Games for Windows???

Dec ´06
11 6:50 pm
  • Posted by: Bryan-Mitchell Young
  • Category: opinion

One of thestories that has been going around the gaming magazines and news sites is Mircorosft’s new “Games for Windows” initiative. In addition to some stuff that will be in Vista, it basically ammounts to that magical word, “advertising,” and that other magical word, “branding.”

The Holiday 2006 issue of PCGamer has a coverstory about “Windows Vista and the Future of Gaming” that discusses the Games for Windows initiative with some industry people. Scott Miller of 3D Realms has some surprisingly candid things to say. In response to the question whether or not this initiative will do any good he quite wisely says that the best thing to do would be to make Windows suck less. On the other hand, when asked if he was excited by the prospect of Microsoft buying shelf space at stores for games, Miller has an odd response:

“All of this is frivolous. If Microsoft really wanted to help the game industry, [it would] lobby to instate a legal window whereby retailers cannot resell games within two months or so. (31)

So Miller thinks that more laws and not selling used games would be the solution??? Call me crazy, but I think his first quote makes a lot more sense than his second.

Case in point, Call of Duty 2. Sunday I went to the store to buy a game and because it was on sake, I deceded on Call of Duty 2. I got it home and opened the box only to see that the game came on 6 cds. SIX! What??? That is just insane. A DVD drive can be bought for something like $20. I think it is time to get rid of multi-cd games.

So I start to install it and I get some random error that it can’t find msvhs30.dll or something. I search around online and find that people are saying that Windows Defender is the cause. So I’m going to have to uninstall itbefore I casn even play the game. I imagine that most people would have just given up without even looking the error up on Google, but having to uninstall a program to get a game to install? That is just plain crap.

Because I figured that Windows would want to restart after uninstalling Defender, I was hesitant to uninstall it. On a whim I right clicked on the cd and started the installer instead of the crapy “autorun” program and guess what? It installed without a hitch. So the problem wasn’t the game, but the stupid autorun splash screen thing. Even more lame.

Of course, as any PC gamer knows, the lameness wasn’t over yet, because the stupid game insists on having the cd in the drive in order to play the game. Sure, because I love th sound of my drive spinning up when I start a game… So I have to go online and download some hack to get rid of the cd check.

And some people think selling used games is the problem with PC gaming???

It seems like ever PC game I’ve bought lately has been screwed up by everything that goes along with the game and the hoops one has to jump through before you even get to the game. No wonder people pirate games.

I’ve had to download a pirate copy of a game that I bought couldn’t get to run because of all this crap and I’ll admit I’ve downloaded a couple of older games that I wanted to play for my research. You know how much trouble I’ve had getting those pirated games to run? Absolutely none.

Maybe there’s a message in there soemwhere…

About Bryan-Mitchell Young

On Art and Violence

Now that the semester is winding down I’ve got a bit of time to blog (and write my last couple dissertation chapters and then revise all of them and write the intro and conclusion chapters…). A couple things have happened (and are in the process of happening) that have the gaming world buzzing: Roger Ebert wrote about videogames again and the Supreme Court is taking up the case of California’s law forbidding the sale of videogames to minors.

Regarding Ebert, he ends by asking, “Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art?” which echoes my own call for all of us to stop caring about “art.” Tons and tons of people have tried to convince him he’s wrong — so many in fact that I don’t even want to bother hunting down links to some of the stories that do it. I’m not interested in arguing with him because I don’t really care if he thinks games are art or not.

However, it is very disconcerting that he seems to think that he can judge games by looking at screenshots. Would he write a review of a film based on the text on the back of the dvd box? That’s pretty ignorant to think that he can judge games in that manner.

Unfortunately, this is just the top of the iceberg because look at the picture at the top of his post. Now I have no idea if he picked that picture or not. I would say that he probably didn’t but he did pick the rest of the pictures in the post so perhaps he did. Regardless, the picture didn’t just appear by itself. Someone chose that picture. What is in that picture? A kid. So someone whether it was Ebert of just some random web guy, wanted to pick a picture of a gamer and they picked a kid — once again perpetuating the stereotype that games are for kids and in this instance also seemingly indicating that games are in and of themselves childish. Wow. That’s pretty sad.

OK, now onto the Supreme Court…

I’m pretty confident that the Supreme Court will say this law is unconstitutional not only because lower courts have consistently ruled that laws regulating videogame sales are unconstitutional but also because of the recent Supreme Court decision declaring a law banning animal cruelty videos unconstitutional.

Today the Diane Rehm Show had a segment on the Supreme Court taking on the Videogame law regulating videogame sales and had Leland Yee, the California politician behind the bill, Craig Anderson, the guy who has never met a form of media that didn’t cause aggression, and a couple other people I don’t remember. Now, I’ve previously criticized Anderson’s vague use of the term “aggression” so I was pleasantly surprised that Diane Rehm’s first question to him was “what is the difference between agression and violence?” Anderson initially tried to avoid answering the question but then Rehm re-asked the question and Anderson admitted that while violence is generally understood as an extreme form of aggression, it is very rare for aggression to actually turn into violence. I think that it really key because in that statement Anderson (who also in this CNN video says that videogame-caused “aggression” isn’t really any worse than film or television-causes “aggression” ) says that videogames don’t really make kids violent.

If the most well known person who thinks videogames cause aggression doesn’t think they make you violent then that makes the case that they are so bad that we need laws against selling them much harder to prove.

Personally, I look forward to the SCOTUS shutting down these kinds of laws once and for all.

…well that and Jack Thompson getting involved and saying some crazy things…

Movies can be scary too…

Allow me a non-videogame-related rant here… It is still about moral panics surrounding children and media though so it could easily have been about videogames instead of movies.

I caught a story on the local NPR station last night about someone threatening a lawsuit against Redbox because they sell “R-rated” movies. I searched for something about the story and apparently it got picked up by a few local news outlets including the Indianapolis Fox Affiliate and the Louisville ABC Affiliate. According to stories the whole thing is being stirred up by Vanderburgh Country Prosecutor Stan Levco.

Of course there’s two little details that neither of the two stories linked to above or any of the other stories I saw seemed to mention: First, The MPAA rating system “is a voluntary system” and the ratings are not legally enforced. The only possible grounds for a lawsuit that there would be would be under obscenity or pornography laws. Levco almost certainly knows this. So why is he causing a stir? That leads to the second missing detail: Levco is running for re-election.

So this is just a ploy to get into the headlines so that Levco can say he is “fighting for families” and concerned about “family values” without having to do anything. The minute I heard this story I immediately wondered if the guy was up for re-election because that’s the only time public officials try to start legal proceedings related to media. I guess Levco couldn’t find any easy videogame targets.

Heaven forbid that any of the media outlets that aired this story would take two minutes to wonder why Levco was doing this or anything… That’s some good reportering there…

1 Comments Showing 50 most recent
  1. mriswyth

    I grew up playing mostly PC games and played them all through college. Post-college with all my “disposable” income I had a hankering to play some of the Nintendo franchises of my youth, so I decided to buy a GameCube. That was followed by an XBOX, a Wii, soon an XBOX 360, and no computer upgrades. There are times that I miss it (Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 didn’t feel quite right), but things like this allow me to remember why it was so easy to stop playing on a computer.

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