Tigranes

It is important to punish criminals. But is it more important than anything else?

Actually, it's in the *long run* that it would harm the US, not the short or medium term. Why do you think the US constantly meddles in other nations' affairs? Because what happens to other nations and the world at large has a direct effect on US culture, economy, politics, military and future. It isn't good for the US to have, say, Mexico and other nations collapse into poverty: it brings instability and spite and hatred, it effects the economy adversely - leaving out entirely the moral argument that seems to be the masquerade, it's impractical to just say "they can do whatever, we'll do whatever." That said, I've already suggested and supported a revamp of the system to accept more workers legally and stratify the system. It's probably more benefitial for the U.S. to do that, then do a crackdown on all illegal immigrants; those who fit the criteria are accepted,but those who do not are unforgivingly deported. There's no point being an armchair philosopher and crying they should all be kicked out.

Also not forget the 19 remaining Korean hostages held by the Taleban, the BBC and other major western networks hardly report anything on this because the situation is remaining too static to be 'newsworthy'. Afghanistan remains in an unenviable situation for its visitors, its government and most of all its own people just as much as Iraq...

That's some thought going on right there.

What a great review, huh? tbh was never really caught on the hype (hell, never played system shock, wouldn't run on my machine), but i remember seeing a 25 minute gameplay trailer run-through or something and it just didn't really get me. Funky graphics and physics stuff, but nothing truly engrossing.

....>What?

One of the issues is that game-makers themselves usually don't see what they do as 'art'; at best they see it as 'art-istic', and subscribe to a dichotomy between entertainment and art - one that really doesnt' stand up to any kind of prolonged examination. Pop, it's not about 'justifying' love for games by calling it art. I don't give a crap what other people think games are, art or not, in terms of my playing it; they could call it the worst thing since goat porn and well, who cares? I like 'em, I play 'em. Some avant garde films are great for me, some I find stupid and horrible. It doesn't matter if someone calls me a barbarian for disliking Picasso, or a pretentious git for reading Thomas Pynchon. I argue stuff in this topic because of 1/ intellectual curiosity and 2/ I do believe games can occupy a different and more expansive space than it currently does now. By the way, whoever talked about the structural argument? No way. Markland's argument can be somewhat debunked by the point that games don't often have 'auteurs', sure, but even with auteurs, no text has a unidirectional communicative process. Even if it's Spielberg or some other great auteur, that makes the film or book or painting all by himself, the meaning of that work will always be dependent on who the audience is, when and where they are looking at it, and what they think it is (do they treat it as art or not? games or book?), and so forth. So that's the reason Ebert's argument is completely superficial. He doesn't recognise this. He thinks that if an auteur makes the text and it has no itneractivity, people will, have various degrees of understanding of the 'true meaning' behind this text. Yeah, right. The meaning in the Mona Lisa is dependent as much on the creator as the reader; so theres no fundamental difference from video games, and thus games are not disqualified.

What a noob. Maybe I should hire someone to rob DR, but not kill or anything, just rob. It'll teach a lesson that there are robbers out there.

My post is predictably tl;dr'd, so: It's more than the writing, it's also visuals, sound, context in which you watch it, hell even interactivity I guess. It supports your point though.

