Messages

CJ: Israel?

An all-rounder means you can do a lot of things, not that you can't do anything.

The interesting thing about most programmers, designers, and other people with skills useful to game development... is that most of the time they can organize themselves.

If only they would have elected Cobra Commander?

I think video games (at least in my personal experience) are more of a stress deferrer than a stress reliever. That is, I can escape into Unreal Tournament or Diablo or something else for a few hours (or days...) and avoid thinking about what's causing me issues, but when I'm done the issues that cause that initial stress almost always still remain and continue to do so. It's really just another form of procrastination.

I actually try to avoid playing games for "stress relief" and try to stick to games that I actually find interesting, challenging, thought-provoking (gasp!), or just fun.

Are we going to ban every single game which involves shooting someone?

Shush, the Germans will accuse you of stealing their ideas. (Cheap shot, yeah.)

I think a rape simulator is about as equally fucked up as Manhunt, and as long as kids can't buy it and adults know what they're getting I think they should be allowed to sell it. (There's legal fake-rape porn, isn't there? Or am I mistaken? I really don't care to try to find out...)

The second alcohol one now looks more (to my eyes) like a jug of milk; the wheat/grain looks . . . odd; and the rifle and shotgun are a little too small for my liking (perhaps exaggerate the proportions so as to allow for greater detail and therefore clarity? eta: or just do what progz did, heh).

Those are the only ones I see issues with; I like the water pipe, beer, and pistol ones especially (though the pistol is a little more vaguely defined compared to the sharp contrast found in the rest).

Erm, the argument was that violent entertainment (and violent video games in particular and Manhunt to be even more particular) are a symptom (or, I suppose a less judgemental term would be "manifestation" or even "result"/"effect" -- the point is that it comes after the problem, not before) of a cultural obsession with violence.

There isn't a concrete cure, you're right, because it's not a concrete problem. It's a problem with people and only people can solve it -- by changing themselves. We can't do that. There is no quick fix for this.

That may sound depressing/cynical/avoidant/whatever... but, to bring up a much more extreme example, consider the War on Drugs. We've spent how many years and how many dollars and how many lives trying to stop the symptoms of drug abuse -- illegal drug trafficking -- and (at least according to the figures I've seen) we've barely made a scratch in the drug industry. From what I've read (which is admittedly probably biased and perhaps therefore unreliable) rehab facilities and similarly-aimed efforts have much more of an effect than all the arrests, stings, etc. made by law enforcement.

Obviously it's not so simple with violence, because there's no one obvious "cause" -- but that's my point. Drugs have one easy "cause" and fighting that doesn't even help. How can we seriously think that banning video games or any violent entertainment will have any significant effect on a violence-obsessed culture?

games like Manhunt which only aim to depict death as real and grisly as possible today pave the road to even extremer levels of violence tomorrow

You're still making the argument that Manhunt leads to more violence. And that's just not true.

Manhunt is a symptom of a larger disease (if we will be so arrogant as to call it that) that you have alluded to: our cultural obsession with violence. But removing one symptom will not cure that disease; nor, indeed, removing all symptoms. The government cannot cure this, because the problem lies within the hearts and minds (if you will pardon the cliche) of its people; and the government cannot control that, disregarding Orwellian measures (which is why the slippery slope is dangerous in this case: if they try, and they keep going until it works, that's how far they'll have to go). The only thing that can change a culture is the people who constitute it (which is why, of course, someone smart once said that cultural change is glacial). It takes a long time to convince people, but any quicker methods, like what you've proposed, simply won't work.

the case some time ago in which a kid was apparently inspired by the game to murder another boy

Yes, the case in which the murdered boy was the one who owned the game.

As has been said elsewhere: aside from interactivity, I fail to see how Manhunt could be much worse than Hostel, and that wasn't banned.

I'm personally not for banning any kind of entertainment, simply due to the possibility of a slippery slope; but that can only work if ratings are enforced, which they currently mostly aren't. And of course that depends mostly on the parents, and will hopefully change as gamers grow up and people become more comfortable with the medium and recognize it's not just "for kids" (but then, animation/comics still bear that stigma after how many decades of trying to escape it, so it's possible that games will forever be marginalized; but that seems unlikely given the current growth of the industry).

What happened to the second GF entry (I can't remember who did it off the top of my head)? I liked it.

That's what they always say.

I'm with Radiant on this one. I honestly had not heard of anyone who actually enjoyed the H2G2 film, and I'm frankly quite surprised that anyone did. The thing that always appealed to me with H2G2 (the novels) was that while appearing as random absurdist humor, there was an underlying serious satire to the entire enterprise, and the individual passages were often poetic and almost musical, giving the "randomness" a sense of natural flow that (IMO) is a large part of the true genius of Adams.

The film, on the other hand, was for the most part truly random, absurdist shit, like any of the hundreds of amateur flashes populating the Internet. Part of the blame may actually fall on Adams, as much of the new content was his idea; part, on the production crew, for not understanding Adams' work and just producing a film of generally mediocre quality; but the most blame, I think, lies in the fact that H2G2 has always been dependent on text, written or spoken, and that does not translate well into film. Much of Adams' best humor (IMO) is in the way he describes things, the metaphors and personifications and so on, which obviously are left out in cinema. (Consider that the best parts of the film, at least to me, were the excerpts from the Guide, which were often lifted whole-sale from the novel's text and simply affixed with extraneous animation to attempt to blend them into the film.)

That, and casting a woman for the voice of Deep Thought totally ruined the biggest joke in the whole damn thing.

The Hitchhikers omnibus (which I also have) has "Zaphod Plays it Safe", a short story, in addition to the five novels.

The Salmon of Doubt was still a Dirk Gently novel at the time of Adams' death. (I have the edition with essays, interviews, etc. along with what exists of the manuscript.)

I'd second DOTT and Grim Fandango. "I feel like I could... like I could... TAKE ON THE WORLD!" With the shot up at the previously small, now positively looming purple tentacle. And the credits with the road trip ("back... to the mansion!") and all the visual gags and such.

Psychonauts had a great opening, to move away from adventures, as did Beyond Good & Evil.

Garth Marenghi's Dark Place if the idea of a comedy based on terrible, cheap horror novels appeals in the slightest

You sound as if it shouldn't! I love Dark Place.

And you're lying, but it doesn't matter.

Though It's a well thought out and well meaning piece, do these people have any husiness doing this? Do creationists make a annotated "Origin of Specis"? or "A brief history of time" or issues of Scientific American?

http://www.conservapedia.com/

Even if you had some validity when he was sincere, he's now so far into "I'm being an ass just to be an ass" that there really is no other reasonable option.

Hammerite, when somebody plays the I agree with Fred Phelps card, that, if nothing else, should tell you that this is a person you cannot argue with.