fuchikoma

Such an awesome game. Music was great too. I would use it as my first taste of co-op in a way but I'd already played TMNT II: The Arcade game. That would go in my 3x3 if I ever get round to it. Do it! It's fun... It made me consider what my big influences and turning points were, which I hadn't really done. I just kept a running list of games as I thought of them and read this thread, then narrowed it down a lot and made the grid... Just remember to save the image URLs, not the images, like I did the first time I was going to do this! TMNT II... Is that the one where you can have up to 4 players, and can cut down things like parking meters and signs? I loved that game.

Sounds like it's getting exciting. Being a phone game and not demanding the highest fidelity, how about procedurally generating certain sound effects, as you would on an NES or GameBoy? I'm picturing a Diablo-ish game and thinking things like rings dropping (ting!), coins (shing!), clothes (fwop) etc could be replicated with pretty simple waveforms and white noise combinations?

Super Mario Bros: My first console game was actually Smurfs on the Colecovision at an uncle's place, but trying some bizarre hack of SMB at a mall was my first Nintendo experience. We had a PC at home, but this was light years ahead of it. From then, I had to have an NES. When I finally did, I put countless hours into this at home and at friends' places, and I even started making friends simply because we both played SMB. Chip n' Dale Rescue Rangers: My first (and almost only, next to Four Swords) taste of "coopetition." Team up for a common goal... or if the guy next to you is getting annoying, pick him up and turf him off the edge, heheh! In grade 2, I knew a guy who would fight me on the playgrounds (if hit n' run from behind is fighting) but one day we were each going to the corner store with our dads and found out they were old buddies and he lived a block away. We talked a bit and found out we both liked Nintendo. I went to his place and played this game ALL DAY for a day or two straight with him, and we ended up hanging out as best friends for the next 9 years. He later confessed he only started this to see if I had any good NES games! haha... The bonds of Nintendo! This game really opened my eyes to gaming as a social activity. Street Fighter II: Same deal pretty much. Just about all of my friends were into this game, and I played it whenever I could. More than a few times, we'd rent it on the SNES, have a sleepover, and stay up playing it until we collapsed from exhaustion. I got a lot of colds this way... totally worth it. Ever since, I've loved a good 2D fighter. Wipeout XL: By this time I was in high school, and a few years into the PSX era. This game was like a godsend. I loved the sci-fi design, the funky Designer's Republic art and design all over it, the seriously awesome soundtrack filled with various big techno artists, and the insane sense of speed. I hate to say it, but the pioneering in-game advertising also set me on a 10-year quest to try Red Bull (as an artificially caffeinated non-cola, it was illegal in Canada for ages until convenience stores finally imported the original Thai product with an over-the-counter drug info number. After that, the law quickly changed.) Anyway, this game really gave me a taste for racing as a preferred genre and not just something to dabble in. Diablo: I'd played roguelikes for as long as I could read, but this was a whole new level. Graphics. Sound. Mouse-driven interface! More importantly, it was one of a couple games I had that would go online. I have such fond memories crawling random dungeons with strangers on the net. It was cool how everyone used the same servers too, so if you stayed up late, you'd see different rotations of people online. Since I was starting to study Japanese (and starting to obsess over anime...) I liked to stay up until around 3am when the Japanese players would get more common. Like their reputation in FFIX, they were pretty much all polite and helpful, unlike the hacking griefers during the day. This game also got me interested in RAM hacking, since it was a way of life in Diablo 1. I even made some varyingly successful joke hacks, like glitched ear items. Chasing the magic of Diablo, I later loved playing Shining Soul 2 with friends, and making new friends in Ragnarok Online - some of my fondest gaming memories. Even now, my friends and I play Marvel: Ultimate Alliance together. Long-live the dungeon crawl! beatmania: A friend got me to try Pop'n Music 3 in the late 90s. Even on 5-button mode, with two of us sharing the controls it was pretty brutal. Eventually though I got hooked and it got more fun the better I got at it. I discovered the beatmania series it spun off from. It was ok, but the music was pretty bad... Then I found beatmania: Best Hits and my future was set in stone. Eventually I bought most of the IIDX series, all the DJ Max Portable games (well, I'll get 3 soon,) and countless other rhythm and music games. I love rhythm