Fuck, man. At this point I wish every new game was released for the DS.
I think I have more sense than my cat does.
on
Videogame Mythbusting
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· Score: 4, Insightful
TFA brought up an excellent point, and one that I think bears repeating to those that think video games can "bleed" into real world behavior. All mammals distinguish between play and actual violence. TFA mentions primates, but I don't know about primates, so I'll talk about kittens.
Kittens fight. They kick and bite each other, pounce and paw with this wild look in their eyes. It looks like they're trying to kill each other, but this is how kittens play. They intentionally avoid injuring each other, and they have signs to tell the other kittens to stop if they actually get hurt. Yes, this play simulates a real catfight, as that's exactly what it's meant to prepare them for. Yet a kitten knows the difference between play fighting and real conflict.
Some people see kittens fighting, and instinctively jump in to stop them because they might hurt each other. Even more so because they're kittens - supposedly soft and sweet and helpless. I've seen humans peg the kitten who initiates play as "bad" because he is "bullying" the other kittens. Most people don't understand that the kittens are just playing.
I guess my point is, if a cat, an animal with a brain the size of a lemon, can figure out the difference between play and real, surely our own children can. We could at least give them that much benefit of the doubt.
...which is why XBox games are generally cheaper than their PS2/Cube counterparts!
Wait...
If anything, the XBox has driven game prices up, partly as an attempt to induce the illusion that cost is quality, and partly due to their receding profit margins.
He decided to go on a legal rampage to promote his new book, thinking that by the time it hit the shelves, the nation would be so full of anti-videogame paranoia and bile that they would buy the book on its position rather than its merits. This has worked for politico authors in the past, so it seemed like a sure shot. Jack's publisher probably supported or even helped him draft his "modest proposal."
Unfortunately, in a classic Thompson mistake, he chose to run his publicity stunt in a way that invited people to respond. The response was overwhelming, and those who opposed Jack's particular flavor of moral outrage were able to make his stunt fall flat while being gracious and generous themselves. In the meantime, the legal actions which might have helped sales of the book were being challenged. The intended political pot stirring barely reached beyond the smaller audience of gamers themselves, for whom the message was a non-starter.
In the end, the book only served to damage Thompson more, because it was beamed toward a highly sympathetic audience. Had he managed to create that audience, the book would have done well. (Imagine if he had stayed on the Alabama case and made it into the OJ Simpson Trial of video games.) As it stands, without wealth of pre-existing sympathy for his ideas, people are looking to the book for some justification of Jack Thompson's crusade - as is reasonable to expect from a 200 page book. They aren't finding that justification, because the book was never intended to have substance of its own. It is a symbolic book. People reading it undecided can only see that Jack is a very angry, egotistical, and unreasonable person.
So let this be a lesson to those who would ride the crest of public outrage to sell themselves - when you wipe out, you wipe out hard.
You're right. As ethical people, we should certainly bail out of any organization that shows signs of corruption. Except that of course, as an American, this would require me to support scrapping my own government. Instead, don't you think we should try to weed out the corruption to save the better parts of the organization? The bits that are sheltering orphans and leading peacekeeping forces?
I'm not saying that this is your argument, but it certainly seems to be the President of the United States' argument. He and many of his proponents are in favor of just ignoring them entirely, throwing away all the good the UN does in spite of its corruption. But I'll tell you a secret: the head USians don't want to be rid of the UN because it is corrupt. They want to be rid of the UN because it isn't their kind of corrupt.
Yes, parents are still responsible for reading the game box. But that doesn't negate the need for this kind of study.
The point here is that Jack Thompson and several California congresspeople have been hemming and hawing for the past few months that the ESRB isn't doing its job - basically claiming that, since the board is controlled by the industry, there is incentive for them to put more kid-friendly ratings on mature games. They even proposed creating a government committee to do its job instead, although that part of the law never made it into the final draft.
Now, to you and me, it's blindingly obvious that the ESRB is doing nothing of the sort. Violent titles have a "M" on the box for a reason. But some people don't bother looking at the evidence, or they actually want to believe that all the game companies are evilly trying to corrupt our youth. The ESRB is just trying to dispel the myth that they are intentionally using the wrong ratings. Maybe once that issue is cleared up, our policymakers can get back to debating actual issues instead of wildly gesticulating toward some vague conspiracy theory.
A Tale in the Desert is a great example of a game made by people who know nothing about games. It seems like five guys in a dorm basement had this cool idea, to make a non-combat MMOG where you could write the laws of the land...and then everyone walked away from the table. They never bothered making the game fun - in some ways, they never bothered designing the game at all - the whole thing has a cobbled-together feel. Playing the game is like reading an acclaimed novel and realizing you wrote like this in the sixth grade.
Don't get me wrong. ATITD can be great fun if you like walking through a desert for hours on end. Or tediously gathering sand. Or sitting at your computer counting to ten over and over. Or playing "social games" with people no more intelligent than your average MMO crowd. Or if you get off on the idea of being part of a social experiment, which, I can tell you, gets old fast. Or if you like lots and lots of arbitrary rules. (Not to mention the wonderful, wonderful sexism.)
ATITD is a great idea. If you can get into that idea enough to pay by the month for a flat game, that's your business. To me, playing the actual game simply wore the concept down. I love the idea of a non-combat MMO; if anyone made a Harvest Moon or Animal Crossing Online, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. I want to play the game described on the ATITD web site. I'm just waiting for someone to make it.
