I don't know about that. One common theme is that we only look like pirates. Generally speaking justifying any action with "But.. but.. but.. we're pirates!" will earn you the scorn and derision of the community, unless of course what you're doing is interesting and compelling and somewhat competitive, instead of just annoying and futile. But then you don't need to justify it with "But..but... but... we're pirates!"
I mean if you're stylistically opposed to the whole notion of a game in the style of puzzle pirates, then yeah, obviously it's not your game. However, i'm not a fan of FPSs such as the one you described. My general opinion of Halo, Quake, etc, is that they suck, and that I can have a lot more fun at a firing range and/or with a paintball gun. Plus the term you are looking for is "scupper that."
Yes, it uses "tetris" to determine the outcome. This is the main draw of the game. Some of us find puzzle games much more entertaining and interesting than poorly modeled simulations of real physics with exploding thingies. In short, I find a lot more pleasure in carefully constructing a strategy and combo for sf than I do for see the goon, shoot the goon.
It suprizes me that so many people are still in the graphics are more important gameplay camp.
Uh, no. Sorry. GS IV, GS 3, Dragonrealms, etc, are all pretty much the way I described them. You come, you level up, you leave. Don't get me wrong, they're good for what they do, but at the upper echelons of play it's all just stats. No real skill is involved.
Puzzle pirates is simply the best MMORPG ever made. Only World of Warcraft can even come close to attaining the same consumer satisfaction. It is an everquest for those who hate everquest, but love the idea behind it. The absence of any discernable level grind combined with the presence of discernable but uncoded levels of skill make puzzle pirates the first game to even come close to achieving what pretty much everyone wants to have a shot at achieving when playing an online game:
The idea of the hero. There is no other game where a player can realistically hope to achieve heroic type fame. Granted, it is similar to hoping to become the best basketball player around, or the best chess player on earth, but the fact remains that you are not as hindered by a mixture of luck and hardcoded statistics as in everquest, world of warcraft, or any other MMORPG that has come out, ever. Puzzle pirates remains the only game out where this is an achievable dream.
Pretty much everyone who makes stuff that China is already stocked to the brim with. Forget about any primary sector industries. The big deal about asia is the service sector, video games straddle the fence between two sectors what with online components.
Except that the vast majority of americans don't care about speeding, which as you point out can actually kill someone, so why would they care about this?
No. The general public has gone from not seeing it to seeing the way they see any pervasive and widespread crime almost equivilant to speeding: They don't care.
There are better inter-user communication facilities, and a heightened sense of community, but that comes at a cost, namely the fact that it's a lot harder to incorporate ones self into the node-gel then into a series of wiki prefixes.
Also, Wikipedia has many more features than Everything2.
A much more enlightened place to be? Well, not really. I was an early user of Everything2; while I could be a troll and list a series of reasons why E2 sucks, i'd rather just invite everyone who is interested in both to take the pepsi challenge. Try both.
Why exactly were you posting doc questions to the game dev forum anyway? What's wrong with the help forum?
And the individual in question does nothing to disparage customers, at least no more so than any other online game forum. You'll never see anything like the Alphaville Herald debacle in Puzzle Pirates.
Concidently, if the Alphaville Herald debacle proves anything, it's that the vast majority of users don't give two kanga's about "customer support representatives who disparage customers." Which Puzzle Pirates does not anyway.
Critical aspects of gameplay such as what, exactly?
5,000 vs 100,000 users has little or nothing to do with a moderator on a forum or documentation.
Take Ultima Online for example. Documentation included a quick view card, online documentation very spotty. Very popular. Burnings? Lord British assassinated, beta tester banned.
Puzzle Pirates has several disadvantages when it comes to getting subscribers, and none of them are because they have poor customer support.
1. Puzzle Pirates has no shelf space. 100,000 subscribers at launch is great and all, but it means nothing for City of Heroes. If they sell like what, half a million more copies, they'll/almost/ beat deer hunter, right? And Deer Hunter was such an excellent game. Eat poo, five billion flies can't be wrong.
