Broken Toys

p.s. imagine a game that allowed you to fight for sound money and the Constitution, instead of sitting in your single-mom’s basement, taking out your hate for the feminist/fiatocracy (which destroyed marriage so as to undemrine the family) by shooting unarmed women and innocent hookers in the games the fiatocracy pumps hundreds of millions of dollars into to keep the fanboys from manning up and finding their true fathers–from reading the Constitution and the Great Books and Classics.

http://www.amazon.com/Meltdown-Free-Market-Collapsed-Government-Bailouts/dp/1596985879

Dr. E, given you posted a link to the same exact paragraph you cited, the link itself is of no value whatsoever. Just a pro-tip: use links to supplement your writing only when they add something of additional substantive value.

But ok, your claim is that your unique idea is the transformation of humans into vampires, zombies, and other monsters based on coming into contact with certain ideas. These people can be transformed back by coming into contact with ideas antithetical to the vectors of infection.

First, is this a novel idea? Perhaps. I genuinely don’t recall any examples of this idea in the games I’m aware of. In other fields it’s obviously in no way novel, e.g. Grant Morrison’s “The Invisibles” has explicit examples of people being turned into monsters by certain ideas, and then turned back into people by contrary ideas.

Second, is this a tenable basis for gameplay? I’d have to say it probably isn’t – I don’t see any interesting choices to be made here – e.g. where there are multiple ways to solve a given problem, and the player has to choose one out of several viable solutions. Rather, it’s (as Belsameth said above) completely linear and based on regurgitating dogma that the designer likes. The player isn’t being challenged here to think for him- or herself, but to react to one talking point from the designer’s personal library with another talking point from the designer’s personal library. This sounds tedious and completely uninteresting as far as gameplay ideas go – I’d be just as well off taking a copy of “Das Kapital” off my shelf and then striking it repeatedly with a copy of “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations”. Actually, that sounds like a lot more fun than your game since there’s actual freedom of expression there and the potential for emergent gameplay.

Wow… just… wow. At least I got a few LOLs out of this.

I have a new term for you: batshitcrazocracy.

That could be a mod of the new technology!

batshitcrazocracy vs. the fiatocracy!

Dr. E, you have a seriously disturbing fixation with prostitutes. You’re clearly unaware of this, but the vast majority of games don’t mention hookers or feature hookers or have anything to do with hookers. Of those games that have any hooker-related content at all, it’s a tiny, tiny minority that encourage or allow violence towards them. There are other games out there besides GTA. Honest.

And no, I’m not coming around. I still don’t see any gameplay value whatsoever in this idea. I certainly wouldn’t pay to play the game you propose, and I don’t believe anyone else would either. I don’t care about your golden penis-metaphor, and the promise of a “reward” like that isn’t enough to make me want to sit through the thoroughly pointless and uninteresting gameplay that (as you describe) would precede it.

@foolsage

You write, “And no, I’m not coming around. I still don’t see any gameplay value whatsoever in this idea. I certainly wouldn’t pay to play the game you propose, and I don’t believe anyone else would either. I don’t care about your golden penis-metaphor, and the promise of a “reward” like that isn’t enough to make me want to sit through the thoroughly pointless and uninteresting gameplay that (as you describe) would precede it.”

why sooooo serious? plus it is not a golden penis but a gold 45 revolver which shoots zeus’s lightning in proportion to the moral level of your preceding actions. what is with you people? sometimes a cigar is just a cigar–freud.

you would be most welcome to not play the game and not be rewarded with epic story, profundity, meaning, and depth; but many, many would play and rejoice in the new technology.

check out the global buzz, dude!
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DrElliotMcGucken/20090717/2462/_Marketers_of_Video_Games_How_Much_is_The_Massive_Gold_45_RevolverIdeas_Have_ConsequencesMoral_Premise_Buzz_Worth.php

don’t be a gold 45 revolver playa hata!

what do you peeps have against the mentally ill?

