Some games ARE a strategy board game, a crossword puzzle, chess,etc. You can't say they are nothing compared to themselves. Growing up nobody in my family ever wanted to play chess or Risk with me because they already knew they were going to lose. They didn't play them often enough to understand the rules like I did so it just wasn't fun for them, instead they got me the vidja versions of the same. The computer opponents allowed me to keep enjoying them and grow my skill level, and then when online versions became available it was great. In middle school, whenever it was too rainy to be outside after school we would all go home and play a few games of WarCraft and later WarCraft 2 instead of Risk. Since our parents already had computers in the house for other things, it was a lot easier to get a game of something going online then to find a billiards, foosball, or ping-pong table. Especially since any of those we would have had to physically be at the same place, and Blizzard had the spawned copies thing where you were allowed to use your disc to install a multiplayer usable version of the game on another computer. The local park had some tables, but that would mean walking in the rain since if it wasn't raining we were probably playing basketball, football or soccer.
More accurately, if you appear to be lacking in skill, many will assume you are on a bought or borrowed account. Saying skill is everything is not accurate, I don't care how skilled you think you are you will not be completing end game raids naked. This has led to a lot of gear as skill conflation where less well geared toons are seen as having less skill.
I wouldn't call it common, but it's known to happen. There is even talk of doing it in an upcoming Bioshock patch. I wish I could remember who it was, but there was a dev that talked about how they basically had a compromise with the publisher, they put whatever protection the publisher wanted on the game for release, and then after a month or two they released a patch removing it. Explanation being that publishers are most concerned about the initial sales being eaten into, but after that the possibility of the protection interfering with a legit purchasers install out weighs the benefit of keeping it since cracks are going to be out by then.
You say becoming, but I'm not actually familiar with this period of time when copy-protections were actually effective. I hear a lot of reference to game protections stopping the casual copier, but the kind of user who is going to be tripped up by the majority of systems I've ever experienced is just as likely to have been frustrated by the install process itself.
I'm guessing you mean something like: "Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000."
My understanding is that this mostly refers to unlicensed production of bootleg copies. There is some ambiguity here, in that it could mean infringement without monetary gain is still investigated by the FBI but not that it is punishable by 5 years in federal prison.
The thing that bugs me about the handling of Manhunt 2 is really the fact that they decided to submit it for a rating in the first place. They could have made the game contain whatever they wanted and left it unrated, if it worked anything like movies some stores would then actually carry it because it had bypassed the AO stigma to some extent. Otherwise they could just sell it online. Does Steam have a policy about AO or unrated games? It makes me suspect that as far as Rockstar/Take Two are concerned, all of this is just a very effective advertising campaign.
I think you are going the wrong direction here, if you can just use open mod tools to recreate your character, you are back at the original Diablo style hackfest. Which means if you want to play a legit game, you are limited to playing with groups you already know. You can't really run an Eastern Sun Ladder without something like bnetd.
Really, I think the point is that if you start judging the quality of art, it is necessarily subjective. When broken down to basics, something being art simply means it plays on your senses and the way you percieve beauty. Art is mainly just a way we reference the human pursuit of aesthetics, and sometimes we tend to get so caught up in what pleases us that we start calling things that are not pleasing to us "bad art". Something that makes you feel disgust or boredom is still invoking your senses and is thus art, there is no good or bad. Something you want to hang on your wall and see every day is not better art then something you never want to see again, it is just something you want to hang on your wall and see every day.
This is not true. There will still be over the air broadcasting, it will just be digital only as of midnight on February 17, 2009. This is why there is the whole digital television converter box coupon program.
I want to say they are both entirely E rated unless while I was not looking it became illegal to take a six year old to a swimming pool or the beach and see a woman in a bikini.
Unless, of course, they will just blame decreasing sales from people not buying the game on piracy and just move to a more restrictive copy protection thinking eventually they will be able to prevent it.