2. Java implementation. It's a tough stigma to get over, and i'm pretty sure anyone who reads games.slashdot.org is aware of it and likely as not holds a bias. How many of us/didn't/ mock Sun when they put out that gamining initiative? It's really a shame Sun and 3 Rings (Puzzle Pirate Developers) haven't gotten together in some sort of marketing pact, since PP has pretty much done what Sun was begging for.
3. Marketing. The vast majority of people only want to pay one monthly charge for an online game at a time, not to mention the time investment MMORPG's take if they already play one. Most of the word of mouth about puzzle pirates has gone between people already paying such a fee. They'll try it, but they aren't likely to give up their EQ or Shadowbane characters for it. Too much time has already been invested.
4. Gameplay style. Puzzle games are a very niche market.
Ah, Slashdot Trolling. First of all, i'd like to shamelessly and pointlessly brag about my UID to point out that i'm one of the original trolls. Probably why said player-moderator finds me vehemently distasteful, to say the least. Oh, very, very least.
That said he's never deleted any of my posts, nor am I aware of any posts being deleted, although they certainly get locked when the same discussion is taking place simultaneously in another thread. It's somewhat akin to how Slashdot moderates submissions, and I fail to see how there's anything wrong with it.
They put together a great product and provide updates at what seems to me an astonishing pace. There was a period of still waters while blockades were being prepared, but delays before major feature additions are to be expected.
You've seen a lot of people get burnt how exactly? Puzzle Pirates, famed as it is, has 5,000 subscribers. I'm rather curious to know how many of them you know got 'burned', espically considering that a large number of that 5,000 recieved special deals for being alpha or beta testers. They were selling lifetime and two year subscriptions to alpha and beta testers on, what I would call, the cheap.
Furthermore, the personal web-pages of the developers, particularly Cleaver's, demonstrate that the company has a very, very keen understanding of online gaming, and how not to burn people. In fact, I think it's the first game i've ever paid for based even in part on reading a developers comments and realizing how amazingly freaking right he was.
By the way, the documentation was updated fairly recently, around last week or so I think. If you really want to get that up in arms about documentation, I suggest Open Source Software.
As the -1 replies demonstrate, Medievia is helped out greatly by people like AxL and such who manage to inspire a near universal hatred for medievians, such that, when they are discovered they are sometimes (perhaps more often than I think) told to go back from whence they came.
The Medievia debacle demonstrates how fiercely protective coders are of code, even of code that isn't actually their own. (AxL, unless I am mistaken, has taken up a crusade on behalf of the DIKU team, not as a member of it.)
Upwards of $250k is a rather generous estimate. It would require at/least/ 5000 purchased items be sold every year to a playerbase composed of around 1250 donating players, or roughly 4 donation items per year per person spending about $200. That isn't to say it's not profitable, it most certainly is. However, the profit is more akin to that derived from a convenience store than that of the country club it is often accused of being.
The question of Medievia asks "Whats fair?" versus "Whats legal?" If Medievia did nothing more than cosmetic alterations, why has it persisted as a profitable online game? Certainly, it had roots in the DIKU framework and the legality of that is dubious at best. However, the licence proved neigh undefendable, whether the reasons behind that were a lack of funds to spend on trial or the relative strength of Mr. Krause's (Vryce) case, the reality is the same.
And what good would have come if the DIKU team could have up-held their copyright? Not much. The internet would have one less service that people were willing to use and support. There would be fewer MUDs stealing Medievia's good ideas (turnabout is fair play, after all.) And undoubtedly other (supposedly "clean") muds that get away with this without the rabble rousing of people like AxL and KaVir would never have started.
Example given: Materia Magica, formerly known as Moongate. Its sin is the exact same as Medievia's, of course AxL and the like never went after them because M.M.'s administrators learned how to obfuscate the fact from Medievia's example. Strange indeed, since a history of the admins involved in both MUDs reveals that they are, in many cases, the exact same people. This explains how Circle of Power moved their entire clan with ease between the two games before they had both developed beyond being similar games.
So yes, it is illegal, albeit a civil crime the developers and rabble-rousers are content to let pretty much everyone else get away with. The presence of Medievia in the MUD community has had an over-all positive effect, despite the attempts of AxL and others to harm it (efforts which have done more to harm the MUD "community" at large than Medievia).
