Alien Nathan Edward
Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short
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even then, it’s essentially paywalling your rights. you need to go to court, wait for the matter to be adjudicated, hope it works out in your favor, run out any potential appeals, all while paying attorneys and not being able to do something you’re legally entitled to do. If you can’t do all that, then your rights are moot.
I can’t help but think that if this sort of thing proliferates that it will essentially hamstring reviews. This particular agreement might be just because the game is in alpha, but it’s part of a broader trend of ToS/EULA wishlists that are so restrictive that they’re probably illegal already buy in order to test that you have to go to court against a huge, overpaid legal team which leads to people having their basic rights violated.
I’m currently playing through the ace attorney series, couch party w my fiancee. We’re having a blast, but there’s absolutely no doing this a second time. The nature of the games is such that you can’t really progress in any of the cases without having asked every question of every witness, gathered every piece of evidence and explored every relevant branch in cross-examination, so by the time you finish a case there’s just nothing left to go over a second time.
okay but land ownership and rent seeking are inherent, inevitable parts of capitalism. Even Smith talked about how rent-seeking is an unavoidable outcome of a system where one person can own what another needs, and about how in order to succeed capitalism will require some way of discouraging or taxing rent-seeking. “As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce.” This isn’t a new phenomenon and it’s not a return to pre-capitalism, it’s capitalism doing what we all new it was going to do from the beginning.
Silicon Serfdom?
No that’s still capitalism. Capitalism is still the problem. To call it anything else is apologetics, the core issue is that the private ownership of the means of production leads to a concentration of power in the hands of precisely the wrong kind of people after selecting for and reinforcing the most selfish behaviors in them. It then allows them to essentially usurp whatever form of government exists.
I play a lot of single player shooters. One thing they all have in common is that I know they exist, which I’m thinking could potentially be part of the problem with this one. Based on reactions in this thread it seems like a lot of people are in the same position I’m in, where the first they hear of the game is when it’s being pronounced a flop. I’m getting big The Producers vibes.
launch bugs are what they are, but I’m mostly disappointed to hear of how little people are enjoying the actual game when it’s functioning as-intended. I loved the arkham series and the flowy, beautiful combat it has. Between it and the very similar middle earth games, I’ve put in hundreds of hours of counter and dodge focused ass-kicking, and I was hoping for more in a universe that I actually quite like.
I mean, if it were me I’d isolate the copyrighted assets in a way that makes them really easy to add or remove, remove them from the official distribution, then plop a tarball and an install script of some sort onto all the most common piracy outlets. If people want it, they’ll find it and legally I’m not liable because I’m just distributing a mod that has a place where you can put copyrighted assets
shades of the Jamie Kennedy documentary where any time someone says they didn’t like Malibu’s Most Wanted he complains that he “worked really hard on it” as though explaining why something is shitty is just as good as making it not be shitty
If your game sucks due to design and implementation decisions that were made with sound rationale behind them, your game sucks. It doesn’t matter at all why it sucks, or that there’s no feasible way to make it better. It sucks. You can tell me that there’s no way to make it not suck, but I play plenty of games all the time that don’t suck.
pixel dungeon series is very pick up and put down-able. they’re all roguelikes, f/oss, with different variations for different game experiences. right now i’m playing Experienced Pixel Dungeon because it introduces a character class I really like (the duelist: rather than being a straight fighter or a caster it’s a melee weapon fighter where each type of melee weapon comes with a different special attack).
The fun in these is that for each variation the gameplay will be similar, but have different elements added. There are some that have skill trees, some that have new PC classes like I outlined above, some that are just basic nethack/rogue clones with a GUI, and a bunch that I haven’t tried yet. And they’re all offline, turn based, and let you save at any point so you can just pinch it off and get back to whatever you need to do in an instant.
I was under the impression that ludonarrative dissonance was when you purposely try to subvert the way the game “wants” to be played, rather than you trying to do what the game wants and the game failing to interpret your actions in a realistic or satisfying way. Like the people who try to be law-abiding pacifists in GTA V or people using armor stands to turn Minecraft into multiplayer chess.
Why single out Blizzard?
Because that’s who we’re talking about now. The idea that I’m okay with everything I’m not currently complaining about is an emergent toxic antipattern of trying to talk to people on the internet. I’m not bringing up Microsoft, or John Deere, or anyone else who’s also toxic and exploitative because this isn’t the place.
I’m old enough to remember when you bought a game and then you had the game, and you played it when you wanted to because you own it. I miss owning things. This whole thing where you actually bought a single, revocable, non-transferrable license to use the thing rather than buying the thing is kinda horseshit.
This is the problem with the whole “vote with your dollar” thing overall. Going by net worth, the median net worth of an american family is $103,500. Jeff Bezos, otoh, has a net worth of 152 billion. That means that he has 1468999 times as many votes as the average person. That’s about a third the population of America. If we “vote with our dollars” because “the free-er the markets, the free-er the people” then one guy has the same power as a full third of the country’s population. As inequality increases, the middle class is disappearing. The number of people with effectively no voice at all is increasing, and the number of people with a voice that can speak over the populations of entire states is also increasing.
My partner and I have started using the vague “Y’know, covid…” to dismiss anything without explaining it. It comes from when I was in the hospital and they wanted to stay on the couch in my room with me. They were told that they couldn’t, and when they asked why the nurse just said “y’know, covid…”. Now in real life, the best covid policy is to stay, not to go out into the world and come back. But after 3 years of all sorts of knock-on craziness due to the pandemic people who work in customer service seem to have realized that they can just say “you know, covid…” to almost anything and everyone else will just be like “Yeah…”
I love this thing where buying something has been replaced by buying an alterable, revokable license to access that thing. It lowers costs and adds flexibility for producers, which allows them to save money, and they pass that savings on to me in the form of higher prices and my shit that I paid real fucking money for just disappearing one day. Then they explain that I never really “owned” it despite the fact that they use the word “own” in the marketing material, because it’s also legal to use words that have known definitions in agreements and then later explain that you were actually using an entirely different, secret definition of that word that’s actually the opposite of what you very purposefully implied.