"Isaac is the legendary ancestor of... well, of Jacob" They didn't say that Isaac was the son of Jacob, they said Isaac is the ANCESTOR of Jacob, which means Isaac came before Jacob.
Would it not be more healthy if they were able to express to you and discuss with you that they have a desire to play a video game and explore alongside you why it is they have that desire, rather then them feeling the need to hide it from you and indulge in it only in private, potentially leading to guilt and shame about the way in which they want to behave and no real understanding of why?
I was that nine year old, dungeons and dragons was the media, and a third grade teacher was the authority figure. I never had any marks for disruptive behavior, she overheard a conversation I was having with a peer about how neat this new form of imaginary play I had been introduced to was, and she told me she didn't think that was an appropriate game for me to play. From then on I was being supervised much more closely then I had been previously. After that I never let any teachers know anything about what I did for fear that it would be deemed inappropriate.
I have cousins in the six to eight range who wouldn't understand the words corrupted, consumption, and media with ease, but understand what I mean by the concept if I say something more like "Some people feel that you playing this game with me will cause you to want to do bad things". I tend to use it as a teachable occasion and discuss with them why a given thing that a character does in a video game or an action we take against each other in a board game is not something they would want to do if it were anything other then a fantasy. Much the same as why even though you pretend to be cops and robbers and shoot at each other, you would never wish to be physically harming each other outside of the fantasy play.
Link 2:"Results suggest there is a smaller effect of violent video games on aggression than has been found with television violence on aggression." Link 3:"These data suggest that playing violent video games leads to the development of a short-term hostile attribution bias." None of the abstracts make it clear how much more aggressive the violent game exposed subject is compared to the child playing the non-violent game, but more importantly there has still yet to be any kind of connection with actual violent behaviors. I'm interested in seeing a comparison showing how much more aggressive playing a game of soccer or gridiron football or baseball makes the subject compared with playing the violent and non violent video games, and whether the affects of sports is more long term then the video games. What happens if a contextual lesson is added to any of these activities explaining that they tend to make people more aggressive and using it as a platform for teaching coping techniques?
Has it actually been established that playing a game that allows me to act in a violent "grey" manner will lead me to act in that way, or is it at all possible that I could use the virtual world to explore why I would never actually be doing that? Do all those hours of Mario make me more likely to decide the solution to some guy hitting on my girlfriend is to find the nearest turtle, jump on it, then pick up it's shell and chuck it at the guy? Is there any evidence supporting the position that I myself, being somebody that has logged a staggering amount of hours in games simulating violence, am any more likely to react in a violent manner in a given situation then I was before I had played the games?
We hear plenty about people who end up doing something violent who happened to listen to a specific violent lyric song or played a specific violent game or enjoyed a specific violent movie. We hear far less about the people who were listening to the same song, playing the same game, and watching the same movie, but who have never been involved in perpetrating a violent act. Every person who ever tried to instigate a violent altercation with me when I was in middle school and high school, was a football player, not a doom player.
Your most difficult children may be playing GTA, but that wholesome little angel who is the paragon of virtue and never does anything wrong in class just might be playing as well. They may not feel at all comfortable sharing this fact with you because they have seen that it can red flag them for closer watching by authority and suddenly cause behavior they got away with before to be noticed and cause punishment now that it's known they play a specific game, because it's now seen in a context of 'oh no they have begun being corrupted by consumption of media'.
Frankly, I get annoyed by all the off-the cuff proclamations here by people who seem to have children. Your entire perspective seems to discount the fact that every single person you are interacting with WAS a child if they have never HAD a child. Your original post has implied that my parents were not responsible in the way they brought me up for having allowed me to play violent video games. You have taken the position that they allowed something that was bad for me and said you need no evidence to support this position. You have also taken the position that there is something inherantly wrong with being a software engineer, saying you will do anything to discourage your child becoming one.
Have you taken the time to consider that encouraging your child to play a 'real' contact sport could have an impact on them similar to the one you assume comes of violent video games?