(Hint: It would work much better as a pen and paper RPG. Implementing GNOMIC in code is a bitch.)
People still believe in the literal 6 days of creation, when you only have to go back 3 translations from NIV to Latin to find a version that describes them as "periods" or "eras" instead of days. This, to me, is powerful evidence that creation was believed to have been something that happened on a "godly" scale of time as opposed to a human one.
Yet the number one reason Christians discount this when I talk to them is that they believe no version of the Bible before KJV is accurate. In other words, they choose, in their wealth of wisdom, to ignore it. Now, maybe it's not important in the grand scheme of things. But that's the sort of philosophical question that splits sects - not that I really believe that any Christian church should be fighting about Genesis when the whole point of the religion is the message of Christ's life and death, but that's just me.
In any case, it isn't about undermining or supporting your theology - it's about the truth. Do you mind?
Many people I know would ask the same question the other way around. How can you believe in God and free will at the same time? In many sects, they seem pretty mutually exclusive. (For example, the idea that surfaced in the early days of Protestantism and still thrives in newer sects in America, that all souls are either inherently damned or saved, and that the church is a meeting place for the saved, seems to strike free will pretty directly.)
I'll give you a free hint: in these sort of arguments, both sides like to think that only they believe in and defend free will.
I think this article garishly displays the problem we're facing here. Science was never meant to be a faith, and I don't think, judging from the thousands of conversations I've had over the years, that it really acts as one, even in the current culture of harping on faith more than anything else. But people who are brought up in the kind of churches that are predominant in America seem to think that faith is the only option. Kids who are raised under a church with a name and identify strongly with it, tend to think that everyone falls into a category, whether Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Baptist, Hindu, Buddhist, etc. So when they see any kind of system of belief, anything they can identify as such, they see a religion. They see an identity for other people.
But if we take science as a religion, it becomes rapidly apparent that this is not a desirable one. It offers no sense of absolute principles or coherent social structure, it does nothing to distinguish man from animal, it systematically refuses to speak to the nature or even the existence of God. And seeing this system of belief with the assumption that it is a religion, that people identify with it the way they identify as Methodist or Mormon or Bahai, it is very obvious that, given also the assumption that one can only sustain one religion at a time, to "convert" to science would be to lose everything of spiritual value.
Of course, this is exactly why there is no Church of Science. Science is not a religion, or a means of belief. It is a method for building things, a series of expectations, a way of looking at natural phenomena and applying logic to what we see. It is practical and powerful, but it does not supplant religion or encourage intolerance. It does not march into your church and tear apart your bible. It does not stop you from believing, nor does it want to. People who are closely tied to their church are likely to take everything they are taught as something they must believe, identify with, and defend. Science only asks you to know. It is an entirely different animal.
Name a game available in major retailers or most small U.S. game stores that in any way involves sexual assault.
What's that? You can't? Gee, I wonder why.
Probably because the ESRB wouldn't rate those games anything other than AO. In fact, they probably wouldn't rate them at all. You know, that ESRB that supposedly isn't doing anything to protect anyone, and is getting paid to rate eeevil games low so kids will buy them?
On the other hand, A Clockwork Orange - which contains a nasty mix of rape and violence, or The Godfather - which contains horrific scenes of murder and spousal abuse, are considered paragons of filmmaking. American filmmaking, no less; not produced by those wild and wooly foreigners. You can see depictions of rape on the Lifetime network, especially if it's movie night. Hell, we have an entire CSI franchise devoted to sex crimes. But somehow, video games that don't even depict these crimes are considered worse? Consider me puzzled.
The truth is, the only argument in favor of this law is fear. Politicians like Yee play on the chance that there might possibly be some kind of nebulous harm somehow attached to the object in question. And harm is certainly bad...I mean, other things that hurt us are banned, so they must have a reason, right? I don't have a problem with them arguing to restrict something. What bothers me is when they lie. Sexual assault games? Pedophiles using The Sims to sneak a peek at naked children? Selling a kid a video game is as bad as physical abuse? The head of the ESA is like a Nazi propaganda agent? Clearly, someone isn't being entirely honest about the situation here.
You really haven't thought this through, have you?
Firstly, children should be protected - Duh.
We all have a duty to protect all children. - Duh.
Finally, trying to deny that what you do in a computer game will influence what you become as a person, can only be the result of massive ignorance. - Insulting, but technically accurate. Nothing we experience is ever erased.
It makes perfect sense to me that there should be restrictions on violent games, and that it should be enforced by the authorities. - Schwaaaa?
You've shown that your heart is in the right place - you don't want to see children hurt, okay. None of us do. But what is the logical connection between saying that video games influence your personality, and mandated restrictions on games? Tell me, oh great moralizer! Give me a sign!
You see, when I was growing up, I would stop playing a game if it required me to do something I considered patently immoral - not because I was filled with the moral rage that the older generation seems to think is so gauche, but because to me, it meant that I was "stuck" in the game. Later I learned that I was being silly by equating real world experiences with simulated ones - but I think it's obvious that once you've learned that, you're immune from this alchemical "personality change" anyway. Now, I wonder where I might have learned those "holding back" morals from...
Guns kill - that's their purpose. - What the hell does this have to do with anything?
