn (the first one), you could drive over a infantry unit with vehicles.
Granted that having cavalry do it is a great mechanic and gives a huge strategic value to cavalry units (one that is fairly realistic) but it seems so obvious.
I would like to point out the neither Alice or Undying were developed by Electronic Arts, they were only published by them. While EA's publishing arm does take some risks at times, EA's development arm takes very few.
No children can not buy pornographic material. However you would be very hard presses to find any game that has the content of pornographic movies in stores anywhere in the US. Even if you could those games would already fall under preexisting pornography laws based on their content.
And comparing video games to alcohol and tobacco is a ridiculous argument. Video games are pieces of media and lumping them together with a controlled addictive substance that is being regulated due to physical health concerns is absurd. They are fundamental different things
No you can't. However you would be very hard presses to find any game that has the content of pornographic movies in stores anywhere in the US. Even if you could those games would already fall under preexisting pornography laws based on their content.
I know a lot of people in the game industry (some good friends) that would agree with you and disagree with all the people on here who are saying the Full Sail is a bad school.
I am a Full Sail grad myself. Personally I have not been happy with my own career in the game industry (QA work mostly) but I put the blame for that directly on myself not on the school (problems in my private life more then from my education). However I know many who have had very successful careers after Full Sail.
There is a surprising amount of people in the game industry that graduated from Full Sail. The graduates are out there and many are doing well. Here is a quick fact, I know of 6 Full Sail graduates that were part of the quake 4 development team.
The problem that I see is that people only trust other people that have similar education. CS graduates will prefer CS graduates and tech school graduates will trust other tech school graduates. There is comfort in the idea that you have similar experiences because you have similar degrees. So when dealing with someone that you don't share the bond with there is a bit of fear of the unknown.
That and over generalization of graduates. People meat one or two bad apples and then generalizes the entire system as bad. I have met plenty of CS graduates that didn't know the first thing about programming, especially game programming. Now I don't take from that that everyone with a CS degree knows zilch about game programming, but I guess to some that would.
I think the exact opposite actually. I think there should be more people in charge of game companies that actually play games. Sure some of the programmers, artists, and designers will play games when they have the time but the people who pick what games are made the executives, marketing, and investors by and large aren't interested in games.
I am actually very surprised at how many people I meet in the industry that don't play games at all. Programmers that are only there because they like "pushing graphics as far as they can go", business types that are just there because it's a growing industry that they want to capitalize on, former gamers that gave up playing games decades ago, or people who just sort of fell into games because they were looking for tech work at the right time, the industry is full of them.
Ok... now I know I have been watching to much sci-fi fantasy and anime type stuff because I can't remember whether this was a fact tidbit I picked up or an excerpt from fiction. The line is blurring In my head.
Well anyways I thought cells could only divide so many times over the course of a person's life time. So, from the day you are born your cells are dividing as you grow and age, but eventually your cells stop dividing and you body starts to decay.
Could someone please tell me if this was just fiction? I'm pretty sure if was from some fiction involving immortality but I can't remember where.
Slashdot Mirror
"The only claim for harm here is money; the only penalty is loss of income. That's not what chilling effects claims are about. The criterion was that the law have a "deterrent effect" on freedom of expression. That doesn't exist here."
This is not just a question of just loss of revenue it is legally narrowing the audience for m rated games.
Publishers must have their company's best interests in mind (by law if it is publicly traded). So when development houses come with ideas for M rated games there is an undue scrutiny put on it by the publishers. Then if it gets past the publishers there is extra scrutiny put on it by retailers on weather or not they want to carry a game with extra legal baggage attached to it.
Lamont v. Postmaster General, 381 U.S. 301, 85 S.Ct. 1493 (1965). That case invalidated a Federal law that required postal patrons receiving "communist political propaganda" to specifically authorize the delivery of each such piece of mail, and my personal favorite example of chilling effect.
This is one that was ruled as unconstitutional because it added the extra layer of confirmation on the recipients' part. It didn't stop the author from publishing or the consumers from getting the product in anyway, it just stated that recipients' must confirm that they actually want the product.
The case at hand in Lamont v. Postmaster General didn't have a direct impact on the publications of "communist political propaganda". They could still publish anything they wanted. It had a deterrent effect on the people who receive the material.
