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The gaming community discussion thread; Separate from gaming news
Topic Started: Jan 15 2013, 11:51 PM (1,868 Views)
Romanticide
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http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/02/03/editorial-why-games-should-enter-the-public-domain/

One, I'd rather not sidetrack the excellent LoL discussion in Gaming News, and two, this is probably more fitting here.

About the only thing that isn't addressed in this article is downloading ROMs and the like. (Most gaming sites aren't going to address this unless it's to say "WE DON'T CONDONE IT", though.) I obviously don't support piracy of games that a developer just put out. If it's a good game, you should be buying that shit if possible, even if you're going to wait until it hits 75% off or something. If it's a bad game, you might be able to justify it to yourself by saying "*insert AAA publisher* deserves this", but in doing so you justify their warped rationale to include DRM, which hurts us all as gamers. The right approach is simply not to buy that game until the problematic things have been dealt with.

I don't mind people downloading a ROM of some game that the developers don't support anymore and/or a game that you can't find new anymore. (No, that one asshole collector calling his game new on Amazon is not what I mean - I mean new at a reputable store/site.) At that point, the people who made the game won't be seeing a dime of your money. With older games, the publisher won't either because you'll most likely be buying a used copy. If you want to buy used copies because you can play those on your TV or whatever, it's your money, but I'm not going to lose sleep over downloading Earthbound (example) when people sell the cart for over $100 and the only reasonably priced ROM is on Wii U.


Everything else is an indictment of our copyright system, which is pretty obviously borked. (see: The YT fiasco, SOPA and its ilk, and so on)

The simplest way to begin repairing it IMO would be to lower copyright protection to 14 years, which has been shown to be the optimal amount of time, but LOL that isn't going to happen. I'd accept 25-30 years as a compromise, though again, even this isn't likely to happen.
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LightningBolt
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I think the introduction of things like the Virtual Console and Playstation Network make it untrue that they won't be seeing a dime of money for older games.

As for the 14 years thing, I think there's a pretty big difference between research copyrights and artistic copyrights. I'm personally of the belief that the creator of a certain work of art (in this case, videogames) should have control over those copyrights until the day they die, and this goes for music, movies and TV shows (usually a bit difference since they're usually owned by studios), and paintings and books and whatever else, too.

Maybe I just completely misinterpreted what that article was saying (I just woke up), but I definitely do not believe videogames should become public domain after 20 years. Or perhaps I'm not sure what public domain ensues, but I'm under the impression it's basically the copyright transferring from the owner to the public.

EDIT: I read it more thoroughly after showering, so I'll share more thoughts.

The tone of this article is godawful, to start with. It's some kind of law with videogame-related articles to be as snarky and condescending as possible, I suppose. Probaby one of many reasons the medium isn't taken seriously by many. Even the supposedly intelligent people involved in the medium act like condescending know-it-all tweens when it comes to videogame-related subjects, even one as relatively "grown up" as this one. He starts off by basically saying anyone who defends the other side is pretty much brainwashed by corporations. Not the best way to start.

Tone aside, I really don't think he brings anything new to the table that would convince anyone not already convinced. It's a battle if philosophies, plain and simple, and at the end of the day he's essentially saying "games should become public domain because it's right. Which isn't the worst thing ever. He explains why he thinks it's right, but it in no way refutes the other side at the same time.

This is a tricky subject because there's a distinct difference between music (which he references as a comparison several times) and something like videogames. I'm a firm believer that music should belong to its creator for as long as they live. In the same way it seems right to him, it seems wrong to me that a song like "Spirit in the Night" would suddenly not belong to Bruce Springsteen anymore because an arbitrary amount of time has passed. And even then, "life + 70" is a bit long. I'd probably be more in favor of a rule that's like "40 years flat, or until death", that way if the person dies like a day after releasing their music, or before (like Jeff Buckley or the singer from Sublime), the rights are lost to the void off the bat.

This is different from videogames, though, where a game made by a certain group of people is owned by the company and not those people. Final Fantasy is owned by Square Enix, and not the person who actually created it, making this trickier. I can see copyright running out on something like Final Fantasy IV after a while, because Square Enix will never die. It's not a sentient being. The tricky question is "how long?" 20 years seems short. That game already came out more than 20 years ago, and Square Enix is still releasing it on new platforms and they still have it up on the Playstation Network easily buyable. Yoshi's Island would cease being owned by Nintendo as of next year.