On KaVir's Medievia licence page, he asks himself, "Who cares?" He responds to himself by saying "Many of us." I question the truth of the assertion, given the sheer apathy he and his group have for attacking "the problem" past this one mud. Given the sheer inability of most of the parties to conduct a serious discussion of the license past a flamewar or pre-written FAQ's about DIKU code, we shouldn't be amazed that nothing has come from the "debate" other than bile.
Or rather, a vast majority of the Canadians who did want to play it would pirate it. Porn games just haven't taken off in North America like in other places, and not for lack of attempts to get them imported. What it comes down to is that most North Americans attach a smaller stigma to watching an act being performed than feeling as if they had something to do with it. US Citizens certainly have great access to this sort of material, at least in its non interactive form, despite the current administration's efforts to eradicate it.
If you don't want your work modified then you should avoid releasing it in any form whatsoever. The conception that people will not modify a product in order to increase its usefulness or the enjoyment they derive from it is unfounded and silly.
Granted, modification is a form of legal, low level piracy in a way. By improving an original product you have added hours of use to it, and changed the planned obselesence of the developers, thus robbing them of money if they release a new version of a product with the same modifications. For example, the journal in Morrowind is greatly improved with the expansion.
However, the designer of DOA is clearly not up to speed on what constitutes the difference between artwork, simple modifications, and a new project from scratch. To my mind, this raises questions about his role in his work. Granted, this is for no other reason than the fact that he doesn't seem to have a clue what he's talking about.
The conventional wisdom still holds. Because the video game has a movie license, the money, or rather, the people fronting the cash to develop the game, will automatically be unwilling to let the game operate under a standard, reasonable development cycle. They don't expect the game to make money. They expect the name to make money. The impressions of beta testers support this. You can be assured that SWG will have one of the shortest lifespans of any MMORPG. The movie license almost guarantees that updates and patches will be far and few between. Remember, developers don't decide when something leaves the door, their bosses do.
In short, it's a movie license. It will suck just like 99% of all games with a movie license have sucked before.
Every Final Fantasy has been different. Final Fantasy 8 for example had a wonderful storyline but gameplay wise was perhaps one of the most boring games ever created. Final Fantasy 9 and Final Fantasy 7 were much better in terms of gameplay.
Jak Jr. standing for "Just another knee jerk response", or Jack Jr. if you're that sort of person.
Although we cannot define this politican by his traditionally defined political allegiances, it is quickly becomming apparent that a new alliance has formed across party and ideological lines.
By no means can this alliance of Neo-conservatives, "family values" liberals and a host of centrists agree on all things. The only thing they truely agree on is the fact that America requires a return to social and cultural values that are closer to the fifties than the sixties. For many this involves toning down violence in the media, for some this concerns discouraging homosexuality, and apparently for still fewer this involves legislating against what they perceive as the symptoms of our corrupt culture.
The logic of this mindset is clearly apparent in the law. "Video games cause fat, therefore, tax video games to stop fat."
I sincerely hope that people recognize how dangerous this group is to the rights of a majority of Americans.
I briefly did this sort of thing for a now defunct website which was then gamehacker.com (now domain trash) and didn't make much headway. My only big successes were when I asked a publisher a direct question in an email, for instance when I asked Bethesda, directly through their website in fact, whether or not in the wake of the whole quake source thing they were considering releasing the source to Daggerfall. [The answer was no, they didn't think this would boost sales, and yes, they were still selling a good many copies.] It wasn't much, but it was a blurb you could fit somewhere.
My immediate interest is drawn to the description of trades people. I once and ocassionaly play a mud where merchants serve effectively the same role, building castles and doing all sorts of things like that, while not being very good at most forms of combat.
The immediate problem with this is that the vast majority of people don't want to play a 'tradesperson' full time. I would be suprized if there were more than twenty or thirty out of every ten thousand people who wanted to be a full-time tradesperson. Unfortunately for them, people wont go to a 'well known' tradesperson to buy whatever, they'll go to one of their friends alternate characters, which basically just means that in EQ Live having more than 1 character will be essentially required.
As far as PVP goes, I think games should have risk involved, and PVP poses the greatest risk. If you're wandering around at the bottom of some deep dank dungeon and some sketchy looking people show up, you should be worried. I'm not really at all interested in PvE at this time because I don't believe there is currently a development team in existence with the stamina and creativity to maintain a PvE experience for longer than a few months.
