Great games blog

An interesting article from Game Politics (hey that’s the 2nd one today!) citing a website called Divorce Online. Divorce Online state that 15 percent of divorces can be attributed to game addiction.

From GP:

According to a press release issued by Divorce Online, an examination of 200 unreasonable behavior petitions filed by women using its service between January – April of this year found that 15 percent complained that their husbands were happier playing video games than they were paying attention to them.

Once again I must express my skepticism.

And I’ll start by saying that I do believe that there are some legitimate cases of game addiction. Some people do have problems with handling their compulsions, and we see addicts of all different kinds: Gambling addicts, sex addicts, Television Addicts, Chocolate Addicts… okay that last one cannot be an addiction. Something so good cannot possibly be addictive.

But as proportions of the overall population these people are a fairly small percentage, and surely could not account for such a large percentage of divorces.

So let’s look at the important part of that quote again.

…complained that their husbands were happier playing video games than they were paying attention to them.

That’s the crux right there.

Perhaps the marriage was already bad, and the respondants husbands simply wanted a distraction from an already unhappy situation. I’m not married, but if I were and my marriage was unreconcilable, I might spend time away from the other half too.

In days gone by, husbands and wives in bad marriages did spent time ignoring each other. There’s nothing new in that. The only thing that has changed here is that there are now distractions like World of Warcraft and other games for one of the parties to escape to. Rather than heading down the pub, or escaping to the toolshed, these guys spend some time in WoW. Rightly or wrongly, these husbands are retreating from their marriages, just like husbands in bad marriages have done for centuries.

I also suspect that even if the gaming time were reasonable and non-compulsive, there would be some complaints about it from unhappy wives. These would get incorporated into the ‘official’ figures and be reported as we have just seen.

So my skepticism remains. I don’t believe that gaming is addictive, or is causing the break down of marriage. Remember correlation is not causation.

Divorce: 15% Due To Game Addiction

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The long time thorny issue of used game sales has reared its head once again. Game Politics has a post about this from a slightly different perspective; how used game sales are driving the development of online multiplayer games. (I thought everyone blamed that on piracy.) However, this topic always raises the same question in my mind.

We all know that the game companies don’t like it because they’d like everyone to buy a new copy. That’s fair enough. Calling it piracy as some do though? Well that’s a different matter. And it’s wrong. In the US and Australia, consumers have the legal right to resell property they have legally purchased. If it’s legal, it is not piracy.

The game companies and their representatives however claim that games are different. My question is how are they different?

Games are software. So are DVDs. A lot of modern DVDs come with special software encoding, some have games on the disk, and all the menus and special features are software driven. And I can legally give away or sell my DVD. I can buy used DVDs from the local video store.

Games have stories. So do books. I can borrow books from libraries. I can also borrow games from some stores. There are a gazillion used book stores; you can find them in any city. I can give a book to a friend.

Games are art. Once again, I can buy second hand art anywhere. Go to the local trash-and-treasure market and you’ll find all kinds of art for sale, most of it ‘used.’

Games are copyright. Sure. So are all the above. Books, movies, even artworks are covered under copyright. They are all legally available as second hand products. Copyright only covers copying a protected item without permission, and even then there are exceptions given under fair use provisions.

Games are licenced. This is the rub. A lot of companies sell their games under licence, many of which only require  the consumer to open the package without a signature. These licences are supposed to form contracts with the end user, and by opening the package the user often gives up some rights. However, some rights cannot be given away. Depending on which state and country you live in the provisions for re-selling may be one of those rights that can’t be given away.

But the licence issue is a sticky one. What’s to stop a book publisher putting fine print in the copyright section of a book limiting your right to re-sell or give away the book after the original purchase? What’s to prevent a DVD publisher somehow locking a DVD to the original purchaser and claiming that the DVD is licenced only to you?

It seems that consumers are slowly having their rights whittled away under dubious licences.

Why shouldn’t consumers be allowed to sell their old games, what makes games so special under the law?

Why Are Games Different?

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Chinese Prisoners Forced To Farm WoW Gold

I wonder how much longer that game developers like Blizzard, and gold buyers, are going to keep supporting slavery.

To be fair, Blizzard are one of the companies that do a lot to ban gold farmers and sellers, but sometimes I wonder exactly how much they really care about gold sellers. After all, each time a gold seller is banned, they simply open a new account. Often using a stolen credit card. It works in their favor.