The thing is, as technology in the videogame medium is progressing, we're seeing these older copyrights actually becoming relevant again. With the Virtual Console, Playstation Network, Steam, Apple Store, and XBL Marketplace, companies are putting their older games out on the market again. What happens if these games become public domain? It'd be interesting to see how that works itself out, at any rate. I think your suggested time and that in the article is too short. That said, I think the current laws are too long, and this goes for basically all copyright. Fuck if I know what a happy in-between would be, though.
Edited by LightningBolt, Feb 3 2014, 09:08 PM.
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Romanticide
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That assumes those developers still exist. Not a given. Even if they do, Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft are likely making a dealer with the publisher, and who knows if the publisher is kind enough to give the developer money from this new deal.

I wouldn't be surprised to see some developers get money, but I wouldn't be surprised to see that most or even all don't.

Public domain simply means those works are available to us all to use. I suppose in video games, the closest analogue would be Good Old Games, though there really isn't one because no game will hit public domain for a very long time. What they do is repackage old games in a format that players with modern PCs can play without having to jump through hoops. Obviously, there is value in this work, along with maintaining their site/catalog, and they should be paid for that work.

Where it gets sticky is in determining what games they should have to pay licensing fees to sell on their website. It makes sense that they have to pay a licensing fee or what have you to sell newer games on their site. But when we get into the SimCity 2000s, the Planescape: Torments, and the older games in their catalog, it's somewhat of a question. These games aren't supported anymore and publishers aren't trying to make money off of them anymore unless a GOG or a console's online shop comes along and asks if they can sell those games on their service. If they were still trying to actively make money off of their older titles, I could understand it, but they leave most games to die after they've made money off of them in their first year or two of life.

Something like a GOG would always be around because running an old game on a modern rig isn't easy. (As compared to music, books, and movies, which all have fairly standard formats nowadays.) I suppose it would be their choice to give money to the developers/publishers in this pie-in-the-sky scenario where copyright law is reformed, but I'd have to think they would, if only to ensure they can sell newer games from major publishers.

Even "life" would be an improvement. I can at least understand the rationale for that. "Life plus seventy years" came about as a thing because Disney wanted to protect its works still longer than "life". I don't think that people who didn't create the work in question should get to control works for seventy years after the author's (or authors' I guess) death because they were lucky enough to somehow own the rights to it.
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Snowman
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I didn't follow Twitch Plays Pokemon very much. Yeah, it was cool, and some of the memes that came out of it were funny. But why do so many people keep praising it for the "religions" it started? How are those not just memes? I know there isn't an official set of requirements for something to be called a "religion", but it seems like the Helix Fossil (and whatever else) only became a "religion" because people "consulted" it a lot and attached "Lord" to it at some point. I just feel like people are trying to make it sound DEEP and PHILOSOPHICAL by saying the internet formed a religion to make this meme somehow better than other memes. Sure, it's cool how it got started. I've had plenty of fun moments/experiences making stories in games like Minecraft and some little fan-made Harry Potter and Final Fantasy MMO's on BYOND. And it's fun to remember them. Had some light politics on a Minecraft server once, and full-blown wars were fought in the HP/FF games. I'm sure DayZ players have created a ton of fun stories walking around their world too. But I don't think I'd call any of them religious experiences just because a nifty item or character got us through a tough spot, or because someone accidentally did something that was funny. I do think TPP was cool and it'll be interesting to see how long the "Twitch Plays _________" thing lasts, but the whole "religion" idea seems a bit exaggerated.
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Romanticide
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I don't think anyone's serious about the religion thing. Depending on the people, there's a bit of mockery of religious beliefs inherent to such jokes. I don't want to get too into this for various reasons, but yeah. For the most part it's just the internet being the internet and exaggerating something to hell and back. It's what happens on the tubes.


As far as Twitch Plays Pokemon goes, I didn't care about it at all. Which is weird, this is precisely the kind of thing I should care about. It was (or is, I guess) an interesting way to play a game in a series that I enjoy.

Part of it is game choice. The original gen one games are a mess for various reasons. I doubt I could play through the originals, knowing full well that I have a superior version (Leaf Green) sitting in front of me right now. If it were gens 2-6, I probably would have given it a chance.