games. Playing a good hard music game at a level that completely saturates my attention and ability has led me to discover the joys of "flow" in everyday life, and even no-mind, without effort or intent to do so, so I can't overstate the influence of this series. There you have it - beatmania IIDX is a complete sermon on mindfulness that shows the joy and skill of total concentration, and the annoyance and inability of an unfocused mind. Tourist Trophy: I traditionally hated Gran Turismo - I didn't know what sensible corner speeds or racing lines were, and even when I tried to apply them, the controls on a PSX were inadequate and I'd end up spinning donuts trying to just get back on track. After getting hooked on Initial D (go ahead, laugh, heh) I sat down and tried GT3, which was so much more playable with actual analog inputs! Then GT4 was a big improvement over that! I still wasn't a big car guy though, hardly able to tell most apart, and feeling that four wheels is still too complex unpredictable physically when pushed to the limit. Then I got Tourist Trophy... wow. I'd always wanted a motorcycle, but my parents never allowed it as a kid/teen. Here was the only game I'm aware of to this day that accurately simulated motorcycle racing physics. Weight transfer, wind turbulence, riding position, tire friction, g forces... This is still a favourite game of mine. It even inspired me to go out and get a sportbike of my own, and a few times when I've skidded, or hit a corner too fast for safety, habits I learned in TT got me out without even falling. Tourist Trophy helped me live a lifelong dream, AND maybe save my life from accidents in the same! The Impossible Game: I got this a while before Super Meat Boy, but it had about the same effect. I've always hated games that are hard just to be hard. In fact, from around ages 8-13 I was even quite the cheat code abuser. From around 16-20 I was also a pretty avid console pirate since I had next to no money, lots of technical expertise, and an endless thirst for novelty. This led to a bad habit of playing many games, very superficially, as a sort of tourist. That was kind of ok, since I play games for not achievement, but novelty, but TIG was a sort of rehab. It's brutally hard, but makes no ceremony of punishing you or taunting you for failing. It just ups the attempt counter and goes "psshh! Start!" No lives. No continues. Short level. Clear, unambiguous challenges. Poking at this for a while, I eventually made it about 85% into the first level on the iPhone without using practice mode (the taste for challenge had already sunk in and I figured practice was too easy.) It showed me that a hard game is less about possible or impossible, and more about how much time and effort you're willing to put into gradually making it through, and that most any game is probably beatable with determination. I still won't waste time on a game that's buggy or unfair, but I now have a taste for hard, but not punishing quick games like TIG, SMB, Warning Forever, or Aban Hawkins and the 1000 Spikes. Touhou Project (Imperishable Night): ...which brings us to Touhou. 45 minute games with 45,000,000 bullets. Actually, I've always hated 2D shmups. It always seemed futile to me, fighting an endless stream of enemies only to be taken out by some lone bullet you didn't see, coming from some guy on the side you missed because you were shooting his dozen buddies at the top... hated it. One day I found Marisa Stole the Precious Thing and it was completely confusing. Also, it got stuck in my head. Eventually it bugged me enough to look it up, and when I found out what Touhou really is, I went "ugh! That's for masochists!" and left it. But it gnawed at me. That didn't really look like a generic fighter plane fighting generic mecha-things and aliens, and I still have a soft spot from my anime otaku days so the random manga girl fighting intrigued me. I downloaded a bundle of them and tried them out. They kicked my ass... but not nearly as bad as I expected. And the music was amazing. I stuck to it, and got good enough to at least progress through the levels and enjoy it, and before long, I was even getting addicted to grazing bullets and appreciating the designs of the spell card attacks. Since then I've rushed around catching up on bullet hell games I'd missed. IMO bullet hell is easier than normal shooters because you're not taken out by a stray shot - bullets tend to come in HUGE colourful, unmissable clouds, and the real challenge is finding the non-lethal spots in those clouds. Totally different - like a realtime morphing maze, especially with Touhou's usually slow bullets. I could go on about other things that set this series apart in the genre to me, but I'd fill another page with babbling, so I'll shut up now.

oops... It was so far back, I totally forgot! I think I just had too much time there and got locked into serious discussion mode from hanging out in the piracy thread, hehe... Still, even if it was boring, I had fun because I'm fascinated by this stuff.

