What they did was examine how 'aggressive' the kids were at the beginning of the study, and note that the game-playing kids became more aggressive even when taking their start values into account. Certainly that's more useful information that only having them play games and measuring the aggression at the end of it.
However, if you're still letting the kids choose their own videogames, then you still have a strong chance that kids who were already going to become more aggressive over time anyway will pick the more violent games.
A better next step for research would be to randomly assign kids to play violent and non-violent games, in order to remove the child's inherent tendencies. That still wouldn't be a perfect study, but it'd be a start.
People still are making point and click adventures. (No, not me. But they are.)
Heck, fairly large numbers of adventure games are released to retail every year, to the slew of whiny reviews complaining about how outdated they are.
If you say you'd choose such a game over the Sims any day, but you haven't taken five seconds to look around and see that they exist, what does this say? That the game industry is doing a terrible job at letting people know what games are out there? That customers are too lazy to search for anything that isn't shoved in their faces?
Or do you already know about all the indie and niche games that exist, but ignore them because they're not as pretty as the big releases, because they can't possibly afford fifteen million dollar graphics? That's one of my enormous frustrations with pirates*... some of them complain that a game's not worth buying because it's not pretty enough, but by not contributing, they make it impossible for the developer to afford to make anything prettier.
* - not saying you're a pirate! just seguing to the Thing That Annoys Me:)
Well, assuming you actually want more games to be made, why don't you try buying games from companies that sell DRM-free games instead of pirating those that don't?
I know most commenters earlier didn't seem too impressed by a weak camera/mp3 player since they had other gadgets. I don't actually own a camera phone or an ipod and was practically ready to preorder the second they said they had a new toy ready... until they sprung this on me.
Dear Nintendo - I live in England. I have a great fondness for Japanese games. I am also interested in playing games that come out in the US that will never be released in Europe because of translation/licensing issues. I happily pay stupid prices to import games, and I have absolutely zero interest in pirating them. (I pay *really* stupid prices to import PC games from Japan, as anyone else with my habits can sympathise. DS titles are easier.)
Frustrations with region-locking are a reason I don't own a 'big' console, and there's no way I'm buying a DSi if it's going to be like this.
I was a completely easy sell if they hadn't muffed it, but if that's the way it is, I have an awful lot more non-locked games to play.
So, basically, you think Copyright is the equivalent of throwing a lot of shit at a wall to see what sticks ? Now there's a compelling endorsement...
You got a better way to describe the pathetic hit-rate of most creative enterprises? What percentage of bands, songs, games, books, paintings, or anything else creative are even vaguely successful? A few will be. Most won't be.
Why ? The carpenter can only sell chairs that don't fall apart. You think he makes a perfect one every time ?
You think a carpenter sells a chair for the exact cost of what it took to make it, time included? Have you ever worked a non-wage-based job?
A freelancer charges a lot more per-hour than they actually need per-hour if they were working every hour... because they're generally not going to get 100% takeup. (Which is why you can often negotiate a discount on a larger job.) A producer is going to charge you more than cost partly because they need that money to cover other expenses and accidents. For exactly the reason you stated above. The carpenter needs to have enough money available to replace the chair if it all goes horribly wrong.
Oh no ! The harsh bright reality of real life is shining on Copyright !
My mistake, I thought you were actually telling the truth when you talked about wanting copyright to stimulate invention rather than just wanting any excuse possible to ignore copyright. Well, if you have zero interest in making it financially feasible for anyone who isn't independently wealthy to perform creative work, then there's really nothing more for us to discuss.:)
To say it again in the hopes of phrasing it more clearly - It's not productive to try and limit it explicitly to 'recovering development costs'. The majority of creative endeavors are commercial failures. If you've watched various large investors, you've probably seen them put money into a LOT of different business ventures, all with potential for a high rate of return. They know that most of these business ventures will probably fail, therefore they pick businesses that, if they succeed, may return huge profits in order to make up for all the failures.
Similarly, to stimulate invention, you need a single invention to not only make up for its own development cost, but also to cover a handful of your other inventions that flopped. Otherwise, attempting to live by invention would mean automatic bankruptcy, because *nobody* succeeds with every single creation. If you could only recoup development costs from each creation, then even with an unthinkable 100% success rate you'd only just be keeping your head above water.
