It’s really annoying to accidentally hit a key, then feel like I have to send a full message. Why is this the ‘standard’ among chat programs now, without even the option to turn it off?...
Agree, but let’s not dilute the meaning of “gaslighting”. That word has a VERY specific definition and it had been getting used in inappropriate contexts so much that that very specific and necessary definition is being lost. It refers to a specific abusive behavior pattern which needs a good and concrete word to communicate it. My teen stepdaughter had it in her head that us educating her on the world was “gaslighting”, which is dangerous because she had the “gaslighting bad” reaction to things that were not gaslighting, and it is not limited to her. There is a concerted effort on the part of some political groups to break and weaponize the definitions of things like gaslighting and manipulation, we need to work to make sure it is not successful.
Judging by the descriptions given by another user these “between track” drives are A. Part of the race and removing actual time on the actual tracks, and B. Not optional. Those things together make for some seriously bad game design.
Roblox, an online gaming platform that supposedly fosters creativity and connection among children and teens, harbors a darker underbelly that has harmed countless young users for years. Families nationwide are coming forward with stories of how predators, explicit content, and exploitation pervade this digital playground. The...
Also, under US law, ignorance is not a defense in both civil and criminal court. It does not matter if you did not know it was illegal, it does not matter if you did not know it was happening, if you provide an avenue and forum for illegal activity you are culpable at minimum. The corporate shield will prevent any criminal charges against individuals, unfortunately, but the civil liability is pretty evident. It occurred on their platform which means that they did not take sufficient steps to prevent or discourage the practice in the first place. It should not have been a thing that was present to report or react to in the first place. It falls into the same vein as doing background checks and personality evaluations on prospective teachers and daycare workers. Doing 0 checks to validate that these people are not a danger and then claiming ignorance when they touch children in the broom closet is a nonstarter too.
Yeah, but a contract that you cannot negotiate before signing isn’t really a contract is it? It is a gate keeper. A gun to the head. An “agree to this or else”. In the modern world, one can do essentially nothing without signing a EULA. Want to get a job without signing one? Good luck. Want to play a game? Not many of them. Want to shop online, look at art, communicate with friends and family. Many of the most integral parts of maintaining our mental health are being put behind abusive “contracts” that strip us of any rights we think we have. Community, leisure, socialization, entertainment, all of the primary avenues in the modern world have predominantly become privatized and every one of those comes at a pretty steep nonmonetary cost.
“No shirt, no shoes, no service” is a health code, not a EULA.
Also, you are conflating social contracts with actual legally binding ones. If you had to sign a contract to eat at a resteraunt which gave them the right to photograph you and record all of your conversations while you ate then use all of it for marketing without compensating you or to sell the contents of your conversations and likeness to unknown 3rd parties without informing you of who they were sold to and what the intended use was, would you still eat there.
Your comment shows an utter lack of understanding of the issues at hand and what abuses of rights are done in digital spaces.
That is not a rebuttal. A rebuttal requires evidentiary support of your stance. For instance, as support for saying it costs them nothing, one might offer the following:
once released, users would distribute and maintain the file servers independently of the corporation, thus costing the company nothing.
once released, users would maintain independent game servers and pay for their upkeep, thus costing the company nothing.
once released, the modding community would take over the maintenance and development on the code base, thus costing the company nothing.
There, 3 salient points which support the position that releasing the codebase for the game when sunsetting it costs the company nothing. I could even make points about how it is actually profitable for the company, but I want to give you your turn to rebutt me now that you have a good example of how to provide a good argument.
Except… For a contract to be legal it must be agreed upon by both parties free of manipulation or coercion. Now, usually this is specified to be manipulation or coercion on the part of one of the parties, but what I argue is that in the modern era that is insufficient to encompass the growing complexity around the way society works and how it will continue moving forward.
Pulling the numbers out of my well educated ass, 40 years ago the average person would encounter EULA-like contracts a handful of times per year. Maybe for a mail order service, or a piece of software. Today we encounter them daily. The amount of information in them is intentionally made dense and overwhelming so the average person becomes numb very quickly and opts to click through on most of them without reading them. This enables all sorts of personal liberty and information abuses on the part of corporations.