The language would be impossible to boycott. Besides, would they speak the language of their English forefathers, Spanish enemies(?), or make up a new one? Everyone would just speak what they know. I do find it ironic that they stand virtually alone now in using the "imperial" measurement system though! Still, the issue itself was with the taxation of tea, so they turned against tea because they weren't going to pay it. I should point out that when an American says "British accent" they certainly mean "English" and use it interchangeably. Good luck explaining that Wales, Scotland, or Northern Ireland are British. As for generalizing accents, in North America, many of us aren't very attuned to regional variations and dialects, but they can be classified by nation for broad comparisons. (For instance, most would probably tell you rhotic accents sound American, while non-rhotic accents sound British, generally.) Personally, I could probably only discern around three major English British accents, and would admittedly probably lump whole families of accents together under one heading. I hesitate to even try naming them for all the mistakes I'd make, but even a fool can tell you Cockney is different from received pronunciation, even in North America - whether or not it occurs to them that there are multiple accents in use. I natively speak West-Central Canadian English, and while I study languages for fun, apart from idioms, I can't really hear a difference between it and North Central American English, though some can. In fact, I may be confusing NCAE with General American too. While there are many regional variations, I'm mostly just aware of English as it's spoken in most of Canada and the USA, the , which apparently may vary from a Maritimes accent, the "Southern American" accent, and generally some . Boston definitely has a , though without hearing "r", I don't have enough of a shibboleth to really notice it. (I am bad at this... I'd probably screw up and guess New York instead of New England.) Supposedly California has a regional accent. I've never noticed it, even when looking for it. tl;dr, in North America, many of us aren't very aware of regional accents unless they're very pronounced, so we don't think of them so much as regional, but national - where Great Britain has a lot more distinct accents in a small geographical area so of course it'd be obvious. As for some kind of modern American accent sounding more like a common British or English accent at the time of America's founding... I could believe it, but I really can't find much on it now. I'm guessing maybe it's more like a New England accent, since they've been more conservative with language, distinct from other parts of the country, and had more contact with England? I vaguely recall reading that it was actually more elements of English and Scottish that came to North America... but I have no links to good studies so I'll just shut up about it before I dig myself into a hole here. This should be of general interest to this thread - Hugh Laurie and Ellen Degeneres discuss American and English slang:

I'm still not satisfied that we've defined morality yet, but we are close, so this will come back to bite us if we carry on any discussion here without establishing a base for comparison. But to make sure we're on the same page, are you saying the creator's wishes do not impact the morality of a decision - it is a matter of respecting or contravening the legal rights of ownership? In other words, it is immoral to break the law? (It really sounds like you're saying that piracy is immoral because it goes against the creator's wishes, but used games are moral because they are legal, and these two value systems directly conflict when applied asymmetrically like this. It is hypocrisy to claim the creator's wishes decide the morality of an action and then claim that something else that violates them is ok. If morality is justified by legality, then we need to address the issues with that as well.) I said "So, again, what is it that makes demo piracy immoral?" But you have not said "morality is" or "it is immoral because;" you simply said what each side is doing. This is just "Accidentally the whole thing" with a new texture. If you can't define the issue, you've no right to argue it. Talking morality with someone who cannot define morality is like asking a gardener to design an apartment building. That is a very good dilemma... I bought Guitar Hero 3 for PS2, but later bought it for the PC because about 1 in 6 times, I'd load a level and there would be a loud hum all through the song. That made the game unplayable. If the PC version was made and distributed by the same team, I should have pirated it - but it wasn't, it was ported by Aspyr, and they had not sold me a faulty product. I also bought RE4 on GameCube, but later on Wii because I felt the Wiimote aiming would provide a unique novelty over the original version. I think when the versions are more or less comparable, for instance a Dreamcast and PS2 version, or PS3 and 360 version, a case can be made for the consumer that they are just continuing to enjoy the same content. Again as a consequentialist, it is at least not wrong to do this because there is no impact - considering it's unlikely you'd buy two identical copies. However, the teams involved should be considered again - are you cheating people out of a sale who did not get your money for the first copy? That MAY be wrong. Or maybe you can justify that what you're doing is the same thing as if you'd simply dug out your other system and hooked it up? I won't impose a judgment for this onto others, but just mention the different factors to consider. For enhanced versions, like Rez HD, SotC/ICO HD, or maybe even the low-res, widescreen Space Channel 5 pt. 2 on XBLA, I think it can be shown that while the game is the same in spirit and content, the experience of playing it is different, and it warrants some compensation. I also hold this standard to handheld ports. Own a Playstation game? Playing it on PSP now? That game was never pocketable before, and Sony made the Playstation emulator so that you can play games you purchased for the PSP. (Ports are... ports. Clearly it's a different product, running widescreen in your pocket.) Would I always hold myself to the last standard there? Not always - My PSPs run open firmware, and I've ripped FF7 to them, before it was available on the PSP (is it even now?) People asked for this product endlessly, and it was not given to them, so there was no product to buy, thus no product to steal. It may have been an unauthorized use of the game and the emulator, but I was depriving no one of anything, even potentially. This next part concerns the same console, but different game format: Digital copies. I feel that if a game is released as a DRM'ed download, there is a certain understanding that it will not last forever, but I find it especially unscrupulous to sell it one generation after the next, or even to pretend that a copy locked to your hardware or account is a "sale." You can make a case that this is all part of the terms of the agreement, but I feel it's more about lack of consumer choice. My other games, I OWN. I can plug in Super Mario Bros right now and play it on my NES. I can grab my GameBoy and fire up Kirby's Dreamland. When my systems break, I can grab new ones, plug the games in, and keep playing. When this age of consoles has passed, my Wiiware games will only last as long as my Wii - after that, they are also broken. Likewise for any PSN or XBLA game once you cannot log into the service, or when they have stopped offering them for download. Even though you've paid for the games, they are taken away. This goes doubly for XBLI, since you need a net connection to play them; the day they stop allowing logins is the day all those games break for good. The companies that sell these games get to keep my money forever, but I don't get to keep their games, and I feel that's a moral infraction of the customer's right to the product they bought. To this end, I believe the customer is justified in doing what they can to preserve the game. How does this tie into this question? Sometimes DLC is released on disc. I was a huge Wipeout fan. I had to have Wipeout HD. I really, really did not want to buy it as DLC for the reasons I already gave. I wanted to own it. $20 to me is too much for an intangible game, but I'd been waiting for this game since Wipeout XL/2097 (1997) came out. So I bought it. Then not long afterward, the European territories got a disc version. If I'd prepped my PS3 for piracy, I would absolutely pirate the disc copy for long term archival, and have zero qualms about it. Likewise if I'd bought The Lost and the Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony for GTA4 - I'd argue that I bought the content, have a right to keep the content, and cannot do so with the only means presented to me, so I'd have to copy the permanent copy that was later released.

