Archives

The Pirate Academic in the Digital Age

Or maybe it should be the Digital Academic in the Pirate Age?

Anyway, I’m backing up my data including stuff I have on dvds since I’ve heard burned dvds might not last very long. I see that I have around 500 gigs of stuff including various videogame documentaries, news coverage, websites, interviews, youtube videos, and newspaper and magazine articles. Some of the stuff is pretty rare so I would hate to lose any of it. I bought two extra drives and my plan is to back up everything on both of them and take one to my parent’s house so I have off site backup (I’d love to set up something like a pogo plug at my parent’s house but I’m still a poor grad student.). I have the idea that this stuff will be useful as research one day but the truth is that I’m something of a low level hoarder (I don’t have a pet so there’s no danger of finding its dessicated remains under a pile of junk and there’s not much chance I’ll be burried alive by bits and bytes).

The problem with all of this is that, as you may have guessed from the title, is that while a large amount of that data has been obtained by using my dvd recorder to record stuff off of television probably just as much if not more of it has been downloaded from bittorent sites. So I’m a pirate. MPAA you can come and get me. There might be some illegally downloaded music on my computer so RIAA you can come and get me too.

I don’t deny the legality of it. What I do question is the morality. Let’s face it, the odds of my getting sued are pretty slim. Moreover, academia has a pretty long record of infringing on copyright anyway by making copies of articles for students without paying for them. Heck, I’ve even done it with a book that one of my advisers edited.

On the other hand, most people in the media are helpful to academics and I’ve actually gotten a free copy of an episode of a show from a cable network when I emailed them about it and I have had a couple indie documentary makers send me stuff when I inquired about it. So maybe I could get copies of some of this stuff through legal means. Does getting it through piracy make it less moral? I think so since I don’t have permission even though I doubt they would care since nearly all the stuff I’ve downloaded hasn’t been available for purchase (which is kind of weird since there is a demand for this stuff since I still get hits on the post I made about the video game documentary Tony Hawk hosted so there must be some people out there who want to see that stuff (although I guess in that instance they did make that available for purchase since it is listed on Amazon). Moreover, I haven’t uploaded the stuff that I was given by the cable channel or the documentary maker so I must feel like it is somehow a bad thing and a breach of trust (the cable company did make me sign a form promising I wouldn’t share the tape).

I do feel like being an academic does make a difference. I’m not downloading this stuff just because I want it. I like videogames and all but I’m not that fanatical that I would download every video I find related to computers or videogames. But is “it’s for research!” a valid reason? I’m sure that the judge wouldn’t think so but I’m not so sure what an ethicist would think.

So until I hear from an ethicist or the MPAA or RIAA brake down my door I’ll just wear my pirate hat with shame.

…And no I won’t send you a copy of my stuff.

Jack Thompson Li(v)es!!!

I just noticed that Jack Thompson was on Eagle Forum Radio back on June 5th. Eagle Forum is a super right wing group created by Phyllis Schlafly who thinks that “By getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don’t think you can call it rape.” The show is also apparently co-hosted by her son, Andy Schlafly, who is the creator of Conservapedia and the effort to write a conservative translation of the Bible. With this group you know it would be an interesting show…

I took a couple hours of my life and listed to Jacko lie, lie, and lie again and I thought I would list the lies and omissions that were made on the show:

