It's still not a convincing one though. If it wasn't this weapon used, it would have been another, regardless of where the perp first saw it. I'm not a fan of Activision, but this isn't on them.
So I’m not a fan of guns but, “marketing guns” is not per se illegal nor unique to video games. Yet the lawsuit separates out video games specifically. So I am not sure I agree that it’s less crazy at the end of the day.
I did some cursory searches to find the actual arguments and came up blank. It’s important to note this isn’t the standard “video games cause violence” lawsuit that has absolutely no merit. This is different. The summary presented in articles is that this gun manufacturer explicitly marketed their product for things like this using a sophisticated campaign. If I understand the summary correctly, it therefore hinges on both the marketing of this specific gun and its presence across the digital landscape. The parents aren’t going after shooting in games; they’re going after a company that actively markets its products on social media and in video games.
It’s novel. I’m kinda skeptical because the solution would have to limit product placement and advertisement which has a massive lobby. There’s also nothing that really says “this specific gun leads to violence” without implicitly relying on the whole “video games cause violence” which is bullshit.
There’s precedent though. Alcohol and tobacco have significant restrictions on marketing material. I would argue that firearms should fall into the same category.
My impression was the same- eye roll at the “videogames cause violence” argument that’s been beaten to death, but I actually think they may have a point when it comes to marketing.
Sadly, I also think that COD is a military recruitment strategy (Boy Boy did a video breaking down the way the American recruiters use COD to capture a certain demographic) so I don’t think this lawsuit will go anywhere. Thought-provoking though.
This makes me realize that I can’t think of hardly any videogames with a black character at the forefront.
Sure, there are black playable characters in MOBAs and MMOs, but how many story-driven games have black characters at the forefront?
The most recent one I can think of is Alan Wake 2. And Spider-Man Miles Morales. But there really are so few compared to those with white main characters. Which is sad.
can’t even pick a decent black hairstyle in the character creators. 90% only have a fro, 9% that weird comb over dread style bc it was in black panther, even tho i’ve never seen a real person wear it
Slime Rancher’s protagonist, Beatrix LeBeau, is definitely not white. It’s not the most story-driven game out there, but I really appreciated how the main character is a PoC woman, with zero fuss about it. She’s just a lady with a ranch on an alien planet, and why shouldn’t she be a PoC woman rather than a white dude?
Just for the record I agree with you, but the opposite of that final question is true, why shouldn’t she be a white dude, or a PoC man? Ranching/farming isn’t a job that requires a specific gender or sex.
I mean, that’s kind of the point. For the vast majority of games, there’s no real reason why the protagonist has to be a straight white dude, yet 99% of the time, that’s what they are. I like it when devs do something different.
One of the 6 characters in Xenoblade 3’s main cast is black. He’s quite interesting too, this game has pretty good character writing IMO. They’re not the usual stereotypical JRPG character types.
Final Fantasy XIII had Sazh Katzroy. He’s not the main character (that’d be Lightning), but he is an important playable character right from the get-go. He has his own storylines as well.
Assassin's Creed Odyssey? Or Origin? Too many of them, don't know.
Watchdogs 2.
Most games with a customizable main character.
Mafia 3.
Crysis 2 and sort of 3?
Some platformers I can't name because it's not my genre.
That 80s Kingdom offshoot.
Does Crusader Kings 3 have African leaders enabled or does it come as a DLC?
Civilization series.
Representation of any demographic in games should be done by those who have an interest in doing it well.
Doing it just to pad the numbers is more insulting than even not doing it at all.
Does Crusader Kings 3 have African leaders enabled or does it come as a DLC?
The base game has a notoriously difficult achievement involving starting as a specific female tribal chief uniting “all of Africa” under one reformed pagan religion. Scare quotes because the map doesn’t go further south than approximately the Sahel, not all Africa is playable. Whole of the Americas, Oceania, as well as much of east Asia (incl. China and Japan) are missing. There’s probably going to be map extensions (and China and Japan will be DLCs with lots of custom mechanics) but the original map is already bigger than CKII ever got, and India was playable from the start, with custom mechanics and all.
Steamdeck is for me everything even new ones like Armored Core, Cyberpunk etc… and indies and even old ones like half life. Everything possible through proton.
Sure, you can play games like Cyberpunk on a Steam Deck! Absolutely true. I just prefer playing more demanding games at higher settings and framerates.
If Steam’s built in remote play doesn’t quite meet performance needs then look into Moonlight. That software, with some help from Tailscale, lets me stream Yuzu from home to my deck at work, and I cannot perceive the input lag though I’m no snob.