Your argument arguing is that children have to be protected from themselves because they aren't fully equipped to handle the media. That has to do with the person, the child's psyche. You can't argue that a game is like a gun, in that a child can innocently use it to kill, because your entire view teeters on the point that games encourage children to develop malice without providing means- a la, "people kill people." Malice in itself is not violent, and you can get rid of it simply by talking to the malicious person. But so many parents avoid talking to their own children - and teachers with their students - for fear of sending them into a media-induced frenzy. I'm not saying that this is the real problem, but it can't help.
Video games aren't designed to kill. They take button input - that's their purpose. Use a better analogy next time.
The problem with people like you, however, is that you so quickly flip-flop when the parents do try and monitor/control their kids behaviour. It's people like you who scream "1984!" at any suggestion of a GPS-enabled cell phone that parents can track, or RFID school passes that make sure kids are in class, or any other tools created to help parents do exactly what you (at least for now) are demanding parents do.
When I was growing up, I traveled all over the place with friends and school. We hung out at a park miles away from the city. Some of my friends even lived outside the city limits, in the blank area between a shopping malls and office parks. I never had a cell phone. I had to make sure I had a quarter in my pocket and find a pay phone if I needed to call anyone. And my parents never freaked out about where I was or who I was with. You know why? Because we talked. Every time I came home, we'd chat - and I don't mean "chat" the way some parents use it, I mean an actual conversation - about what I'd been up to that day. My parents didn't need to know where I was every second of every day, because they knew they'd get to hear the whole story when I got back. And they knew I was smart enough to stay out of too much trouble, because they were the ones that taught me how. This sort of thing is known as parenting.
So no, I don't think parents should be tracking their kids' GPS phones or putting them in an RFID electric fence. School feels enough like prison already. I think parents should be parenting. More than anything, this means TALKING TO YOUR KIDS. Come on...your kids are interesting people. You should want to talk to them. Once they trust you to talk about their day at school, you won't have trouble talking about anything. Don't want your kids to skip school? Talk to them about it. Don't want them to take drugs? Talk to them about it. You can't stop them from staying out late and getting into a little bit of trouble; even the best kids will. But the last thing you should do, the worst thing you can do, is shut up and let TV/games/internet do the talking. Kids don't understand everything; even the ones who think they do. They need your context to make sense of the world. So give it. That's what parenting is about.
As I've said before, and yes, I'm hoping it catches on...
If they're so goddamn impressionable, make an impression already!
Actually, in my experience it's been the exact opposite: pets seem to emulate the beefiness of their owners, with the exception of show dogs, who are kept fit for their prize-winning potential. Owners tend to consider that what's okay for them is okay for their pets, too. This is also why my parents stopped smoking when I was young, and my boyfriend's parents stopped drinking when he was young. Good parents change themselves to avoid hurting their children. Paradoxically, this is probably the exact reason for this video game ban: some parents, having given up things in the name of their children, see no reason for those things to still exist.
Tobacco, alcohol and pornography ARE less harmful to adults. Adults have fully-formed lungs, greater body weight and more understanding of the world. Almost everything is less harmful to them. It's just that some of them try to stop being adults when they become parents. To parents: the time your child spends watching violent video games will be spent doing something if you take the games away. Whatever they do, whether it's reading, watching TV, or being out there experiencing the real world, your job is to give them context for what they see. That's what we mean when we say this is your responsibility; not your responsibility to shield your children from seeing things, because they inevitably will, but your responsibility to let them know the real score. Let them know that in the real world, shooting people is a very bad thing to do. We constantly jaw about how kids don't know the difference between fantasy and reality, but can't we fix that by just telling them the truth? If they're so goddamn impressionable, then make an impression already!
And er...weather pornography? "Oh, your front is so warm!" Methinks it's a bit niche.
Remember Aeris? The video game character people actually cried over? How many polygons were in that model? How involved were her facial expressions and her body movements?
Digital or no, there's only one thing that will always make a good character: compelling writing. If you've seen an amateur production of a famous play, you know what I'm talking about. Words make the characters what they are, and as long as those words are conveyed faithfully, the character comes through. True, a really brilliant actor can play a horribly written part and make it sympathetic; but which would you rather do: try to distill the essence of truly great acting into billions of tiny digital subtleties, or write a good script?
Assuming you even have the skill to create and manipulate the kind of models you're talking about, trust me, writing the script is still easier.
Oh man, you have the most amazing insight into where this game is going! I'd just like to point out that the developers said right-out that the game is designed to avoid exactly this issue. Like, a year ago. (If you scroll down a bit, you'll see the question, "Am I required to buy new chapters?" They refer to "common areas" - these are the areas in the current scope of the game.)
If you think the designers won't be able to get around this problem, I suggest you take a peek at the game and the server structure. It lends itself to a modular expansion system pretty directly.
When your copyright expires has the public domain stolen your intellectual property?
He he...funny story. After the parents of my friend divorced, his mother took custody of all seven of their children who were still minors. My friend was very angry about this because, according to him, his mother had "stolen" his siblings.
Okay, I guess that story isn't so much funny as depressing and creepy. My point is, we tend to think that ownership is absolute, even when the things we "own" are impossible to control.
