Categories
Games Politics/Government

Why I Think The Game Industry is Quiet

I read Seth Godin’s post Stuck (with a bump on the head). Apparently there is a study that found child seats are no more effective than seatbelts for children.

Yet Americans spend millions on car seats every year. In some cities, it is against the law to strap a child in with a seatbelt. In the mind of millions of people, child seats are safer, so they’re willing to spend that much on laws and products. Logically, these efforts are not well spent, yet people do it anyway.

I think that example can explain why the game industry is quiet when it comes to laws like the ones passed in Illinois. The laws try to ban the sale of violent and sexually explicit video games to minors. No similar laws are being passed to ban the sale of violent or sexually explicit DVDs or movie tickets even though such sales happen, and in the case of DVDs, can happen more often.

Apparently there are studies that show that most video game purchases are made or approved by parents. Yet politicians and media will go in a frenzy about the need to “protect our children” and then pass laws that ban the sale of games to children. Now, if most children get their games through their parents, how are they being protected by a law that prevents the sale of the game directly to them? They aren’t, but politicians and parents can feel good and pretend that they’ve made a difference.

And I think that the video game industry in general knows that these laws won’t make one difference in their ability to sell games. I haven’t heard an outcry, and the IGDA made an effort only after the laws passed one of the two parts of the Illinois Congress. Maybe people feel that these laws are helping. After all, children shouldn’t be playing games with an M or A rating, so they shouldn’t be able to buy them. It makes sense. Of course, how much sense does it really make when you can point out that children aren’t buying the games in the first place! Once again, all the studies that the Illinois governor has used point out that minors CAN buy the games. It doesn’t tell you whether or not that they do. And those same studies point out that those same minors CAN buy DVDs at a much higher rate of success than games. Shouldn’t we protect our children by also banning the sale of violent or sexually explicit DVDs to children?

No, because people seem to understand that just because a child CAN buy DVDs it doesn’t mean that they DO. But there is no public outcry over children watching these movies. Not all movies are for children, after all, and the public knows this fact. At the same time, these people can’t get over the fact that not all games are for children either. It is a lot easier to assume that children are buying excessively violent games on an epidemic scale and that such purchases need to be stopped. It is a lot easier to assume because it is easier to believe that these laws are actually helping than to do something that actually helps.

And the game industry doesn’t need to worry because it knows the laws are ineffective. EA won’t lose out on sales since it knows that the people who make the purchases aren’t affected by these laws.

Categories
Geek / Technical General

Anti-spam Measures Taken

I recently talked about the huge amount of trackback and comment spam I’ve been receiving. I’ve added a WordPress plugin called Bot Check to prevent comment spam by requiring readers to enter a code from a random image in order to get comments submitted.

Trackback spam, on the other hand, might have to go through another plugin, if it exists. The Mod_Rewrite Trackback Spam Blocker would be great, but it isn’t compatible with WP1.2, which is what I am running.

Categories
General

Learning Kyra: Some Tidbits of Info

The Learning Kyra series to date:

  1. Learning Kyra
  2. Learning More Kyra
  3. Learning Kyra: Attack of the Clones
  4. Learning Kyra: Tiles and Z-Ordering
  5. Learning Kyra: Hit Detection

I’ve spent some time just reading through the documentation for SDL and Kyra. I’ve also tried to pick up what I can at Kyra’s forums on SourceForge.

For instance, GlDynArray has been removed from the library for the next update. I can substitute std::vector<> though, which for all intents and purposes means very little has changed except for a redirection/abstraction. For now, I need to use it when doing hit detection, but I shouldn’t rely on it for my own code.

I was thinking about the need for more complex animations and Actions for an individual sprite. For example, a sprite may have a standing animation. When you press the space bar, an attack animation should run, but I might not want it to loop over and over. Was I going to have to keep track of how many frames of animation there were for a given Action in order to make sure it doesn’t loop?

Nope! Turns out that Kyra’s KrSprite class has functions for determining the number of frames for an animation and for getting the current frame. Now I can do something like the following:


if ( theSprite->Frame() >= numFrames )
{
// then the ATTACKING animation is over and should change state
}

I also found that a sprite can clone itself. In my June GID, I had these fuzzy creatures multiplying, but I loaded in a resource from a file and created a sprite from the resource. I originally thought that I could optimize it by storing the resource to be used later, but I could further optimize by just using the Clone() function to create a new sprite. I could also use GetResource to get a pointer to the resource used by an existing sprite if I really needed it.

I want to work on some code to test what I’ve learned to see how well it works. I can get something substantial completed this week.