I spend time with my family doing activities such as watching things like Stargate or watching different movies or playing trivial pursuit or recently watching Olympics. It can be very quality time, because the quality of the time is not just about the activity you are sharing, but the way you share it. Watching an episode of Stargate that stimulates a discussion about a certain topic causes us to interact in a way we would not have interacted without the show. The same goes for trivial pursuit, it can stimulate a conversation about oh remember when such and such.
If anybody else in my family actually had an active interest in gaming, then playing a game we enjoyed in common would easily represent quality time with them. I certainly feel fragging nubs with my friends outside the family has been quality time. I have certainly enjoyed dominating a server with an ex-girlfriend before, it presented an opportunity for bonding over a shared interest and promoted thinking as a unit.
>What this means, then, is that digital property is worthless. Without copyright protection, I can't imagine a scenario where you could sell it. Can you?
For starters, I would suggest you consider the scenario of how the many different freely available open source Linux distributions manage to still sell retail boxed versions.
It affects them in a similar manner in certain areas, but as a whole, the effect is not the same. If you have a work you produced and I actually take the physical work as a whole from you, you can no longer as for compensation from another party in return for giving them that work because it is no longer in your possession, the actual thing you were going to part with for compensation is gone. If I see that work you have produced, or if you have three of them and I buy one, then start making my own examples of that work, you still have the concept of how to produce that work, but because you are not the only one who can produce them now, we can be in competition now.
If I am willing to offer them up for less compensation than you, I am undercutting your valuation of the work. Since you expended more effort in the first place to come up with the original idea, it is even understandable that you would feel slighted by me and in some sense feel that I had stolen value from you. You have no inherent right to receive compensation equal to your valuation of a work if there is a way of acquiring that work without infringing on your rights such as the right to be secure in your person and property.
Well for one you are still talking about 10x to 6x the speed of a dial up connection, so there are plenty of things that are still quite fast comparatively for you. My Grandfather recently decided since his shows kept referring him to a website for additional information on things (especially the nightly news) he wanted to get into using it, so my Father and I have been getting him set up with a dial up account. Every time my dad walks him through how to access some website, he comes back home to tell me just how sssllllooooowwwlly dial up loads pages compared to our dsl. We also have the "slow dsl" package for the area. 768Kbps as opposed to the "fast dsl" 3Mbps we could have instead.
I could still get my Daily Show fix on dial up, but it would be more effort to do so. I would have to sit around waiting far longer for each clip to buffer. There are plenty of free music sites around these days, many of them far more legit than the napster of old. I can grab a sample track of an unknown independant artist that wants the exposure and listen to it immediately deciding whether or not I want to go ahead and download the whole album set, or move on to the next artist. Movie and game trailers, game demos, viral videos. All possible on dial up, but I used to actually have to consider whether or not it was worth the online time investment and pick and choose which ones I got, now if I have the slightest interest in it and time to view it, I grab it. My ping in online games has never been lower or more stable. Those are the main focuses of MY use of broadband.
So what happens if I'm actually capable of sculpting a replica of David in one week? What if I do it in a single day? If it takes me let's say twenty minutes to commit to memory all the nuances of the surface of David, and from then on I can pound one out in six minutes? Rather than marble, sometimes people come to me and say you know I would be just as happy if you made me a replica out of ice?
If you are saying that the issue is dependant on "your own skill, talent, time, and effort" then does that mean if it took me a hundred days to copy a retail disk to my hard drive and transfer a 1:1 image of it to somebody else on the internet then that would be enough time and effort? Or maybe it needs to take 3 years and that's enough time? Maybe I've gotten pretty good at doing it, maybe I can break a copy protection scheme in a day or two and start transferring images, would that represent enough skill and talent?
If Michaelangelo had not produced the original David, then if not for the fruits of his labor, I would have no Sculpture of David to copy. Once that first copy of that software was produced, there was something new in the world that I could choose to copy given the right means.
Whether or not you think it is right, what is being done is not stealing, is not a theft.
