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Ah, alright. I just wanted to make sure you weren't wasting valuable brain-time on lectures he's going to ignore. Also, I wouldn't call him an Aspie. I know plenty of Asperger's types who aren't THAT hideously stupid.

No, my diagnosis is "pompous know-it-all high-school graduate".

So I was leaving Marden's with the first brand-new pair of Jordans I've ever owned in my life when I noticed two little old ladies sitting at a table just outside the doors.

They were collecting signatures in an effort to get a proposition on the ballot to repeal the recently-passed law that allows gay marriage in Maine.

As offensive and disgusting as this would have been to me anyway, it was made worse by the fact that one of the ladies was, well, ethnic. I don't know if she was latina or mulatto or what, but 50 years ago she would have been riding in the back of the bus and drinking from a separate water fountain. And she was old enough that she may have, at some point in her life, had to do exactly that. Some people are awfully quick to inflict on others the miseries that were ,until fairly recently, inflicted on them.

As I was headed towards them to deliver an angry and hung-over rant about how their bigotry was an affront to human decency (I know there's no such thing but it makes for good oratory), I had a better idea.

I walked across the parking lot to the nearby Coffee Express stand and bought myself a large black coffee, scalding hot.

Then I walked back to the two old ladies and their table and asked if I could sign their petition.

As I took the pen and bent over to sign, I "accidentally" knocked over my cup of coffee, spilling it all over their table.

As near as I can tell, I completely ruined at least 6 full pages of signatures.

Oops. My bad.

Well done.

LMNO, are you really trying to lecture him?

That's stupid. It's like trying to fell a tree -- a big one, mind you, think "sequoia" here -- by headbutting it.

Give up. He's stupid. He's going to remain stupid. All the most meticulous logical arguments will fall apart in front of him. No one on earth can fix him because he doesn't fucking listen. For example, I foresee a post about how he meant our clothing is going to strangle us in our sleep or some similarly fucktarded explanation of how YOU WERE MISINTERPRETING HIS VAST SUPERPOWERED SPACE-BRAIN'S WORDS OF INFINITE WISDOM. He's not worth the thinking it takes to acknowledge he typed shit. Please, for your own sake, stop trying to fix him.

Unless, of course, you're just publicly giggling at him, in which case I ask you to ignore this entire post.

[Maybe this guy is legitimately exploring a darker side of humanity]

You guys are giving him a lot of attention

which he probably really likes

I stay out of "artistic" discussions because they never end well. Maybe this guy is legitimately exploring a darker side of humanity, and maybe it is important.
There is an participation element that is more apparent then other media, books, movies, comics, ect.

But I'm very much on the fence on this issue, thought I do find it interesting that more and more the object of identification in many games is not one of a virtue, or even moral ambiguity, but this identifying with a perpetrator of an almost fratlike violence, more often against women, or minorities. Something that's also crept into horror movies, especially with these almost sensational torture porn films - which might I add are much more water downed then the more grimy almost poetic gorefests of underground films of the 80's (ie Psycho Girls, Guinea Pig 2, or 5) and definitely invoke a less negative reaction in the viewer.

I tend to agree, sympathize with your position, and definatly aggree with it more when there is an attempt to commercialize
but on the other hand human fantasies can be dark, very dark

No, he's not. He's a 14 year old kid. He's stated that he does this shit to piss people off, in other words to be an insensitive cunt. This has no artistic merit. I tried to think up a good metaphor in the vein of "It has all the artistic merit of...", but there really isn't anything to compare. There's more art in flushing a toilet or stabbing your eyeball with a heroin syringe than in his garbage.

Thurnez, great timing. Today in that thread, Sigvatr had the wonderful idea of making a game to rape small children at a McDonalds.

This person is harmless, right? Not despicable, just an "artist". Right?

And it's totally not okay for him to, say, be tied to the front of a derailed freight train heading for a forest fire, right?

I think you're misinterpreting what we're saying, Hoopla.

The games are fine. The people who play them are fine, mostly. It's just that when I see someone catch the giggles from setting someone on fire, I feel disgust. It doesn't matter whether or not they are bad people or will be bad people, they tripped the "oh god what the hell" switch in my brain.

I'm sure Trip feels similarly.

Okay, I prefer it put that way.

I like the idea of getting paid to express myself. It's one of the big reasons I want to devote myself full-time to game development: because I can LIVE off of that. It won't just be something I shove to the side in favor of a house and some food.

I like the idea of ENJOYING what I get paid for, or better yet, getting paid to do something not just enjoyable, but -fulfilling-. That's why I chose game development, why I like architecture and film (and want to learn/do both at some point), why I'm writing a story for a freeware game studio. I want to do stuff that makes me, as a person, feel like I did something fulfilling... without forcing me to give up basic necessities. That's why I don't think of art -> payment as a problem.

We've discussed this in IRC before, Cram.

I like the notion of IP, but I think it's gone out of control.

The biggest problem with Creative Commons is you can't live off of it. You can sell it, but who will buy? It's a great idea, to be sure, but not all of us can use it.

I think, personally, something between trademark and patent law for copyright would be good. Say, a short period of copyright "inactivity" where nothing new is being done with the copyrighted work leads to public domaining it, but it can only be extended to (imo) 15-20 years, maximum. How does that sound?

The evidence around me day to day is enough for me to know that most people are not stupid.  It's just the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.

Cain, I HIGHLY suggest reading the background to the White Wolf RPG Exalted (for the gods-as-political-assholes bit, and you'll probably LOVE the stuff about Sidereals) and playing the PS2 action-RPG Radiata Stories (for pretty much everything else, oh, and moral choices that you actually have to honestly -think- about).

I'm looking forward to this as a game developer.

People may dress as Jedis and state that as their religion on forms but the fact is they don't go around breaking up fights with their lightsabers.  And if you find a case where someone did, it's irrelevant...

You see absolutely nothing wrong with the logical structure of this argument?

WAY TO GO TAKING THINGS OUT OF CONTEXT, PAL.

Not everyone can be assed wording everything they say with the same care and diligence of the mega-human you clearly are.

The logic is sound, the way it was stated says to you that it wasn't. How about, to get it through your fucking skull, I reword it for you.

Crazy people are far, far, far more likely to do crazy things than non-crazy people. Therefore, it is safe to assume that when a crazy thing is done,the person responsible is crazy.

EDITED FOR CLARITY IN CASE I GET YELLED AT BY SOMEONE WHO CAN'T DO SOMETHING AS SIMPLE AS PARSING INFORMAL LANGUAGE

Hoopla, don't get me wrong. I'm not Jack Thompson here. I'm not going to say violent video games are murder simulators and ask for them to be banned by the government post-haste. I played Quake 3, I'm making a multiplayer FPS with my dev team. I want to play that one Wii game, MadWorld. Have you seen videos of that? (If not, go look them up on youtube. They are the most awesome thing ever.) Personally, I think videogame violence is a good way to let out one's frustration harmlessly.

It's more just a general "goddamn those people creep me the hell out" sort of thing. I don't know. There's just something about people who can laugh till they shit themselves over dismembering someone, even just a digital someone... It just makes me want to avoid that person. It has nothing to do with the likelihood of them going axe crazy.

(To be fair, some might argue that they're all already axe crazy, but those people are shitheads.)

And Arafelis just reinforces Hoopla's sentiment that some people are fucking batshit to begin with. Who is this guy, anyway? He seems awfully stupid.

I donn't like the subject matter of the game, but it isn't what prompted the rant.

What prompted the rant was being so full of himself that I mistook him for a fractal.