That I can't say for sure. It's not abnormal. I mean, it's likely in an office, but so is a water cooler with a boiling water spout. At home, you might use a microwave, electric kettle or stovetop kettle. The thing is that, indeed it seems the British electrical system is more robust, but I never hear anyone complain about how long it takes to boil water, and there's no shortage of boiled water based drinks here. When I think about it, I'd imagine Americans drink tea less often as a holdover from forming a republic and establishing themselves as "not British." Historically they'd boycotted it due to taxation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvLqrm15wko

You didn't seem to disagree that morality was about the will of the rights holders and that legality was not morality, so the natural assumption would be that since you didn't correct us, you agreed? What else are we to conclude from this discussion? You're confusing morality with legality. It's a common mistake but a mistake nonetheless. MORALS ARE NOT THE SAME AS LAWS. Ok - so then the immorality comes into play because the pirates are going against the will of the creators, or if nothing else, subverting the way the product was meant to be distributed? But your justification for buying used games is: We could only at this point imagine that your reason for moral objection is because piracy goes against the will of the creators as per how the game should be distributed and used. That would be hypocritical though, because game developers and publishers alike have come out against used game sales, tried to design them out of the picture, and have complained about how much it hurts their profits. Does it have to be both illegal and against the owners' wishes in order to be immoral? You were saying that it would be wrong for the creator to encourage piracy if the publisher did not allow it, or is that not because it's illegal, but breaks their contract? So, again, what is it that makes demo piracy immoral? Is it, in fact, because it is illegal? Because then whatever is legal is moral. You seem to agree it's not because it's illegal. You now say it's not because it violates the creator's wishes. Is it because there IS impact on the IP owner? How? I think after we've spent this much effort digging for some justification for your absolute and unyielding opposition to the premises we've discussed, you owe it to us to make a concise, compelling logical explanation of why it is immoral, or cede that it isn't demonstrably so. In any case, if we still cannot reconcile this issue now, perhaps you should just leave us to explore the topic and conclude that most of us are wrong. (Disagreements from anyone?)

I assumed you meant a teapot's worth. Personally, I usually fill a strengthened glass tumbler with water and throw it in the 1000W microwave until it boils.

Ok, that is actually quite impressive, because 15A breakers are the norm for 120V sockets. Do you plug ovens and washing machines/dryers into standard sockets? Here, they're usually on 30-60A 240V circuits with special (NEMA 14) "range sockets." But in any case, it's not that tea is unpopular in the US because it's too hard to boil water. It's not as unpopular in Canada with the same system, and most ovens are electric anyway. I could actually get a kettle that draws twice as much as my current one, but it's just a 4-cup. I suspect people heat kettles on ovens more (if that's the case? It isn't up North here that I've seen) because they don't use them enough to justify an appliance for it, while a cheap metal kettle is only a couple of dollars.