40 years ago you did not have one to find a job, a lover, buy a car (still had a loan contract, but if you paid up front you had 0 contracts other than the bill of sale). You would not encounter them to work most jobs. You could go years without having to risk signing your rights over to a company and usually when you did you had negotiation power. This is not true today. You work for a company, they use Zoom, Slack, Google Workplace, a Virtual Timecard service, all of which have individual EULA that you as a private citizen, not an employer, must agree to and be bound by. Microsoft can put in their EULA that they are allowed to take a screenshot of your computer every 15 seconds and transmit it to their servers. This could be intercepted, or the servers could be hacked and have the entire database compromised and you have 0 say other than public outcry or to airgap your system, which then complains constantly that it cannot connect to the internet and becomes virtually unusable for about 80% of why you want to own it.
Being required by an employer to use software which requires that you as an individual sign a EULA is coercion. Having 0 recourse for alternatives in a marketplace which do not require signing a EULA is coercion. Having the terms which strip your rights irrevocably and transferrably buried and written in confusing ways is manipulation.
I should never have to worry that my copyright is being stripped from a piece of art I create just because I share it to a friend on some website.
I don’t really see it as an entirely separate topic. It is still an abuse of rights. In this case, it is an abuse of ownership. If I make a purchase of a good, I should own that good. If the company later decides that they no longer want to support the services which support that purchase, they should be required to provide the opportunity that all purchased goods remain valid and operational. If we take a different good as a stand in, cars, a manufacturer may eventually decide to stop supporting a vehicle, but they do have to sell the component rights to aftermarket manufacturers (or at least make good faith attempts) when they drop support so people who own those vehicles have the chance to maintain and use them. I see this as no different than that. Their dropping of support means that products purchased are removed from use or function without the owner’s consent.
And I know you are going to say “well the EULA says you don’t own it and you agreed to it” which is precicely the problem we are arguing. Purchase should mean ownership and forcing people to agree to whatever you want is wrong. Legislation is required because no company will protect the rights of customers, that is the duty of legal systems.
And by what mechanism would it have affected sales of the sequel? Historically, and demonstrably, greater access to a game increases the sales of sequels. Why do you think developers put games in a series on sale when a new game in a series is coming out? I would definitely argue that having released the server hosting code for The Crew to allow people to host private servers would have potentially added to The Crew 2 sales. Also, if they release the server code, but not the game code, they could continue the sales of the game on storefronts at a reduced price having it marked that it will no longer receive updates and still made even more money from those sales. I would definitely prefer if they just release the whole game, but either would have worked.
The general minimum for a National Landmark is 50 years. This would make any game released prior to 1975 eligible. That is a good chunk of games. That said, protecting works of art are usually much shorter terms. Works of art can be justified to be protected almost immediately depending on the artist and work.
In this case, it is a prohibition on sunsetting a game without providing the means for purchasers to continue playing without your support. They are taking an action in their sunsetting decision, this is a prohibition on one choice made in that process.
I know I could find examples, but I am exhausted after coding all day on one thorny problem, so I am just going to make educated guesses from what I know of US history. I would bet that the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore received National Landmark status before the general 50 year mark. I would hazard that the presidential monuments on DC did as well.
That said, this was an exercise in examples of things that need to be protected as part of history. Works of art have a much lower bar than national landmarks for this. Games that are transformative or innovative in a way that we still feel today, or games that are massive parts of the cultural zeitgeist for a period definitely deserve preservation. Rogue, Dark Souls, Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy VII, Super Mario Brothers, Zork, etc. The reason this is such a big deal is that it might be hard to measure in a moment what is or is not going to have that long reaching impact. Imagine you are an art historian in 30 years and you are doing a paper on the growth and history of game mechanics. How are you going to research that. If you were doing one on painting and how techniques grow over time, you go look at the paintings, study them. The game paper will have no source material to study to draw new conclusions or find previously unnoticed connections if 70+% of the source media disappears in the next 10 years.
At what point in the purchase cycle is it known that they won’t? Because the right reserved in a EULA is not a guarantee of occurrence, so how does one make a decision when or when not to purchase?
Also, when single player games are being forced to be always online and are being affected, there is a real problem. If there is no valid tangible benefit to the player for a game to be online, and require the online component to play the game, it should be illegal.
You always have with Nintendo products. They have always had very aggressive licensing practices. In the early days they were more flexing them on developers, but it does not surprise me that in the wake of everyone telling them that modding and emulators can be explicitly legal that they would turn that particularly litigious aspect of their family friendly brand on the customers.
Ditto. They are stopping support, but I highly doubt they will just brick all Windows 10 machines. If they do, I will just throw Linux on a flash drive and boot from that to recover my data ahead of switching fully to Linux.