Part of it is that I'd rather be playing a game than watching it. In the time that this has been going on, I beat Lightning Returns and made a lot of progress in Etrian Odyssey IV. If I got caught up in this, I doubt I'd have made much progress on the EOIV front, at the least. I also would never have downloaded DOTA 2 because my internet fucking blows.

And another part of it was the inevitable trolls. While it's evident that there were more people who wanted to see this through than there were trolls because they beat the E4/rival, there were almost certainly trolls throughout. I guess you can argue that's part of the conflict inherent to this idea, but it's a conflict I'd rather not see because gaming is already rife with trolls and assholes.

On the not-troll front, these types of chats are filled with too many people and the conversation, if there was any outside of inputs, likely goes too fast for almost anyone to keep up with. The Persona 5 announcement had 600 people in a Twitch chat and nobody was really talking in there; they were just screaming dumb internet shit over each other and that fucking sucks. I could barely keep up with all that shit, not that I wanted to. (I was in a smaller chat for this event, where people could and actually did chat.) I guess what I'm saying is that a huge chat doesn't really lend itself to a community feeling.
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Romanticide
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http://kotaku.com/the-best-jrpgs-for-beginners-1577536392

I like the idea behind this. I'd have liked it more if the author gave 3-5 titles he thought were appropriate for beginners to the genre, but I guess you can't win them all. Still, there are a lot of good suggestions here, and very few I doubt I could hit on that weren't mentioned. The only flaw is the comment section is probably too big to wade through.

Anyway, I suppose I'll post some titles in the genre that I feel would make good starting points. Random encounters are not newbie-friendly due to the random factor/potential difficulty of said encounters, so none of the games I list will have them. They're also not a good mechanic in 2014.


1) The Last Story

Story-wise, it has a great (for video games) romance and a decent political intrigue. Unfortunately this is the first half of the story; the second half descends into the typical "saev teh wurldz" stuff that gets so tiring.

However, that's not why I'd recommend it to a beginner. First, it's one of the easier JRPGs of modern times. It's unfortunately so easy that I think many of its ideas aren't utilized to their fullest, but for beginners this probably beats the alternative. Second, it's a very focused game. You don't have to grind because the game is carefully balanced so that the required encounters will have you at a decent level for bosses. You can still grind via the arena and circles that summon monsters, but there's no need.


2) Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door

The story falls on the more humorous/quirky side. It doesn't have a serious plot right up until the very end, and even then it doesn't take itself seriously at all. This is one of the funniest, most joyful games I own, and for that alone it's worth playing.

Like The Last Story, this is an easy game. Damage output is generally fixed and in the single digits, so you'll always have a good idea of what will happen. The most interesting mechanic is the audience. Depending on how you do in battle, it can grow or shrink, and the bigger it is, the more star power you get for doing almost anything. They can also give you items to help you in battle. This being Paper Mario, some of the bosses interact in... interesting... ways with the audience, but I won't spoil them because they're hilarious.


3) Lufia II (SNES version)

This one's pretty deeply buried in the comments, so I'll include it here.

Oh look, it's another easy JRPG. Actually, this one has two or three bosses that could be tricky for first-timers, which automatically makes it harder than the first two. It also has many, many puzzles that are reminiscent of the ones in Zelda or something. Don't be ashamed to look up solutions to some of these puzzles in a walkthrough; they can be pretty tricky. But beyond that, most regular battles are easy, and most bosses aren't overly challenging either. It's also one of the most character-driven JRPG series in an era when that wasn't exactly stellar.

However, if you want challenge, there's the Ancient Cave/Gift Mode, which throws you right into a 100 floor dungeon at level 1 with nothing but starting equipment. This is one of my favorite modes in any game, because it's never the same twice.


4) Secret of Mana

I saw its sequel (Seiken Densetsu 3), which also works rather well, but not this. However, your only option there is emulation.

This is probably one of the earliest great action RPGs. This game becomes easy when you get magic, and even more so once you look up how to cheese bosses with said magic. However, even without cheesing bosses, this game isn't overly challenging. It has some tricky bosses, yes, but it's not one that will have you throwing a controller in frustration. It also has a challenging *area* late in the game, where you quickly realize the enemies are far stronger than anything you've faced and likely untouched spells like Lucid Barrier are very useful.

The story and characters aren't anything original, but the battle system works, regular encounters aren't bad, and most bosses are just challenging enough to keep you playing.
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