The essential reason laws like this will continue to be created (regardless of being struck down) is that gamers have in some politically active circles become one of those hated groups.
These groups of legislators and lobbists, whom I will refer to as knee-cons (for knee jerking) believe that the current style of video gaming is symptomatic of what they feel ails society. To put it crudely, they want to push the clock back as far towards 50's TV land as possible, with a few exceptions for their largest groups of supporters such as the newfound status (since the 60's) of women.
Not all knee-cons are Republicans, some are simply democrats who believe strongly in the "republican motherhood" (small r) concept: Good upbringings make good citizens make good republics. Unfortunately everyone is their (Big?) brother's keeper these days.
These legislators represent a segment of American society which holds that video games, homosexuality, any rise in drug use (including medical marijuana), etc. are a threat to the social fabric and thus the political stability of the United States.
In essence, it is necessary that gamers realize that a war has been declared upon them as well as gaming in general. The main fatality could be the constitutional freedoms of entertainers.
Once this has been realized by all groups threatened by this law, the sheer size of the majority will crush the political muscle of the knee-cons. The US Army's game will not be able to include foreign law enforcement officers, even those of tyrannical or evil countries. Tom Clancy will be a step away from having his books banned. Simply put, we're very close to being neck deep in the smelly stuff.
Actually, you do not have this right in Japan. Several years ago Japanese video game producers lobbied for and got a law which essentially made it illegal to sell used copies of video games at stores. I am not all that familiar with Japanese laws regarding the sale and resale of media, but I believe this restriction also applies to movies.
The reasoning behind the law states that the sale of the video game represents the sale of the video game experience to the consumer, not the media itself. Thus the consumer does not actually buy the video game, but a licence to play the video game which is theoretically still the property of the producer.
This is clearly nonsense, but that is the way it goes with laws, eh?
Slashdot Mirror
... You mean theories like gravity?
One of our state representives recently proposed abolishing the instruction of all theory in schools. Yay enlightened government!
I don't know about that. One common theme is that we only look like pirates. Generally speaking justifying any action with "But.. but.. but.. we're pirates!" will earn you the scorn and derision of the community, unless of course what you're doing is interesting and compelling and somewhat competitive, instead of just annoying and futile. But then you don't need to justify it with "But..but... but... we're pirates!"
Had a blockade with 500 the other day.
I mean if you're stylistically opposed to the whole notion of a game in the style of puzzle pirates, then yeah, obviously it's not your game. However, i'm not a fan of FPSs such as the one you described. My general opinion of Halo, Quake, etc, is that they suck, and that I can have a lot more fun at a firing range and/or with a paintball gun. Plus the term you are looking for is "scupper that."
Yes, it uses "tetris" to determine the outcome. This is the main draw of the game. Some of us find puzzle games much more entertaining and interesting than poorly modeled simulations of real physics with exploding thingies. In short, I find a lot more pleasure in carefully constructing a strategy and combo for sf than I do for see the goon, shoot the goon.
It suprizes me that so many people are still in the graphics are more important gameplay camp.
Uh, no. Sorry. GS IV, GS 3, Dragonrealms, etc, are all pretty much the way I described them. You come, you level up, you leave. Don't get me wrong, they're good for what they do, but at the upper echelons of play it's all just stats. No real skill is involved.
Puzzle pirates is simply the best MMORPG ever made. Only World of Warcraft can even come close to attaining the same consumer satisfaction. It is an everquest for those who hate everquest, but love the idea behind it. The absence of any discernable level grind combined with the presence of discernable but uncoded levels of skill make puzzle pirates the first game to even come close to achieving what pretty much everyone wants to have a shot at achieving when playing an online game:
The idea of the hero. There is no other game where a player can realistically hope to achieve heroic type fame. Granted, it is similar to hoping to become the best basketball player around, or the best chess player on earth, but the fact remains that you are not as hindered by a mixture of luck and hardcoded statistics as in everquest, world of warcraft, or any other MMORPG that has come out, ever. Puzzle pirates remains the only game out where this is an achievable dream.
Given that there are exactly zero other games that handle massive player on player combat well, i'm going to disagree.
