@xtremeflem2day You don't even need to use antidepressants. Parents have been drugging their children since 2-3 years old with caffeine, a physically addictive drug that can have potentially severe physiological side effects, for decades now. On top of that there's a growing body of evidence that various food additives, artificial colors and sweeteners, can interact in unhealthy fashions with children who possess abnormal brain physiology or brain chemistry like those affected by ADD and ADHD.
@questersson @Marikhen Parents bear the ultimate responsibility for raising their children, and how they raise their children affects how other children grow up making them responsible in part for how the children they and their children associate with grow up.
Regarding state/local CPS agencies stepping in when you spanked your child, consider this. For every government action there is an equal and opposite, or worse, inaction. I spent years being hit in the ass with a cricket paddle by my school 6'2"-6'5" principle for fighting, and even when I didn't start the fight I got punished for starting the fight. Later I had another principle, a nearly 6' tall woman this time, decide hitting me in the ass with a ping pong paddle that had holes cut out of it three times per failed test would be a great way of teaching me to do better on said tests. To this day, over two decades since that ended, I still have moderate to severe panic attacks which can leave me physically incapable of speaking as a result of that. Spanking your child can have long-term, life-altering repercussions when done incorrectly.
Oddly I still support spanking a child when it's warranted despite the abusive nature of my experiences with it. /shrugs.
I love it when Congress would rather blame video games than the parents. I don't necessarily blame the parents of the children involved, but all of the parents involved do hold at least some collective responsibility for the way they raised their children and how their children interacted with the aforementioned "problem children."
Also, something interesting to note about the "deranged gamer" comment, it was part of a comment made by a cop who was, so far as I can tell, talking out of his ass. The entire line was, "In the code of a gamer, even a deranged gamer like this little bastard, if somebody else kills you, they get your points." I've been a heavy gamer for something like 25 years and a gamer in general for closer to 30 and I've never once come across that "code of a gamer."
With people like that picking up the pieces you know that there's not a good chance of the real story being put together. -_-
@orth3rion Agreed. I've been calling it World of Diablocraft since before it launched, and most of my complaints about the game would be null and void had they just called it that. Complaints about the auction house, online only component, combat being too action-y, the complete lack of even the smallest survival/horror elements, and so on.
Of course complaints such as the one I had where Diablo 3 only ran off of a single core on my CPU 60-80% of the time for the first six months or so after launch (and before launch too) wouldn't be resolved by changing the name of the game...
I'm too much of a selfish bastard for anything like reciprocity to have much of a bearing on what I do. Likewise I'm too antisocial to care what others think about me so conspicuous consumption is out too. For that matter the "mere exposure" effect doesn't track well with me as I despise the whole "intermediate currency" thing enough that the only purchased I've made with them is when the currency could be gained via surveys or once, with Path of Exile, to get something which cannot be acquired in-game and has a mechanical, of sorts, benefit. IOW I dropped $20 for 6 more stash tabs. That also comprises the entirety of my F2P spending so I've spent $0 on League of Legends.
Personally, I'd be interested in finding out just what percentage of habitual game pirates out there who don't buy the games they enjoy playing actually do pay into any F2P games that they play. I doubt it'd mean a whole lot in the grand scheme of things, but it might be interesting to see how many people who take "free" gaming for granted will pay into free games.
The sad part is that this didn't make it to some of the later titles. I actually managed to lose at Sims 2 on the PS2 because I wouldn't make my (in my mind at least) lesbian character get into the hot tub with "Randy Hotty."
To this day I, and others, are still wondering just how the heck you can lose at a Sims game like that. >_>
To (mis)quote a line from Iron Man, "What good is a video game system that doesn't play video games?" To answer that question just leave your XBox One unplugged from the internet for 24 hours and all you get to do is watch cable TV, but only if you have a working cable receiver of course, and play DVDs which your old(er) systems already do anyways. You could just pull an old PS2 or XBox out of the closet for DVD playing.
I don't consider myself a privacy nut, but what Microsoft is doing with the Kinect, especially in light of their now infamous patent, is just ripe for privacy invasion lawsuits. If the MPAA can't be bothered to send representatives to everyone's house to make sure everyone's viewing movies they've purchased in a "legal" fashion I don't see that Microsoft should do it for them yet that's exactly what one of the possible "features" of the new system is.
Likewise I have a relatively stable internet connection and live in a fairly large city of a "first world country" so the requirement of a consistent, though of course not necessarily constant, network connection isn't an issue in and of itself. The issue is that this is, in my opinion, an asinine requirement done solely to hurt gamers and help corporations is an issue, however. I'm not referring to just the gaming corporations like EA either. Telecom companies stand to profit from this as well by, at least in a sense, forcing people who purchase these consoles to maintain an internet service even when they might otherwise drop it or outright fail to pay for one altogether. In a very real sense for some people this requirement ups the cost of owning an XBox One to whatever the monthly rate for their internet service is.
Frankly, the part that really bugs me about all of this is that a lot of people just aren't seeing how this could affect the future of tangible goods in general. What we're seeing now is an industry slowly moving towards a model where the manufacturer can, and does, dictate to the end user exactly when, where, and how their products will be used, and few people if any are objecting to it. It was bad enough when they were able to do this with the games themselves, but doing it with the consoles will be much, much worse in the long run.
Hopefully they'll do something with their dynamic water so that it changes how it appears to flow with the level of water. Water running completely over the top of rocks has, or at least should have, a different appearance than water running through a bunch of rocks. Water not flowing properly is one of those things that really pulls some people out of the game and back into the "real" world.
Marikhen's comments