of course walking away is an expression of opinion. if you liked or could tolerate it you would have stayed. the moment you walk away you show your displeasure (unless its to use the wash room lol). sorry about capitalising bigot my comp sometimes get stuck on Chinese keyboard but it also brings up a point. expressing ones view without damaging an opposing view isn't bigoted however once you do try to attack an opposing view it is bigotry correct? I think my main concern with your definition of intolerance is that the negative connotation the word intolerance has, effects peoples ability to vocalise opinions without receiving the stigma of being ?intolerant'. people shouldn't have to fear being labelled bigot or intolerant just because they have an opposing view point or for vocalising them. for acting upon them towards a detrimental effect to the opposing side is bigoted/intolerant.Orekoya said:
Jimquisition: I Hate Videogames (Because I Love Them)
- Thread starter Jimothy Sterling
- Start date
but the issue is HOW do we demand better services??? admittedly boycotting would only have a negative impact on the industry true, but how else can we as consumers of a product show or voice our demands to a faceless and heartless corporation like EA? they wont listen as long as they have the legal right to abuse consumers in order to protect their intellectual property rights.orangeapples said:
your example of being a US citizen is perfect. the gaming community has became stagnant and will to tolerate any abuse or bull shit targeted at us for the better protection of property and rights belonging to people with money and power.
a counter argument for your case-in-point is that no gamer had a option with EA's origin system. they had to or not have any game. do you think if gamers had the choice the would have installed it? no of course not. saying either buy it with their limitations or don't buy it isn't giving the consumers options. its only one step away from being forced to kiss the feet of almighty publishers to allows us weak mortals to consume the dross they squeeze out while they shove the brain eating insect from wrath of khan in our ear.
there needs to be a change in intellectual property right laws worldwide and we as a community need to start pushing for it. the issue with that is that it would take money and knowledge that I don't think our community has or is will to give.
p.s. i know boycotts never work and won't happen but isn't it nice to dream that we have the power (which we don't have) to stop people like EA from abusing us by using our all powerful boycott power? lol
Walking away thing can't be an expression of opinion because it can be caused from any number of reasons, you had a hard poo building in your colon. Something you love even more is available else. You were hungry or thirsty or sleepy. Any number of reasons could've led to the action. Also I would agree that expressing one's view without damaging another would probably fall outside of bigotry because it takes another's opinion to reject an opinion.antman890 said:
Frankly I hate connotations. People get shallow and mentally lazy putting too much stock in them and it leads them to think they don't have to examine a situation beyond the surface elements. "Jill has such strong steadfast moral conviction. Frank is intolerant of Jill's beliefs." Well, without knowing Jill's beliefs or their affect on Frank we don't really know if Frank's intolerance is warranted but because there's a negative connotation for the word intolerance and 'strong steadfast moral conviction' are all words that all have positive connotations I guess that means Frank's the bad guy. Even if Jill is a Westboro Baptist protesting at his son's funeral.
Ah right okay. I just found it a bit funny how he made that crack at the start about finding Chic-Fil-A disgusting because it tastes of "hating gay people", with no remark to it's actual taste or quality (an obvious allusion to Jim's negative reaction to the remarks made by one of CFA's top bosses); to only then go on to talk about how you can love a product for what it is and buy it, yet hate the company/publisher who puts it out there (regarding business practices etc).Res Plus said:
I had a Chic-Fil-A meal while I was over in the US a few months back, they are freaking amazing. And I'd be inclined to go again despite the fact that I hold differences in opinion between myself and one of the top bosses of said company, because their products are great and, I believe, are worth my money.
I also agree with Jim's general assertions in the video, it's why I have Battlefield 3. DICE made a fantastic shooter in my opinion, it's just too bad it got saddled with Origin, but EA being idiots wasn't enough to put me off an otherwise great product.
And as you say, I'm probably reading more into it than was intended or required.