Slashdot Mirror
Some games ARE a strategy board game, a crossword puzzle, chess,etc. You can't say they are nothing compared to themselves. Growing up nobody in my family ever wanted to play chess or Risk with me because they already knew they were going to lose. They didn't play them often enough to understand the rules like I did so it just wasn't fun for them, instead they got me the vidja versions of the same. The computer opponents allowed me to keep enjoying them and grow my skill level, and then when online versions became available it was great. In middle school, whenever it was too rainy to be outside after school we would all go home and play a few games of WarCraft and later WarCraft 2 instead of Risk. Since our parents already had computers in the house for other things, it was a lot easier to get a game of something going online then to find a billiards, foosball, or ping-pong table. Especially since any of those we would have had to physically be at the same place, and Blizzard had the spawned copies thing where you were allowed to use your disc to install a multiplayer usable version of the game on another computer. The local park had some tables, but that would mean walking in the rain since if it wasn't raining we were probably playing basketball, football or soccer.
More accurately, if you appear to be lacking in skill, many will assume you are on a bought or borrowed account. Saying skill is everything is not accurate, I don't care how skilled you think you are you will not be completing end game raids naked. This has led to a lot of gear as skill conflation where less well geared toons are seen as having less skill.
I wouldn't call it common, but it's known to happen. There is even talk of doing it in an upcoming Bioshock patch. I wish I could remember who it was, but there was a dev that talked about how they basically had a compromise with the publisher, they put whatever protection the publisher wanted on the game for release, and then after a month or two they released a patch removing it. Explanation being that publishers are most concerned about the initial sales being eaten into, but after that the possibility of the protection interfering with a legit purchasers install out weighs the benefit of keeping it since cracks are going to be out by then.
You say becoming, but I'm not actually familiar with this period of time when copy-protections were actually effective. I hear a lot of reference to game protections stopping the casual copier, but the kind of user who is going to be tripped up by the majority of systems I've ever experienced is just as likely to have been frustrated by the install process itself.
I'm guessing you mean something like: "Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000." My understanding is that this mostly refers to unlicensed production of bootleg copies. There is some ambiguity here, in that it could mean infringement without monetary gain is still investigated by the FBI but not that it is punishable by 5 years in federal prison.
The thing that bugs me about the handling of Manhunt 2 is really the fact that they decided to submit it for a rating in the first place. They could have made the game contain whatever they wanted and left it unrated, if it worked anything like movies some stores would then actually carry it because it had bypassed the AO stigma to some extent. Otherwise they could just sell it online. Does Steam have a policy about AO or unrated games? It makes me suspect that as far as Rockstar/Take Two are concerned, all of this is just a very effective advertising campaign.
I think you are going the wrong direction here, if you can just use open mod tools to recreate your character, you are back at the original Diablo style hackfest. Which means if you want to play a legit game, you are limited to playing with groups you already know. You can't really run an Eastern Sun Ladder without something like bnetd.
Really, I think the point is that if you start judging the quality of art, it is necessarily subjective. When broken down to basics, something being art simply means it plays on your senses and the way you percieve beauty. Art is mainly just a way we reference the human pursuit of aesthetics, and sometimes we tend to get so caught up in what pleases us that we start calling things that are not pleasing to us "bad art". Something that makes you feel disgust or boredom is still invoking your senses and is thus art, there is no good or bad. Something you want to hang on your wall and see every day is not better art then something you never want to see again, it is just something you want to hang on your wall and see every day.
Wait, since when did open battle.net not use locally saved character files?
This is not true. There will still be over the air broadcasting, it will just be digital only as of midnight on February 17, 2009. This is why there is the whole digital television converter box coupon program.
I want to say they are both entirely E rated unless while I was not looking it became illegal to take a six year old to a swimming pool or the beach and see a woman in a bikini.
Unless, of course, they will just blame decreasing sales from people not buying the game on piracy and just move to a more restrictive copy protection thinking eventually they will be able to prevent it.
