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What was the last video game you played (if any) that absorbed you to the point where you shrugged off other responsibilities for it?

Wow. Great question. Minecraft.

But before that?
… It’s been a while. I’ll give you a short lists of games I truly love, and have shrugged off other things in favor of (in no particular order): Fallout 3, Oblivion, Morrowind (Oh God,) Psychonauts, Shadow of the Colossus, Ico.

And close? Saint’s Row 2, and GTA: San Andreas, and sometimes, rarely but sometimes, GTA4.

I’m sure there are tons more, but… That’s off the top of my head.

Ask me anything

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Buying Used Games (And The Other Fees)

Let me catch you up on the story thus far. Game developers sell you a game. You can trade that game in at stores (who re-sell them as used,) and you get store credit. Simple, right? Enter: politics and money.

If you do buy a used game, you (increasingly?) have to pay an additional charge to play online, something that was included with the initial purchase price. Recently the Creative Director of THQ (the publisher of the game,) Cory Ledesma tells CVG:

“I don’t think we really care whether used game buyers are upset because new game buyers get everything. So if used game buyers are upset they don’t get the online feature set I don’t really have much sympathy for them. … That’s a little blunt but we hope it doesn’t disappoint people. We hope people understand that when the game’s bought used we get cheated.”

Today Tycho of Penny Arcade chimed in, (PA being a huge webcomic often seen as “the voice of gamers,” they they’ve often shrugged off the label,) and Tycho is vehemently against the purchasing of games from the secondary market. This has raised the ire of many gamers.

Personally, I haven’t bought many games second-hand in the years past. Then again, I haven’t bought many games at all in years past. I’ve raised my standards in gaming, largely to Shadow of the Colossus and a few other games that carry both their story and an interesting subtext well. That said, I’m bored, and thought I’d make some comments.

o If trade-ins are really the problem, why not look toward those who are running the trade-in market? The Games Industry has turned a blind eye to their business partners (GameStop, Target (as of today), etc.) who, if this truly a grievous crime, are the perpetrators. To use a possibly-reaching comparison, publishers are like fathers beating on their children for doing what their mother says is okay. And the father refuses to address the mother’s implicit guilt in rearing her child. It’s not the child’s fault. The marriage is bad.

o Imagine you made songs for an iTunes and the songs sold for a dollar each. Then imagine iTunes introduced a service that lets people sell songs back to the store for a quarter each, and sold the “used strips” for fifty cents and keep all the profit for themselves. This would eat into your potential profits. Would that be the fault of the fans, who truly enjoyed your song but wanted to get it for the cheapest price possible from those who didn’t? The fault of iTunes who agreed to sell your music, but is screwed you? Or your own fault for supporting the site that not only with your music, but pre-order bonuses, and tons of give-aways in your deal with them, as game publishers do with game stores?

o Quite simply, it’s double charging for a portion of the game included in the original price.

o IANAL, but I imagine there would be no legal problem with cracking the second-charge scheme. As that portion of the game was included for the price of purchase, after that it’s up to the person who bought it to decide what to do with it. So long as no one tries to use the service after they sell it, or duplicate the service, I really doubt they’d have a case.

Bonus points:
o If people felt a developer’s games were worth keeping, this wouldn’t even be an issue, but they’re largely not — hence the all too common scenario of developers constantly pumping out annual updates for full price. Note that the “fighting words” were over a game that’s had a yearly iteration since 2000. What impetus do they have to make a game that players will even WANT to play years later when they’ll be forced to make a new one next year anyway? You think too many people are looking to sell their copies of Civilization or games from Team Ico?

o I own an Xbox 360. Thanks Microsoft, for giving me the chance to pay publishers extra to play a game online that I’m already paying you once to play online on an Internet connection that I’m already paying someone else for. Dicks.

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Jeff Freeman is dead.

I’ve been on vacation this passed week; away from the internet too. I checked in the other day to find out that Jeff Freeman was dead. He committed suicide, actually, back on September twenty-fourth. And I’ve no doubt that everyone who reads this knows (or doesn’t care,) but I just wanted to write some stuff out. Jeff Freeman was a game designer “who some of you may remember as the lead designer behind the hugely unpopular changes in the Star Wars MMO,” as the news stories go, but why stop there? Refering to him as that seems odd to me. I didn’t know the man. To avoid confusion let me repeat: I did not know him. At least not in the sense that you ‘know’ anyone you consider yourself ‘knowing’. I read his blog. He (apparently) read mine (he commented on separate occasions,) and we exchanged emails a few times over the years.

(It’s important to note that his brother posted this on the net, and said that his suicide had nothing to do with his work, and was apparently in relation to personal problems.)

Working in journalism, I understand the need to frame information in a way that allows people to understand why they should care, but I much rather would’ve had news stories refer to him in ways that people didn’t know as well. Take the moment to read his blog a bit and realize that he had a great sense of humor. Mention that he was a parent who lampooned irresponsible parents (here, “I can’t stop my little children from playing 37 hours a week of Baby-Killer 3, because I don’t understand this little letter on the box it came in!”) or even an Army Reservist.

Of course, his blog immediately got comments with people saying they hoped he burned in hell, largely because of the Star Wars thing. Thus goes gamerdom… A bunch of assholes. The additional shame there is that it’s not like he ever got to make the game he wanted to make. He was just a guy with a job.

Of course the irony is painful; he really came across as the kinda guy most gamers would have absolutely loved. Just read this, written by a guy who actually DID know him. Chances are you’ll say “Damn, I wish I had a chance to know that guy.” That’s what I’m saying right now. If he’s going to be remembered as something to do with games, then why can’t he be “the guy who solved server over-population problems with a simple blog post:” http://web.archive.org/web/20050323233508/http://mythical.blogspot.com/ (You’ll have to highlight that first post. For some reason the Internet Archive fucked up the color.) Or the guy who said (something to the effect of) “To have a good MMO, you have to start with a world that would be interesting even without players.” Why can’t he be a guy who knew that better things were possible and fought that on the front lines?

Man, gamers are assholes.

Bah. Well, here’s his blog: http://mythicalblog.com/. I’m going to see if I can find some nuggets of wisdom left behind. Y’know, I recall him saying something along the lines of “you guys are tired of me talking about my game ideas all the time” once, but I can’t find it. I completely disagreed with that statement.

Some highlights from the past few weeks of Jeff Freeman’s blog:
Freeman Fights Torture
Freeman on (the lack of) Storytelling and Story Arcs in MMOs when compared to serial TV
Freeman on ‘banning’ players.
On Journalism, Entertainment Journalism, and Game Journalism

Heh, looking at it, he was quite the aggregator of quality media, too. Man, I’m going to regret not buying that buy a beer.

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