I hate video games for what they are becoming: they're taking themselves too seriously and are really time consuming, the branching is also hateful. It's all trilogies, and linked with books and comics, and then you need it all to absorb the whole story. I mean, I loved Gears of war, all three, but I liked Gears 3 the most, however, I don't feel comfortable playing it unless I play the first two as well. There comes a time in life when we can no longer play as much as we wanted to... True enough, I seldom replay games anymore, I'm trying to change the way I buy them now. I'll start being ridiculously picky about what I buy now, I mean, I'd rather replay GTA IV and Batman Arkham City ten times rather than playing something brand new like the new Tomb Raider, simply because I'm not a HUGE fan of that series.
If you want to try one of their sandwiches without spending money with them, someone's reverse-engineered one here: http://lifehacker.com/5930789/make-your-own-chick+fil+a-sandwiches-at-homeJimothy Sterling said:
Go try one. They're good.
Maybe i'ts because I don't care about many video games series, nor any gaming platform I can't install Windows on, I never understood why other gamers constantly get so upset.
Make no mistake, I still love many video games. But I usually stick to a few favorite FPSs and I've never explored many series that other people seem to love. I've never even played a Mass Effect game, so nothing was more annoying and mind-staggering to me as when the entire gaming community got up in flames over something as silly as a bad ending.
Make no mistake, I still love many video games. But I usually stick to a few favorite FPSs and I've never explored many series that other people seem to love. I've never even played a Mass Effect game, so nothing was more annoying and mind-staggering to me as when the entire gaming community got up in flames over something as silly as a bad ending.
I agree about the Chick-Fil-A thing, thanks Jim.
I also agree, you can criticize a product while liking certain aspects of it (in addition, yes, you can also fairly criticize a product that you don't like if you honestly feel it made enough missteps). The business practices behind games are definitely worth criticizing from a consumer perspective, because, well, it's our money. They say vote with your dollar, so to speak, or whatever monetary system one may use, but it only goes so far - sometimes you need to speak up as well, because, quite honestly, a great mass of gamers don't know any better. Sometimes you need to tell someone that they may in fact deserve better, before they're able to realize it.
I also agree, you can criticize a product while liking certain aspects of it (in addition, yes, you can also fairly criticize a product that you don't like if you honestly feel it made enough missteps). The business practices behind games are definitely worth criticizing from a consumer perspective, because, well, it's our money. They say vote with your dollar, so to speak, or whatever monetary system one may use, but it only goes so far - sometimes you need to speak up as well, because, quite honestly, a great mass of gamers don't know any better. Sometimes you need to tell someone that they may in fact deserve better, before they're able to realize it.
Pretty much what I've been saying for years now, without Jim's platform of course.
The problem is of course that simply complaining about it does comparitively little, because people have already shown that they will tolerate these things, and will do so before choosing to go without a specific game (much like an addict, complaining about their dealer). With the game industry more profitable than ever before, and comments about how it's a growing multi-billion industry compared to the basement development of a few decades ago, there is no real incentive for the industry to change.
Part of the problem of course is how locked in the industry is as well, you really can't hurt the publishers without hurting the developers. After all if you decide to boycot a game and enough people do it to affect it's bottom line, a publisher is just going to dissolve or refuse to hire (if still independant) that development house, rather than change their overall practices. To really succeed we'd need something unprecedented in terms of say the majority of the game playing audience refusing to buy ANY games no matter how incredible for an entire year or whatever to pretty much sink everything equally.
I'll also say that despite the PR, people are also not critical enough of the developers who actually make the games. Both for refusing to stand up to those who pay them (duh), but also for themselves being pretty greedy. To make a computer game basically takes three things, a bunch of computers, office space to put the computers in, and people to work on those computers and write the code/make the graphics/etc... In comparison to your typical game budget the cost of office space and computers is minimal, that means the majority of that money is going towards human resources, and the price rises as developers demand more and more money for their services. The problem is with the graphics designers, coders, etc... but perhaps a bigger problem is with the guys running the development houses or acting as the resident "rock stars". When we've had articles talking about guys like Itigaki fighting over 20+ million dollars he's owed for game developement, there is a problem, we're seeing "name" game developers demanding, and expecting, to be paid like many Hollywood actors. If a game with say a 100 million dollars as a budget sees 20 million dollars going into the pocket of say Peter Molyneux directly (I don't have any reliable figures for him, but I've read some stuff talking about him making crazy bank off), don't forget that this is passing down to us.