Pretty much everyone who makes stuff that China is already stocked to the brim with. Forget about any primary sector industries. The big deal about asia is the service sector, video games straddle the fence between two sectors what with online components.
Except that the vast majority of americans don't care about speeding, which as you point out can actually kill someone, so why would they care about this?
No. The general public has gone from not seeing it to seeing the way they see any pervasive and widespread crime almost equivilant to speeding: They don't care.
There are better inter-user communication facilities, and a heightened sense of community, but that comes at a cost, namely the fact that it's a lot harder to incorporate ones self into the node-gel then into a series of wiki prefixes.
Also, Wikipedia has many more features than Everything2.
A much more enlightened place to be? Well, not really. I was an early user of Everything2; while I could be a troll and list a series of reasons why E2 sucks, i'd rather just invite everyone who is interested in both to take the pepsi challenge. Try both.
How cute.
Why exactly were you posting doc questions to the game dev forum anyway? What's wrong with the help forum?
And the individual in question does nothing to disparage customers, at least no more so than any other online game forum. You'll never see anything like the Alphaville Herald debacle in Puzzle Pirates.
Concidently, if the Alphaville Herald debacle proves anything, it's that the vast majority of users don't give two kanga's about "customer support representatives who disparage customers." Which Puzzle Pirates does not anyway.
Critical aspects of gameplay such as what, exactly?
/almost/ beat deer hunter, right? And Deer Hunter was such an excellent game. Eat poo, five billion flies can't be wrong.
/didn't/ mock Sun when they put out that gamining initiative? It's really a shame Sun and 3 Rings (Puzzle Pirate Developers) haven't gotten together in some sort of marketing pact, since PP has pretty much done what Sun was begging for.
5,000 vs 100,000 users has little or nothing to do with a moderator on a forum or documentation.
Take Ultima Online for example. Documentation included a quick view card, online documentation very spotty. Very popular. Burnings? Lord British assassinated, beta tester banned.
Puzzle Pirates has several disadvantages when it comes to getting subscribers, and none of them are because they have poor customer support.
1. Puzzle Pirates has no shelf space. 100,000 subscribers at launch is great and all, but it means nothing for City of Heroes. If they sell like what, half a million more copies, they'll
2. Java implementation. It's a tough stigma to get over, and i'm pretty sure anyone who reads games.slashdot.org is aware of it and likely as not holds a bias. How many of us
3. Marketing. The vast majority of people only want to pay one monthly charge for an online game at a time, not to mention the time investment MMORPG's take if they already play one. Most of the word of mouth about puzzle pirates has gone between people already paying such a fee. They'll try it, but they aren't likely to give up their EQ or Shadowbane characters for it. Too much time has already been invested.
4. Gameplay style. Puzzle games are a very niche market.
Ah, Slashdot Trolling. First of all, i'd like to shamelessly and pointlessly brag about my UID to point out that i'm one of the original trolls. Probably why said player-moderator finds me vehemently distasteful, to say the least. Oh, very, very least.
That said he's never deleted any of my posts, nor am I aware of any posts being deleted, although they certainly get locked when the same discussion is taking place simultaneously in another thread. It's somewhat akin to how Slashdot moderates submissions, and I fail to see how there's anything wrong with it.
They put together a great product and provide updates at what seems to me an astonishing pace. There was a period of still waters while blockades were being prepared, but delays before major feature additions are to be expected.
You've seen a lot of people get burnt how exactly? Puzzle Pirates, famed as it is, has 5,000 subscribers. I'm rather curious to know how many of them you know got 'burned', espically considering that a large number of that 5,000 recieved special deals for being alpha or beta testers. They were selling lifetime and two year subscriptions to alpha and beta testers on, what I would call, the cheap.
Furthermore, the personal web-pages of the developers, particularly Cleaver's, demonstrate that the company has a very, very keen understanding of online gaming, and how not to burn people. In fact, I think it's the first game i've ever paid for based even in part on reading a developers comments and realizing how amazingly freaking right he was.
By the way, the documentation was updated fairly recently, around last week or so I think. If you really want to get that up in arms about documentation, I suggest Open Source Software.