So if we look at what laws like these are proposing to do to games, we see that it is much more drastic then just asking for a confirmation. These proposed laws are legally limiting the distribution of a product from certain audiences all together. Legally limiting the audience that can play a game, the distribution of the game, and the effects that that will have on the industry is very much having a "deterrent effect" publishers and retailers thus infringing on the freedom of speech for developers.
Well dose you beer pass the Miller test?
Wait, no it doesn't even apply because beer can not convey a message and be considered speech.
How is that different the other industries? Most musicians only have 1 or two good albums in them as well that doesn't stop the music industry from saying who made the music. You don't buy sony/bmg Gfunk 2000, you buy Outcast -Stankonia. To a lesser extent the movie industry awards the people who make good movies behind the scenes as well. I guarantee you can name more directors then you can name game designers
The game industry is just like the music and movie industry. They all have high washout rates; however that doesn't stop them from promoting their shining people.
It's just not in publishers best interest to let the developers become known. Once people get their names known then they can't treat them like crap anymore. For fear of if the designer jumping ship the public will follow the name over the brand.
Yeah know when I read "there workers work 80+ hours and only pays them for 40" I see two problems.
One that the employees aren't being paid for the time they work. This one they have been working on for a few months apparently. We see people on here defending it all the time, but there are just as many if not more people who say they are still just doing it under the radar.
Then there is the second problem of making their employees work 80+ hours in the first place. This is a problem that I haven't seen EA make too much of an honest effort at. A lot of people have the idea that "hey their getting paid to work 80 hours a week why should they complain?" Well when you are working on your 5th crunch of the year what you get paid stops to matter. There is always talk of trying to make the hours less but the action did not follow.
Maybe they got better. I worked for EA for 3 years (stopped about a year and a half ago) and even though I have had opportunities I do not want to go back because the treatment of employees while I was there was just terrible and from the employees that I know stayed there I didn't expect them to do anything more then a public image campaign to get hide of the problems.
The ESRB was the compromise. It was created the first time the government came after video games. This was meeting them half way. If you keep moving back the line in the sand eventually you won't have any ground to stand on.
- Allow ESRB raters to choose the spots of the game they will examine.
They already do that. They have a system in place that requites developers to provide a tape of every thing that falls under their categories. Leaving it to them to disclose the information voluntarily. After the game is released the ESRB is given a full copy of the game that they can review however they like.
This type of system should sound familiar. The tax system works like this. You Don't have tax auditors coming to everyone's house before they submit asking the tax payer to show them though their taxes and financial records. The taxes get submitted and the tax office decides after the fact weather or not more detail is needed (an audit)
- Fine stores whose clerks don't card for MA+ games. This isn't fascist, it's simply obeying the law.
This creates an issue of prior restraint and chilling effect.
If the stores are under legal obligation to have extra scrutiny over M rated games then stores that carry these games are put under pressure to not carry them at all (why risk it). There are plenty of stores that do not carry the majority of M rated game at this point already (I'll give you a hint is starts with a W ands ends will almart), how do you think they will react when there is now the threat of financial reproductions in case an accident happens. That pressure inhibits the freedom of speech that dame developers have because now if they make an M rated game it is very possible that they can not release it to a substantial portion of the market.
Also if there is this extra importance put on the high ratings then games that are rated M or even high level T games would take longer to get their rating then games that are E and low T since they will have to go through games with a fine tooth comb due to the difference in legal status. How do you think publishers will react when it takes an extra few weeks to get their product on the market if it has a high rating?
No he just made a very valid point. The M rating that you seem to have such a problem with is not to designate pornography. There is a separate rating built into the system to specify things that are too sexual. It is the AO rating.
There is no need to add extra laws to the system over video games because the issue of pornography in games would already be held by the normal laws that cover all pornography.
Well I guess that depends on what you consider the hot coffee scene.
If you are talking about two naked characters having sex on screen then yes it did require additional content. If you are talking about dry humping between a full clothed man and a partially modeled woman (they didn't even finish texturing her) then yeah that was on the disk and could be accessed with a running memory hacking program
You have got to be kidding. You can't know anything about the game industry if you think that designer positions are useless. That's like saying that programmers are useless. Design is a very important step in making the game and ultimately determines if the game is any good or not. Tell me have you heard of the names Sid Meier, Shigeru Miyamoto, Hideo Kojima, Warren Spector, or Will Wright. If these names aren't familiar to you, you have absolutely no business in telling anyone about making video games and what is wrong with it. They are game designers. Are these the development's leeches you were talking about?
