As a parent, I'm far less concerned with the fake violence my kid sees or participates in when playing a game, than I am about the content of the nightly news. The unabashed violence (often accompanied by racism and general intolerance) that I grew up on just from Tom and Jerry is shocking when one reflects on it. We didn't have ugly remote controllers in our hands to 'shoot' one another- we had as-realistic-as-possible toy guns and looked each other in the eye while yelling BANG.
It's really no different than sports games. Most people will never be pro football players, but a game lets you simulate that. Likewise, few FPS players are themselves soldiers, or ever will be. That's probably why the FPS genre doesn't hold much interest for me, nor am I an avid collector of military firearms in real life- there's nothing in a shooter I haven't survived for real while in the service and the reality makes the simulation much less interesting. I've been shot at, but I've never conjured a flaming chick with a big rack- thus Skyrim holds my attention much longer than CoD ever will.
In generations past, the real life of a kid usually included pleasantries like forced labor, disease, seeing parents and siblings die young, economic ruin, unrestricted submarine warfare, etc. If the worst thing that kids rich enough to have video games sees is some animated blood- then we should consider ourselves lucky. Given that context, it's also just arrogant and childish to obsess over the effects on kids with the time and money to waste on games- when much of the world's kids still live in a world of real death and deprivation. Oh poor us indeed.....
My holy trinity of racers is Forza, F1, and Dirt. The only story in these games is building a career in a racing series for F1. Otherwise, it's just cars and driving, in games pretty well dedicated to something specific- in the belief that these are often the best examples of the genre. Games that try to encompass every facet of racing are usually too arcade for me. So I take my supercar and Le Mans racing from Forza, my drifting and rally driving from Dirt, and indulge my love of open wheel racing (as well as being an F1 junkie already) with the brilliant F1 series.
As an aside- why is there no decent motocross sim? Every MX game has moon gravity to do ridiculous stunts, has trucks, atvs, and buggies in them, and feature the most arcade of controls. With the popularity of MX/SX, I'm surprised no one makes a good sim of it. There is usually both MotoGP and SBK games for on-road simulation level bike racing, which is much more niche than motocross- and yet someone develops them every year. NASCAR, F1, and even Rally get yearly sim-level, detail obsessed games while I don't even think they make the arcade MX games at all anymore. Just wondering
@DiamondDM13 That is part of security. The technology to prevent attacks, or find and punish those that do succeed is part of the security apparatus that people rely on to be safe, while the public has little access to such measures. Non-public key encryption on communications for example, prevent attacks by making one's plans and movements unknown.
The increase in technology is part and parcel of increase in security. Again, this is why to make a statement and affect policy change, the 9/11 hijackers focused on mass destruction rather than killing a figurehead. The choice of a mass attack versus a spectacular single assassination came down to ease of operation and chance of success.
The goal remained the same. They simply chose the path of least resistance to achieve it. No doubt they'd have preferred to steal military aircraft over airliners, but security on military planes is much tighter.
But the primary goal was policy change all along. They got it by forcing a war. In this way, the murder of thousands on 9/11 was no different than the single assassination of Arch-Duke Ferdinand. Both cases caused the aggrieved party to respond with war that ultimately cost them far more than they gained.
Assassination of individuals is becoming less and less successful, and less useful even when it's successful. Powerful people or groups with virtually unlimited resources make themselves secure to the point where only suicidal attacks have any chance of success, and even then- rarely. It's a harder sell too, a one way mission unlikely to succeed anyway.
It has been replaced by the 'assassination' of a mass of people so that the victim gov't is forced to respond no differently than an attack on a figurehead. Regime change is Policy change, the two are interchangeable.
Both have the desired effect- generally forcing the victim to respond predictably so that it's reaction can be made to benefit the attacker. Direct regime change by way of simple murder rarely achieves lasting success. The fact that murder became the leading cause of death among Roman rulers following the murder of Julius indicates that no one really 'won' in the long run by just killing the GIC- Guy In Charge.
Lasting impact is better made in the mass killing of 'average folk' for whom our memories burn much brighter than for figureheads we don't really trust anyway. The public is far less protected than individuals, and by killing an individual, you make that person a martyr to a few people- but assassinate thousands of brothers, sisters, parents, friends, co-workers, etc- and you've created that many martyrs to fuel whatever reaction you're after.
This is why it's often some lone nut that actually whacks someone important- just no accounting for crazy. Lone fanatics focus on one figurehead, organizations of fanatics have learned to simply target the public. Both should be catagorized as assassination for having the same core purpose- policy change.
@u1tradt I don't know of any Formula One cars in Forza. However, I don't have every car pack, so perhaps I missed something. But I don't think the license is in place for Forza to have Formula One cars. They do have LMP1 cars (the R1 class) that comes from the series like American Le Mans, but Forza specifically steers away from open wheel cars.
Good episode, but the interviews need better editing to whittle them down. The Starcraft episode was horribly long blather about pro gaming (an oxymoron) that left the topic of Starcraft long before Danny took the stage back.
This was somewhat better, but remember- this is Danny's show, and for 2 seasons it was just his wit and humor. This season is relying on talking heads rather than just the guy who's show it is.
There is Eve, then there is everything else. Yeah, it's tough, complex, brutal, and often flatly unfriendly in New Eden, but once you learn Eve, all the elf and dwarf MMOs seem like children's games.
Nothing else remotely comes close to the sandbox that is Eve. Nothing lets you make a character so uniquely YOU in an epic setting. Not just another troll/hunter among thousands of identical ones.
And we ALL play in one universe. No shards with maybe a couple thousand people in it. In Eve, there is nowhere you can run to hide that I can't find you, and shove an assault missile up your tailpipe for some transgression. But what a transgression it can be-- heists of billions of isk can change fortunes overnight. Backstabbing alliances can change the political landscape in an instant.
And we'll be dropping bombs on fools in Dust 514 soon.
Eve is the oldest MMO still active, and is the future of MMO's way beyond anything else on the market. Everything else is the kiddie pool of MMO's at this point.
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