Categories
Game Development Games Geek / Technical

Keeping Up With Games

I was in Ohio over the weekend, and I just caught up with my email. I saw the trailer for Age of Empires 3. I thought AoE2 was pretty fun, but 3 looks amazing. And not just the graphics. It looks like the gameplay will be different from the “you attack, the attack does X amount of damage”. For example, it seems like ships will lose masts depending on where they were hit. Then again, it was a video and I may have just assumed that it wasn’t pre-animated damage.

Civilization 4 is also looking great. I am still guilty of not playing Civ3 yet. What I would love to see is a sequel to Colonization though.

I have two games to review for Game Tunnel, so it isn’t all AAA mainstream titles. There are a number of indie games I want to check out as well, including Oasis and Trash. Unfortunately there isn’t much available for Gnu/Linux, although Nexuiz recently hit 1.0 and so should be more stable now, DROD seems to be fun, and Neverwinter Nights looks to be a better value than ever before.

I’m also missing out on console games. The new Kirby game seems to be great fun, and Katamari Damacy‘s sequel is almost here. I haven’t played either game.

But what I plan on doing is setting a regular schedule to play the games I do have. Final Fantasy VII, Civilization 3, and others have been sitting here and have never been installed. I really must do something about this situation.

Categories
Personal Development

A Nice Walk

I finally had a chance to weigh myself on a scale and found that I was 185 lbs. That’s 5 lbs heavier than I was when I last visited a doctor who told me to try to get back to 150. My watch has been feeling a bit tight lately.

So one day this past week, I took a walk for about an hour. I was half expecting to get winded 20 minutes into it, but the walk was great. I also came up with game ideas while walking. Bonus!

Steve Chandler mentions that walking exercises the mind since your arms and legs are cross-patterned. When you take walks, it actually helps develop your mind’s ability to think creatively. Chandler will take walks when faced with difficult problems and claims that he always thinks of a solution by the time he finishes.

It’s a bit sad that an hour of just walking was more exercise than I’ve gotten in some time. I plan on making walks a regular habit. Besides wanting to be healthy in general, I like the idea of being more productive because I won’t need as much sleep. I’ll sleep better and more efficiently. Also, the more oxygen getting to my brain, the better I’ll be able to think, especially over long periods of time.

Hopefully I’ll lose some weight, but I’m more interested in being as athletic as I was in high school. I suppose I would have to join a soccer team. I can’t wait.

Categories
Marketing/Business

Superstitious Pigeons

Seth Godin wrote wrote an article a few years ago in Fast Company called The Threat of Pigeons and Other Fundamentalists. He claims that not too much has changed today.

It basically talks about how people make business decisions based on what they think the truth is. Pigeons, it turns out, are superstitious. If you put them in a cage and feed them at regular intervals, they do whatever it was that they were doing when they got fed. They apparently believe that if they got fed while spinning around, they must be getting fed BECAUSE they were spinning around.

Contrast with a company that becomes successful while concentrating its resources on some specific aspect of the business. If that aspect doesn’t apply anymore, how long will it be for the leadership to adjust its view? If the company did the equivalent of spinning around while becoming successful, it will be difficult to persuade the people involved that they are being superstitious.

The article caught my eye because PigeonGB is my handle when I play games. It was a nickname in college.

Categories
General

A Game I Will Never Make

I will never make a Texas Holdem Poker game. Ever.

Why? Because hundreds of trackback spam and comment spam just came through the past couple of days. One was for male impotency pills. The rest were for some online poker sites.

And if I do make a poker game, I would fear that people would assume that my company is the one behind all of the spam that I’m sure others also get. I don’t need the bad association.

Who can face themselves in the mirror knowing that they are making money by being so much of a nuisance? When these spams trickled it, they were manageable. Now I am afraid that if I don’t periodically check in a few times a day, I’ll be overrun. Luckily I manually approve these comments so that they don’t get published, but it is getting to be a lot of work.

Categories
Game Development Games

TIGRS: The Independent Games Rating System

The Entertainment Software Rating Board acts as the video game industry’s self-regulating body to enforce and apply ratings and marketing guidelines among other things. Unfortunately, if you aren’t a multmillion dollar publisher, you might find it difficult to contact the ESRB to get your games rated.

What do indie game developers do? They either continue to push, hoping to get heard eventually, or they sell their games without worrying about the ratings.

Enter TIGRS, The Independent Game Rating System. It’s simple, clear, and free. There is no need to go to some licensing board who will take their time to approve an expensive grant to claim that your game is kid-friendly.

It is also well-designed. The colors were carefully chosen so that the small percentage of the population that is colorblind can still comfortably read the ratings.