why hate on people who cannot help it?

show some love peeps, and the gold 45 will glow gold and shoot zeus’s lightning in that third act y’all are yearning for deep in yer spirits.

i forgive you hmm.

i said it before and i’ll say it again. the fiatocracy blinded you to your soul’s glory–to the wondrous beauty of the great books and classics. that is why they are funding EA to place Beatrice in hell, but ultimately they will fail. i know it is not you that says mean things, but it is the fiatocracy working through you, as they slay the soul, love, honor, and epic romance with their hooker-killing, stalinist technologies.

but they have no power over my love for autumn and beatrice. and mark my word–this renaissance will be. that gold 45 will glow gold in that third act. i have concept art to prove it–will share soon.

“Autumn Rangers”

go now–sin no more–go forth and spread the word of the great books gaming renaissance.

I can imagine the Gold 45 development process.

“Hmmm… that’s weird, the programmed game isn’t turning out at all as I thought it would in my mind. This C++ compiler doesn’t get it. Well, no wonder, it was created by hooker-killing members of the fiatocracy. Perhaps if I include a great deal of quotes I admire in block comments throughout the code it will work. Hmm, no, it’s still not working… but I do feel a lot better about myself, and suddenly people are giving me money. Well, I guess that’s progress, then.”

“Seriously though everyone–when is the last time you had so much fun just *READING*?”

Honestly? I read for pleasure all the time, both in print and on the net. So, um, earlier today.

“@foolsage
You write, “And no, I’m not coming around. I still don’t see any gameplay value whatsoever in this idea. I certainly wouldn’t pay to play the game you propose, and I don’t believe anyone else would either. I don’t care about your golden penis-metaphor, and the promise of a “reward” like that isn’t enough to make me want to sit through the thoroughly pointless and uninteresting gameplay that (as you describe) would precede it.”
why sooooo serious? plus it is not a golden penis but a gold 45 revolver which shoots zeus’s lightning in proportion to the moral level of your preceding actions. what is with you people? sometimes a cigar is just a cigar–freud.
you would be most welcome to not play the game and not be rewarded with epic story, profundity, meaning, and depth; but many, many would play and rejoice in the new technology.”

I’m not all that serious in general. I was attempting to extend an open-minded offer to you, to see if you were able or willing to engage in any level of meaningful discourse about your game design ideas. I already have my answer. Thanks!

And yes, I understand your metaphor is in the shape of a gold revolver. I’ve read that rather a number of times, since you seem very attached to repeating yourself verbatim.

For the record, I have nothing against the mentally ill, and I don’t hate on people who can’t help it. But then, I’m not hating on you, just disagreeing that your ideas as stated have either objective merit or potential value.

http://intertran.tranexp.com/InterTran?from=dan&to=eng&type=url&url=http://www.playright.dk/forumemne.php?id=14902&sort=0&start=40&Submit=Translate

i feel like bruno likes my patent! (or he likes me.)

I find it astounding that “Dr. E[vil?]” is here arguing with point with the many intelligent people who comment here, as well as Lum himself who’s a big furry savant of goodness and virtual virtue.

I would merely laugh off the fact that McGucken is doing this as sad and pitiful, but after one gets over the patent application’s inherent silliness (when it got to “Woman redistributes property and wealth” I just imagined myself in a sexy red jumpsuit tossing houses all over the place) it gets very scary.

It’s like a listing of very specific fantasies McGucken has. But considering he works at a college, am I the only one who finds *this* to be very alarming?

“The only thing missing from the Hell they have created is the fire, and this game allows one to take a flamethrower to the church of postmodernism- the University. And as they kicked and tortured and beat the poets and prophets, now it’s their turn to feel Justice.”

Not to mention his bizarre fixation on the sexual behaviour of women, his obsession with a gun, and the fact that many of his “moral choices” in the game only ever seem to funnel the player into murdering people who disagree with The Founding Fathers, Hayek, Rand, or whoever the flow chart happens to genuflect before at the time.