As the -1 replies demonstrate, Medievia is helped out greatly by people like AxL and such who manage to inspire a near universal hatred for medievians, such that, when they are discovered they are sometimes (perhaps more often than I think) told to go back from whence they came.
/least/ 5000 purchased items be sold every year to a playerbase composed of around 1250 donating players, or roughly 4 donation items per year per person spending about $200. That isn't to say it's not profitable, it most certainly is. However, the profit is more akin to that derived from a convenience store than that of the country club it is often accused of being.
The Medievia debacle demonstrates how fiercely protective coders are of code, even of code that isn't actually their own. (AxL, unless I am mistaken, has taken up a crusade on behalf of the DIKU team, not as a member of it.)
Upwards of $250k is a rather generous estimate. It would require at
The question of Medievia asks "Whats fair?" versus "Whats legal?" If Medievia did nothing more than cosmetic alterations, why has it persisted as a profitable online game? Certainly, it had roots in the DIKU framework and the legality of that is dubious at best. However, the licence proved neigh undefendable, whether the reasons behind that were a lack of funds to spend on trial or the relative strength of Mr. Krause's (Vryce) case, the reality is the same.
And what good would have come if the DIKU team could have up-held their copyright? Not much. The internet would have one less service that people were willing to use and support. There would be fewer MUDs stealing Medievia's good ideas (turnabout is fair play, after all.) And undoubtedly other (supposedly "clean") muds that get away with this without the rabble rousing of people like AxL and KaVir would never have started.
Example given: Materia Magica, formerly known as Moongate. Its sin is the exact same as Medievia's, of course AxL and the like never went after them because M.M.'s administrators learned how to obfuscate the fact from Medievia's example. Strange indeed, since a history of the admins involved in both MUDs reveals that they are, in many cases, the exact same people. This explains how Circle of Power moved their entire clan with ease between the two games before they had both developed beyond being similar games.
So yes, it is illegal, albeit a civil crime the developers and rabble-rousers are content to let pretty much everyone else get away with. The presence of Medievia in the MUD community has had an over-all positive effect, despite the attempts of AxL and others to harm it (efforts which have done more to harm the MUD "community" at large than Medievia).
On KaVir's Medievia licence page, he asks himself, "Who cares?" He responds to himself by saying "Many of us." I question the truth of the assertion, given the sheer apathy he and his group have for attacking "the problem" past this one mud. Given the sheer inability of most of the parties to conduct a serious discussion of the license past a flamewar or pre-written FAQ's about DIKU code, we shouldn't be amazed that nothing has come from the "debate" other than bile.
Or rather, a vast majority of the Canadians who did want to play it would pirate it. Porn games just haven't taken off in North America like in other places, and not for lack of attempts to get them imported. What it comes down to is that most North Americans attach a smaller stigma to watching an act being performed than feeling as if they had something to do with it. US Citizens certainly have great access to this sort of material, at least in its non interactive form, despite the current administration's efforts to eradicate it.
If you don't want your work modified then you should avoid releasing it in any form whatsoever. The conception that people will not modify a product in order to increase its usefulness or the enjoyment they derive from it is unfounded and silly.
Granted, modification is a form of legal, low level piracy in a way. By improving an original product you have added hours of use to it, and changed the planned obselesence of the developers, thus robbing them of money if they release a new version of a product with the same modifications. For example, the journal in Morrowind is greatly improved with the expansion.
However, the designer of DOA is clearly not up to speed on what constitutes the difference between artwork, simple modifications, and a new project from scratch. To my mind, this raises questions about his role in his work. Granted, this is for no other reason than the fact that he doesn't seem to have a clue what he's talking about.
The conventional wisdom still holds. Because the video game has a movie license, the money, or rather, the people fronting the cash to develop the game, will automatically be unwilling to let the game operate under a standard, reasonable development cycle. They don't expect the game to make money. They expect the name to make money. The impressions of beta testers support this. You can be assured that SWG will have one of the shortest lifespans of any MMORPG. The movie license almost guarantees that updates and patches will be far and few between. Remember, developers don't decide when something leaves the door, their bosses do.
In short, it's a movie license. It will suck just like 99% of all games with a movie license have sucked before.