The author has granted the freedom to use these works so long as you don’t claim authorship. The only request is to not abuse the fact that you can basically give yourself an E for Everyone rating when you have clearly made a game that deserves an A for adults.

In the end, I think it should be fine. You can’t confuse an E game for an A game. A problem I can see is that someone from Japan will think a game is for everyone whereas someone in America will see the game as too racy for children. Similarly a game will be perfectly fine for American audiences, but will be deemed to violent for Japanese children. Different cultures will have different standards for E, T, and A.

But maybe I’m wrong and there will only be minor quibbles about whether or not a game has cartoon violence or realistic violence. TIGRS will be more effective when more people use it, of course. I think it is a good idea, and it can evolve as needed.

EDIT: the system is fairly new and changes were made. It will no longer use E, T, and A ratings. It is also easier to create the rating. Now, the website is really useful for publishers and customers alike.

Categories
Politics/Government

Can’t Watch My Own DVDs Without Being Called a Criminal

The Chicago Sun-Times ran an article last week about DVD Jon cracking Google’s new video service.

Johansen, 21, became a hero to hackers at age 15, when he posted software called DeCSS to unlock the Content Scrambling System, or CSS, which the film industry used on DVD movies to prevent illegal copying. The act made Johansen a folk hero among hackers.

I wrote my response, and they published it! Below is the unedited version that I sent to them. I think the version they printed makes me seem like a better writer as it is more focused and clear.


Your article about DVD Jon claimed that he was a hero to hackers. While he is, I am not sure your readers were reading “hackers” correctly and assume that he is simply a criminal.

DVD Jon’s work has made it possible for DVD players to run on Gnu/Linux systems. He managed to decrypt the copy protection method used on DVDs that he himself owns so that he could play them on his own software or back them up, which is allowed under Norwegian law.

The MPAA, RIAA, and other groups have managed to take more and more rights away from customers. In exchange, we haven’t really gotten anything. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act makes it a crime to just own the means to circumvent copyprotections, and this law was passed under the thinking that the creators need the overreaching protection to continue to innovate. Instead, there has been less innovation from these industries and more lawsuits. You can even look into how the DMCA has been abused by companies such as Walmart and Best Buy. Actually, I would enjoy reading that expose.

They don’t want me to watch my DVDs in players that aren’t approved by them. DVD Jon made it possible. He’s a hero to people who don’t want to stay stuck with RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, or Apple approved systems. There should not be anything criminal about playing my legally purchased DVDs on Gnu/Linux in an open source player. Unfortunately, it is.

By the way, people taking newspapers and running off with them isn’t the same thing as downloading a movie. In the first case, there is one less newspaper to actually sell. In the second case, there is no theater that is now missing a film canister. It isn’t theft. It’s copyright infringement. Stop spreading misleading statements from the media companies.

Gianfranco Berardi

Regarding the newspaper theft vs. movie copyright infringement, the link above will take you to a different set of commentary that the Sun-Times editors made regarding the recent court decision against Grokster. The part I was referring to:

The issue now is twofold. First, file-sharing systems will continue to evolve, and the music and movie industries will have to continue fighting them in court.

Next, doing so will help in the larger battle to make the public understand that musicians, writers and artists — and the much lower paid technicians and others who support them — have a right to make a living just like anybody else. People do not, generally, grab newspapers from newsstands and hurry off with them, first because the vendor might give chase, and second because it is wrong. That second understanding, regarding stealing music and movies, is gradually filtering into the public, who initially reacted to file sharing with the typically greedy reflex of anyone confronted with apparently free goods: They took them. Now they are not so quick

I’m tired of the media companies telling us that copyright infringement is the same as theft. The courts say it isn’t, but these companies insist on misusing the term and misleading the public. It’s called deception. These companies would have you believe that every CD album downloaded off of a file sharing network doesn’t just mean one less CD sold (the logic doesn’t follow if you stop there either). They want you to believe that the downloader is somehow taking money from the recording artists.

Let me ask you: the last time you “stole” software or music, did your bank account increase, even by a few cents? Did you find extra spare change in your pocket? Money in your wallet?

And if we aren’t talking money but instead are talking about the nebulous “intellectual property” rights of the artist, did you somehow gain the rights to reproduce said software or music?

No. You didn’t. Because you weren’t stealing. You were infringing on copyright.

Not that I advocate it. Copyright infringement is a serious offense. I’m just getting tired of the public’s seemingly willful desire to be ignorant of the situation.

On the other hand, I think that the situation today is heavily in favor of the copyright holders and leaves the customers and users with little of the rights they originally had.