This is disturbing. I’ll be up front and say it, we all know school shootings have happened. Someone ought to make the college aware of this pronto.

Maybe he can’t get on the set of whatever television show starring women he hates and murder its cast and crew, but hey, he’s got ID for Pepperdine doesn’t he?

Dr. E I pray that you are the greatest troll of our generation. Because if you aren’t, you need to be put away.

I didn’t say you should be killed. I said you need help and lots of it.

Not only have there been dozens of video games that present moral choices along the lines of what you describe, but what you’ve written in your patent is nothing short of frightening.

There is nothing “higher” about mass murder of stand-ins for everyone you disagree with, and speaking as a woman you are *not* my saviour. You also have no idea what the lives of sex workers are like.

But even getting around that idea where- in your bizarro universe- feminists like porn that exploits women, your higher form of gaming is “kill everyone who disagrees with you.” It’s not even realistic. How does *one character* agreeing with a person spouting dialectic materialsm cause the world to collapse?

GTA and its like are violent but also nondescript. They are not politically motivated. Your fantasies as expressed in the patent are for everyone connected with- what you see- as some sort of moral rot in our culture to be killed. TV producers, actors, college professors and students, radical leftists. The grand irony in all of this is that as you extol the Founding Fathers you forget what the United States of America was built in: liberty and justice for *all*, including those with ideas you don’t academically agree with.

I’m saying you need pyschiatric help before you turn us all into your own FPS.

There are many ways to fight for democracy and freedom without resorting to violence. Far from encouraging a “more moral” worldview, your game does little else but give us stark insight into a troubled mind who finds oppressors in every realm of his life and has fantasies of killing them.

Women are not your damsels in distress to save. How dare you say that I am so easily led and pliable that I need *you* to save me. How dare you trivialise the lives of those who have been forced into sexual slavery or sex work. And how dare your bosses allow you near students.

There is nothing mean-spirited in my remarks. *This* is me exercising my democratic right to strenuously challenge and disagree with you. That’s real liberty, and it’s time you got used to it. If by some dark miracle this ‘game’ gets published I will merely be one of the first among millions who questions you. Scores already have. You’re going to have to have to accept that this fundamental right to discourse is the real right the Founding Fathers bequeathed us with. Not the right to take a flamethrower to a school.

You seem to be genuinely missing the point.

It isn’t about the act itself as shown in a fictional setting. I’m quite certain Pacino nor anyone involved with the making of that film would’ve written a script or a proposal describing that scene in the laudatory terms you do- as if they wished it would happen in real life but are settling for it on the silver screen.

And second, Pacino’s performace there has him ranting about doing so, not actually doing it. You want to actually do it… I mean, have us do it. In a video game. Uh huh.

I’m saying that based on your patent you have fantasies about these things happening. That’s very different from a person writing a screenplay or novel or video game about such things occurring to make a broader point, whilst in no way condoning imitation in real life.

Second, read your *own* flow chart. The second one Lum picked out in no way represents any sort of complexity. The player keeps quoting your heroes, but the woman (interesting that it’s a woman…) keeps on quoting Lenin and then rushes off to seize property and redistribute it (all by herself, evidently, as if she’s some sort of Communist superheroine) and at the very end you have three choices. Agree with her and the world falls to serfdom, quote the Founding Fathers and the world falls to serfdom, or kill her which causes sunshine and happiness and unicorns to rule the day!

Do not insult my intelligence, Mr. McGucken.

You have obviously never played (or more likely, understood) video games if you think moral choice is an absent concept in them. Like many right wingers you assume GTA is the only game that’s ever been made, and also assume we’re all so stupid and sheep-like that the very sight of it turns us into mass murderers. Those more banal insults aside, you also don’t seem to understand what happened in Mass Effect, KotOR or Bioshock. Those systems, as such things go, were rudimentary, yes. But honestly? No more so than what you propose here.