Trying to live off sales of creative products is a risky business. Most people make more money by having normal steady jobs.:)
So, yes to copyright limits, but it's ridiculous to try and strictly limit it to cost-recovery.
But do you actually know that or are you just assuming it? Many, many games actually incur large losses, not tidy profits. Perhaps not with these super-old retro titles before budgets got so inflated, but more recently, mainstream gaming is something of a loser's market. (Don't look at me, I'm an indie.)
Every other schmuck has to go to work every day to earn a crust. Why should people who just happen to be part of the copyright gravy train be any different ?
I earn a living off my IP. It's not a gravy train. And I *do* go to work every day in order to do it.:) In fact, unlike your average person with a nice wage-earning 9-5 job, I'm likely to be working nights and weekends too. And you certainly don't get paid vacations as a self-employed creator. Or health care. Or a pension.
But like everyone I know in the business, I keep busily trying to turn out game after game. For one, sales of my old titles decline over time. I need to make things that are new. For another, as I make more games and receive more money, I have more budget to put into future productions, and I want to make things that are shinier. And lastly, I like making games! Is there anyone who actually creates a copyright hit that *doesn't* want to keep making new things? (Okay, I'm sure there's some example somewhere or other. But for the most part, people do keep working.) Even if I made a million bucks, I'd still be making games, the million would just ensure that I could pay more people to be involved in the production.
I don't believe in eternal copyright, but I do believe that I have a right to some return on my investments.
yeah, because the people rushing around to pirate games made within the past year really care about copyright lengths...;)
I mean, I do agree with you, there should be some limits, or at least companies should have to update products in order to maintain control over them. Updating things is good, that's nice to incentivise.
On the other hand, in a case like this, the properties are clearly still valuable, or he wouldn't be making lots of money from selling them. It's clearly unfair to profit from selling games you made no investment in, while denying any return to the actual creators. It would be morally fine, in my book, if outdated, abandoned games were sold for cut-price and a share of profits sent back to the owner. See 'compulsory licensing'.
Why do people keep saying all this when it's irrelevant to the question that was actually asked? We're talking about why people pirate INDIE games, tiny download-only games sold for about $20. With the exception of the accessibility question (which is valid, and I've had my own share of troubles with that, especially relating to sites that give me grief because I live in Europe) most of your statements don't apply.:)
That's part of the point of this question being asked - when you're already NOT doing most-or-all of the things pirates whine about and you're still pirated JUST AS MUCH OR MORE as the big companies are, you begin to feel that perhaps the pirates aren't doing it for the reasons they say they are.
Um... while helpful, these reasons don't apply to the question that was actually asked, which was "why do people pirate INDIE games".
1. Okay, some indie games do have some DRM. Not all. Many require a keycode to install. But there are a lot more indie games with no DRM whatsoever than there are retail games with same.
2. Cost. Um... how many indie games have you seen charging $60-75? We're talking $7-25.
3. There are indie games with community support for modding. Try Eets, for one.
5. Downloadable indie games. We don't HAVE a CD to put in the drive.
6. Generally not a problem with indie games, which don't tend to have huge amounts of patches.
7. Many online sellers DO offer 30-day guarantees.
8. Most indie games have very low requirements.
So, clearly, from all of this, the sum up is that you should buy more indie games and ignore the mainstream industry. Job sorted!:)
Before you rant, make sure there actually IS this huge delay - I know *my* order processor usually sends out download information right away, but every now and then either the servers are down for maintenance or the people handling the money decided that the order needed extra scrutiny to be sure it's not a stolen credit card.
Neither of which are things that I can do ANYTHING about, nor even know that they've happened until I get an annoyed email from someone asking where their download is.
Almost every single time this has happened, by the time I've actually GOTTEN the annoyed email and responded to the customer with apologies, the payment processor has figured out where they hid their ass and given the customer their download. Delay time - Less than 8 hours.
It's possible you've been given a "48 Hours" message as pure ass-covering, rather than a sign of the actual delay.
Again, if we're talking about indie games, quite a number of them *have* a 30-day money back guarantee.