Btw designer and producer are different positions designers make decisions about the games, producers make decisions about the business. In fact each is just a category for positions. There is level designer, character designer, sound designer, game designer and others. Producers are used in every facet of the game high level producers are watching the budget of a game and making planning on the development timeframe, milestones and manage the mid producers. Mid level producers are enforcing the milestones communicated between departments and aid and manage the lower producers. Low level producers handle asset management, database entry, some bug fixes, and general gofer work around the office. All of these positions are absolutely necessary in big budget games.
If you are talking money wise the number one issue in game development is marketing distribution and licensing not staff.
Actually yes it is. Enabling network connectivity isn't a cheap endeavor as far as performance is concerned but a loot of the problems with networking games has more to do with fixing errors and hiccups in the network itself. It's more of a challenge in stress (that of the programmers) then it is a challenge in hardware
However having 2-4 viewports on one screen can have serious repercussions on performance. That is 4 controls being controlled by one system, 4 places in the game world to compute the 3d sound for, 4 graphic pipelines running at the same time all running on one system. Having split screen and high quality graphics really is a performance challenge
So if playing a certain sex of a character influences your identification with the character more then race then shouldn't the sex of playable characters should be ambiguous as well? It would just help with people being able to relate to their characters more if every one, male or female, can think that they share a sex with the character.
There is a big difference though. The USA Triathlon requires a membership to compete in their races that costs $40 for two or three year increments.
To quote from the article I linked that you obviously did not read
"Does our company really need to pay tens of thousands of dollars in order to present awards to our own games?"
Seth Killian
Capcom Entertainment Inc
Also you don't have write in votes to get a runner to compete in a triathlon. In this case let's look at what happened in last years awards
"For last year's awards, so many voting members of the AIAS were upset that Resident Evil 4 was completely left off the list for awards consideration, that the members themselves wrote in the game. Upon seeing the results of the write-in votes, Capcom Entertainment was contacted by the AIAS and told that the game would still not be eligible for any awards unless the company joined the organization. Our company was told, in essence, "Pay to play," a sentiment echoed in the quote from the AIAS representative."
Seth Killian
Capcom Entertainment Inc
So according to Seth they pretty much said "hey we would like to give you an award. Pay us tens of thousands of dollars to do it please." Quite an interesting racket they are running there.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid= 22479
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?st ory=12559
I'm sure with ethics like that they are really judging the games by their content and not lest say how much the companies "donated" this year.
This award ceremony is nothing but an Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences fund raiser and advertising campaign.
If no one buys new then there will be no used games on the market as well.
There is a reason why it is so hard to find copies of sleeper hits. It's because customers didn't know about them when they were new and by the time customers heard the word of mouth it is too late all the new copies have been removed from the shelf and only a small finite number of used copies are in circulation.
I really have no problem with selling used games; I have a problem with the way used games are being sold at the detriment of new games.
Eventually in a games life there is no reason for retailers to buy new copies because they won't sell anymore. However right now you have a market where the only way you can get a new game is by getting a preorder because that is the only new stock that they will carry. Once all the preorders are filled retailers rely on the used game to be returned to sell the game. You're not waiting a couple months for a games price to go down, you're waiting a couple months for someone to return the one they preordered.
This kind of practice and the idea of only buying used games are seriously just destroying sleeper hits, independent, low budget, and scarcely marketed games (basically everything that doesn't get preorders).
Daler Mehndi (the artist that performed "Tunak Tunak Tun") is from India. So I would say that has little to do with Iraq and the surrounding nations. That is unless your definition of "that part of the world" extends beyond the reach of the Middle East, 3 countries over from Iraq (roughly the distance from Mexico to Canada), into south Asia.
Every game has bugs. There is not a game on the market that can't be crashed or broken in some way. That is a fact. No game is finished to the degree that the creators would like it. There always comes a point in polishing and fixing where you have to say close enough and send it out.
I freeze the game at least once in just about every game I play. I seem to have a knack for it (perhaps it is the QA experience kicking in) I would take a game with a few bugs and a freeze over a game that crashes relatively often any day.
I completely disagree. I thought the game was very well made and entertaining. There were only a few times that I was caught off guard by a bug of some kind (game froze for me once) but for me at least a few bugs and one freeze for the entirety of a game is pretty good.
I thought the game play was fairly engaging and that there was some decent social commentary being made.