Your patent shows only unbelievably stark choices; a parody of the game systems in the aforementined big games, which at least tried, at times, to go for shades of grey and believable consequences within the context of the game’s fantasy.

Second, ever heard of this little thing called D&D? Indeed, it’s not just Dungeons and Dragons, but every pen-and-paper RPG out there, some of which have their own video games. They present a bewildering and dare I say realistic series of moral choices. D&D has nine morality alignments which are only the vaguest framework to organise the literally thousands of possible moral codes and choices a character can make in the course of a campaign. Such *does* exist in graphical video games.

Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2 both have single player campaigns where there are a wide variety of moral choices at your disposal. My favourite in NWN 1 was a court case your character acted as defence counsel for, with several differing choices presented to them that were a fair mirror of the quandries that face lawyers every day in our own world.

Perhaps you don’t care because none of this has anything to do with Objectivism or a warped reading of the Constitution or with the sex lives of women.

But to most of us normal people, those are morality games that are considerably more advanced than what you’re proposing.

Returning to NWN, my friends and I play on a private gameworld of our own design and when we run campaigns and roleplay our characters we have them confront any number of moral choices which are far deeper and realistic than “Quote Jesus so the world is saved” or “Quote Marx and turn the whole world to serfdom” which are, again, parodies of morality choice games.

On our own private initiative (you’re a capitalist extremist, you should like that) we and countless others created gameworlds that offer a real space for morality to have an impact. We don’t need *you.*

Neither do any other gamers. What you propose is some bizzare game that trivialises politics, men and women alike, and sublimates any sense of realism to your deluded fantasies of slaughtering all who disagree with you in the name of saving the world. It’s childish and a particularly adult kind of sick all at the same time.

I don’t need *you* to create “deeper, more exalted roles for women”. I do that myself, with my characters, in the games I play. Maybe your paternalistic mind can’t give us enough credit for, y’know, roleplaying our own characters in the way we want, but guess what, we do.

Many single player games aren’t exactly progressive when it comes to women at times, but what you’re proposing is no less stupid and no less the product of peculiarly male fantasies about needing to save us from ourselves and ‘protect’ us from hedonism. It is not empowering, it’s just another form of patriarchal tripe.

If you’re truly interested in creating roles for women inspired by Athena, Penelope, and Beatrice, how about recognising that not every woman needs to be rescued by a “virtuous man”?

@Quinnae Moongazer

“If you’re truly interested in creating roles for women inspired by Athena, Penelope, and Beatrice, how about recognising that not every woman needs to be rescued by a “virtuous man”?”

Yes! I agree! Dante put Beatrice in Paradisio/heaven in the original Divine Comedy–she needed no rescuing! That’s what I’m talking about.

EA is putting her in hell in their game Dante’s Inferno, and Dante has to rescue her now.

I thought this was totally missing the point of the poem/inverting Dante’s intent, as it is Beatrice who rescues Dante, and not the other way around.

That’s the kind of archetypal woman games need more of–the true Beatrice.

I agree with the videogames journalist Heather Chaplin:
http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/694389/GDC-2009-Smartbomb-Author-Heather-Chaplin-Tells-Game-Designers-To-Grow-Up.html

http://www.destructoid.com/videogames-are-stupid-and-babyish-states-games-journalist–126722.phtml

http://www.destructoid.com/videogames-are-stupid-and-babyish-states-games-journalist–126722.phtml

“Chaplin used her slot to tell the industry, as reasonably as she could, to grow up. See, she covers the business for the mainstream outlets – she co-write Smartbomb, the single best book to buy anyone who doesn’t understand your “hobby,” and she reports at NPR among other venues. She says this puts her in the role of a “translator,” trying to tell the mainstream why gaming even matters. This also means explaining a lot of big-name games that feature zombies, and aliens, and girls in metal bikinis wielding axes. And while she’s heard the excuses – it’s “a very new medium” – she’s way past accepting them.

