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ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

Jack Thompson was disbarred, and any kind of assertion between video games and real world violence is long since dismissed. Meanwhile games are willfully designed to leave you with a worse product and little to no indication what you’re actually getting for your money, and that isn’t some theory. Leaving a game in a reasonably functional state without intervention from the game’s publisher is pretty specific, and it just happens to cover some use cases that affect a game company’s bottom line, but that should be the cost of doing business. Developers and publishers can be just as guilty on this when they’ve got the same incentives.

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NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Accursed Farms themselves have said variations of “We’ll figure out the specifics later”

Without “the specifics”? You are not proposing legislature or even “an initiative”. You are just writing the kind of MoveOn petition where Obama will have to do Hot Ones if you totally get ten million signatures.

And… that really matters for reasons we have already seen. You and I think Jack Thompson was a hack and a moron. But we semi-regularly see people talking about how loot boxes and gacha games need to be outlawed without even considering the underlying skinner box/operant conditioning aspects.

But hey? How about “stop corrupting gamers”? Gambling is bad and it ruins lives. So let’s get some legislature. Oh noes, now there can be no kissing or depiction of blood in any game because sex ruins lives and so does murder!

THAT is the difference between a child screaming into the void and actually trying to enact positive change. The former is vague “gimme what I want and figure it out for me”. The latter is “We want X, Y, and Z because of reasons A, B, and C.”.

Because

Leaving a game in a reasonably functional state without intervention from the game’s publisher is pretty specific,

Yes. Nothing more specific than “a reasonably functional state without intervention”.

As for what actually would be specifics?

Instanced multiplayer games with less than 128 players per server require either a dedicated server to be released or for support for listen servers": This is “reasonable” because… that is literally how these games are running. Under the hood, a CoD lobby is not much different than a UT server was back in the day. But, as you scale up the number of players you start sharding (see: Planetside) which begins to become something that would be nice but also might not “exist” outside of “run the entire backend”. And the obvious loophole is that we are suddenly going to get a bunch of 130 player Overwatch games.

“Games where N% of the game simulation happens on the customer’s computer must have an offline mode”: This is stuff like Dark Souls and Arkham Suicide Squad and The Crew (the game EVERYBODY totally loved…) and whatever. Ironically, games like Splinter Cell Conviction would be broken by this (because that is the DRM it used) but… fuck them? And the obvious loophole is “Well, we simulate N+1% because we stream this texture or some shit?”

But once you get beyond that? You start getting into messes of things like MMOs where there are a lot of very valid reasons for not wanting the entire server infrastructure to be running on a single player’s computer. And the reality ends up being you have things like all the WoW and Everquest private servers that literally charge players money to play a pirated version.

Specifics are good. Vagueries are just how you get dicked over by lobbyists and special interest groups.
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- ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  It is a citizens’ initiative for the EU. Ross has been consulting with legal experts and even members of parliament in these territories in order to get this off the ground. This is not some feel-good change.org thing; this has legal ramifications, albeit with an absurdly high threshold to clear.
  
  Gambling is bad and it ruins lives. So let’s get some legislature. Oh noes, now there can be no kissing or depiction of blood in any game because sex ruins lives and so does murder!
  
  This is a strawman. We do legislate gambling already. Several countries have legislated loot boxes already without adding violent content on as a rider.
  
  This initiative, which again, has actual legal implications unlike most petitions you’ve ever heard of, can only ask for so much before it’s in lawmakers’ hands. Terminology like “reasonably functional” is used all over laws on the books, and courts rule on what is reasonable or not. It would be reasonable to say that a video game is no longer functional if you can’t play it anymore. Lobbyists and special interest groups are why we have an industry subsidized by legalized gambling for children and other ways of fucking us over.
  
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  - NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    
    Lobbyists and special interest groups are why we have an industry subsidized by legalized gambling for children and other ways of fucking us over.
    
    And vagueries that will be interpreted by courts that likely have no knowledge of what a vidya game even is will resolve that?
    
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    ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    We have to hope they do, because the industry would love to never resolve this on its own. So far there are reasonable laws on the books in places in places like Belgium and Australia for things like loot boxes. Also, you do your argument a real disservice by using childish language like “vidya games” and “oh noes”.
    
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