Well, that’s a rant! :)

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Apr 282008
 

Richard Bartle: Gamers have won the battle against the censors | Technology | guardian.co.uk

“We’ve won. Get over it.”

  15 Responses to “Well, that’s a rant! :)”

  1. Pritchard says:
    April 28, 2008 at 5:14 pm

    “Too long. Didn’t read.”

    Didn’t is two syllables, right?

  2. Michael Chui says:
    April 28, 2008 at 5:16 pm

    Just… ick.

  3. Spaz says:
    April 28, 2008 at 8:26 pm

    Why “ick”?

  4. Morgan Ramsay says:
    April 28, 2008 at 8:49 pm

    Michael Chui wrote:

    Just… ick.

    I presume that you’ve never seen Parliament “debate”? And, hey, it’s English and the Guardian, whaddya expect? ;p

  5. DM says:
    April 28, 2008 at 9:33 pm

    His tone, by my admittedly American standards, was a tad brash, but I like the gist of his thrust or whatever. However, to use the US as an example, growing up with television has not stopped regulatory agencies like the FCC and various activist groups from all kinds of campaigns against modern TV (Janet Jackson at the Superbowl, for instance). I hardly think video games have “won,” they’ve just gone mainstream in the culture wars.

  6. Michael Chui says:
    April 28, 2008 at 10:40 pm

    It’s not that different from Richard’s usual–a little more–and I’m admittedly out of touch with the doings of England (hell, I’m out of touch with the current US election cycle, nevermind international), but really?

    I guess I’m tired of the fight, in which case I’m somewhat honor-bound to applaud Richard for continuing it. But the icky part was his, “Do your worst.” I don’t want them to do their worst. Their worst could be really, really bad. What if they’re not actually too late? I mean, this is not actually helpful insofar as I can see it.

    Okay, so I’m being a fear-mongerer now, which I hate and it’s completely contrary to me, but… eh. I can’t say I agree with his choice to do that. I find it icky. But everyone who knows me knows I’m non-confrontational. =P

    *waves hand*

  7. Morgan Ramsay says:
    April 28, 2008 at 10:57 pm

    DM wrote:

    His tone, by my admittedly American standards, was a tad brash …

    “Cheeky” is the right word in this context!

    I hardly think video games have “won,” they’ve just gone mainstream in the culture wars.

    They win, by default, because the critics will eventually die off.

    Michael Chui wrote:

    “Do your worst.” I don’t want them to do their worst. Their worst could be really, really bad.

    Ah, literal humor… ;p

  8. Richard Bartle says:
    April 28, 2008 at 11:56 pm

    Michael Chui>Just… ick.

    They asked for an opinion piece, so I gave them one. I was hoping it would be published in the print edition, but it seems that The Guardian’s technology journalists have a running battle with the non-technology journalists over getting anything onto actual paper.

    Of course, when the non-technology journalists can point to games people saying “ick” even when pro-games material only appears on the web site, I guess that means we’ll have to wait a little longer.

    Richard

  9. Michael Chui says:
    April 29, 2008 at 2:10 am

    Of course, when the non-technology journalists can point to games people saying “ick” even when pro-games material only appears on the web site, I guess that means we’ll have to wait a little longer.

    Perhaps we’ll have to wait for that generation of people who still read the print newspaper to die off?

    Or do we merely need to wait for the politician who grew up playing games but now swears they’re evil because it’s still the savvy move to make after the UK has successfully “done their worst”? Certainly, no government today is capable of doing what I can imagine happening, with the glacial quickness of bureaucracy, but I might be wrong about that assessment.

    Of course, such fears won’t come to pass, because not everyone who’s pro-games is taunting the government with a red cape, blowing a raspberry. Don’t become our Jeremiah Wright.

  10. Trevel says:
    April 29, 2008 at 5:48 am

    Unfortunate, perhaps, that it ran so close to the release of GTA IV (at least in North America).