Not really. In Canada, we use the same electrical power as the USA (1 phase, 120V, 60Hz) and I have an electric kettle at my place. It will boil in a couple of minutes - it just draws around 900W by way of 7.5A, where on a 240V 50Hz system, it'd use 900W by drawing 3.75A. [edit: Single phase, not 2-phase... oops]

To your point about game rentals, as a kid I spent most of my money renting games. Now there's nowhere to rent from really, as even Blockbuster is gone where I am. Sites like GameFly, when I last checked, don't cater to Canada, and most of the games I really like don't get English releases (which was actually what got me into console piracy, as I needed to mod my PSX to play purchased imports, but that also opened it to play copies.) It's also highly disingenuous to pick one example of a bug out of a long list, and then pretend that is the whole argument, but all through this thread I've seen you pretend arguments are not there when they do not serve you... For instance when Ethan put a large effort into making a very detailed explanation of his stance, including his stance on creator's rights, his consequentialist philosophy, intangibility of product, the right to protect the product, and cases where piracy could and could not be acceptable, and then you simply accused him of not explaining, and simply claiming it was fair use to pirate.

No. Actually it's been about a decade since I played GTA3, but until GTA4, the 3D series was so damn buggy I could only use it as a sandbox to fool around in. Missions would always be stopped by things like psychic police shooting me through walls, or running from the cops only to encounter a massive intersection pileup with chain reactions of exploding cars, and a whole host of other glitches. What I'm saying is that neither trailers, nor buzz among players, nor reviews left me sufficiently informed to know that the game was so buggy I considered it a write-off. If I had pirated it though, I could have made an informed decision.

Again, you must have a special power that no one else does then. An excellent example is the Grand Theft Auto 3 series. It looked great. It was popular. It even got good reviews. The trailers didn't mention that you can put a car into a garage, come back, and find nothing. Or that if you stand too close when the door opens, you might fall through the ground and land in the middle of a random street, dead. Or that in Vice City, your bullets would be stopped by the oversized hitboxes around objects (like shirts on a rack), that police could see and shoot you through solid objects like walls and billboards, or that in San Andreas, bicycles would often get stuck halfway underground, or that certain missions in 3 and SA would just glitch out and fail. I'm sure people buying Assassin's Creed weren't looking forward to watching guards hump walls, or riding horses that get twisted around bizarrely. Or that in Red Dead Redemption, that people would have to watch out for cougar people, ride donkey-faced women, do missions with a gunslinging coyote, or watch people fly around in the sky with knees bent, flapping their arms like birds. This list goes on forever. I've tried to be nice and diplomatic about it, but the only dead horse beating we're doing in this thread is trying to debate moral objectivism with moral absolutists. It stops the exploration of relative qualities and turns it into an endless loop of disagreement because an absolutist can not alter their opinion, will not give consideration to an argument, and cannot offer a plausible reason to see things their way, so it all just dissolves into "no it's not!" "yes it is!" It is certainly each person's right to believe what they believe for any reason at all, if any, in any way they choose. But in a philosophical discussion, the only arguments I can give any weight to are those that are philosophically (logically) sound, not simply those that feel right instinctively.

If a company sold you a car without letting you see or test drive it, you'd better believe there would be a law forcing dealerships to take returns - if there isn't already. If you happen to buy a PC game you didn't like? It's your fault for not asking your future self whether you liked it or not. Hell, even if you get a console game, you'd often lose half its worth in trade-in if the shrink wrap is off. You never hear "oh, it's too bad your new Ferrari accelerates slower than a Daihatsu Midget... Tell you what, you can trade it in for half of what you paid for it..." but you CAN buy a game that looks good in trailers and screenshots that's a buggy broken mess. No lemon law for games, sadly - but that's the thing - they're not just art assets that you subjectively like or dislike; they can also function better, worse, or not at all. Also, it's entirely possible (I'd say evident) that the consumer's rights and the property holder's rights do not mesh neatly. A customer could, as Ethan says, have the right to sample, while the owner has the rights to defend their product from misuse. (Though keeping in non-entitlement, I'd argue the consumer doesn't have the right to sample a game, but that the nature of the market makes it something of an imperative, right or no right.)

