Rico Penguin

  There is something remarkable about video games. The sheer scope of what can be done even in the simplest of senses is astounding. Frogger even presented you with a universe (however small) where you interacted with a moving environment and dealt with ever present adversity. From there it has gotten all the more complicated, with creatures and characters becoming more and more lifelike. Spore even presented an entire universe that was diverse, sure the game play was as stale as year old bread, but it was a diverse universe regardless.

  So I’ve been thinking, relatively recently, about what this plays in the understanding of creationism. Creatures in video games are alive, but they are alive just because, the creator said they are alive and thusly they are alive. There are no complex mechanics within their bodies, they are solid blocks that function just because. They are held to the ground not by gravity but instead because the creator says they are held to the ground. When they eat the food just vanishes, it doesn’t flow through a series of complex systems. The sun above shines just because, there is no complex system of physics going on in the background.

  These systems exist as they do because they were created. There is absolutely no reason to add organs, if you are creating all the laws of a universe you do not need them. There is no reason to make the sun complex, it can be just as beautiful as our own just because. Indeed the suns in Spore are stunning. Water can be gorgeous just because, trees can be there just because, and indeed all live can exist just because. It doesn’t have to degenerate, there is no necessity for cancer, and with the proper knowledge even intelligence can exist just because. It does not require an incredibly complicated interconnected system to function, it can just be. Yes sure the code can be a little complicated but even that gets ever more streamlined as the understanding of creating grows for people. There is nothing stopping us from making something ultimately incredibly and infinitely simple but time.

  To me this is the big problem with creationism. It is not to say that a creator couldn’t just be very terrible at their job, that’s true, perhaps they added in a bunch of systems because they are batshit stupid. That’s fine and I can accept that. However it could not go hand in hand with being all powerful, all knowing, or all anything. These sort of mistakes are almost below human, they are insanely complicated mechanics to pull off tricks that could be as easy as a single switch. The sun is the sun because it is the sun and it glows because it is the sun. There should be no underlying mechanics beyond that. If there is that is a very distinct example of poor coding.

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
  –  Antoine de Saint-Exuper

  So that is my problem I think. We exist in a fantastically imperfect universe and are fantastically imperfect beings. For each reason there is a previous reason and for each of those reason their exists a previous reason. All of these are unnecessary and should really boil down to “because”. The problem is that our universe does not function on a single “because” yet we try to explain it as such outside of science. That to me shows a severe disconnect between fantasy and reality.

  To think, that sort of thought all stemming from a bout of World of Warcraft. Goes to show that gaming really is rotting my brain.

  Note: I apologize for missing my update yesterday. I’m pretty glum about losing track of time, ah well. Onto the discussion.

  I was thinking recently about the entire debate over the legitimacy of piracy of digital media. As the cogs were turning I was reminded of a famous quote that anyone familiar with the Civilization video game series or just human history in general should be familiar with.

Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it.

Publilius Syrus
(~100 BC)

  With this in mind. I believe that Piracy may be an adequate measure of the quality of a product. There are first some misconceptions that must be clarified before we move on with this thesis. The first is that when an item is torrented by a new person that it is officially a lost sale. There is absolutely no direct connection between the sales of a product and the amount of people pirating it. There are however connections with piracy and quality.

  It is an irrefutable truth that quality sells. There are many real world companies that sell products that at one time were militantly marketed, at this point however they sell primarily on word of mouth, while you will indeed find pepsi or coke commercials they are nowhere near as prolific as they once were. Their products sell by word of mouth and a compounding effect that can be found all over the universe in various forms. Once you hit a certain point in sales you will always see an increase in sales until you over saturate the market.

  However there is a strong misconception that the price tag slapped on a product is that products worth. This is only true if people are purchasing it at that price point. If 10 people attend to a product and only 1 person buys it then the price is not indicative of the products worth. A 50 dollar game is only worth 50 dollars if the consumer feels it is, it is in no way decided by the developer. This is true for all products, car manufacturers have tried to slap ridiculous price points on outdated automotive products for a long time and it has more than once hurt them dearly.

  You will always be able to find people who will buy something regardless of the price point. However they aren’t buying the product because of its quality or usefulness, in most cases it is a matter of status. Most Apple products aren’t worth half of what they cost when you get down to the nuts and bolts of it all but they sell well to many people because of the status that comes along with them. It’s silly, it’s foolish, but since people traded stones for products we’ve had an unusual desire to put poo on a pedestal.

  There are a few major differences between digital products and physical ones. Digital products can be replicated a nearly infinite amount of times for almost no cost. The only literal loss the company suffers from the replication is a loss of time for the employees, which is hard to legislate against because we all cost others precious hours out of their life. We do it by contributing to traffic, by being slow at the grocery store, or simply be not planning things out before we leave the house. Old property laws were put into place not because of the time lost but because of the literal notion of physical products, once someone has stolen your car you no longer have that car. It is no longer a functional option for you, however is someone copies your car screensaver you still have a copy of it.

  When a video game is pirated, there are a few outcomes that can result. The people will enjoy the product and will wait until the cost of the product is relative to the quality of the product, which can very well be at its starting price point. They could not enjoy the product and delete it from their PC, which more often than not is the case (more on this later). Finally they could download the product and enjoy it but never purchase it. We’ll start with these folks and work back up.

  People who pirate because they want things free are potentially dangerous to an economy. However there is absolutely nothing to gain by fighting them. Since their piracy of a product does not effect the overall number of copies available (as opposed to a corn or car thief) there is no reason to attempt to prosecute. They would never purchase the product in the first place, so if you ended all piracy you wouldn’t gain any sales or at the very least would gain negligible returns.

