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The weekend is pretty much over all ready, making it feel ridiculously short. I spent most of my Sunday playing Persona 4 after a late Saturday. Frank's bistro had a trial opening, where they decided to open the doors at 5 PM to the public, but with no fanfare except having told friends and family. The result of the opening was a nearly immediately packed joint - the bar filled up with friends, but the restaurant end pretty much had someone in every table until the end of the night. My assumption is that's good.
On an unrelated note, I really like this :
www.buzzfeed.com/peggy/michael-ceras-must-see-list
I don't have any verification that's legit, but that's the kind of list I'd imagine Michael Cera would write up. Also, maybe it's just me, but I really like him. I see that he gets a lot of hate from people, or maybe they're just burned out on his characters, but I've never had a problem.
Before I went out to the opening yesterday, I stopped by Gamestop to see what they had in the way of PS2 games and walked out with the last PS2 Guilty Gear game and Shadow of the Colossus. There are a few things going on in that last sentence, though, that interest me.
It may be that you recall a debacle based on Roger Ebert and his opinions of video games and their status as art. (His opinion : They arn't.) After a certain amount of brou-ha-ha in that blog circle and online in general, he eventually replied with this :
blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/07/okay_kids_play_on_my_lawn.html
I don't really believe in 'high art' except as a social construct, and the definition that I do apply is actually pretty encompassing. (Anything intentionally created in order to provoke a response.) Colossus is one of those landmark games I've heard about but never played. Ever since I heard how great it was, I had regretted not buying it when I saw it sitting in the bargain bin at Best Buy for 8 bucks.
There are many measures of quality in art, and I'm looking forward to observing them in Shadow of the Colossus.
More recently, Jerry Holkins, aka 'Tycho' of Penny Arcade fame posted the following :
www.penny-arcade.com/2010/8/25/ - Words and Their Meanings, relating to customer status and the used game market. Gamestop is far and away one of the most easily recognized names in used gaming, and in this area, the Slackers chain is kind of similar. I use Gamestop in a similar way that I use Amazon; basically in the pursuit of games that are no longer in production. Most of my game purchases fall along those lines, actually. I don't know the last game I bought that was recent at the time of purchase. Probably Nights 2, for the Wii, and like all my Wii purchases, it was a gift for someone else. Even my PS3 purchases are me playing catch-up.
In many ways, this makes me exempt from the whole discussion, but it still made me think. The stance that Jerry and Mike took wasn't that used game purchases should be illegal, but that when you're buying used, you're not buying new. And if you're not buying new, then your dollars are going to someone that's not the developers. I think that requesting full serviceability from games that one purchases used is something you can do, but not something you can demand. I think that his stance on gaming purchase is reasonable, given who he is, what he does, and who he's around. He ends his post with, " You meet one person who creates games for a living, just one, and it becomes very difficult to maintain this virtuous fiction."
For most people, I'd write that off, but Holkins is someone with a very precise grasp on the written word. I feel that, given the nature of the blog here, one could easily substitute the word 'books' for 'games', though, and we reach a point where many people could feel strongly about the argument. Which is true, for what it's worth. The closer you are to the people that produce these things that we consume, the more involved your perspective becomes. He revists the issue in the next post (here @ http://www.penny-arcade.com/2010/8/27/ ) and I think he does himself a disservice by setting aside the issue as a whole in exchange for this one point. However, he does ask the correct questions when he says " Yes, I'm giving somebody money when I buy used. Is that sufficient? What is the end result, and what systems am I sustaining by doing so?"
These are actually questions that can be answered, in that systems are sustained and there is a certain quantity of money that a company will require in order to be sustainable. There isn't really an ethics question to be answered here, simply a matter of what agenda you're perusing and what cause you'd like to support or, in many cases, a matter of complete indifference to the system as a whole. The agenda in this case is the pocket book and convenience.
While the question can be answered if one's in a mind to do so, I feel that it's eventually moot. Clients like Steam allow games to be downloaded directly to desktop, which is a very, very efficient thing. As a connection to the internet is almost ubiquitous at this point, and as it circumvents the issue in general, while allowing the price on games to come down (which might increase the number of purchases, actually, which would be the whole point), we might be able to sidestep the issue entirely. At this point, buying new from stores is giving the bulk of our money to those institutions - in fact, all of it, when it's the stores that pay the development companies. I don't believe we're giving money to the developers at all by buying new, but we do influence their paycheck.