The Digital Millenium Copyright Act is an example of a law that changes the nature of copyright. You can still have all of the fair use rights you gained over the years. But if you try to circumvent the copy protection measures put in place, no matter how lame they are, you are committing a felony. A felony! To play DVDs you already own! To create MP3s and OGG Vorbis files from your own music collection! Hell, just having the means to circumvent the copy protection is a felony!

You’re allowed to play with all of the toys in the toy store, but you can’t open the front door because the handle is locked. Owning the key is a felony.

So while I think copyright infringement is wrong, I also think that the copyright owners today have too much power over the customer.

I don’t buy my music from iTunes or any company that sells music that is under Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). I buy them from places such as Audio Lunchbox. They get my money because they treat me like a customer rather than a criminal.

It’s sad that the bar has been lowered to the point that customer service means “We won’t assume you’re guilty!”

Categories
Politics/Government

Thoughts on War and Politics, Virtual or Real

I read webcomics, and one of my favorite is CTRL+ALT+DEL. I enjoy reading the thoughts of the comic authors, and Thursday’s Of war and controller ports talked about war.

Battlefield 2 was recently released, and a number of people have been enjoying it. I haven’t played it yet, but I should probably add this game to the list of games I should play. In any case, Absath talks about how people are playing Battlefield 2, which is meant to entertain, while real soldiers are fighting and dying. He also stresses the importance of remembering that it isn’t just a statistic when a soldier dies. There are families and friends involved. Many people are affected when each soldier dies.

He also made the following point:

I’ve said this before- I don’t care if you feel the war in Iraq is justified or not. If you don’t support and respect our troops overseas that are fighting and dying to defend our country, whether you think it needs defending or not, you are no kind of human in my book.

Please note that the following will likely upset a lot of people and is fairly off-topic from what I usually cover. I seldom will write on such topics in the future.

Now, maybe I just don’t come into contact with enough people, but I have yet to meet someone who was against the war AND the troops, and so I don’t think such a reminder is really necessary. I was under the impression that whether you support or are against the war, you generally didn’t want the American troops to be hurt. Then again, I’ve heard about crazier things that people have thought or done, so maybe there are such people in America. In that case, those people are just as bad as “right to life” advocates who don’t think twice about bombing abortion clinics or shooting the doctors that work there. But I have a feeling that such people don’t actually exist, but there are those who would like you to believe they do.

I think that an informed public that is allowed to give their opinions, even when those opinions disagree with those in power, is what makes democracy work. I’m tired of hearing how anyone who is disagrees with Bush’s policies are “aiding and abetting terrorists” and “putting our troops in harm’s way”. How absurd to think this way!

Which helps terrorists achieve their goals more? Allowing people to oppose the current President’s policies openly, or forcing everyone to follow the policies without complaint? One is what democracy not only allows but was created for. The other paves the way for a police state.

There are those who will read this and think that I am just spouting “liberal nonsense” and make the outrageous claim that I am both against the troops and supporting terrorism. Do me a favor and read it again. Do it. We’ll wait for you right here.

Done? Now, honestly think to yourself how you can love America and hate that different opinions exist. How do you reconcile being a patriot while making false connections between political opposition and terrorist support? It’s how the United States works! People are not only permitted to question our leaders. It’s our responsibility!

I can’t pretend to speak for any of the soldiers, but I think it would be horrible to believe that I am fighting to defend freedom for America only to come home and find that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are torn up to allow only group to be free.

I don’t have a purely left or right idealogy. The left has their problems as well as the right. Basically, I’m just tired of people making non sequitur arguments without being put into check. Being opposed to war doesn’t automatically make you opposed to the warrior. Being opposed to the President’s policies doesn’t automatically make you opposed to the United States. Exercising your rights to free speech doesn’t make you a terrorist.

It makes you American.

So can someone explain how they can profess to love America but can’t stand Americans? Can your right to provide a dissenting opinion bother you so much that you would rather have it taken away than abused? How can you still call yourself American after that? And how can you claim that you yourself aren’t aiding those who are against what America stands for?

This July 4th, please remember that we have brave soldiers fighting and dying for our freedoms. Please remember that those freedoms aren’t threats to America. Specifically, your ability and your fellow citizen’s abilities to complain about the government’s policies should be a point of pride. To consider it as simply a tool for terrorists is to insult America and those who stand for it. Celebrate your freedom! Do not be ashamed of it.

I cannot say “Thank You” enough to those who defend my freedom to say what I just said above. Some nations would try to prevent me. Some people here would prefer that the United States do so as well.