It's always really irritating to grant a refund. I pester them for "why?" first, and if they don't answer me, they don't get their refund. This is largely to track down solvable technical issues (some people would rather request a refund than ask for tech support, but with prompting can have their problems fixed) and to get hints on what people would like to have in future games. But I, like a lot of people selling downloadable products, DO grant refunds.
How useful are the secrets within a Big Game Company to a one-person indie?
The contacts are very useful, if you were in a position within the game company to have any and not relegated to some sort of dark coding cavern. But the latest greatest supertactic to squeeze extra polygons out of a next-generation console or whatever is likely not of much practical value to someone whose budget is 0.01% of Big Game Company's budget.
Disclaimer: I never worked for a Big Game Company, I'm an entirely self-taught indie, so maybe I missed the level-up mushrooms.
All the games reviewed looked like bland boring versions of something I bet I could find somewhere else for free already...if I wanted to waste all that time looking for something so dull anyway.
I could say the exact same thing about counterstrike though. Looks really boring, I could probably find something similar for free, but why would I bother?
This seems so obvious it shouldn't even need saying, but... people like different things. Some people really enjoy playing solitaire or gem-swapper. Some people like FPSes. Some people like RPGs.
The games listed come in a range of different types. Maybe none of them are what you're interested in. So? Maybe another month there will be something that you are interested in. There's a lot more variety available there than there is in the quite limited PC Releases shelf at your gaming store. No one's strapping you to a chair and forcing you to play solitaire if you hate it.... That I know of.
If it were just "hey, I found this bug" sent by a pirate, that's no problem. That's almost slightly helpful of the pirate, enabling me to fix a problem and release an update for my paying customers (the pirate will just have to steal it again, because I'm certainly not going to provide a special custom download just for someone who intentionally ripped me off in the first place)
However, some people have no shame.
Q: "I cracked this demo to have unlimited playtime and now it crashes when I jump on the foozle!"
A: "Buy the game, then you won't have that problem."
Q: "I downloaded this game from a torrent and one of the files was broken, can you provide it for me?"
A: "No. Buy the game, you won't have this problem."
Q: "I just got this game and it has a huge bug in it at the end of level two! Your company is a terrible game company! I will never buy from you again! I hope your entire family dies in a fire!"
A: "That bug only existed in the private beta-test version and was already fixed in the very first version of the game that was on sale. Buy the game, you won't have this problem."
Q: "This game is hard! Can you spend the next few weeks providing a slow step-by-step walkthrough of exactly how to win the game and answer all of my questions about it?"
A: "... got a receipt?"
Pirates reporting bugs isn't a problem. Pirates taking your hard work for free and then demanding that you do even more work for them personally, for free, deserve a head-booting.
Of course you lost tons of weight on it. You can lose tons of weight on most diet plans, they wouldn't sell otherwise. And selling stuff is exactly what the diet people want.
The question is, DID IT STAY OFF? And for how long?
Most diet plans will take the weight off you. By the end of five years, the weight will be back, even if you're still on the diet. That way, they can sell you another diet.
Capitalism, the nasty little beast that eats itself!
9 pounds in 6 weeks is very good! Project that to a year and you get 72 pounds
... unfortunately, this sort of bad science is absolutely rampant in the weight loss industry. "It worked to lose ten pounds, so if I repeat it ten times I can lose a hundred!" That's generally not true. The body isn't that simple a machine. Metabolism adapts, and weight gets progressively harder, not easier, to lose. But quacks trying to sell you stuff will use such 'logical' estimates to 'prove' that their product will change your world.
But yes, a slow weight loss is generally kept off a lot longer than a crash one. And anything that keeps people active and HAPPY (instead of miserable exercise making people hate doing it so that they quit as soon as possible) is good.
There are plenty of developers who sell games without evil copy protection. But are you buying from them?
If the DRM-haters don't buy any games and the lowlifes pirate games without DRM and buy the games with DRM... then DRM appears to be the winner and any company that wants to survive has to use it.
Developers aren't evil, they just want to make a living. If you fanatically support non-DRMed sellers and convince everyone to buy their stuff and make them money, more people will go non-DRM.
The worst situation is for those who work in the UK but get paid in dollars (usually Americans.)