The act of piracy is such a morally piddling thing that we might as well not discuss it. We might as well be arguing over the morality of heckling a street performer, or whether it's fundamentally right to use MLA attribution style on your bibliography page. Only the paranoid could place any real value by the morality of such insignificant actions.
I was just sitting here enjoying myself playing games, and you have to come along and try to make it all mean something. If I wanted to be a soldier in an intractable war, I would've signed up for the military right off. Thanks for killing my buzz, asshole.
By the time you hit engineering school you should have been taught critical and analytic thinking.
Um, sorry, what? When? Most people go straight from high school into an undergrad engineering program. Are you actually going to tell me that high school will teach you all of the critical thinking skills needed to be an engineer? Bull shit.
Critical thinking is hard for most college graduates. Don't tell me the engineering students were the only ones who paid attention to some magical universal thought training. There has to be something that sets them apart. And I don't know, but I suspect it has something to do with those intense programs they have to go through.
Silly religionists. You always think that for some reason, people who don't believe in God, or even in your God, don't believe in an absolute truth. A wonderful talking point brought up by these assholes, among others. Unfortunately for your postulation, we do believe in an absolute truth. We're totally willing to give you absolute truth.
The problem is, people like the Promise Keepers don't believe in the absolute truth. They believe in an abstract moralistic system that somehow trumps the truth that everyone can see. It isn't hard to understand that murder is a sin, or that rain falls downward, or what it means to harm another human being. It isn't hard to see why those things are. But FAITH as it's used by the Biblical literalists, as a Value more important than all others, can freely ignore the absolute truth. Followers themselves can be relieved of their duty to basic kindness, mercy, and decency if they are dealing with matters of faith, and especially when dealing with non-members of the church. If nothing else because the church has a charter with God to make as many people as possible into believers.
Followers of the southern Christ are brought up to believe that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, and that's cool with me. But they're also taught that, if the truth of this were ever to be denied, the world would be turned upside down. Nothing can be more true, or even as true as the story of Jesus. (Which is just silly. As long as you believe in a persistently real universe, it would be equally true that "It's raining today." Put that in the bag of things that are true. Jesus died on the cross for our sins, and it's raining today.) And so everything must be justified and explained through reference to the idea of Christ. People don't like to be told that they're right for reasons other than their own.
And so the hundreds of schools of thought, who all agree that, say, murder is wrong, sit around all day arguing about WHY murder is wrong. We get nowhere. And somewhere, someone has to go and tear apart someone else's First Principle of the Universe - usually not on purpose; First Principles have a habit of getting in the way - and the fundamentalist, who has been raised to believe that the world will be meaningless without his First Principle, begins to believe that the others are all just making lip service to the idea of common decency. This is obvious, because really they want to turn the world upside down.
Of course atheists are moral. There's just nothing that can turn the world upside down for them - because after all, aren't we all sticking off a globe anyway? The assertion that only Christians can find any virtue at all in Christian literature or Christian movements is one of those world-inversion things. Are you really going to tell me that Augustine doesn't make sense if you haven't been baptized? I'm an agnostic and I've read the Bible in Latin. One interesting feature (if you're into the evolution/creationism debate) is that there are two forms of the word "day" in Latin, and the one used to describe the days of creation actually means "an indeterminate amount of time." (Perhaps in the sense that your grandfather would say, "back in my day...") As a non-Christian, do I have no right to understand this? Because I'm not a Christian, does that make it wrong? But it's the truth - the absolute truth.
Does it seem right to you that Christianity is so proud of the things it has given us - art, music, philosophy, charity - but that they are so quick to snatch these offerings to the betterment of mankind away when they are used and adapted by people they didn't intend to give them to?
Christian or no, there is an absolute truth. The only difference between ideologies is what you choose to ignore it for.
They should get Sean Stewart and Elan Lee to write the screenplay. They're the only ones to make a compelling story out of Halo yet.
Seriously...didn't they basically make a Halo movie (sans video) with I Love Bees? Oh wait, we're not supposed to talk about that. Our delicate nerd sensibilities are offended by the smell of advertising, and Halo fanboys hate to hear that something they didn't have to pay fifty dollars for had better writing and voice acting than their adorable little "BEST GMAE EVAR!" Cognitive dissonance, kiddos. Look it up. Wait, no, I'll save you the trouble.
Dungeons and Dragons, the movie. If you're thinking you might want to give this gem a rent, I submit this particularly fetid bit of dialogue as a deterrent.
Wizard Chick: I can do it! I'm a mage!
Fighter Guy: Yeah, a low level mage.
Suspension of Disbelief, meet my friend Sledgehammer. I know you two will get along.
Sony has completely lost touch with reality. Evidence? They keep trying to sell the UMD as a format in and of itself. Hello, Sony. This is reality calling to remind you that those little discs that only your handheld can play and only you can write are NOT a format. They're the things you put in your handheld. Do you expect that you're going to trick someone into buying a $20 UMD - Oh man, didn't you hear? It's the new format! - and then they'll HAVE to get a $200 game system to watch it on? Oh yes, cackle, surely that will work, crash of lightning.
Sony, what the hell is wrong with you? You add DRM to old media and call it New Special Shiny Media, you shunt your product beteen disparatie niches, none of which it very well fits. You can't even be bothered to get demo units to the stores that sell your shitty handheld. The only people who sell their products on theory are con men and pure profiteers. I wonder which one we're dealing with here?