  1. Right off the bat they introduce Jack Thompson as a lawyer and neglect to mention that he has been permanently disbarred.
  2. Jack starts off trotting out the same old lies about studies having proved that video games are bad for you. His favorite is to mention some elusive Harvard study that did MRI scans of people but no one has ever found the study he is talking about. The closest studies I’ve found are a 2003 study and a 2009 study that were both done at IU Medical and were both sponsored by The Center for Successful Parenting.
  3. Jack said that a Kaiser Family Foundation found that kids play videogames 8 hours a day when what they really found was “8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes to using entertainment media across a typical day” and that they only played videogames approximately 1hour and 13 minutes a day (but watch tv nearly 4 and a half hours a day)
  4. He then blames the Columbine shootings on videogames but that isn’t enough for him. He then goes on to say that the reason the news media doesn’t cover school violence more is because the media (even Fox news) is in the pocket of the videogame industry!
  5. Then Jack cites Dave Grossman and claims that the military uses videogames to desensitize soldiers. In reality the military uses videogames to teach teamwork and hand-eye coordination.
  6. In the midst of all this Phyllis Schlafly claims she has never heard any of this before.  This is a funny claim since you would think she would learn something about someone before having them on her show, and since she mentions her son has been active in this area. Additionally, Jack has worked with various branches of the Eagle Forum for a while.
  7. Jack also claims that the videogame industry makes more money than the film industry.  While it may be true that the gaming industry makes more money than Hollywood does at the box office, movies also make a lot of money internationally, dvd sales, pay-per-view, and other sources.
  8. Jack does admit that the majority of videogames made are not violent but then he says that non-violent games don’t sell. …If that is the case then why do they make them?  Of course it is not true as a glance at this month’s sales chart will tell you.
  9. He also claims that Lee Malvo one of the Beltway Snipers trained by playing Halo. There’s no evidence of this ever happening.
  10. He talks about the FTC testing to see if children can buy M-rated games but neglected to mention that the video game industry did better than movies and music at shielding kids from violent content.
  11. Jack also claimed that the killer in the Virginia Tech killings was addicted to Counter-Strike. He claimed that the New York Times said this. This is wrong, too. The New York Times did a large article on the killer and the second page of the article does state that when he started college, “Perhaps he would no longer retreat to video games and playing basketball alone the way he did at home.” But the main source of Jacks claim here is a single post on the Washington Post’s website that claimed the killer played Counter-Strike but that post was quickly removed when the story’s writer was unable to verify that he ever played the game.
  12. The last statement from Jack that I’ll talk about is perhaps the weirdest: He claimed that the reason that more men than women are dropping out of college is that the men are playing too many videogames…

Of course I should be revising my dissertation and not fact checking Jack Thompson.  I guess that I can always blame Jack if I drop out of college…

Roger Ebert apologizes to the “kids”

As was the case the last time Roger Ebert wrote about videogames, the gaming websites are all talking about his latest post about gaming. He writes:

I was a fool for mentioning video games in the first place. I would never express an opinion on a movie I hadn’t seen. Yet I declared as an axiom that video games can never be Art. I still believe this, but I should never have said so. Some opinions are best kept to yourself.

Well that’s fine. I’m glad he saw the light at least a little bit. However, I have the same problem with this “apology” as I did with his last post about videogames. Let’s look at the title for his post: “Okay, kids, play on my lawn.” Just like the last post he is still implying that videogame players are children. Sure, in this case, he is using the old cliche about old people and responding to people who wrote that he only dislikes videogames because he is old. However, it is still the second post in a row that he has made a connection between videogame players and children.

One step forward. Two steps back.

(White) People Are Strange

I’m currently writing a dissertation chapter on whiteness at LAN parties. That makes it a kind of coincidence that there’s an article over at Kotaku about the fact that the characters in the movie Prince of Persia are mostly being played by white people.

What’s most interesting about that article isn’t the actual content of the article itself but the comments. Any bets on what race most of the people commenting about how race shouldn’t matter are?

video game ethnography video

I was procrastinating today and taking a look at my dismal google analytics and noted that one of the keywords used to get to my site was ‘video game ethnography.’ Curious, I put the phrase in google and looked around and then I decided to put the link into yahoo and this video showed up as the first result (I don’t show up on yahoo. Perhaps it is because I prefer videogame over the term video game?):

Video Games Ethnography at Bridgewater College
It is a pretty interesting video. I hope the person that did it got an A in the class!

Site is mostly back

I managed to get my posts back up. I think the links to the images might be messed up but I’ll have to try to go through and fix those by hand.

What I ended up doing was installing wordpress locally using something I found calledBitnami, then editing the sql backup so I could import it into that virtualized wordpress. Then I used worpress’s export feature to export the entries to an xml file which I uploaded here.

Now I got to get a theme going and my blogroll and I’ll be back in shape. This will be a good excuse to do a bit of a redesign that I’ve been meaning to do so that’s something I guess…

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…

The Site is Borked.

As you can see (if this is the newest post when you are reading this) I’ve messed up the site.

I use 1and1 for hosting and I’ve never had any problems but I decided to update wordpress and it required a newer version of mysql than the one I was using.  My plan with 1and1 doesn’t allow me to have more than one mysql database at a time so I backed up the database, deleted it, and created a newer one. Then I try to import the backup and it fails.

I opened up the sql file in a text editor and all the posts are in there but I don’t really know how to get them out. So I found an old wordpress backup and uploaded it but as you can see it is 3 and a half years old.  After 3-4 hours of trying to figure out stuff I’m calling it a day. So until I figure out how to get the data out or do it all manually some rainy day, the site will have a bit of a gap in it.

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…