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SOPA and PIPA – Combating Piracy Stupidly

by Nojh on Jan.18, 2012, under Articles, Blog, Comics, Computers, Culture, Gaming, Internet, News, Opinions, Politics, Video Games

For those of you who have been paying attention, there is a list of useful links below. For those of you who haven’t, stay awhile and listen.

Actions being taken by the United State government will begin to fundamentally change the internet. Please read or watch the following to understand what is happening and if you want to take action about it.

[spoiler show="For those of you who would like my words on the subject. Click here."]The United States created the Internet. Despite fancy names like “World Wide Web” and “Global Communication System” and “Series of Tubes”, the internet is not managed by the world. It is managed by corporations on the united states and is subject, for the most part, to US Law. Even more so these days since a majority of the people connect to the internet via their local telecommunication company (phone, cable, satellite, etc).

That being said the internet has been pretty untamed for the last few years. Anybody could put or post up anything. Your information was only as secure as how well your protected it. It was effectively the digital wild west. Now, however, the internet is in so many homes, has become the focus of so much economic use (online shopping, movie and song streaming, video games, marketing) that this can’t last. Just like the trains that brought big business to the west, killing off the last place where your only real protection was the gun at your side, progress is going to try to tame the internet for the good of all, to the detriment of the few.

This is more or less inevitable. The new internet that will come into place will be highly regulated and likely more forcefully controlled by the big economic interests that want to use it to provide services to the world for money. When they do, innovation will become exceptionally difficult. Websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and the like, will still exist, but their successors likely won’t appear. Blogs, chat rooms, social networks, bulletin boards/forums system, may or may not survive in this new internet. Words like “National Defense”, ”Anti-Piracy”, “Copyright”, and others will be used to tightly regulate any site that tries to provide the public with ability to communicate and share.

Effectively the basis for the internet as we know it, sharing and communicating, will come to an end at the hands of capitalism and censorship.

The first steps for this have already begun. The United States government has two acts currently being discussed. The PROTECT IP act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Both have been getting a lot of news. As of right now, both look to be dying heavily under media massive campaigns set forth by various websites and organizations, despite the money being thrown at it by media and telecom corporations. The best example is today, February 18th, 2012, where websites all over the internet are “Blacking out” or putting up protest notices. You can read up more about what these acts do in the links below, but to summarize the acts allow and empower the US government to try to block or remove internet services (primarily websites) that infringe on copyright, without significant due process.

Now I am not a proponent of piracy. I make a living off of software development and I hope to some day make a living as an author. These are both areas that have notably high piracy rates, which concerns me. I would like to be compensated for my effort and work but I also feel that censoring the internet is not the answer. So for now, I protest.[/spoiler]

[spoiler show="For those of you who like videos. Click Here."]

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

[/spoiler]
Information:

Protesting Websites:

And many, many more, including you, hopefully.

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D&D 5th Edition: The Great Unifier?

by Nojh on Jan.16, 2012, under Articles, Entertainment, Gaming, Roleplaying Games

Wizards of the Coast, creators of the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons (3rd and 4th edition) have announced (via the New York Times and elsewhere) 5th edition D&D. They also announced, somewhat surprisingly, an extended public play testing, where in the general public will be able to attend events and publicly play test the game and provide feedback. This has caused all sorts of responses from naysayers, to the confused, to the cautiously hopeful. I fall into the latter.

Monte Cook, one of the more well-known roleplaying game designers and a prior designer on D&D 3rd edition and an announced designer for 5th edition, wrote up on article on his column on the D&D website.

Let me quote you some really interesting paragraphs:

“The goal here is to embrace all forms of the D&D experience and to not exclude anyone. Imagine a game where the core essence of D&D has been distilled down to a very simple but entirely playable-in-its-right game. Now imagine that the game offered you modular, optional add-ons that allow you to create the character you want to play while letting the Dungeon Master create the game he or she wants to run. Like simple rules for your story-driven game? You’re good to go. Like tactical combats and complex encounters? You can have that too. Like ultra-customized character creation? It’s all there.”

“Second—and this sounds so crazy that you probably won’t believe it right now—we’re designing the game so that not every player has to choose from the same set of options. Again, imagine a game where one player has a simple character sheet that has just a few things noted on it, and the player next to him has all sorts of skills, feats, and special abilities. And yet they can still play the game together and everything remains relatively balanced. Your 1E-loving friend can play in your 3E-style game and not have to deal with all the options he or she doesn’t want or need. Or vice versa. It’s all up to you to decide.”

Those are some serious goals. I know because I’ve worked on helping to design games to meet goals like that before and it is difficult. If they can pull it off it’ll be an awesome game. There are a lot of complex problems with goals like this. Particularly in how to present the rules to make the game easy for entry-level players. Modular systems leads to complexity. Additionally this kind of system could lead to a scary route for marketing and sales. Will they sell entire game with sufficient rules to be able to play any edition or will some of the rules be handed out in a video game “DLC” like fashion, where we pay $2-$20 bucks for each rule module? I don’t doubt Wizards wants to create the game everybody wants to play but I also don’t doubt Hasbro, Wizard’s parent company, wants to make the serious dough.

So I’m still cautiously hopeful and I plan on attending the play test in order to help, and maybe practice my own game designs kills a bit more. If you’re interested in joining int he play tests as well there is a sign up link at the end of Monte Cook’s article.

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