Like Wendy slapping around the lost boys, Chaplin patiently but firmly laid down the line. “It is you guys as game designers who are mired deeply in ‘guy culture,’” Chaplin said. The problem isn’t the medium: “You are a bunch of stunted adolescents.” Games avoid any of the things that separate men from boys: responsibility, introspection, intimacy, and intellectual discovery. And “when you’re talking about culture-makers, this is a problem.””

–http://www.pixelvixen707.com/?p=1406

More later, but have to go surfing!

Wow–we all typed a lot today….

Best,

Dr. E

Mr. McGucken, I have to thank you for furnishing me with a series of quotes from a very intelligent woman to make my point for me.

The problem I have with you is that you missed the broader point in the last sentence of my previous post (as well as conveniently ignoring the fact that I disproved the need for your patent’s very existence).

It is that *you* fancy yourself as that man, telling me what I need, daring to tell me that I need to be saved by your wisdom, and telling me how I react to video games and what they’re doing to me.

Second, I find ’stunted adolescent’ a good way to describe you, based on your writings. If you think that anything in that patent creates a game world that promotes responsibility, introspection, intimacy or intellectual discovery, then you are truly lost and I pity you, merely hoping those who *are* responsible have the wherewithal to keep you from sharp objects.

A game that posits women as hookers needing to be saved, and a game that posits women (like your Lenin spouting Marxist) who disagree with your views as needing nothing less than death, as well as a game that more broadly mangles politics to a very infantile shadow of its former self and teaches nothing, a game that teaches us that women who don’t toe your line deserve to be shot, a game that teaches us that philosophical conversations cause the world to end in serfdom… is nowhere near what Ms. Chaplin was asking for.

I am *very* interested to hear what she thinks about this. Perhaps I’ll email her. Thanks for the link, Mr. McGucken.

Holy shit, what’s going on here!

Dr. E, using Leonidas, Sparta, or 300 as an analogy for a good society is pretty wrong-headed. The movie 300 is an embarrassingly bad re-write of history. The truth of the matter is that Sparta was able to keep a large, highly trained standing army because the nation was founded almost entirely on the practice of slavery and needed said army to prevent revolt, not to protect Greek freedom.

Likewise, you might also have noticed – if you had payed attention – that rather than being vindicated in his right to speak as he chose, Socrates was put to death, the only mercy he was shown was the chance to take his own life rather than being deprived of it forcibly.

Of course, if you actually had any interest at all in the classics you might have stumbled upon these little gems. Similarly, you might also have noticed that the Boston tea party so beloved in American history actually occurred because the British were importing tea with lowered rates of taxation into the colonies (once it reached the consumer), against which the local smugglers could not compete – turns out a number of your “sons of liberty” were self-interested smuggling assholes.

Stop using specious retelling of history to front Nietzsche-ian Ubermensch philosophy dressed up as an idea for a game. Because a) Nietzsche was exceedingly naive as to the ability of a man to discern right from wrong (See: Hitler, NSDAP – who used Nietzsche’s work to justify totalitarianism and slaughter) and b) games already exist that give the player the ability to choose from several morality choices (limited at a systemic level). It’s not our fault that these choices don’t agree with you: because you’re a fucking fruitcake.

I’m really not positive he’s outright insane, so much as if he’s actually just a really determined charlatan who is (if you pardon the pun) sticking to his guns. Dragging a bunch of barely applicable quotes out of the woodwork to support your premise is fairly standard fodder for a confidence trick.

Whether or not he’s really out of it depends on if he honestly believe what he’s saying. However, either way, he should consider mental help, as being criminally inclined enough to file bogus patents or bilk institutions out of $125,000 is, in itself, a mental illness.

You are correct, however Nietzsche’s ubermensch philosophy was naive all the same, as it presupposed that a truly moral man could exist, that such a man should have the power to rule autocratically, and that moral inferiority prevented an unworthy man from rising to the forefront.

Which is kind of what I’m saying to Dr. E, the heroes we revere are often not the men they are made out to be.