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Fuck, man. At this point I wish every new game was released for the DS.
TFA brought up an excellent point, and one that I think bears repeating to those that think video games can "bleed" into real world behavior. All mammals distinguish between play and actual violence. TFA mentions primates, but I don't know about primates, so I'll talk about kittens.
Kittens fight. They kick and bite each other, pounce and paw with this wild look in their eyes. It looks like they're trying to kill each other, but this is how kittens play. They intentionally avoid injuring each other, and they have signs to tell the other kittens to stop if they actually get hurt. Yes, this play simulates a real catfight, as that's exactly what it's meant to prepare them for. Yet a kitten knows the difference between play fighting and real conflict.
Some people see kittens fighting, and instinctively jump in to stop them because they might hurt each other. Even more so because they're kittens - supposedly soft and sweet and helpless. I've seen humans peg the kitten who initiates play as "bad" because he is "bullying" the other kittens. Most people don't understand that the kittens are just playing.
I guess my point is, if a cat, an animal with a brain the size of a lemon, can figure out the difference between play and real, surely our own children can. We could at least give them that much benefit of the doubt.
...which is why XBox games are generally cheaper than their PS2/Cube counterparts!
Wait...
If anything, the XBox has driven game prices up, partly as an attempt to induce the illusion that cost is quality, and partly due to their receding profit margins.
He decided to go on a legal rampage to promote his new book, thinking that by the time it hit the shelves, the nation would be so full of anti-videogame paranoia and bile that they would buy the book on its position rather than its merits. This has worked for politico authors in the past, so it seemed like a sure shot. Jack's publisher probably supported or even helped him draft his "modest proposal."
Unfortunately, in a classic Thompson mistake, he chose to run his publicity stunt in a way that invited people to respond. The response was overwhelming, and those who opposed Jack's particular flavor of moral outrage were able to make his stunt fall flat while being gracious and generous themselves. In the meantime, the legal actions which might have helped sales of the book were being challenged. The intended political pot stirring barely reached beyond the smaller audience of gamers themselves, for whom the message was a non-starter.
In the end, the book only served to damage Thompson more, because it was beamed toward a highly sympathetic audience. Had he managed to create that audience, the book would have done well. (Imagine if he had stayed on the Alabama case and made it into the OJ Simpson Trial of video games.) As it stands, without wealth of pre-existing sympathy for his ideas, people are looking to the book for some justification of Jack Thompson's crusade - as is reasonable to expect from a 200 page book. They aren't finding that justification, because the book was never intended to have substance of its own. It is a symbolic book. People reading it undecided can only see that Jack is a very angry, egotistical, and unreasonable person.
So let this be a lesson to those who would ride the crest of public outrage to sell themselves - when you wipe out, you wipe out hard.
You're right. As ethical people, we should certainly bail out of any organization that shows signs of corruption. Except that of course, as an American, this would require me to support scrapping my own government. Instead, don't you think we should try to weed out the corruption to save the better parts of the organization? The bits that are sheltering orphans and leading peacekeeping forces?
I'm not saying that this is your argument, but it certainly seems to be the President of the United States' argument. He and many of his proponents are in favor of just ignoring them entirely, throwing away all the good the UN does in spite of its corruption. But I'll tell you a secret: the head USians don't want to be rid of the UN because it is corrupt. They want to be rid of the UN because it isn't their kind of corrupt.
Yes, parents are still responsible for reading the game box. But that doesn't negate the need for this kind of study.
The point here is that Jack Thompson and several California congresspeople have been hemming and hawing for the past few months that the ESRB isn't doing its job - basically claiming that, since the board is controlled by the industry, there is incentive for them to put more kid-friendly ratings on mature games. They even proposed creating a government committee to do its job instead, although that part of the law never made it into the final draft.
Now, to you and me, it's blindingly obvious that the ESRB is doing nothing of the sort. Violent titles have a "M" on the box for a reason. But some people don't bother looking at the evidence, or they actually want to believe that all the game companies are evilly trying to corrupt our youth. The ESRB is just trying to dispel the myth that they are intentionally using the wrong ratings. Maybe once that issue is cleared up, our policymakers can get back to debating actual issues instead of wildly gesticulating toward some vague conspiracy theory.
A Tale in the Desert is a great example of a game made by people who know nothing about games. It seems like five guys in a dorm basement had this cool idea, to make a non-combat MMOG where you could write the laws of the land...and then everyone walked away from the table. They never bothered making the game fun - in some ways, they never bothered designing the game at all - the whole thing has a cobbled-together feel. Playing the game is like reading an acclaimed novel and realizing you wrote like this in the sixth grade.
Don't get me wrong. ATITD can be great fun if you like walking through a desert for hours on end. Or tediously gathering sand. Or sitting at your computer counting to ten over and over. Or playing "social games" with people no more intelligent than your average MMO crowd. Or if you get off on the idea of being part of a social experiment, which, I can tell you, gets old fast. Or if you like lots and lots of arbitrary rules. (Not to mention the wonderful, wonderful sexism.)
ATITD is a great idea. If you can get into that idea enough to pay by the month for a flat game, that's your business. To me, playing the actual game simply wore the concept down. I love the idea of a non-combat MMO; if anyone made a Harvest Moon or Animal Crossing Online, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. I want to play the game described on the ATITD web site. I'm just waiting for someone to make it.