I remember seeing a leaked paper about them putting an omnipresent advertising ticket at the top of the screen that will be displayed regardless of full screen status. The only reason I can think that they are forcing this so hard is that a lot of their forced ad servicing plans are not possible to implement in earlier versions of Windows due to root level functionality that cannot be changed. I’m guessing things like direct injection of ads in running processes or that ticker.
Ads have no place in an OS, especially not as kernel level processes. If ads on the internet have taught us anything, it is that bad actors can inject malicious code directly into them without content servers or hosts knowing and compromise untold numbers of machines who just, let me check, rendered the ad.
Between the aggressive plans for in OS advertising and the privacy abolishing actions and policies with AI datascraping, I am done with MS. Windows 10 will be the last one of theit OS’s I run. If work needs me to do something on Windows, it will be on a virtual machine that I remote into.
Luckily I already don’t trust the internet already and don’t go anywhere online without script blockers and I don’t open emails as a rule of thumb. I am sure it will be dangerous, but I am not relying on passive security already.
Yeah, legislation needs passed that any software on any device purchased or leased must be removable without voiding warranties or service contracts. That would go a long way towards making phones, computers, and other devices less invasive and actually privacy protected.
Just did a GOG survey that focused on the idea of a paid membership option on GOG. Seems they’re determining what people would be willing to pay extra for. Some of the options were...
This is a future proofing measure. With the enshittification of Windows there is a reasonably sizable share that is looking to migrate. Making an API/front end functional on the platform is just good business. I for one will be switching 95% to Linux the instant Microsoft acts on their patant for putting a mandatory advertising ticket on the screen. Literally the only thing I will use it for is programming things for work.
Reminds me of Rimworld and the fact that, if there is no other accessible entities on the map with a nutrition stat, children and animals will b-line for booze that raiders drop and get hammered. I can’t count the number of Muffalo, dogs, and cats that I have had which end up with an alcohol tolerance hedif out of nowhere.
I’ve been sinking further and further into the RetroDECK time-sink of setting up my emulators just so, and having the most fun doing so. The PS2 is a largely unknown system to me, I neither had one nor spent much time before now playing through some titles....
No, he is right. The only people ‘cosplaying’ Nazis are Nazis. If you are an actor on stage or film cast to play a Nazi then you are doing your job. If you don a SS pin and a swastika armband you are a fascist and actively advertising yourself as a threat to those around you (unless they look like you). This is “hate speech” which means that it is “free speech” and thus should be protected from government interference. It, on the other hand, can also fall under “fighting words” which are not protected. It all depends on context. In the context of a fascist wannabe dictator taking office who is openly promoting violence against minorities and showing blatant support of white supremacist groups like proud boys and KKK, it falls under the latter. It is also speech that removes ones self from the social contracts of “tolerance”, “compassion”, and “safety”. Just like any contract, the privileges and protections are only afforded to those who are a party to the contract. If someone goes out in a Nazi ‘cosplay’ and gets gunned down, beaten, savaged, spat on, or verbally assaulted they have no room to complain since they wore “speech” that said “I support or intend to do harm to those in my community and I am a threat.”
I can see that point. I get the same thing sometimes when I casually defend social media companies censoring speech. That is why I usually do it like I did here; direct, verbose, and overtly unambiguous.
People do need to have an understanding that applying an ideal to all people does not mean that you condne the behavior of anyone in specific. I do, personally, hold the philosophy that social contracts need to be mutual and by nature cannot be applied ubiquitously. That is the essence and source of the Tolerance Paradox. That is the most easily digested version, but all social contracts hold the same paradox. Tolerance, compassion, inclusion, safety, etc. The only reason any of of them function is because we all agree on them. It is safe to drive becuse we all agree that that yellow line means we don’t cross it. We are safe standing on a subway platform because we all agree not to push each other onto the tracks. We are able to lead peaceful lives because we agree not to accost each other in public spaces. We are confident we can shop in stores, attend churches, spend time in parks, and move about in life because we include each other in our spaces.
Those who do not do these things forfeit the confidence they hold in those contracts. If you own a store or business and exclude some group, you should expect to be unwelcomed in the spaces of others. If you express hateful commentary or accost people, you should expect to be accosted and to not lead a life of peace. If you openly declare yourself as a threat to the health, wellbeing, and/or safety of other members of society, you are not owed any of those things. Period. That is the solution to the Social Contract Paradoxes. Those who are not party to them are not protected by them. It would be like if I signed a contract with a roofer to replace my roof and my neighbor started demanding they replace his roof too under my contract. They are not a party to the contract so they derive no benefit from the contract.