What I took from Yantelope's argument a few times was more that if, as a creator, you decide that it's ok to pirate your game, it's still wrong to encourage it if you've signed the rights to a publisher who does not allow that use. If that's correct, I can actually get behind that stance since it's violating if not the letter, then the spirit of the agreement terms. I wonder what the argument would be like if you weren't allowed to look at the car before you bought it because its likeness was strictly controlled IP. You'd have people smuggling the photos around trying to see what they're like while others argue that statistics are plenty to base a decision on. I'd just like to add that a lot of game trailers and ads in mainstream (not gaming press) media are also totally useless to tell what a game is like. For instance, the American Gears of War series TV spots are tastes of the feeling of an aspect of the game. That's a pretty distant abstraction of the game itself. It's like watching a movie trailer like this to find out what the movie is like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xvc8rIh8zkI

While we're speculating you could just as easily say that without piracy the Anime industry wouldn't be struggling. That's fair. It is speculation. However, I think more of the problems the industry faces is due to outsourcing and competition with wages in South Korea or China. It is hard to be competitive in modern Japan as animation pays too little to live on, but too much to make a project profitable for a great number of productions. I have however found an interesting read about how piracy led to the birth of the American anime market though. I can understand skepticism of the source, being firsthand, but this link explains how what may have been the first fansub group was also the first company to commercially translate anime for English audiences as a primary business model, calling it anime. That has led to untold billions of dollars flowing into the Japanese industry in licensing fees and royalties.

Actually, even though anime has been on American TV since the 1960s (50s?) most people in North America did not know what anime was until the late 1990s, and I suspect many still don't. Before Sailor Moon and Dragonball hit here, there was just some vague understanding that shows like Robotech or Astroboy weren't produced domestically - though many wouldn't have even thought of that. Beyond that, there were mostly just some vague stereotypes from a few people who thought it was all deviant porn. A vast number of pioneering anime fans, including some who started the current mainstream translation companies, only found out about it because of bootleg copies passed between fans that they may have seen at a friend's house, or often a university sci-fi club. I would even go so far as to say that given the economic troubles the industry has faced in the last decade, without the worldwide adoption increase due to piracy, there may not BE an anime industry today - or at least it would certainly be smaller and hard to compare to what we have now. (Though... personally I'd love to see it do less hyper-pandering to the niche that exploded in the last decade, that's another issue.) But I think this comes down to the basic definitions of morality again. (I believe) you see it as taking the product against the creators' will, and when not authorized to take it, so it is wrong. I see it as basically creating the global industry as it stands today, which has been hugely beneficial, so I'd even say it was a good thing. Morally good? Well, I don't think the fans were trying to build a market as much as they were trying to share something they found neat. Certainly good in terms of "doing good for the supposed victims." Of course, that too is a grey area as the underground distribution channels are so sophisticated now, Japanese have been known to acquire English fansubs that are barely reduced in quality from the commercial discs, turning philanthropic piracy into normal piracy. I cannot say with certainty whether the effect of piracy in the domestic Japanese market is overall beneficial or detrimental to it.

Ok - so then the immorality comes into play because the pirates are going against the will of the creators, or if nothing else, subverting the way the product was meant to be distributed? While my own views don't back that position, that does make sense and I respect that. I personally believe that for something to be immoral, it must cause harm, or be done with malicious intent or at least guilt. Still, I can see how it would be seen as wrong to take someone's art and instead of appreciating it as it was intended, to manipulate it for your own gain. If I am understanding you correctly here, I'm wondering how you feel about unauthorized music remixes or mashups? Would it be wrong to take a song and turn it into something it was never intended as, assuming it doesn't compete with the original commercially? I misunderstood then. When you said "A long time ago I quit this topic because someone just admitted "I know what I'm doing is wrong but I don't care". That's all I really cared to hear," I thought you'd basically washed your hands of the thread and decided to drop it.

Since I didn't mean it as an overt attack, I'll explain. It means that either You claim that you're fully willing to argue a subject, but when asked directly to do so, you quit the discussion. Or since you were talking about pirating then not buying, and I asked about pirating then buying, it would mean you are only willing to address the side of the argument that specifically strengthens your point, and will not consider any other scenarios, even when both are for piracy. What bothers me the most is that you've been going on about how it is immoral to pirate games at all, but have not given a good reason why it should be considered immoral (or I missed it skimming the first 26 pages?) Then right after you offer to get to the point, you quit. I suggested that because harm cannot be shown for the scenarios we're discussing (demo use) that it is not immoral, even if it is not morally good either. As far as I'm concerned, my argument stands unchallenged, and you've simply asserted that you are right. So can you please explain why you believe that any piracy is immoral? I don't see much objection to the talk of no harm. So far I can only guess it is because it is illegal, and you believe breaking the law is inherently immoral? At this point, we are debating your morality like many people debate "games as art" - that is, without defining the very thing we're debating - which is pointless.