  11. Eolirin says:
    April 30, 2008 at 2:12 am

    @Michael Chui, Jeremiah Wright is a great example of stupidity on the part of the news media and the people who hang on their every word. I can only pray that *my* generation isn’t *that* stupid. *sigh*.

    Bartle is right of course; no matter what they try to do, there are at this point, too many of us that it’ll matter. Anything they succeed in doing will be overturned in the course of time. Probably the very short course of time.

  12. len says:
    May 2, 2008 at 12:30 pm

    Sorry to tell you Eolirin, but EVERY generation is that stupid. Changes in human evolution are glacial. What hasn’t changed is every generation actually believes they are smarter. There is a good Mark Twain quote on that.

    I won’t comment on the rest. This is not the place to fight the US Democratic nomination. People in other countries on this list would be pretty bored by that. And rightly so.

    Do look at the political history of countries who try this sort of thing and eventually lose the ability to control it. Even the Chinese Firewall is full of holes and drip by drop beginning to show signs of political change. Information IS an irresistable source of change if not wisdom. What affects evolution is the choice of choices. It is a second and third order system.

  13. Please says:
    May 4, 2008 at 11:22 pm

    @12

    Every generation is not that stupid, they’re just humans.

    If you measure intelligence\stupidity on a scale of what we understand of the universe, then each generation has been much more intelligent than the last.

    If you’re speaking of base mammalian instinct, well, we haven’t gone beyond without force of will. That isn’t a measure of intelligence though.

  14. len says:
    May 5, 2008 at 4:17 pm

    @please:

    You assume every generation remembers what the previous one learned or draws the right conclusions or builds on it. Did you miss the class when they taught about the fall of Rome, the Dark Ages, the destruction of the Mayan codices, the burning of the Alexandrian library and any of hundreds of thousands of times when human learning fell back from the previous heights? How long does is take to recover?

    Every generation is THAT stupid. It’s not intelligence that matters. It’s in the way that you use it.

    Some believe the web is the inflection point like the Gutenberg press or cave paintings signalling an increase in intelligence. Others think it is slightly better than brown paper bags.

    IOW, while they are relentlessly innovative at getting what they desire. they’re still short-lived mammals.

    A fun exercise is to consider the conceptual evolution from Egyptian hieroglyphs to 3D modeling. If the BigBadWithEMP happened and the electricity were turned off for say ten generations, how long would it take to recreate the equivalent of WoW?

  15. Eolirin says:
    May 5, 2008 at 7:19 pm

    Ten generations len? I assume we’re also losing all our hard copies of things like books on programming (it’d actually probably be kinda short if we managed to hold onto that stuff and could still read it when the power came back up) so… About as long at least, if some of that data could be recovered. Longer most likely if we’re talking a complete data loss. That’s pretty catastrophic.

    It’s not necessarily comparable though. As you say, the net could potentially be an inflection point on this issue, since it’s much easier not to repeat mistakes if you’re actually aware of them. And it’s much easier to be aware of something you can see in action every time you look at a forum. Still going to happen, but much easier to anticipate and deal with the result. Honestly, dealing with forum trolls on a semi-regular basis is the perfect preperation for dealing with political discourse. And you have no idea how much I wish that were a joke.

    But I also said stupid, and that was the wrong choice of words. I’m under no illusions that people aren’t likely to become more intelligent or make the right choices. What I really meant was that I pray to god my generation isn’t so willing to listen to people harp on a single point, and a meaningless one at that, when there’s so much else they could be listening to. I really do think that most people are kinda sick of it by now, but they keep saying it over and over again. The internet definitely can be used to help there, if only by promoting a horrible amount of ADD. 😛 At a miminum, we won’t be relying on the same 3 news sources to get all our information from. And because of that, self-preservation should begin to kick in at some point, and people should stop deliberately chasing sensationalism all the time, because it gets old, and when there are other options, people move on. Free market forces are just as old as history, and this is really a problem with there not being a free market on information. We’d be hearing a lot less of it if there were. We’ll be stupid in other ways I’m sure, but not in ones, that like this, aren’t self-serving.

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