That would be “safety”. Just to be clear. And we do condone the harming and killing of those who mean to harm or kill us. Self defense laws, castle doctrine, capital punishment, etc.
By definition a legal framework is not a social contract. Technically there IS a social contract that we will agree to follow the laws, but not everyone does that one either. We violate speed limits, download media, burn crosses in front yards.
There are also many cases where laws do not cover the violations of a social contract. Slurs are protected speech under most circumstances, but that does not mean that there are no consequences to utilizing them in your vocabulary in public. You will never go to jail for it, but in using them you violate a social contract of tolerance, and thus the members of society around you should not tolerate your presence. If you pull a gun while using those slurs, that is a clear indicator that you intend harm, specifically on the people to whom the slurs refer. This violates the social contract of safety, which means that you are open to being harmed yourself by the members of the contract around you. They protect the safety of the members by preventing you from harming them. It is actually covered in the US laws and has been condoned by society. The “murder is wrong” tautology fails very quickly in the face of reality. Is it OK to kill someone who is actively raping an infant? How about if they have a knife to your partner’s or child’s throat? What about if they point a loaded gun at a crowd of unarmed protestors and are not a legally recognized peace officer? Your moral code determines where that line is, but everyone has a line. Do you condone Israel’s actions against the Palestinians? Let’s go for the good ole trolley problem. Do you pull the lever? Is that OK?
And this is the crux of the statement. Social contracts are group moral codes. The Nazis do not adhere to the terms of the contracts and thus are not protected by them.
Thank you. All of these things are actually very well defined. Nazism, Fascism, Authoritarianism. These are not words that are just thrown around haphazardly and have no meaning. The ones who DO use them inappropriately are those whom they describe. It is a concerted effort to redefine or undefine them so there is no longer a word to describe them.
That first paragraph put me off from the article because it positioned the research on gaming violence as if there were a positive correlation instead of reporting that it is actually negatively correlated. It also did not mention the positive research that came from the studies on game playing and eye hand coordination and the many other benefits video games have been proven to have. The author made it sound like this was the first positive thing about video games.
The issue is that I think there are Steam bundles that can’t be gifted, such as the Valve pack and that kind of thing. That also makes something like Civ 6 less likely, just because of the DLC bundles. I can also use Fanatical or Humble but frankly the region thing might be an issue....
I agree. People keep suggesting Factorio, which leads me to believe that they have not actually read the post since his friend is into souls-likes and heavy combat games. Factorio is the antithesis of that! I don’t personally play those games (Factorio is one of my most played games), so I can’t make suggestions aside from Monster Hunter.
Consider me a psycho with a hot take, but I have always preferred games that mix the enemy difficulties around in a zone. Something like Ark where, sure, level 3 Dodos spawn on the starting beaches, but a level 70 Spino can spawn not far away and you have to be sure to skirt it lest you become a healthy snack. The steady progression of “zone difficulty” has always bugged me a bit because it is just so far off from realistic. Sure, close to a settlement there would be culling of particularly dangerous creatures, but some of them would still exist (if the settlement is being responsible). And yeah, as you get farther into the wilds those sorts of cullings would fall off rapidly, but to say that there would be areas where there are no easy monsters or no hard monsters, even in the wilds, is just not accurate.
Also, you get the same feeling of accomplishment, sometimes more, when you have died to hard monsters in starting areas a bunch of times then learned to skirt aggro properly, but then suddenly you come back after being out for a while and utterly decimate them. Just feels so good.
Itch is by no means a small time player. Doing some very fast statistics off of the game price breakdowns available and the counts of games available vs. the number they rate as best sellers, if 20% of their best sellers make a sale each day and 7.5% of their non-best sellers make a sale each day, assuming an average price for the three pricing filters of (under $5, $2.5), ($5 to $15, $10), (over $15, $20), then Itch sells approximately $20k/day. Half a day is $10k. If those averages are actually much higher in their respective areas, as in just below the maximum then the daily total jumps to over $35k/day. There is wiggle room in my assumptions, but it is safe to say that Itch sees about $25k±7k/day.
As mentioned in other suits, there are nonmonetary damages as well which are harder to quantify without access to their analytics such as reputation damage, lost traffic, maintenance and repair from the forced outage at the domain level, etc. I could see a suit for $50k in actual damages and another $500k-$1M in punitive damages to send the message that this behavior is intolerable in general.