Sadly, I fall into this category. As an indie game developer living in the UK I get paid in USD... and gnash my teeth a lot as the rates swirl around. Also, housing here costs a LOT more than where I used to live in the US, but it varies an awful lot city to city in the US.
Most? I believe studies have found that *90%* of players of some games have warezed it.
I know as a game developer that I certainly see many, many, many more pirate downloads than I do sales. I try not to stress too much about it, because giving myself ulcers really won't help. But most people do NOT pay. Which is thoroughly annoying when they then whine about, say, a lower art budget in the games they're ripping off. If more people/bought the games/ then it would be practical to spend more money on them... otherwise, as a tiny independent producer, I can't waste more money making a game than I'm likely to get back from selling it. I like having a roof over my head, thanks.:)
The pirate may be able to steal the game for free - I can't steal the custom content needed to make it.:)
I appreciate your sentiment and would once have agreed with it, except that for many, many, many pirates, it's just not true. If you venture onto a game piracy forum, you will find that they are trading as many, if not MORE, under-$20 games than they are fullprice. Games that can be bought entirely online. Games with full demos for you to try out. Often because the cheap games are generally much smaller filesize-wise and a hell of a lot easier for them to post to fileshare websites and download before the links get taken down again.
And it's not that they hate these cheap games, either. If they thought the cheap games were crap and not worth paying for, then pirating them makes no difference to the seller. But if you read their posts, they LOVE these casual games. They're eating them up. They whine and beg for someone to steal more of them. They talk about how much their children love playing these stolen games they're providing. They don't seem to feel that ANY price is worth paying, even the $8-per-game of a membership at BFG.
Most restaurants do not have problem with patrons running off without paying the bill.
Read Customers Suck on livejournal sometime. They don't have too much trouble with running out, because that's easily catchable. THey have a lot of trouble with bastards coming in, ordering a bunch of expensive food, bothering the waitress with special requests, and then inventing a 'problem' with the food they already ate and demanding that they get their whole meal for free. People suck.:)
- getting people to pay attention to you when you don't have a giant machine behind you!:)
See GameTunnel's Indie Game of the Year awards, which slashdot didn't even bother printing this year:
http://gametunnel.com/cat_goty.php
Assuming that any book is superior to every videogame solely because of medium is elitism. There are many books that are a lot 'worse' for you than many videogames. There are a lot more really great books than there are really great videogames, but books have been around longer and had more time for masterpieces to be made.:)
Some games have puzzles, but it's nothing compared to, say, playing a strategy board game, doing a crossword puzzle, playing chess, etc.
But many strategy board games HAVE video game versions. Crossword puzzles can be played on the computer. Chess can be played on the computer. Why are you automatically assuming that because something is electronic, it is lesser? There are plenty of physical board-games that are far from mind-expanding. (CandyLand, as the obvious example!)
And games do little to enhance verbal ability, unlike reading.
But... many video games INCLUDE reading. At the very least, reading enough to follow the directions. LOTS of games have some sort of story element to be read. And at the far end you have things like Fatal Hearts where the vast majority of game-time is reading, or text adventures where verbal ability is the entire game!
For those who disagree with my statement that video games do not help cognitive development, they don't. Cognitive science research indicates that students develop with "experience," experience being anything that a child experiences, from eating a meal to smelling something yucky to hitting a baseball to getting hit by a snowball to climbing a kitchen cabinet to get to the cookie jar that mom set down on top.
I don't doubt that these things are good for child brains. Doing stuff is an important teacher. But if 'learn by doing' is the only way, why let them read BOOKS? Book time is time they're not out exploring the world!
Obviously books transmit more information than most games. But not all games. There are knowledge-based games (trivia, Carmen Sandiego). There are story-based games (RPG, Adventure). Game-playing also provides practise/experience in various skills of strategy and math as well as reflexes.
Playing the same thing over and over again is definitely limiting to experience, though. Do a wide range of things!
Slashdot Mirror
They do NOT attempt to properly show causation.
What they did was examine how 'aggressive' the kids were at the beginning of the study, and note that the game-playing kids became more aggressive even when taking their start values into account. Certainly that's more useful information that only having them play games and measuring the aggression at the end of it.