Likewise I think there is a problem when the cost of about lying to say a game is good, as opposed to make a game good, is becoming such a priority. Increasingly we see comments about how the advertising budget for games is a huge proportion of the overall cost of the game. I think it was TOR that spent like 100 mil on advertising for example, and I've seen a number of other obscene figures over the years by devs and publishers trying to defend game prices. The thing is that regular advertising isn't quite *that* expensive, sure it's not cheap, but some ads in magazines, some pop ups or ads on web pages, etc... don't really cost all that much. Rather what your looking at is the oft-criticized corruption in the industry, paying off reviewers and publications outright, hiring all of these viral marketers to hang out on websites and say nice things about a game, shills to adjust review scores and meta critic ratings, and all of this other garbage that has been discussed for years. I find it almost absurd that in many cases a game that is mediocre because it seems like corners had been cut with it in development, could have had millions more in it's development if they had focused on making it great, as opposed to bribing people to pretend it was great.
To an extent I think all of this is one of the things that makes so many Indie games so competitive nowadays. Pretty much the entire budget goes into the game, and the guys developing stretch as much as they can because they all want the product. With pro games it isn't the same thing anymore, a lot of the developers, especially studio heads probably look at the money offers and decide anything that puts less than X millions directly in their pocket from the budget (however they get it) isn't worth the time. For all the comments
about last minute crunches and so on, one has to wonder at the mentality that has them waiting to the last minute instead of "crunching" constantly like younger, hungrier developers, and again at a mentality that has a couple million more thrown into hiring
liars rather than say polishing the game itself.
Those are my thoughts, a lot of people loathe what I'm saying (and it covers a lot of what Jim was saying, though I'm more specific), but I've been watching this for a while, and yeah... I really do hate video games as a business, it has become everything it was not supposed to be. Nobody wants to produce a good product for a fair price, right now it's all about monsterous profits for as little as possible, and massive amounts of bloat.
On some levels I actually blame Richard Garriot to be honest. It's not directly his fault I guess, but his success and the massive amounts of money he made (through being a great creator) created a kind of standard of what everyone aspires to be. He was probably the first obscenely rich video game developer in the popular media, and set a standard that I think created unfair expectations for video games as a business. Don't get me wrong, I'm sort of a fan (and loved old school Ultima) but from where I'm sitting I did see a change in tone when people began to realize how wealthy "Lord British" had become. Such has been my observations.
Ditto for the succuess of certain franchises. See I don't play many shooters, but I don't hate them as a genere, on their own merits. I don't even care that they are successful. What I hate is that certain games like "Modern Warfare" (and others) have become so successful that they have literally gimped the rest of the industry due to a mentality where that massive success is seen as a standard, rather than an exception. You see less serious development, than people basically playing "follow the leader" trying to ape the success of whatever the current front runner is. We get so many mediocre games trying to ape the big shooter franchises, that few are actually looking to do anything else on a decent level, everyone failing to realize that such development outside of the leader's shadow is where the next big hit is actually going to come from.
The problem is of course that simply complaining about it does comparitively little, because people have already shown that they will tolerate these things, and will do so before choosing to go without a specific game (much like an addict, complaining about their dealer). With the game industry more profitable than ever before, and comments about how it's a growing multi-billion industry compared to the basement development of a few decades ago, there is no real incentive for the industry to change.
Part of the problem of course is how locked in the industry is as well, you really can't hurt the publishers without hurting the developers. After all if you decide to boycot a game and enough people do it to affect it's bottom line, a publisher is just going to dissolve or refuse to hire (if still independant) that development house, rather than change their overall practices. To really succeed we'd need something unprecedented in terms of say the majority of the game playing audience refusing to buy ANY games no matter how incredible for an entire year or whatever to pretty much sink everything equally.