(Hint: It would work much better as a pen and paper RPG. Implementing GNOMIC in code is a bitch.)
...just something they ignored.
People still believe in the literal 6 days of creation, when you only have to go back 3 translations from NIV to Latin to find a version that describes them as "periods" or "eras" instead of days. This, to me, is powerful evidence that creation was believed to have been something that happened on a "godly" scale of time as opposed to a human one.
Yet the number one reason Christians discount this when I talk to them is that they believe no version of the Bible before KJV is accurate. In other words, they choose, in their wealth of wisdom, to ignore it. Now, maybe it's not important in the grand scheme of things. But that's the sort of philosophical question that splits sects - not that I really believe that any Christian church should be fighting about Genesis when the whole point of the religion is the message of Christ's life and death, but that's just me.
In any case, it isn't about undermining or supporting your theology - it's about the truth. Do you mind?
Many people I know would ask the same question the other way around. How can you believe in God and free will at the same time? In many sects, they seem pretty mutually exclusive. (For example, the idea that surfaced in the early days of Protestantism and still thrives in newer sects in America, that all souls are either inherently damned or saved, and that the church is a meeting place for the saved, seems to strike free will pretty directly.)
I'll give you a free hint: in these sort of arguments, both sides like to think that only they believe in and defend free will.
I think this article garishly displays the problem we're facing here. Science was never meant to be a faith, and I don't think, judging from the thousands of conversations I've had over the years, that it really acts as one, even in the current culture of harping on faith more than anything else. But people who are brought up in the kind of churches that are predominant in America seem to think that faith is the only option. Kids who are raised under a church with a name and identify strongly with it, tend to think that everyone falls into a category, whether Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Baptist, Hindu, Buddhist, etc. So when they see any kind of system of belief, anything they can identify as such, they see a religion. They see an identity for other people.
But if we take science as a religion, it becomes rapidly apparent that this is not a desirable one. It offers no sense of absolute principles or coherent social structure, it does nothing to distinguish man from animal, it systematically refuses to speak to the nature or even the existence of God. And seeing this system of belief with the assumption that it is a religion, that people identify with it the way they identify as Methodist or Mormon or Bahai, it is very obvious that, given also the assumption that one can only sustain one religion at a time, to "convert" to science would be to lose everything of spiritual value.
Of course, this is exactly why there is no Church of Science. Science is not a religion, or a means of belief. It is a method for building things, a series of expectations, a way of looking at natural phenomena and applying logic to what we see. It is practical and powerful, but it does not supplant religion or encourage intolerance. It does not march into your church and tear apart your bible. It does not stop you from believing, nor does it want to. People who are closely tied to their church are likely to take everything they are taught as something they must believe, identify with, and defend. Science only asks you to know. It is an entirely different animal.
Umm...because we're talking about a field whose product is creative in nature? Just a guess.
On an unrelated note, does your dick get chafed from all that waving?
Name a game available in major retailers or most small U.S. game stores that in any way involves sexual assault.
What's that? You can't? Gee, I wonder why.
Probably because the ESRB wouldn't rate those games anything other than AO. In fact, they probably wouldn't rate them at all. You know, that ESRB that supposedly isn't doing anything to protect anyone, and is getting paid to rate eeevil games low so kids will buy them?
On the other hand, A Clockwork Orange - which contains a nasty mix of rape and violence, or The Godfather - which contains horrific scenes of murder and spousal abuse, are considered paragons of filmmaking. American filmmaking, no less; not produced by those wild and wooly foreigners. You can see depictions of rape on the Lifetime network, especially if it's movie night. Hell, we have an entire CSI franchise devoted to sex crimes. But somehow, video games that don't even depict these crimes are considered worse? Consider me puzzled.
The truth is, the only argument in favor of this law is fear. Politicians like Yee play on the chance that there might possibly be some kind of nebulous harm somehow attached to the object in question. And harm is certainly bad...I mean, other things that hurt us are banned, so they must have a reason, right? I don't have a problem with them arguing to restrict something. What bothers me is when they lie. Sexual assault games? Pedophiles using The Sims to sneak a peek at naked children? Selling a kid a video game is as bad as physical abuse? The head of the ESA is like a Nazi propaganda agent? Clearly, someone isn't being entirely honest about the situation here.
You really haven't thought this through, have you?
Firstly, children should be protected - Duh.
We all have a duty to protect all children. - Duh.
Finally, trying to deny that what you do in a computer game will influence what you become as a person, can only be the result of massive ignorance. - Insulting, but technically accurate. Nothing we experience is ever erased.
It makes perfect sense to me that there should be restrictions on violent games, and that it should be enforced by the authorities. - Schwaaaa?
You've shown that your heart is in the right place - you don't want to see children hurt, okay. None of us do. But what is the logical connection between saying that video games influence your personality, and mandated restrictions on games? Tell me, oh great moralizer! Give me a sign!
You see, when I was growing up, I would stop playing a game if it required me to do something I considered patently immoral - not because I was filled with the moral rage that the older generation seems to think is so gauche, but because to me, it meant that I was "stuck" in the game. Later I learned that I was being silly by equating real world experiences with simulated ones - but I think it's obvious that once you've learned that, you're immune from this alchemical "personality change" anyway. Now, I wonder where I might have learned those "holding back" morals from...