Now if you thought you were buying a grand theft auto where you get to run around killing people stealing cars and doing al kinds of violent and illegal acts then yeah your gona be disappointed, because it wasn't that type of game. This really was just about school yard fighting gone out of control and I liked that.
My biggest complaint is that there wasn't enough variety in the missions that you got.
Just because minors can buy the games does not mean that control was taken away from the parent. The parent is still in charge of the minor.
This is the same as the parents having the control on weather their kids go to the park or not. Sure the park exists and the kids have all legal rights to walk into a park but that doesn't mean that the parents can't tell there kids that they can't go. There doesn't have to be a bouncer outside of all parks to make sure that you are not a minor or you have your parent's permission to be there. The fact that the kid is there means that they have the parent's permission explicitly or they have permission from the parents through apathy / negligence.
Same as it is for video games; if a minor buys a video game they either have the parent's permission explicitly or they have permission from the parents through apathy / negligence.
The parent can still decide whether their children have the games, they decide that when they let their child go shopping for them, when there child brings it into the home, when their child is playing the game, and many other situations.
This isn't a case of parents loosing a tool; it's the case of parents not being given an unnecessary and harmful tool.
Really was Battle for middle earth the first to do this? I am extremely familiar with battle for middle earth and I never really thought of their cavalry as revolutionary. This seems like such an obvious idea that it had to be somewhere before. Oh wait. It was Command and Conquer: Tiberian Dawn (the first one), you could drive over a infantry unit with vehicles.
Granted that having cavalry do it is a great mechanic and gives a huge strategic value to cavalry units (one that is fairly realistic) but it seems so obvious.
I would like to point out the neither Alice or Undying were developed by Electronic Arts, they were only published by them. While EA's publishing arm does take some risks at times, EA's development arm takes very few.
No children can not buy pornographic material. However you would be very hard presses to find any game that has the content of pornographic movies in stores anywhere in the US. Even if you could those games would already fall under preexisting pornography laws based on their content.
And comparing video games to alcohol and tobacco is a ridiculous argument. Video games are pieces of media and lumping them together with a controlled addictive substance that is being regulated due to physical health concerns is absurd. They are fundamental different things
No you can't. However you would be very hard presses to find any game that has the content of pornographic movies in stores anywhere in the US. Even if you could those games would already fall under preexisting pornography laws based on their content.
I know a lot of people in the game industry (some good friends) that would agree with you and disagree with all the people on here who are saying the Full Sail is a bad school.
I am a Full Sail grad myself. Personally I have not been happy with my own career in the game industry (QA work mostly) but I put the blame for that directly on myself not on the school (problems in my private life more then from my education). However I know many who have had very successful careers after Full Sail.
There is a surprising amount of people in the game industry that graduated from Full Sail. The graduates are out there and many are doing well. Here is a quick fact, I know of 6 Full Sail graduates that were part of the quake 4 development team.
The problem that I see is that people only trust other people that have similar education. CS graduates will prefer CS graduates and tech school graduates will trust other tech school graduates. There is comfort in the idea that you have similar experiences because you have similar degrees. So when dealing with someone that you don't share the bond with there is a bit of fear of the unknown.
That and over generalization of graduates. People meat one or two bad apples and then generalizes the entire system as bad. I have met plenty of CS graduates that didn't know the first thing about programming, especially game programming. Now I don't take from that that everyone with a CS degree knows zilch about game programming, but I guess to some that would.
I think the exact opposite actually. I think there should be more people in charge of game companies that actually play games. Sure some of the programmers, artists, and designers will play games when they have the time but the people who pick what games are made the executives, marketing, and investors by and large aren't interested in games.
I am actually very surprised at how many people I meet in the industry that don't play games at all. Programmers that are only there because they like "pushing graphics as far as they can go", business types that are just there because it's a growing industry that they want to capitalize on, former gamers that gave up playing games decades ago, or people who just sort of fell into games because they were looking for tech work at the right time, the industry is full of them.
Yeah but when it comes to politics and the game industry I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone that falls into the "Balanced" section.
Ok... now I know I have been watching to much sci-fi fantasy and anime type stuff because I can't remember whether this was a fact tidbit I picked up or an excerpt from fiction. The line is blurring In my head.
Well anyways I thought cells could only divide so many times over the course of a person's life time. So, from the day you are born your cells are dividing as you grow and age, but eventually your cells stop dividing and you body starts to decay.
Could someone please tell me if this was just fiction? I'm pretty sure if was from some fiction involving immortality but I can't remember where.