I'll also say that despite the PR, people are also not critical enough of the developers who actually make the games. Both for refusing to stand up to those who pay them (duh), but also for themselves being pretty greedy. To make a computer game basically takes three things, a bunch of computers, office space to put the computers in, and people to work on those computers and write the code/make the graphics/etc... In comparison to your typical game budget the cost of office space and computers is minimal, that means the majority of that money is going towards human resources, and the price rises as developers demand more and more money for their services. The problem is with the graphics designers, coders, etc... but perhaps a bigger problem is with the guys running the development houses or acting as the resident "rock stars". When we've had articles talking about guys like Itigaki fighting over 20+ million dollars he's owed for game developement, there is a problem, we're seeing "name" game developers demanding, and expecting, to be paid like many Hollywood actors. If a game with say a 100 million dollars as a budget sees 20 million dollars going into the pocket of say Peter Molyneux directly (I don't have any reliable figures for him, but I've read some stuff talking about him making crazy bank off), don't forget that this is passing down to us.
Likewise I think there is a problem when the cost of about lying to say a game is good, as opposed to make a game good, is becoming such a priority. Increasingly we see comments about how the advertising budget for games is a huge proportion of the overall cost of the game. I think it was TOR that spent like 100 mil on advertising for example, and I've seen a number of other obscene figures over the years by devs and publishers trying to defend game prices. The thing is that regular advertising isn't quite *that* expensive, sure it's not cheap, but some ads in magazines, some pop ups or ads on web pages, etc... don't really cost all that much. Rather what your looking at is the oft-criticized corruption in the industry, paying off reviewers and publications outright, hiring all of these viral marketers to hang out on websites and say nice things about a game, shills to adjust review scores and meta critic ratings, and all of this other garbage that has been discussed for years. I find it almost absurd that in many cases a game that is mediocre because it seems like corners had been cut with it in development, could have had millions more in it's development if they had focused on making it great, as opposed to bribing people to pretend it was great.
To an extent I think all of this is one of the things that makes so many Indie games so competitive nowadays. Pretty much the entire budget goes into the game, and the guys developing stretch as much as they can because they all want the product. With pro games it isn't the same thing anymore, a lot of the developers, especially studio heads probably look at the money offers and decide anything that puts less than X millions directly in their pocket from the budget (however they get it) isn't worth the time. For all the comments
about last minute crunches and so on, one has to wonder at the mentality that has them waiting to the last minute instead of "crunching" constantly like younger, hungrier developers, and again at a mentality that has a couple million more thrown into hiring
liars rather than say polishing the game itself.
Those are my thoughts, a lot of people loathe what I'm saying (and it covers a lot of what Jim was saying, though I'm more specific), but I've been watching this for a while, and yeah... I really do hate video games as a business, it has become everything it was not supposed to be. Nobody wants to produce a good product for a fair price, right now it's all about monsterous profits for as little as possible, and massive amounts of bloat.
On some levels I actually blame Richard Garriot to be honest. It's not directly his fault I guess, but his success and the massive amounts of money he made (through being a great creator) created a kind of standard of what everyone aspires to be. He was probably the first obscenely rich video game developer in the popular media, and set a standard that I think created unfair expectations for video games as a business. Don't get me wrong, I'm sort of a fan (and loved old school Ultima) but from where I'm sitting I did see a change in tone when people began to realize how wealthy "Lord British" had become. Such has been my observations.
Ditto for the succuess of certain franchises. See I don't play many shooters, but I don't hate them as a genere, on their own merits. I don't even care that they are successful. What I hate is that certain games like "Modern Warfare" (and others) have become so successful that they have literally gimped the rest of the industry due to a mentality where that massive success is seen as a standard, rather than an exception. You see less serious development, than people basically playing "follow the leader" trying to ape the success of whatever the current front runner is. We get so many mediocre games trying to ape the big shooter franchises, that few are actually looking to do anything else on a decent level, everyone failing to realize that such development outside of the leader's shadow is where the next big hit is actually going to come from.
I never understood the problem with the PS3 XMB it's awesome, the only bad thing is that i can't organize personal carpets but that doesn't make it crap. It's better and more organized than in both wii and xbox, but being a PS3 fanboy i do admit that the Internet sucks in the PS3, but why the fuck would I use internet in my PS3 if there are laptops and iphones and what not and the only reason why i would use the internet while playing is to check a guide but it's impossible in all consoles to do that because you need to quit the game to be able to look at it.
So does any adorable little darling want to say what that game was with the knife and the about to stabby and hahafuckoffmagictime?
Well, I realized that when I got all 3 consoles of this gen.