I lost over 1000 hours on it alone. Currently doing a train world with crazy high resource cost. 100 hours on this one and I just started manufacturing blue science. I'm going to get my ass fired at some point.
I played like 30m of the demo and didn’t like it at all…then later made the huge mistake of giving the demo another go. Spent a couple dozen hours on just the demo. I’m afraid of getting the full game.
One day I asked, “hmm, I wonder how Civ VI would run on the steam deck.” And the answer is too fucking well. Perfect for track pad and touch. Can’t stop playing it.
They claimed the Xbox One (the original last gen model) would be decades ahead of any other competitors because games would be, wait for it, cloud hybrid. Some things would render locally, but Microsoft servers would calculate complex collisions, volumetrics, crowd AI, and so on.
Because people complained about the connectivity requirements. Unfortunately I don’t think we are there still, infrastructure for a lot of areas will not support this.
For all its many many many flaws (like having your flagship game start in a snow storm…), Google Stadia very much demonstrated the viability of full game streaming. Even people with shit broadband could still play a “last gen” quality game. Sure people in the outright sticks won’t be able to but… they likely aren’t doing a lot of gaming as getting a 10 GB patch out to them is hard enough.
And if you are only doing game logic and some simulations, rather than full rendering? The bandwidth needs drop even more.
Sure, people with crappy broadband could play… At something like N64-level settings and slideshow frames per second, even with “last-gen” games. Granted, streaming an entire game is more of a load on bandwidth than cloud hybrid or patches, but if it was really feasible for the masses even a year ago, Stadia might still be up today, but it’s already gone. I would still rather be able to play a game I own on console without needing a persistent connection to play, as a cloud hybrid game may require. If there is still the option to play the game offline at lower settings, that wouldn’t be so bad, but then you just know that M$ will be looking to monetize the cloud hybrid option: “play at full settings online for only $— per month!”
Weird. Very curious what issues you ran into. I didn’t even have anything that bad on hotel wifi.
Mostly because: The video is pretty “easy” and mostly suffers from compression artifacts. If you can watch youtube, you can stream a game at generally one quality setting lower. Because latency is what matters. The actual game inputs are nothing on top of that.
Mostly it was just annoying that google did EVERYTHING they could to market it poorly and “Gamers” lost their god damned minds because they felt threatened. Which… is pretty reminiscent of MS cocking up the announcement of the One.
I honestly don’t care if they do or don’t add this stuff, but please make it skippable. The last thing I want is some boring corporate-approved formulaic bland sex scene that I have to suffer through in the middle of an interactive game. At least movies and shows let me 30-second skip past that stuff. All of them are exactly the same sequence. It’s tedious.
As for flirtation being more important to in-game social interactions and dialog trees that could be fun. It could also set young people up for trouble. They’d be practicing the “wrong habits” that will get charges filed against them IRL.
The reason game designers are afraid of sex is because most of Western society is. Can games help turn that around? I don’t know, but probably not. The USA is super puritanical about all things sex (but blood, gore, and violence are generally OK).
I don’t want or care about sex scenes in anything. Cyberpunk 2077 definitely has this problem, and once I get to any stage where intimacy happens I just get up and let it play out so I don’t have to watch.
It’s well worth the play, and most (possibly all) can be avoided with the correct choices. But there’s some character work related to it that does enhance the story
I’ve been saying GaaS is horrible forever. (well okay I’ve been saying Anything as a Service sucks and I’ve been dying on this hill. The only GaaS shit I “own” I got for free). Now that I’ve got that hipster shit out of my system, can the games industry go back to releasing finished games please? I said please this time dammit.
The only time games were finished was back in the days when you couldnt patch bugs. And that was back when games were designed to be such a pain in the ass to play that you couldnt beat them during one rental period so youd have to rent them more than once to beat them. Or the arcade machines being coin operated.
Seems like a fair move to me. If Hollywood studios like Disney are able to use it for free right now to save time and money producing shows and movies why shouldn’t Epic get a fair fee for the product that enables those savings?
cool, then it’s 20% of your “games” revenue if you want to do that.
Epic generally let companies self report, when using the engine you have to agree to allowing them to audit if they think your self-reporting is incorrect but that’s not a very usual situation
Yup. That seems to be a part of their business model (doing anything Steam won’t do). The problem is when those calls by Valve are for issues that touch on ethics.
It’s why I won’t even install their launcher. I don’t care how many games are free on Epic. I can’t support that kind thing.
This year’s Unity story sums up my discontent with tech nicely. Impressive tech made by extremely talented people, botched by incompetent corporate parasites who care only about securing their millions.
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