However, if you're still letting the kids choose their own videogames, then you still have a strong chance that kids who were already going to become more aggressive over time anyway will pick the more violent games.
A better next step for research would be to randomly assign kids to play violent and non-violent games, in order to remove the child's inherent tendencies. That still wouldn't be a perfect study, but it'd be a start.
Heck, fairly large numbers of adventure games are released to retail every year, to the slew of whiny reviews complaining about how outdated they are.
If you say you'd choose such a game over the Sims any day, but you haven't taken five seconds to look around and see that they exist, what does this say? That the game industry is doing a terrible job at letting people know what games are out there? That customers are too lazy to search for anything that isn't shoved in their faces?
Or do you already know about all the indie and niche games that exist, but ignore them because they're not as pretty as the big releases, because they can't possibly afford fifteen million dollar graphics? That's one of my enormous frustrations with pirates*... some of them complain that a game's not worth buying because it's not pretty enough, but by not contributing, they make it impossible for the developer to afford to make anything prettier.
* - not saying you're a pirate! just seguing to the Thing That Annoys Me :)
Well, assuming you actually want more games to be made, why don't you try buying games from companies that sell DRM-free games instead of pirating those that don't?
Dear Nintendo - I live in England. I have a great fondness for Japanese games. I am also interested in playing games that come out in the US that will never be released in Europe because of translation/licensing issues. I happily pay stupid prices to import games, and I have absolutely zero interest in pirating them. (I pay *really* stupid prices to import PC games from Japan, as anyone else with my habits can sympathise. DS titles are easier.)
Frustrations with region-locking are a reason I don't own a 'big' console, and there's no way I'm buying a DSi if it's going to be like this.
I was a completely easy sell if they hadn't muffed it, but if that's the way it is, I have an awful lot more non-locked games to play.
You got a better way to describe the pathetic hit-rate of most creative enterprises? What percentage of bands, songs, games, books, paintings, or anything else creative are even vaguely successful? A few will be. Most won't be.
Why ? The carpenter can only sell chairs that don't fall apart. You think he makes a perfect one every time ?
You think a carpenter sells a chair for the exact cost of what it took to make it, time included? Have you ever worked a non-wage-based job?
A freelancer charges a lot more per-hour than they actually need per-hour if they were working every hour... because they're generally not going to get 100% takeup. (Which is why you can often negotiate a discount on a larger job.) A producer is going to charge you more than cost partly because they need that money to cover other expenses and accidents. For exactly the reason you stated above. The carpenter needs to have enough money available to replace the chair if it all goes horribly wrong.
Oh no ! The harsh bright reality of real life is shining on Copyright !
My mistake, I thought you were actually telling the truth when you talked about wanting copyright to stimulate invention rather than just wanting any excuse possible to ignore copyright. Well, if you have zero interest in making it financially feasible for anyone who isn't independently wealthy to perform creative work, then there's really nothing more for us to discuss. :)
Similarly, to stimulate invention, you need a single invention to not only make up for its own development cost, but also to cover a handful of your other inventions that flopped. Otherwise, attempting to live by invention would mean automatic bankruptcy, because *nobody* succeeds with every single creation. If you could only recoup development costs from each creation, then even with an unthinkable 100% success rate you'd only just be keeping your head above water.
Trying to live off sales of creative products is a risky business. Most people make more money by having normal steady jobs. :)
So, yes to copyright limits, but it's ridiculous to try and strictly limit it to cost-recovery.
But do you actually know that or are you just assuming it? Many, many games actually incur large losses, not tidy profits. Perhaps not with these super-old retro titles before budgets got so inflated, but more recently, mainstream gaming is something of a loser's market. (Don't look at me, I'm an indie.)
Every other schmuck has to go to work every day to earn a crust. Why should people who just happen to be part of the copyright gravy train be any different ?
I earn a living off my IP. It's not a gravy train. And I *do* go to work every day in order to do it. :) In fact, unlike your average person with a nice wage-earning 9-5 job, I'm likely to be working nights and weekends too. And you certainly don't get paid vacations as a self-employed creator. Or health care. Or a pension.