"Isaac is the legendary ancestor of... well, of Jacob"
They didn't say that Isaac was the son of Jacob, they said Isaac is the ANCESTOR of Jacob, which means Isaac came before Jacob.
Would it not be more healthy if they were able to express to you and discuss with you that they have a desire to play a video game and explore alongside you why it is they have that desire, rather then them feeling the need to hide it from you and indulge in it only in private, potentially leading to guilt and shame about the way in which they want to behave and no real understanding of why?
I was that nine year old, dungeons and dragons was the media, and a third grade teacher was the authority figure. I never had any marks for disruptive behavior, she overheard a conversation I was having with a peer about how neat this new form of imaginary play I had been introduced to was, and she told me she didn't think that was an appropriate game for me to play. From then on I was being supervised much more closely then I had been previously. After that I never let any teachers know anything about what I did for fear that it would be deemed inappropriate. I have cousins in the six to eight range who wouldn't understand the words corrupted, consumption, and media with ease, but understand what I mean by the concept if I say something more like "Some people feel that you playing this game with me will cause you to want to do bad things". I tend to use it as a teachable occasion and discuss with them why a given thing that a character does in a video game or an action we take against each other in a board game is not something they would want to do if it were anything other then a fantasy. Much the same as why even though you pretend to be cops and robbers and shoot at each other, you would never wish to be physically harming each other outside of the fantasy play.
Link 2:"Results suggest there is a smaller effect of violent video games on aggression than has been found with television violence on aggression."
Link 3:"These data suggest that playing violent video games leads to the development of a short-term hostile attribution bias."
None of the abstracts make it clear how much more aggressive the violent game exposed subject is compared to the child playing the non-violent game, but more importantly there has still yet to be any kind of connection with actual violent behaviors. I'm interested in seeing a comparison showing how much more aggressive playing a game of soccer or gridiron football or baseball makes the subject compared with playing the violent and non violent video games, and whether the affects of sports is more long term then the video games. What happens if a contextual lesson is added to any of these activities explaining that they tend to make people more aggressive and using it as a platform for teaching coping techniques?
Has it actually been established that playing a game that allows me to act in a violent "grey" manner will lead me to act in that way, or is it at all possible that I could use the virtual world to explore why I would never actually be doing that? Do all those hours of Mario make me more likely to decide the solution to some guy hitting on my girlfriend is to find the nearest turtle, jump on it, then pick up it's shell and chuck it at the guy? Is there any evidence supporting the position that I myself, being somebody that has logged a staggering amount of hours in games simulating violence, am any more likely to react in a violent manner in a given situation then I was before I had played the games?
We hear plenty about people who end up doing something violent who happened to listen to a specific violent lyric song or played a specific violent game or enjoyed a specific violent movie. We hear far less about the people who were listening to the same song, playing the same game, and watching the same movie, but who have never been involved in perpetrating a violent act. Every person who ever tried to instigate a violent altercation with me when I was in middle school and high school, was a football player, not a doom player.
Your most difficult children may be playing GTA, but that wholesome little angel who is the paragon of virtue and never does anything wrong in class just might be playing as well. They may not feel at all comfortable sharing this fact with you because they have seen that it can red flag them for closer watching by authority and suddenly cause behavior they got away with before to be noticed and cause punishment now that it's known they play a specific game, because it's now seen in a context of 'oh no they have begun being corrupted by consumption of media'.
Frankly, I get annoyed by all the off-the cuff proclamations here by people who seem to have children. Your entire perspective seems to discount the fact that every single person you are interacting with WAS a child if they have never HAD a child. Your original post has implied that my parents were not responsible in the way they brought me up for having allowed me to play violent video games. You have taken the position that they allowed something that was bad for me and said you need no evidence to support this position. You have also taken the position that there is something inherantly wrong with being a software engineer, saying you will do anything to discourage your child becoming one.
Have you taken the time to consider that encouraging your child to play a 'real' contact sport could have an impact on them similar to the one you assume comes of violent video games?