I aint' arguing 'games are awesome and they are art too' in the traditional sense here; I am rather saying that the dichotomy is ill-bred and I can be proud in my pastime without having to try and equate it to a book or film. Several disjunctive points: In its space, games create an ability for meaning to be expressed not primarily by a single agent, but from that interchange itself between author and reader. While such a mechanism has thus far been superficially realised at best, especially because it is much more difficult a mechanism to control, there is potential there. But potential for what? Well, let's see: But art is craftsmanship. Art just as much as video games is dependent on certain reactions of the reader, the interpretive schema within which art is able to place a reader. I detest looking at Picasso. I'm not a stranger to avant-garde film or postmodernism or other wacky things, but when I want to see art I want to see good looking art and to me Picasso is just pointless. One could argue that were I to actually read up about Picasso, or were I in the company of a beautiful woman who asserted that men who like Picasso are romantic and have large ding-dongs, I may revise my opinion quite sincerely. This is the same as the argument about playing Torment with 3-INT. Art is an act of communication and its meaning is dependent on communication just as much as video games are. You have people analysing literature and reading it in ways the original author never even thought of; in this case, is the book great because of the author, or because of the reader? Both and neither, it's the interchange between them that is generative of 'meaning' as we know it. In this perspective, then, video games *aren't* fundamentally different from traditional art; they are different in their methods but they are the same in their fundamentals, as they are all communicative texts. I don't think Ebert deals with the question in this perspective, but I think we should realise this. You (and all of us) make conscious and unconscious judgments about what meaning is 'worthy' and what meaning is not. When you say a INT-3 torment experience is not meaningful, well.. it *is* meaningful; its just filled with meaning that most of us would consider vacuous. I won't be an insufferable postmodernist and argue that even vacuous critter-bashing is 'meaningful' and 'arty', though. What I would argue, however, in this issue, is two things: 1. Games like Torment show us the potential there is - though it may never be realised - for a level of 'meaning' that is indeed quite 'art'-like. This will be more the case once people start to take games seriously, which will happen gradually as generations grow up on video games. Games like Indigo Prophecy could continue to become more sophisticated and take on their own style as opposed to a cheap imitation of cinema; and players could gradually take the NPCs less as "meatsacks" and more like characters in a 'proper' book or film. 2. The meaning you take from a text, such as a game, is not wholly dependent on the text itself. This is a major major flaw in most arguments about the 'meaning' in games. The social and personal context in which you play a game changes the meaning you derive from it. Shakespeare in his time as popular entertainment was consumed differently from it is now in high school English classes. Games as texts will find that the meaning they try to transmit to their audiences is highly influenced by the context of that audience; whether they are playing alone or together, with or without cheats, and so forth. There is a high level of subversion to the original meaning possible, but this does not necessarily mean that the original meaning is 'defiled'; it's not necessarily that. Hell, as the easiest example, the high quality of some of the fanfiction for RPGs out there greatly enrich the emotional involvement one can have with the characters. -------- Wow, sorry. First day of holidays so I can't stand organising that into a big master argument. But perhaps you get the gist. The interactivity of games does not fundamentally change the systems of meaning; the existing systems of meaning in 'art' is already dependdent on a certain level of interactivity. Video games are simply using a different path to do the same thing. Once the social and personal contexts become more favourable and naturalised to video games, and thus people start consuming video games in a different manner, this mechanism will be able to take on a more unique form, and we will have 'meaning' we find 'meaningful' in games - perhaps, never, for some, to the level of 'great traditional art', but then some people still think books are superior to films, and that's not the end of the world for films as art. Of course, this is a highly theoretical argument I'm proposing; I am perfectly aware that practically, most games are 'trashy' and the contexts which I speak of could never really be realised before the demise of the medium's popularity. But the potential is there.

Interesting. What's the thesis' primary question? I assume this 'demo' is not the finished article of the thesis but a supplementary example? I'll check it out, though I don't think I had the time to do the questionnaire before.

Frolick in the fields, taks. Do you really think I would actually be offended by this? I'm not concerned about how some people get to 'walk across the border' and I have to go through all the mess, as in I'm not bothered about the 'unfairness' of it all or something, but when I see high school teachers who are so poor at English they couldn't buy meat at a supermarket let alone teach anyone, or people who come here and never try to learn English or learn about the country and just try to live exactly the life they did at home (and they're not a refugee), well, I don't think that's very good for anybody involved either.

You could play the Fallout Boy in a cell-shaded world.