Guns kill - that's their purpose. - What the hell does this have to do with anything?
Your argument arguing is that children have to be protected from themselves because they aren't fully equipped to handle the media. That has to do with the person, the child's psyche. You can't argue that a game is like a gun, in that a child can innocently use it to kill, because your entire view teeters on the point that games encourage children to develop malice without providing means- a la, "people kill people." Malice in itself is not violent, and you can get rid of it simply by talking to the malicious person. But so many parents avoid talking to their own children - and teachers with their students - for fear of sending them into a media-induced frenzy. I'm not saying that this is the real problem, but it can't help.
Video games aren't designed to kill. They take button input - that's their purpose. Use a better analogy next time.
The problem with people like you, however, is that you so quickly flip-flop when the parents do try and monitor/control their kids behaviour. It's people like you who scream "1984!" at any suggestion of a GPS-enabled cell phone that parents can track, or RFID school passes that make sure kids are in class, or any other tools created to help parents do exactly what you (at least for now) are demanding parents do.
When I was growing up, I traveled all over the place with friends and school. We hung out at a park miles away from the city. Some of my friends even lived outside the city limits, in the blank area between a shopping malls and office parks. I never had a cell phone. I had to make sure I had a quarter in my pocket and find a pay phone if I needed to call anyone. And my parents never freaked out about where I was or who I was with. You know why? Because we talked. Every time I came home, we'd chat - and I don't mean "chat" the way some parents use it, I mean an actual conversation - about what I'd been up to that day. My parents didn't need to know where I was every second of every day, because they knew they'd get to hear the whole story when I got back. And they knew I was smart enough to stay out of too much trouble, because they were the ones that taught me how. This sort of thing is known as parenting.
So no, I don't think parents should be tracking their kids' GPS phones or putting them in an RFID electric fence. School feels enough like prison already. I think parents should be parenting. More than anything, this means TALKING TO YOUR KIDS. Come on...your kids are interesting people. You should want to talk to them. Once they trust you to talk about their day at school, you won't have trouble talking about anything. Don't want your kids to skip school? Talk to them about it. Don't want them to take drugs? Talk to them about it. You can't stop them from staying out late and getting into a little bit of trouble; even the best kids will. But the last thing you should do, the worst thing you can do, is shut up and let TV/games/internet do the talking. Kids don't understand everything; even the ones who think they do. They need your context to make sense of the world. So give it. That's what parenting is about.
As I've said before, and yes, I'm hoping it catches on...
If they're so goddamn impressionable, make an impression already!
Actually, in my experience it's been the exact opposite: pets seem to emulate the beefiness of their owners, with the exception of show dogs, who are kept fit for their prize-winning potential. Owners tend to consider that what's okay for them is okay for their pets, too. This is also why my parents stopped smoking when I was young, and my boyfriend's parents stopped drinking when he was young. Good parents change themselves to avoid hurting their children. Paradoxically, this is probably the exact reason for this video game ban: some parents, having given up things in the name of their children, see no reason for those things to still exist.
Tobacco, alcohol and pornography ARE less harmful to adults. Adults have fully-formed lungs, greater body weight and more understanding of the world. Almost everything is less harmful to them. It's just that some of them try to stop being adults when they become parents. To parents: the time your child spends watching violent video games will be spent doing something if you take the games away. Whatever they do, whether it's reading, watching TV, or being out there experiencing the real world, your job is to give them context for what they see. That's what we mean when we say this is your responsibility; not your responsibility to shield your children from seeing things, because they inevitably will, but your responsibility to let them know the real score. Let them know that in the real world, shooting people is a very bad thing to do. We constantly jaw about how kids don't know the difference between fantasy and reality, but can't we fix that by just telling them the truth? If they're so goddamn impressionable, then make an impression already!
And er...weather pornography? "Oh, your front is so warm!" Methinks it's a bit niche.
Remember Aeris? The video game character people actually cried over? How many polygons were in that model? How involved were her facial expressions and her body movements?
Digital or no, there's only one thing that will always make a good character: compelling writing. If you've seen an amateur production of a famous play, you know what I'm talking about. Words make the characters what they are, and as long as those words are conveyed faithfully, the character comes through. True, a really brilliant actor can play a horribly written part and make it sympathetic; but which would you rather do: try to distill the essence of truly great acting into billions of tiny digital subtleties, or write a good script?
Assuming you even have the skill to create and manipulate the kind of models you're talking about, trust me, writing the script is still easier.
Oh man, you have the most amazing insight into where this game is going! I'd just like to point out that the developers said right-out that the game is designed to avoid exactly this issue. Like, a year ago. (If you scroll down a bit, you'll see the question, "Am I required to buy new chapters?" They refer to "common areas" - these are the areas in the current scope of the game.)
If you think the designers won't be able to get around this problem, I suggest you take a peek at the game and the server structure. It lends itself to a modular expansion system pretty directly.
When your copyright expires has the public domain stolen your intellectual property?
He he...funny story. After the parents of my friend divorced, his mother took custody of all seven of their children who were still minors. My friend was very angry about this because, according to him, his mother had "stolen" his siblings.
Okay, I guess that story isn't so much funny as depressing and creepy. My point is, we tend to think that ownership is absolute, even when the things we "own" are impossible to control.