-I'm a PS3 fanboy and I love its exclusive titles (God of War, MGS4, ModNation Racers, Jak, etc.) but I gotta admit playing online sucks balls compared to the 360, you can't talk to your friends unless you're playing the same game, updates take ages, the interface on the dashboard is not as responsible and so on.
-I got a 360 because all my friends had one an I admit it's not that bad but I dislike the fact that having one means spending a lot of money. Xbox live, network adapter, hard drive, etc. The games get that perfect circle if you move your 360 just an inch and also, the controller is just heavier and not as comfortable as the dualshock.
-I got a Wii because it had at least 5 good games I wanted and it was on sale. I admire the fact that Nintendo tried to introduce motion controllers (Ignoring whether they succeeded or failed) and their games are still family friendly and plain fun. But the classic control will never be the same again, it ONLY has family friendly games, playing online is almost nonexistent, no HD and so on.
I can admit all that. Of course there's no such thing as a perfect console. What i do hate is people trying to take a console's strengths and make up for its weaknesses. And despite the fact that I hate EA and Capcom (And maybe Square Enix) right now, I still love Dragon Age, Megaman, Resident Evil, Final Fantasy, Kingdom hearts and so on. It would be dumb to deny myself of the pleasure of playing a good game because I'm silently protesting against something. As usual, Jim is right...
...Except on that Chik-fill-a comment. It's been said before that chain's owner said he didn't approve of it, not that gay people were not allowed to go buy food there. The man's entitled to his opinion, whether he's right or wrong. If that opinion starts affecting someone else (I.E: Gay people are being denied service, they get charged more, they use their power to affect others,whatever), then by all means; riot in the streets. If not, then whatever. Leave the man be. He may be a retard but his ideas do not reflect on the service given. For all we know, the owner of KFC might support Neo Nazis but he's not about to go out and say it out loud.
-I'm a PS3 fanboy and I love its exclusive titles (God of War, MGS4, ModNation Racers, Jak, etc.) but I gotta admit playing online sucks balls compared to the 360, you can't talk to your friends unless you're playing the same game, updates take ages, the interface on the dashboard is not as responsible and so on.
-I got a 360 because all my friends had one an I admit it's not that bad but I dislike the fact that having one means spending a lot of money. Xbox live, network adapter, hard drive, etc. The games get that perfect circle if you move your 360 just an inch and also, the controller is just heavier and not as comfortable as the dualshock.
-I got a Wii because it had at least 5 good games I wanted and it was on sale. I admire the fact that Nintendo tried to introduce motion controllers (Ignoring whether they succeeded or failed) and their games are still family friendly and plain fun. But the classic control will never be the same again, it ONLY has family friendly games, playing online is almost nonexistent, no HD and so on.
I can admit all that. Of course there's no such thing as a perfect console. What i do hate is people trying to take a console's strengths and make up for its weaknesses. And despite the fact that I hate EA and Capcom (And maybe Square Enix) right now, I still love Dragon Age, Megaman, Resident Evil, Final Fantasy, Kingdom hearts and so on. It would be dumb to deny myself of the pleasure of playing a good game because I'm silently protesting against something. As usual, Jim is right...
...Except on that Chik-fill-a comment. It's been said before that chain's owner said he didn't approve of it, not that gay people were not allowed to go buy food there. The man's entitled to his opinion, whether he's right or wrong. If that opinion starts affecting someone else (I.E: Gay people are being denied service, they get charged more, they use their power to affect others,whatever), then by all means; riot in the streets. If not, then whatever. Leave the man be. He may be a retard but his ideas do not reflect on the service given. For all we know, the owner of KFC might support Neo Nazis but he's not about to go out and say it out loud.
Did you miss the part about how profits from his company are used to fund anti-gay organizations? Therefore, if you eat there, you are financially supporting organized bigotry. So, yeah, the "service given" does actually have an effect on others.Beautiful End said:
And why should we "leave him be" when he makes very public statements to the media about this issue? Is he beyond criticism? Why can't we respond to his public message? After all, it has been taken into a very public political sphere and he has been given active support by Republican Party members, etc. It's not like this is based on some private statement. It was very public political grandstanding. Did you not see the news about the "support Chick-Fil-A" events that happened recently?