Couple million? Probably more than that. I was never really aware of how and how much illegal immigration effects the American economy, but on the assumption that what Hurlshot says is an astute judgment of the situation (since nobody's debunked it), it may be a good idea to 'stratify' the visa / immigration permissions; unskilled workers with poor English are given conditional and highly limited permits, while depending on factors such as work skill-sets and English proficiency they can 'upgrade' their position to a 'full' work visa or whatnot. Anyway, as an Asian immigrant I'm shocked and offended, and I'm leaving this forum forever to frolick in the fields with EnderAndrew.

I forget who Amie was.

I guess it's because many people may not recognise it, and instead associate snakes with biblical connotations.

Hilarious. Just make it a green cross or a heart.. Interesting about the RC v. J&J thing. Potentially, though, because the suit itself is comparatively dull, it has the potential to go nearly completely under the radar - one or two short articles about the result of the suit years later, and that's the end of it. That could very well hpappen. If conditions are right for some journalists and journo institutions to seize upon this and dig up some dirt... well, whether existent or dubious, I'm sure quite a lot could be dug up about the RC, being a large charity organisation. It's kinda inescapable. And if that happens, it will have an effect on the RC - people will often just carry away with them a vague uncertainty about the integrity of the organisation intsead of a concrete idea on what if anything they did wrong. The suit of course isn't completely ridiculous, if it comes down to it, though; J&J is perfectly entitled to protect their legal possessions, and can't give away their logo to any old Joe, no matter how 'ordinary' their particular one tends to be.

By how much does 50 Cent outsell Kanye West, usually?

Clearly, Josh Sawyer.

Well, London for example already spent many a dime installing cameras every corner of central London, so why not fork out some more for, I don't know, privacy? It's a great technology and I hope it is adopted.

You've got to wonder how they made the OC with that.

It would have been one of the *effects* of the bomb, if not the reason. Thus it is significant.

I remember playing Torment when I was 13; the fella (thirty-something) assured me that it was a lot better than BG2, which I had wanted to borrow. I got up to the TNO-Deionarra thing, and I remember.. not being daunted by the amount of text, exactly (I like reading), but hopping through the options like I was trying to fit together a puzzle. Guessing at what the 'best' answer is, and trying to extract most loot/info then move on. But the dialogue wasn't really kind to that kind of mechanisation, and I remember being quite frustrated. I wandered around the Hive a bit, but foundi t the same, and quit. Picked it up later, around... 16? After BGs/NWN, when I was hunkerin' for CRPGs and decided to try PS:T and Fallout. I approached the same dialogues with a lot more relaxed approach, and I was rewarded. For me, though, the hook wasn't Deionarra's dialogue but Mourns-for-Trees in the hive; that was when I really understood how unique and fantastic the gameworld was. Meanwhile, I thought BG2's opening sequence was pretty well done, mainly because Irenicus' VO was masterful. I never got 'hooked' on KOTOR, JE or NWN1; for Fallout it was Marcus in Broken Hills reminiscing about the Master.

I'm pretty sure mes and yuusha on those 5 points were tackling them from slightly different perspectives... both are right in a way, if you can see where they're coming from.

1. Since when has UN peacekeeping troops been effective at restoring peace to a country? 2. Why do you entrust the UN with so much authority when it is not an entirely democratic institution, has too little political power and is not exactly known for its efficiency? 3. Maybe the Iraqis would like a semblance of order and dignity restored to their country as fast as possible, more than worrying about past injustices? If the current arrangement is more efficient at restoring order, then... That said, I don't believe there would be that much difference in restoring order to Iraq at this point whether it was UN or US forces in there. Furthermore, we can't practically expect the US to pull out instantly - no president will ever do that in terms of political action. There will probably be a slow pullout, US troops replaced by UN peacekeepers. Whether that will do the job is another matter. Personally, I'm afraid Iraq won't get very 'stable' for a good few more years, no matter whose troops are or aren't there. At least a hardline US military push is now politically out of the question, that wouldn't do much good. I don't think there's any significant improvement to be had from replacing US troops with UN troops, except for the fact that there might be a bit less animosity towards UN troops. But UN troops will also be less effective at helping a political institution with authority take shape in Iraq. rofl.