On an unrelated note, I really like this :
www.buzzfeed.com/peggy/michael-ceras-must-see-list
I don't have any verification that's legit, but that's the kind of list I'd imagine Michael Cera would write up. Also, maybe it's just me, but I really like him. I see that he gets a lot of hate from people, or maybe they're just burned out on his characters, but I've never had a problem.
Before I went out to the opening yesterday, I stopped by Gamestop to see what they had in the way of PS2 games and walked out with the last PS2 Guilty Gear game and Shadow of the Colossus. There are a few things going on in that last sentence, though, that interest me.
It may be that you recall a debacle based on Roger Ebert and his opinions of video games and their status as art. (His opinion : They arn't.) After a certain amount of brou-ha-ha in that blog circle and online in general, he eventually replied with this :
blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/07/okay_kids_play_on_my_lawn.html
I don't really believe in 'high art' except as a social construct, and the definition that I do apply is actually pretty encompassing. (Anything intentionally created in order to provoke a response.) Colossus is one of those landmark games I've heard about but never played. Ever since I heard how great it was, I had regretted not buying it when I saw it sitting in the bargain bin at Best Buy for 8 bucks.
There are many measures of quality in art, and I'm looking forward to observing them in Shadow of the Colossus.
More recently, Jerry Holkins, aka 'Tycho' of Penny Arcade fame posted the following :
www.penny-arcade.com/2010/8/25/ - Words and Their Meanings, relating to customer status and the used game market. Gamestop is far and away one of the most easily recognized names in used gaming, and in this area, the Slackers chain is kind of similar. I use Gamestop in a similar way that I use Amazon; basically in the pursuit of games that are no longer in production. Most of my game purchases fall along those lines, actually. I don't know the last game I bought that was recent at the time of purchase. Probably Nights 2, for the Wii, and like all my Wii purchases, it was a gift for someone else. Even my PS3 purchases are me playing catch-up.
In many ways, this makes me exempt from the whole discussion, but it still made me think. The stance that Jerry and Mike took wasn't that used game purchases should be illegal, but that when you're buying used, you're not buying new. And if you're not buying new, then your dollars are going to someone that's not the developers. I think that requesting full serviceability from games that one purchases used is something you can do, but not something you can demand. I think that his stance on gaming purchase is reasonable, given who he is, what he does, and who he's around. He ends his post with, " You meet one person who creates games for a living, just one, and it becomes very difficult to maintain this virtuous fiction."
For most people, I'd write that off, but Holkins is someone with a very precise grasp on the written word. I feel that, given the nature of the blog here, one could easily substitute the word 'books' for 'games', though, and we reach a point where many people could feel strongly about the argument. Which is true, for what it's worth. The closer you are to the people that produce these things that we consume, the more involved your perspective becomes. He revists the issue in the next post (here @ http://www.penny-arcade.com/2010/8/27/ ) and I think he does himself a disservice by setting aside the issue as a whole in exchange for this one point. However, he does ask the correct questions when he says " Yes, I'm giving somebody money when I buy used. Is that sufficient? What is the end result, and what systems am I sustaining by doing so?"
These are actually questions that can be answered, in that systems are sustained and there is a certain quantity of money that a company will require in order to be sustainable. There isn't really an ethics question to be answered here, simply a matter of what agenda you're perusing and what cause you'd like to support or, in many cases, a matter of complete indifference to the system as a whole. The agenda in this case is the pocket book and convenience.
While the question can be answered if one's in a mind to do so, I feel that it's eventually moot. Clients like Steam allow games to be downloaded directly to desktop, which is a very, very efficient thing. As a connection to the internet is almost ubiquitous at this point, and as it circumvents the issue in general, while allowing the price on games to come down (which might increase the number of purchases, actually, which would be the whole point), we might be able to sidestep the issue entirely. At this point, buying new from stores is giving the bulk of our money to those institutions - in fact, all of it, when it's the stores that pay the development companies. I don't believe we're giving money to the developers at all by buying new, but we do influence their paycheck.