Every Final Fantasy has been different. Final Fantasy 8 for example had a wonderful storyline but gameplay wise was perhaps one of the most boring games ever created. Final Fantasy 9 and Final Fantasy 7 were much better in terms of gameplay.
Jak Jr. standing for "Just another knee jerk response", or Jack Jr. if you're that sort of person.
Although we cannot define this politican by his traditionally defined political allegiances, it is quickly becomming apparent that a new alliance has formed across party and ideological lines.
By no means can this alliance of Neo-conservatives, "family values" liberals and a host of centrists agree on all things. The only thing they truely agree on is the fact that America requires a return to social and cultural values that are closer to the fifties than the sixties. For many this involves toning down violence in the media, for some this concerns discouraging homosexuality, and apparently for still fewer this involves legislating against what they perceive as the symptoms of our corrupt culture.
The logic of this mindset is clearly apparent in the law. "Video games cause fat, therefore, tax video games to stop fat."
I sincerely hope that people recognize how dangerous this group is to the rights of a majority of Americans.
I briefly did this sort of thing for a now defunct website which was then gamehacker.com (now domain trash) and didn't make much headway. My only big successes were when I asked a publisher a direct question in an email, for instance when I asked Bethesda, directly through their website in fact, whether or not in the wake of the whole quake source thing they were considering releasing the source to Daggerfall. [The answer was no, they didn't think this would boost sales, and yes, they were still selling a good many copies.] It wasn't much, but it was a blurb you could fit somewhere.
My immediate interest is drawn to the description of trades people. I once and ocassionaly play a mud where merchants serve effectively the same role, building castles and doing all sorts of things like that, while not being very good at most forms of combat.
The immediate problem with this is that the vast majority of people don't want to play a 'tradesperson' full time. I would be suprized if there were more than twenty or thirty out of every ten thousand people who wanted to be a full-time tradesperson. Unfortunately for them, people wont go to a 'well known' tradesperson to buy whatever, they'll go to one of their friends alternate characters, which basically just means that in EQ Live having more than 1 character will be essentially required.
As far as PVP goes, I think games should have risk involved, and PVP poses the greatest risk. If you're wandering around at the bottom of some deep dank dungeon and some sketchy looking people show up, you should be worried. I'm not really at all interested in PvE at this time because I don't believe there is currently a development team in existence with the stamina and creativity to maintain a PvE experience for longer than a few months.
Just Another Knee Jerk Reaction.
The essential reason laws like this will continue to be created (regardless of being struck down) is that gamers have in some politically active circles become one of those hated groups.
These groups of legislators and lobbists, whom I will refer to as knee-cons (for knee jerking) believe that the current style of video gaming is symptomatic of what they feel ails society. To put it crudely, they want to push the clock back as far towards 50's TV land as possible, with a few exceptions for their largest groups of supporters such as the newfound status (since the 60's) of women.
Not all knee-cons are Republicans, some are simply democrats who believe strongly in the "republican motherhood" (small r) concept: Good upbringings make good citizens make good republics. Unfortunately everyone is their (Big?) brother's keeper these days.
These legislators represent a segment of American society which holds that video games, homosexuality, any rise in drug use (including medical marijuana), etc. are a threat to the social fabric and thus the political stability of the United States.
In essence, it is necessary that gamers realize that a war has been declared upon them as well as gaming in general. The main fatality could be the constitutional freedoms of entertainers.
Once this has been realized by all groups threatened by this law, the sheer size of the majority will crush the political muscle of the knee-cons. The US Army's game will not be able to include foreign law enforcement officers, even those of tyrannical or evil countries. Tom Clancy will be a step away from having his books banned. Simply put, we're very close to being neck deep in the smelly stuff.
Remember, The Taliban banned Chess.
Actually, you do not have this right in Japan. Several years ago Japanese video game producers lobbied for and got a law which essentially made it illegal to sell used copies of video games at stores. I am not all that familiar with Japanese laws regarding the sale and resale of media, but I believe this restriction also applies to movies.
The reasoning behind the law states that the sale of the video game represents the sale of the video game experience to the consumer, not the media itself. Thus the consumer does not actually buy the video game, but a licence to play the video game which is theoretically still the property of the producer.
This is clearly nonsense, but that is the way it goes with laws, eh?