Clearly he made up his mind before he even joined the discussion and simply needed to hear what he was looking for. It explains why he ignored so many arguments that were made in here... Anyway... I'm glad that's over. Maybe we can make some more progress now. Still, I find this pretty hypocritical:

This is good. This really starts to dig into the differences in our viewpoints so we can elucidate them. "Demoers feel entitled." This is not necessarily true. I for one do not think I am entitled to demo games with piracy. It is not owed to me, nor am I claiming that it is morally good. (Though I do claim that it has no material or financial detriment demonstrable or otherwise in the manner I do, or did it, so at best it is morally neutral.) I do not do it because I am entitled, but because I am able to, and rationally from my standpoint it makes more sense to only buy games that are worth my money. If I maintain intellectual honesty and do not use it to keep games I do not buy, then I'd argue it is not immoral, but it is not "right" either. This is not a justification; I need no such thing. If it was depriving the developers of money however, I would stop. "I don't know why but for some reason you claim that if you don't get enjoyment from your money you've been cheated. This is an entirely bogus concept." It is bogus, but it is not my concept. I have not been cheated in such a case, but I have wasted my money, which is a valuable resource, so I conserve it when it is logical, and not immoral to do so. "The basis of your argument is wholly and entirely based on your one omniscient claim of knowing that you would never buy the game if you couldn't demo it." Demoing is the case we've delved into at this point, and it has not been completely explored yet. Your claim that knowing whether or not we could know if we would have bought is impossible has been logically debunked and soundly rejected by everyone still participating apart from Thursday, yet you still cling to it to attempt to justify your own argument and reinforce your beliefs that we are arguing from a faulty viewpoint. Do you work for a living? Will you go to work next week? How do you know? Maybe you'll go on a shooting spree... or spontaneously buy a plane ticket and go on a tropical vacation without telling anyone! To posit that we are THAT unknowable to ourselves is absurd. It's entirely reasonable to assume that we will continue to follow well established existing patterns, especially when willfully doing so. Irrelevant, but yes. I had 3 games, one of which came with the system. Yes, I played hundreds, but also irrelevant. You're right - I don't demo everything. Yes, without piracy, you'd weigh your options and pick games you think you'd enjoy; this is also the case WITH piracy. I don't think anyone is saying that if they spend money on a game they didn't enjoy, their time was wasted, OR that their time was worth nothing - money was wasted. Time was spent evaluating the game to see if it was good or not - pirated or purchased. You seem to be the one most concerned with the waste of time in piracy, which is odd considering you'd spend almost as much time finding out if a game is good if you'd bought it - but you'd also have wasted time working to earn the money to buy it if it was bad. "Maybe the publishers owe you money because they made you spend your time on a product that didn't bring you joy? No, the fact is that by pirating a game you're getting entertainment that you didn't pay for." I covered this in my first post. On an individual level, you may justify to yourself that you are owed for a crappy game, but taking another game of your own volition is not morally justified because there are other factors at play, such as ripping off people who were not involved with the game that disappointed you. Taking the game that disappointed you for free is pointless, because it's not worth playing. It is however, more pointless to pay for a game that's not even good enough to play for free. Also, you are absolutely right that by pirating a game you are getting entertainment you didn't pay for. I don't believe that's in contention. "They're selling you the opportunity or an attempt at entertainment. That's not good enough for pirates and they take matters into their own hands." That's about right. They often are not even selling you a product, but the service of accessing a product. That isn't good enough, and pirates take matters into their own hands. This happens regardless of law, morality, ethics, justification and so forth. Personally, my intent in this thread is not to justify piracy, but to explore the finer points of these issues that are not clearly apparent. I have already made a strong case for purchasing games (new) when you are able to in my original post. "I'm fully willing to argue that even if you played a game that you didn't enjoy and you didn't pay for it then you're still doing something immoral. Your sense of entitlement is what's making you think it's not immoral." Excellent. I think this is the heart of most of our disagreement with you, though I can't speak for the others. I've said repeatedly, I have no sense of entitlement - that would imply that they owe me this, and they do not. I would like to know how it is immoral however, when it has not been shown to harm the developer, the publisher, or the industry, and developers/publishers have even stated publicly that it has helped them. This jibes with music industry analyses that showed how MP3 piracy boosted CD sales as well, if an analogy can be drawn between industries. (I think if any of these physical product analogies can stand, then an IP piracy of media product analogy can!) So then, how IS it immoral to pirate a game, try it, and then buy it, instead of simply not buying it? Or do you still reject the concept that one would not have bought it? It is clearly illegal, but that says nothing of morality. I think it's appropriate that I would respond to this too. Demon's Souls. It looks very interesting. It's generated a lot of buzz. If I did get hooked on it, it looks like it has the potential to be a favourite. On the other hand, it appears vastly more likely that I would feel some novelty for a half hour or so and then absolutely hate it. It wasn't worth my trouble to pirate since my PS3 and 360 are unmodded, so I will never buy this game unless I get a chance to try it some other way. Generally, I don't keep tabs on games like these because I just forget about them.