Except that most firms that charge $2000/hour take the fee from the settlement, not up front, when doing civil litigation. Really only criminal law is paid directly by the client, at least in the US.
That is where punitive damages come in. Most huge settlements are substantially punitive, which are damages awarded not on merit, but with the express intent of making the settlement hurt enough that the offender, and others in similar situations, think twice about taking similar actions.
Personally I want to see the criminal shield removed for corporations. All C-Level executives become personally liable for any illegal actions, malfeasance, slander/liable, or injurious action perpetrated or instigated by the company with the ONLY defense being proving, beyond a shadow of a doubt (not just reasonable doubt) that an actor within or without the company caused the action with the express intent of harming the C-Level executives, either specific or generally.
Fuck corporate personhood. Fuck people making a LLC and doing whatever the fuck they want under the guise of the company then the company declares bankruptcy while they run off like a cartoon character with bags of money. Leadership liability and culpability should be the norm, not the exception.
Essentially, unless they are personally doing it, they are protected. Embezzle millions and you go to jail, poison a water supply, kill thousands, give birth defects, cancer, and a myriad of other health issues to a community at large and only the corporation is liable/culpable.
Why don't Steam or Discord offer the option to hide when we're typing? angielski
It’s really annoying to accidentally hit a key, then feel like I have to send a full message. Why is this the ‘standard’ among chat programs now, without even the option to turn it off?...
Mario Kart World Faces Massive Backlash After Update, Online Racing Experience Ruined (gamersplan.com) angielski
Roblox Accused Of Allowing Sexual Exploitation In Four Separate Lawsuits (www.anapolweiss.com) angielski
Roblox, an online gaming platform that supposedly fosters creativity and connection among children and teens, harbors a darker underbelly that has harmed countless young users for years. Families nationwide are coming forward with stories of how predators, explicit content, and exploitation pervade this digital playground. The...
70% of games that require internet get destroyed (www.youtube.com) angielski
Nintendo reserves the right to brick your console following "unauthorised use", in bid to prevent piracy (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Nintendo is Trying to Stop You From Filing Lawsuits Against Them With New EULA Amendment (insider-gaming.com) angielski
6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux? angielski
GOG seems to be considering paid membership option angielski
Just did a GOG survey that focused on the idea of a paid membership option on GOG. Seems they’re determining what people would be willing to pay extra for. Some of the options were...
The creator of upcoming life sim Inzoi says he was "recklessly brave to even think about creating a game of this scale" (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
Eurogamer: we can't recommend the PC version of Monster Hunter Wilds (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
EA has open sourced a bunch of old Command & Conquer games (github.com) angielski
I’m not well versed in C&C, but it’s always good to see more games open sourced.
Emulating PS2 for my Steam Deck, would love any recommendations! (lemmy.world) angielski
I’ve been sinking further and further into the RetroDECK time-sink of setting up my emulators just so, and having the most fun doing so. The PS2 is a largely unknown system to me, I neither had one nor spent much time before now playing through some titles....
For No Reason in Particular Here's a Bunch of Games Where You Kill Nazis (hard-drive.net) angielski
It looks like someone at Activision is leaking Slack screenshots to right-wing X users (www.gamedeveloper.com) angielski
Cozy Games May Help Improve Players' Mental Health, Researchers Say (www.gamespot.com) angielski
GTA VI Might Inspire Other AAA Developers to Price Their Games at $100 (80.lv) angielski
Luck be a Landlord Might Be Banned from Google Play (blog.trampolinetales.com) angielski
Longtime buddy of mine just got a gaming PC. What games would make up a good "welcome to PC" care package? angielski
The issue is that I think there are Steam bundles that can’t be gifted, such as the Valve pack and that kind of thing. That also makes something like Civ 6 less likely, just because of the DLC bundles. I can also use Fanatical or Humble but frankly the region thing might be an issue....
What games have you sunk the most time into? angielski
I was looking at my playtime for some games and realized I have over 450 hours in PlanetSide 2....
What do You think about level scaling in cRPGs? angielski
Personally I dislike it very much. It take feel of achievement. Why even bother with gaining experience if it makes enemies stronger?
Funko gets community noted (lemmy.world) angielski
Funko, BrandShield speak out about itch.io takedown (lemmy.world) angielski
Statement is from xcancel.com/OriginalFunko/…/1866255848366039468#m...