I spend time with my family doing activities such as watching things like Stargate or watching different movies or playing trivial pursuit or recently watching Olympics. It can be very quality time, because the quality of the time is not just about the activity you are sharing, but the way you share it. Watching an episode of Stargate that stimulates a discussion about a certain topic causes us to interact in a way we would not have interacted without the show. The same goes for trivial pursuit, it can stimulate a conversation about oh remember when such and such.
If anybody else in my family actually had an active interest in gaming, then playing a game we enjoyed in common would easily represent quality time with them. I certainly feel fragging nubs with my friends outside the family has been quality time. I have certainly enjoyed dominating a server with an ex-girlfriend before, it presented an opportunity for bonding over a shared interest and promoted thinking as a unit.
>What this means, then, is that digital property is worthless. Without copyright protection, I can't imagine a scenario where you could sell it. Can you?
For starters, I would suggest you consider the scenario of how the many different freely available open source Linux distributions manage to still sell retail boxed versions.
Puritan Repression-Compulsion Cycle.
It affects them in a similar manner in certain areas, but as a whole, the effect is not the same. If you have a work you produced and I actually take the physical work as a whole from you, you can no longer as for compensation from another party in return for giving them that work because it is no longer in your possession, the actual thing you were going to part with for compensation is gone. If I see that work you have produced, or if you have three of them and I buy one, then start making my own examples of that work, you still have the concept of how to produce that work, but because you are not the only one who can produce them now, we can be in competition now.
If I am willing to offer them up for less compensation than you, I am undercutting your valuation of the work. Since you expended more effort in the first place to come up with the original idea, it is even understandable that you would feel slighted by me and in some sense feel that I had stolen value from you. You have no inherent right to receive compensation equal to your valuation of a work if there is a way of acquiring that work without infringing on your rights such as the right to be secure in your person and property.
Well for one you are still talking about 10x to 6x the speed of a dial up connection, so there are plenty of things that are still quite fast comparatively for you. My Grandfather recently decided since his shows kept referring him to a website for additional information on things (especially the nightly news) he wanted to get into using it, so my Father and I have been getting him set up with a dial up account. Every time my dad walks him through how to access some website, he comes back home to tell me just how sssllllooooowwwlly dial up loads pages compared to our dsl. We also have the "slow dsl" package for the area. 768Kbps as opposed to the "fast dsl" 3Mbps we could have instead.
I could still get my Daily Show fix on dial up, but it would be more effort to do so. I would have to sit around waiting far longer for each clip to buffer. There are plenty of free music sites around these days, many of them far more legit than the napster of old. I can grab a sample track of an unknown independant artist that wants the exposure and listen to it immediately deciding whether or not I want to go ahead and download the whole album set, or move on to the next artist. Movie and game trailers, game demos, viral videos. All possible on dial up, but I used to actually have to consider whether or not it was worth the online time investment and pick and choose which ones I got, now if I have the slightest interest in it and time to view it, I grab it. My ping in online games has never been lower or more stable. Those are the main focuses of MY use of broadband.
Well, that and the porn.
So what happens if I'm actually capable of sculpting a replica of David in one week? What if I do it in a single day? If it takes me let's say twenty minutes to commit to memory all the nuances of the surface of David, and from then on I can pound one out in six minutes? Rather than marble, sometimes people come to me and say you know I would be just as happy if you made me a replica out of ice?
If you are saying that the issue is dependant on "your own skill, talent, time, and effort" then does that mean if it took me a hundred days to copy a retail disk to my hard drive and transfer a 1:1 image of it to somebody else on the internet then that would be enough time and effort? Or maybe it needs to take 3 years and that's enough time? Maybe I've gotten pretty good at doing it, maybe I can break a copy protection scheme in a day or two and start transferring images, would that represent enough skill and talent?
If Michaelangelo had not produced the original David, then if not for the fruits of his labor, I would have no Sculpture of David to copy. Once that first copy of that software was produced, there was something new in the world that I could choose to copy given the right means.
Whether or not you think it is right, what is being done is not stealing, is not a theft.