But like everyone I know in the business, I keep busily trying to turn out game after game. For one, sales of my old titles decline over time. I need to make things that are new. For another, as I make more games and receive more money, I have more budget to put into future productions, and I want to make things that are shinier. And lastly, I like making games! Is there anyone who actually creates a copyright hit that *doesn't* want to keep making new things? (Okay, I'm sure there's some example somewhere or other. But for the most part, people do keep working.) Even if I made a million bucks, I'd still be making games, the million would just ensure that I could pay more people to be involved in the production.
I don't believe in eternal copyright, but I do believe that I have a right to some return on my investments.
I mean, I do agree with you, there should be some limits, or at least companies should have to update products in order to maintain control over them. Updating things is good, that's nice to incentivise.
On the other hand, in a case like this, the properties are clearly still valuable, or he wouldn't be making lots of money from selling them. It's clearly unfair to profit from selling games you made no investment in, while denying any return to the actual creators. It would be morally fine, in my book, if outdated, abandoned games were sold for cut-price and a share of profits sent back to the owner. See 'compulsory licensing'.
That's part of the point of this question being asked - when you're already NOT doing most-or-all of the things pirates whine about and you're still pirated JUST AS MUCH OR MORE as the big companies are, you begin to feel that perhaps the pirates aren't doing it for the reasons they say they are.
1. Okay, some indie games do have some DRM. Not all. Many require a keycode to install. But there are a lot more indie games with no DRM whatsoever than there are retail games with same.
2. Cost. Um... how many indie games have you seen charging $60-75? We're talking $7-25.
3. There are indie games with community support for modding. Try Eets, for one.
5. Downloadable indie games. We don't HAVE a CD to put in the drive.
6. Generally not a problem with indie games, which don't tend to have huge amounts of patches.
7. Many online sellers DO offer 30-day guarantees.
8. Most indie games have very low requirements.
So, clearly, from all of this, the sum up is that you should buy more indie games and ignore the mainstream industry. Job sorted! :)
Neither of which are things that I can do ANYTHING about, nor even know that they've happened until I get an annoyed email from someone asking where their download is.
Almost every single time this has happened, by the time I've actually GOTTEN the annoyed email and responded to the customer with apologies, the payment processor has figured out where they hid their ass and given the customer their download. Delay time - Less than 8 hours.
It's possible you've been given a "48 Hours" message as pure ass-covering, rather than a sign of the actual delay.
It's always really irritating to grant a refund. I pester them for "why?" first, and if they don't answer me, they don't get their refund. This is largely to track down solvable technical issues (some people would rather request a refund than ask for tech support, but with prompting can have their problems fixed) and to get hints on what people would like to have in future games. But I, like a lot of people selling downloadable products, DO grant refunds.
The contacts are very useful, if you were in a position within the game company to have any and not relegated to some sort of dark coding cavern. But the latest greatest supertactic to squeeze extra polygons out of a next-generation console or whatever is likely not of much practical value to someone whose budget is 0.01% of Big Game Company's budget.
Disclaimer: I never worked for a Big Game Company, I'm an entirely self-taught indie, so maybe I missed the level-up mushrooms.
I could say the exact same thing about counterstrike though. Looks really boring, I could probably find something similar for free, but why would I bother?
This seems so obvious it shouldn't even need saying, but... people like different things. Some people really enjoy playing solitaire or gem-swapper. Some people like FPSes. Some people like RPGs.
The games listed come in a range of different types. Maybe none of them are what you're interested in. So? Maybe another month there will be something that you are interested in. There's a lot more variety available there than there is in the quite limited PC Releases shelf at your gaming store. No one's strapping you to a chair and forcing you to play solitaire if you hate it. ... That I know of.
However, some people have no shame.
Q: "I cracked this demo to have unlimited playtime and now it crashes when I jump on the foozle!"
A: "Buy the game, then you won't have that problem."
Q: "I downloaded this game from a torrent and one of the files was broken, can you provide it for me?"
A: "No. Buy the game, you won't have this problem."
Q: "I just got this game and it has a huge bug in it at the end of level two! Your company is a terrible game company! I will never buy from you again! I hope your entire family dies in a fire!"