  The next group of folks that pirate a game and then delete it because of its low worth are equally harmless. Considering the state of marketing and the nature of misleading for profit it is unreasonable to assume that people would ever trust a companies description of their product. There are various phenomenon in play as well that cause people to see their own creations with a pretty substantial bias (look at Will Wrights statements on SPORE for instance, he is talking about an entirely different game). These people technically cost you sales because they might have purchased the product, however they only cost you sales because it is almost impossible to return the game. This snatch and grab tactic should never be promoted and it is one of the pillars holding up piracy as we know it.

  You can argue for Demos however it is no small secret that Demo’s are about as accurate to the representative nature of a games full worth as the text on the box. They always exaggerate how much more can be experienced with the full game, for instance counting all the renames of a same item to boost the number from 4 unique items to 40 thousand. Not since the mid to late 90’s has a Demo been anywhere near accurate of the full gaming experience and everyone deeply involved with the gaming world knows this.

  Finally we have the first group of folks who play a game, enjoy it, and purchase it once the price point matches the worth of the game. These people are incredibly important. They are the strongest estimator of a games actual quality. When a game comes out for 50 dollars and has almost no sales, but later drops to 30 and sells 2 million copies it is quality control in action. The company should spend less time trying to accuse consumers of theft (for reasons stated above) and work more on providing a product who’s worth is accurate to its cost. A thick layer of glitter on a steaming dog turd is not treasure, it is a turd covered in glitter.

  The day that we invent means to instantly replenish with no cost physical materials, such as food, or wood, or anything of that nature the rules in the physical world will match this medium. Indeed someone physically stealing a copy of a video game from a store is breaking laws and very literally costing the company money. Not only for the physical costly product but for the reduced quantity to supply consumers. However this is not, and never will be, the case with digital products.

  More than likely you will never find a company willing to admit the above. But much like that set of sunglasses on your head that you’ve been looking for for the last half hour, the most obvious information is generally the last information examined. When someone reports the losses they have received from piracy it should be taken with a grain of salt and a shot of bourbon, because it is entirely fabricated. The real damage to their income comes from the glittered turd phenomenon that has swept the gaming world over the last few generations of Consoles (and PC upgrades). The best companies can hope for at this time is that innovative and talented individuals will step forth and bring the next generation of games to a relative quality level that would match the original jumps in gaming. We are in need of another SNES generation, currently the unfortunate truth is that we’ve been stuck in an NGAGE rut for a bit too long and few people are willing to address it honestly.

Recently someone brought up the question of why the US tends to be very slow to get certain games that have been released before the ESRB compared to other nations. It has to do with laws in selling the product and the rating system. I have very strong feelings about just how unnecessary the ESRB, but that would boil down into a rant that I can summarize quite quickly and succinctly “Be a better parent and stop expecting everyone else to do your job.” My parents never once looked at the ratings on the games, they weren’t fools and I’ll explain now the art of gaming names.

There is never a goal of hiding destructive content behind a friendly name, this isn’t the Tobacco industry, indeed it’s almost always (if not always) painfully simple to know whether a game can be safely given to a child that you’d rather not spend time with. I say this because anyone who is attentive with their children will not even need to go this far because they’ll be there while their child is playing “Onslaught Brigade Killer Nazi 7” or whatever else that becomes popular this year.

Lets look at a dozen children friendly games and a dozen non-children friendly games. Try and figure out the pattern for each before you go on to the reveal. When I say child friendly I simply mean that even the staunchest ignorant observer would be hard-pressed to equate playing the game to becoming a murderer (which statistically is unlikely if you were curious).

Children Friendly Games

1. Sonic The Hedgehog
2. Super Mario Bros
3. DeBlob
4. Pokemon
5. Sim City
6. Professor Layton and the Curious Village
7. Dance Dance Revolution
8. Donkey Kong
9. Cooking Mama
10. Lego (Anything)
11. Club Penguin
12. Animal Crossing

Non-Children Friendly Games

1. God of War
2. Grand Theft Auto
3. Killzone 2
4. Resident Evil
5. Gears of War
6. Left 4 Dead
7. Call of Duty: World at War
8. Resistance: Fall of Man
9. World of Warcraft
10. Fallout
11. Street Fighter
12. Assassin’s Creed

So have you figured it out? What noticeable difference there is between games your kids can play and what they can’t (well they could play any of them, but for people who actually think it’ll effect the kid). The games that are kid friendly almost always sound kid friendly, sure you could misconstrue club penguin as a verb and a noun instead of one big noun…which I’ll admit is a HUGE difference.

If you go to club penguin for a fun night of dancing is quite different than going to club penguins. But I digress, even the ambiguous titles up there are pretty obvious upon gazing for about a quarter of a second at the covers. Have you ever looked at a cover for a game and thought “Hmm I wonder if there will be death and destruction.” No. While you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover you will always get a pretty accurate view of the ‘danger’ involved with a game by a look at the cover. Lets have a few visual examples.

Alright this guy has a gun. Probably involves shooting.

Now if the title wasn’t a give away you might notice the pissed off alien with a weapon.

Again if the title isn’t a giveaway (Ultimate Fighting Championship) the picture is.

Now I’ll admit he eats ‘pills’ and ugh…”kills” ghosts…if you can do that. But obviously friendly.

Sure there are lightsabers and ‘violence’ but anyone who knows what Lego’s are knows that they are ALWAYS kid friendly (choking aside).

It’s golf. While I realize this could lead your kid to making millions and incidentally losing their ability to feel compassion (joking joking) it is family friendly.

Now I realize I chose all 360 games (a system notorious for adult games) but that was mostly the point. There is really little to no gray area in gaming. If there is going to be death, murder, drug selling, it’s all painfully obvious on the cover if not by the name but by the visual content. Then again on second thought.

I can see the ambiguity.