It’s kind of like the relationship that governments have with tobacco companies. The gov pass laws to ban smoking in public places, they ban ciggy advertising, and make it hard for the tobacco companies to operate. But they never come right out and ban cigarettes because they make a huge amount of tax revenue on the sale of cigarettes. The revenue gained outweighs the cost to the health system.

I figure it’s the same with Blizzard. There are costs to allowing the gold sellers to operate; annoyed subscribers, customer service calls, and hacked and plundered accounts. But the benefit is a continual positive cash flow from banned farmers and sellers. The revenue gained outweighs the cost to the playerbase.

If Blizzard were serious about dealing with gold farmers they could do a number of easy things, including.

• Remove the ability to send gold by mail. Instead provide an option to transfer between characters on a single account. Or perhaps just let each character gain its own gold. After all WoW is technically a Role Playing Game.
• Ban players who buy gold. Full Stop. Most players would never contemplate risking their account if they knew Blizzard would ban them. There would be some difficulties with this simply because of false positives, but the first step would be to ban the most obvious gold buyers.
• Disallow the transfer of gold between players; perhaps make gold BoP, and only allow transfer via the auction house and cap buy it now amounts to some multiple of the average price for the item being traded.

So do you support slavery?

If you buy gold, you are.

If You Buy WoW Gold You Are Supporting Slavery

Noah over at Channel Massive has some words to say about the news that Age of Conan is going to go free to play, and more to the point, how Funcom are planning to push the game as unrated. I wrote about Conan going F2P last night, but missed the point on the lack of rating. That might have been the lateness of the hour of writing.

Noah makes a few good points about this strategy, including the fact that by unrating the game, Funcom is effectively cutting themselves off from all but the digital distribution channels. At first glance this seems like a bad strategy, but I wonder actually how many boxed copies of AoC are still being sold. My guess is that it’s not very many, and that the digital sales already vastly exceed the box sales.

The other point Noah raises is:

But Funcom has put itself into a dangerous place beyond how the game’s distributed. If this new version just adds a few more fatality animations and more T&A, misinformed media are likely to be the only ones jumping on it, adding fuel to the fire that games are a corrupt, dehumanizing experiences for everyone (especially the children! Oh, the children!).

I’m not sure this move is all that dangerous. Sure, there is some risk here, but there is probably more reward. We all know how the news media, especially types like Faux News, love to jump on the Helen Lovejoy, won’t somebody please think of the children bandwagon when it comes to anything new. Politicians know this all too well, and since they love to be seen so much they love to climb aboard this particular wagon as well.

There is no danger that Age of Conan will be banned due to its content. Politicians have tried to ban games from being sold to minors in brick and mortar stores and they haven’t yet succeeded because the courts see this as an unconstitional attack on free speech. It would be nigh on impossible to succeed in bringing in a law that banned a game being distributed over the Internet.

The thing is, making this much noise about how evil such and such a game is generally doesn’t have the kind of effect that the naysayers would like. They want parents and lawmakers to come down hard and ban the games they don’t like. The fact is most people have more than half a brain and know that games are really pretty harmless (no reputable, unbiased, or peer approved study has ever found a link between games and violence) or they simply don’t care.

All the jumping up and down about games simply advertises the game to people who would like to play it, and they buy. Even some pretty terrible games, and I don’t mean morally terrible, have experience great sales even though they didn’t deserve them.

Noah continues:

Honestly, the “unrated” strategy seems like a desperate swipe for short-lived notoriety, something Turbine’s Lord of the Rings Online and D&D Online didn’t need to be successful after transitioning to F2P. Can’t Age of Conan be meritable just for going F2P and adding a new expansion?

That’s true, but LoTRO was a great game from the start, and DnD Online had the advantage of being one of the first western games to go F2P gaining a lot of publicity in the process. Age of Conan suffered from a lack of content at launch and the subsequent bad publicity, and while the game itself has been vastly improved Funcom don’t appear to have recovered from that launch.

By relaunching the game, and perhaps getting some free advertising from the Helen Lovejoy’s for AoCs unrated extreme and sexy content, Funcom is looking to give the game a large initial boost.

The biggest risk Funcom faces is that noone will take notice of the media and politicians, and not play the game.

Age Of Conan Unrated

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