The act of piracy is such a morally piddling thing that we might as well not discuss it. We might as well be arguing over the morality of heckling a street performer, or whether it's fundamentally right to use MLA attribution style on your bibliography page. Only the paranoid could place any real value by the morality of such insignificant actions.
I was just sitting here enjoying myself playing games, and you have to come along and try to make it all mean something. If I wanted to be a soldier in an intractable war, I would've signed up for the military right off. Thanks for killing my buzz, asshole.
By the time you hit engineering school you should have been taught critical and analytic thinking.
Um, sorry, what? When? Most people go straight from high school into an undergrad engineering program. Are you actually going to tell me that high school will teach you all of the critical thinking skills needed to be an engineer? Bull shit.
Critical thinking is hard for most college graduates. Don't tell me the engineering students were the only ones who paid attention to some magical universal thought training. There has to be something that sets them apart. And I don't know, but I suspect it has something to do with those intense programs they have to go through.
Silly religionists. You always think that for some reason, people who don't believe in God, or even in your God, don't believe in an absolute truth. A wonderful talking point brought up by these assholes, among others. Unfortunately for your postulation, we do believe in an absolute truth. We're totally willing to give you absolute truth.
The problem is, people like the Promise Keepers don't believe in the absolute truth. They believe in an abstract moralistic system that somehow trumps the truth that everyone can see. It isn't hard to understand that murder is a sin, or that rain falls downward, or what it means to harm another human being. It isn't hard to see why those things are. But FAITH as it's used by the Biblical literalists, as a Value more important than all others, can freely ignore the absolute truth. Followers themselves can be relieved of their duty to basic kindness, mercy, and decency if they are dealing with matters of faith, and especially when dealing with non-members of the church. If nothing else because the church has a charter with God to make as many people as possible into believers.
Followers of the southern Christ are brought up to believe that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, and that's cool with me. But they're also taught that, if the truth of this were ever to be denied, the world would be turned upside down. Nothing can be more true, or even as true as the story of Jesus. (Which is just silly. As long as you believe in a persistently real universe, it would be equally true that "It's raining today." Put that in the bag of things that are true. Jesus died on the cross for our sins, and it's raining today.) And so everything must be justified and explained through reference to the idea of Christ. People don't like to be told that they're right for reasons other than their own.
And so the hundreds of schools of thought, who all agree that, say, murder is wrong, sit around all day arguing about WHY murder is wrong. We get nowhere. And somewhere, someone has to go and tear apart someone else's First Principle of the Universe - usually not on purpose; First Principles have a habit of getting in the way - and the fundamentalist, who has been raised to believe that the world will be meaningless without his First Principle, begins to believe that the others are all just making lip service to the idea of common decency. This is obvious, because really they want to turn the world upside down.
Of course atheists are moral. There's just nothing that can turn the world upside down for them - because after all, aren't we all sticking off a globe anyway? The assertion that only Christians can find any virtue at all in Christian literature or Christian movements is one of those world-inversion things. Are you really going to tell me that Augustine doesn't make sense if you haven't been baptized? I'm an agnostic and I've read the Bible in Latin. One interesting feature (if you're into the evolution/creationism debate) is that there are two forms of the word "day" in Latin, and the one used to describe the days of creation actually means "an indeterminate amount of time." (Perhaps in the sense that your grandfather would say, "back in my day...") As a non-Christian, do I have no right to understand this? Because I'm not a Christian, does that make it wrong? But it's the truth - the absolute truth.
Does it seem right to you that Christianity is so proud of the things it has given us - art, music, philosophy, charity - but that they are so quick to snatch these offerings to the betterment of mankind away when they are used and adapted by people they didn't intend to give them to?
Christian or no, there is an absolute truth. The only difference between ideologies is what you choose to ignore it for.
They should get Sean Stewart and Elan Lee to write the screenplay. They're the only ones to make a compelling story out of Halo yet.
Seriously...didn't they basically make a Halo movie (sans video) with I Love Bees? Oh wait, we're not supposed to talk about that. Our delicate nerd sensibilities are offended by the smell of advertising, and Halo fanboys hate to hear that something they didn't have to pay fifty dollars for had better writing and voice acting than their adorable little "BEST GMAE EVAR!" Cognitive dissonance, kiddos. Look it up. Wait, no, I'll save you the trouble.
Dungeons and Dragons, the movie. If you're thinking you might want to give this gem a rent, I submit this particularly fetid bit of dialogue as a deterrent.
Wizard Chick: I can do it! I'm a mage!
Fighter Guy: Yeah, a low level mage.
Suspension of Disbelief, meet my friend Sledgehammer. I know you two will get along.
Sony has completely lost touch with reality. Evidence? They keep trying to sell the UMD as a format in and of itself. Hello, Sony. This is reality calling to remind you that those little discs that only your handheld can play and only you can write are NOT a format. They're the things you put in your handheld. Do you expect that you're going to trick someone into buying a $20 UMD - Oh man, didn't you hear? It's the new format! - and then they'll HAVE to get a $200 game system to watch it on? Oh yes, cackle, surely that will work, crash of lightning.
Sony, what the hell is wrong with you? You add DRM to old media and call it New Special Shiny Media, you shunt your product beteen disparatie niches, none of which it very well fits. You can't even be bothered to get demo units to the stores that sell your shitty handheld. The only people who sell their products on theory are con men and pure profiteers. I wonder which one we're dealing with here?