That doesn't mean that you wouldn't have bought if you hadn't pirated. You don't know the answer to that question. But I do know that in the real scenario, where I could buy, not buy, or pirate each game that I either would not have bought the game without trying it, given those choices, or was already going to buy it anyway, and did. Spinning it off into the extreme hypothetical case is simply grasping for an argument that's not relevant to the reality of the problem. There are many experiences in life which you cannot pirate, like a trip to six flags, and those things do not allow you pay only if you find that they were enjoyable. A trip to Six Flags has nothing to do with a discussion about IP piracy. We are talking about piracy, specifically that of video games - not sneaking into an amusement park. No one is advocating that, so this is ignoratio elenchi. This is the definition of nonsensical. They reason why you pirated it is because you already have an interest in it and a desire to play it so you have already placed value on it. It's interesting how you dismiss the most crucial points as nonsensical. Being interested in something and knowing whether or not you like it are quite different. Interest simply means that I am open to the possibility of liking it. It is not appropriate to launch ad hominem attacks simply because you do not understand that. Putting some small value on something is a far cry from deciding that it is worth $60 and the time it takes to explore it. Now this is simply attacking ad hominem. You're not actually making an argument here. If we're going to talk name calling you're the one starting it here and now. Actually, I thought that started when you were calling Dex and company fools with no concept of the value of time or money (when you yourself could not quantify the value.) Though I'd consider that more sophism, since it implied foolishness of anyone who did not agree with your position. Then as usual, you ignore the argument and pretend it is not there. Let me spell it out: If you are going to state that someone has no concept of the value of time or money, but not back it with anything at all, you are making an ad hominem attack, and furthermore, you give no reason that anyone should take your assertion seriously. Like much of what you have said in this thread, you are simply making assertions and hoping someone will agree with them. I am however, not making an ad hominem attack, as I explained the reasoning for what I stated, pointing out the flaw in your argument - not attacking your person. (It is curious though that you are the only one who seems to disagree with me, yet I've been downvoted right at the same time you've made your reply... hmm.) You can't guarantee enjoyment but your argument is simply a prop justification of morality for an illegal act. You ignore the argument yet again. In my first post I clearly made the distinction between personal attempts to justify piracy and how even if someone justifies it to themselves, it can still be immoral. At best, this is a straw man. At worst, you are using demagogy to try to assault my character to undermine my position. I suspect the truth is that you are not following the argument that you are participating in, but simply trying to speak over it and insist that you are right. Also, you are confusing trying and succeeding. I did not ask "who guarantees their enjoyment?" Again, ignoring the point. I saw that, and I don't deny it. It skirts the issue of the quantifiable value of time and money, but you are correct that it is trying to guarantee enjoyment through an illegal download. I don't think that is in question. What is less clearly defined is the ethical issue of the illegal download. I mostly buy new but there's actually no argument here because everything I do, buying used games is perfectly legal. Is you argument simply that the morality of your actions is purely based on the profit of a game developer? It would be shortsighted to assume there is only one issue affecting morality, but yes, my main argument here is that legal or not, neither used games nor piracy helps those who make the games, and it is hypocritical to claim a moral high ground in used games simply because it is legal. Legality and morality are separate issues, and being legal is not the same as being moral, otherwise all forms of corporate exploitation would be morally acceptable. It is quite ignorant to continually state there is no argument when you disagree, and shows a great deal of cognitive dissonance when you state there is no argument, and then immediately attempt to restate the argument. Now you're attacking a straw man. We're talking cognitive dissonance here not the unknowable future. What people think they will do and what they actually do are two different things. Am I? Where am I making a caricature of Thursday's argument to misrepresent what they are saying? I am simply pointing out that if you're going to stretch the logic so far as to say you can't know any hypothetical with certainty, so anything is possible, that discussing hypotheticals would be pointless because anything could be true. I find the suggestion quite absurd that a person may engage in a given pattern for decades, quite predictably, yet simply because they cannot state with absolute certainty every detail the future may hold, that they cannot reasonably assume they will continue to follow the pattern they always have. This is grasping to an absurd level. [edit: compacting quotes]