A: "That bug only existed in the private beta-test version and was already fixed in the very first version of the game that was on sale. Buy the game, you won't have this problem."
Q: "This game is hard! Can you spend the next few weeks providing a slow step-by-step walkthrough of exactly how to win the game and answer all of my questions about it?"
A: "... got a receipt?"
Pirates reporting bugs isn't a problem. Pirates taking your hard work for free and then demanding that you do even more work for them personally, for free, deserve a head-booting.
The question is, DID IT STAY OFF? And for how long?
Most diet plans will take the weight off you. By the end of five years, the weight will be back, even if you're still on the diet. That way, they can sell you another diet.
Capitalism, the nasty little beast that eats itself!
But yes, a slow weight loss is generally kept off a lot longer than a crash one. And anything that keeps people active and HAPPY (instead of miserable exercise making people hate doing it so that they quit as soon as possible) is good.
If the DRM-haters don't buy any games and the lowlifes pirate games without DRM and buy the games with DRM... then DRM appears to be the winner and any company that wants to survive has to use it.
Developers aren't evil, they just want to make a living. If you fanatically support non-DRMed sellers and convince everyone to buy their stuff and make them money, more people will go non-DRM.
Sadly, I fall into this category. As an indie game developer living in the UK I get paid in USD... and gnash my teeth a lot as the rates swirl around. Also, housing here costs a LOT more than where I used to live in the US, but it varies an awful lot city to city in the US.
I know as a game developer that I certainly see many, many, many more pirate downloads than I do sales. I try not to stress too much about it, because giving myself ulcers really won't help. But most people do NOT pay. Which is thoroughly annoying when they then whine about, say, a lower art budget in the games they're ripping off. If more people /bought the games/ then it would be practical to spend more money on them... otherwise, as a tiny independent producer, I can't waste more money making a game than I'm likely to get back from selling it. I like having a roof over my head, thanks. :)
The pirate may be able to steal the game for free - I can't steal the custom content needed to make it. :)
And it's not that they hate these cheap games, either. If they thought the cheap games were crap and not worth paying for, then pirating them makes no difference to the seller. But if you read their posts, they LOVE these casual games. They're eating them up. They whine and beg for someone to steal more of them. They talk about how much their children love playing these stolen games they're providing. They don't seem to feel that ANY price is worth paying, even the $8-per-game of a membership at BFG.
Most restaurants do not have problem with patrons running off without paying the bill.
Read Customers Suck on livejournal sometime. They don't have too much trouble with running out, because that's easily catchable. THey have a lot of trouble with bastards coming in, ordering a bunch of expensive food, bothering the waitress with special requests, and then inventing a 'problem' with the food they already ate and demanding that they get their whole meal for free. People suck. :)
- getting people to pay attention to you when you don't have a giant machine behind you! :)
See GameTunnel's Indie Game of the Year awards, which slashdot didn't even bother printing this year:
http://gametunnel.com/cat_goty.php
Assuming that any book is superior to every videogame solely because of medium is elitism. There are many books that are a lot 'worse' for you than many videogames. There are a lot more really great books than there are really great videogames, but books have been around longer and had more time for masterpieces to be made. :)
But many strategy board games HAVE video game versions. Crossword puzzles can be played on the computer. Chess can be played on the computer. Why are you automatically assuming that because something is electronic, it is lesser? There are plenty of physical board-games that are far from mind-expanding. (CandyLand, as the obvious example!)
And games do little to enhance verbal ability, unlike reading.
But... many video games INCLUDE reading. At the very least, reading enough to follow the directions. LOTS of games have some sort of story element to be read. And at the far end you have things like Fatal Hearts where the vast majority of game-time is reading, or text adventures where verbal ability is the entire game!
I don't doubt that these things are good for child brains. Doing stuff is an important teacher. But if 'learn by doing' is the only way, why let them read BOOKS? Book time is time they're not out exploring the world!
Obviously books transmit more information than most games. But not all games. There are knowledge-based games (trivia, Carmen Sandiego). There are story-based games (RPG, Adventure). Game-playing also provides practise/experience in various skills of strategy and math as well as reflexes.
Playing the same thing over and over again is definitely limiting to experience, though. Do a wide range of things!