Discuss the massively-multiplayer home defense game.
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i think the american 'right to bear arms' is a completely hilarious and obviously out-dated sentiment
The question isn't 'why should people have guns?', the relevant question is: does it strike you as morally acceptable to use threats of force against peaceful people to take their things? For me the answer is clearly no.
Consider also that the statistical data on gun ownership gives no clear picture of its correlation to homicide. For instance, taken globally, gun ownership rates have a weak _negative_ correlation with homicide. Consider the possibility that on net, the disincentive for attackers that armed targets present is more significant than the negative effects of having more civilian gun ownership--in terms of the total number of homicides. See my post on gun control agnosticism for more.
To echo what liq3 said: 'when seconds count, the police are only minutes away'. And even if police are close by when you're attacked, they have no legal duty to protect you as an individual, whether you're being raped or murdered. Bear in mind too that if 'unrest' gets bad enough, the police will withdraw from your neighbourhood completely. Consider the Korean business owners who successfully protected their shops with firearms from their rooftops during the LA riots when the police decided to stay away.
Bear in mind also that the state is by far the biggest killer of its citizens in the 20th century (dwarfing private murder rates). And that democide of an armed population is much harder than exterminating an unarmed one.
None of this strikes me as 'hilarious'.
what makes guns special (and incomparable to cars) is that they are meant and designed to kill.
It's not so clear cut. If I were a gun manufacturer i'd protest that my product's prime purpose is not to kill, but to dissuade attackers--that's the use I have in mind. Of course the ability of my product to act as a deterrent depends on its ability to cause serious bodily damage, but that damage is not what it's _for_, that's not it's primary purpose.
I see no way to refute this hypothetical gunsmith. His claim that 'guns are meant to deter attackers' is as plausible as your claim that 'guns are meant to kill'.
To claim that any object is 'for' a single thing is imo to commit the teleological fallacy. There's no such thing as purpose in the sense intended here--there are simply things that people happen to do with objects, and ways that people think about those objects. So I think this is a very shaky foundation from which to argue that guns belong to an entirely separate category of object to cars.
One more: The Insidious Game Mechanics of Defender
http://georgeoughttohelp.tumblr.com/pos … f-defender
Hi Jason, thanks. Yes I made the 'George' series of videos with the blue characters. They're collected on one page for convenience here: http://www.georgeoughttohelp.com.
re the 'schools are important!' kind of conversation: absolutely! I've found that it's very difficult to get people to appreciate the violence involved in taxation, because there are a few levels of abstraction involved, and its something you need to direct your attention at for a little longer, in order to see that, than most champions of the state are prepared to do. I made 'You can Always Leave' in part to help communicate this argument so I don't have to keep typing it out.
I've found the phrase 'under the ultimate threat of deadly force' to be useful as a way to characterise the demands made via laws in general. Some of these laws, tax laws for instance, are designed to modify the behaviour of _peaceful_ people (those not violating the property rights of others)--that, for me, is problematic.
If you're ever looking for good resources that talk about these traditions of thought I've personally learned a lot from http://www.mises.org, also http://c4ss.org/ and http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/ often have some excellent writing too.
I hope the unfair responses to your games and statements don't get you down, and keep up the great work.
Thanks. I ended up using a grab from that video. Heres the article: http://georgeoughttohelp.tumblr.com/pos … nt-critics
And one more article here, this time talking about the 2nd half of Kunzelman's hit piece, where he's (imo) making mistakes about Rohrer's ideological assumptions rather than mistakes about how the game plays (NB. long):
Quoted in full because win. Wow, the guy really has no internal hypocrisy alarm bell.
Sorry, I don't want to hijack this thread, but browsing through Kunzelman's blog, I just can't help myself.
Look at some of the criticisms of TCD while considering that the same criticisms were not lodged at Infinite. [potential spoilers]
Some obvious issues with this setup: women and children are property that are essentially resources in the male-on-male violence that makes up the game; this is yet another example of the “dadification” of games where you play a grizzled man who has to do what he has to do, which is invariably killing other people
Sound familiar? In Infinite, you play a dad, essentially a grizzled white dude who "has to do what he has do". Yup, kill a bunch of people. The main NPC is a young girl, treated as property, and mechanically speaking a resource for the player.
Now, listen to Kunzelman heap praise, with no apparent sarcasm, on Red Dead Redemption (emphasis mine):
I appreciate RDR because it doesn’t dodge the question of why the main character is doing horrible things like killing fifty citizens and then razing their town. It wasn’t because he was suffering from psychosis or because he was being mind controller or because *finger wag* the plaaaaayer expects it to be this way, you naughty player. It is because the most important thing in his life is the people he cares about and he is both capable of and willing to do anything, anything, in order to make sure that those people are safe.
Ridiculous.
Interestingly, he has a policy that he will play any game someone buys him if anyone wants to take him up on it: http://thiscageisworms.com/2013/02/17/n … -about-it/
Thanks. Here's a great piece also just published with a coincidentally similar title to mine, it's very good i think: 'The Castle Doctrine and its Critics' http://imaginaryplaymates.squarespace.c … itics.html
I posted an article in response to the one that tells people not to play TCD, and gets a bunch of stuff wrong:http://georgeoughttohelp.tumblr.com/pos … nt-critics
Hi all. I'm writing a blog post that talks about The Castle Doctrine and I mention the fact that players sometimes build tombs to house the dead bodies of their wives. Do any of you have screengrabs of nice tombs that I could use? Thanks in advance!
"All un-dead and un-damaged objects spring back into their starting state for the next robber."
That's the part that was causing me confusion, thanks.
This is almost exactly what i'd done, except the animal wasn't killed, but 'wedged' in a part of the map it couldn't get out of. The animal was still in the wedged position when the next robber arrived, but the switch that the animal had tripped had reset. This was unexpected to me.
A robber reached the vault in my house, and in the process caused a toggle switch to change from on to off. But when the next robber arrived, the switch was back to its initial position of on again. This was unexpected to me, I expected the switch to stay off until I'd rebuilt the house again. Is this normal behaviour?
Playing for a long time without dying is certainly possible.
I don't want players to be prevented from wantonly vandalising, i'd like for that choice to be there. But i don't want them to respawn deliberately in order to get tools in order to vandalise--since this makes destroying a strong and carefully thought-out house very easy--which significantly reduces the incentive to build houses like that, which makes the game far less entertaining.
Ah, that's interesting to know. Thanks.
Without having thought it through very carefully, once option that came to mind for us when this happened was that the amount of tools a robber could bring to rob a house would have a price limit which was affected by the loot currently available in that house. In conjunction with this, perhaps tool selection would happen after selecting a house to rob. Though it's not easy to think of a plausible 'realistic' reason for any such limit, and it would likely limit some 'legitimate' behaviours too.
My brother and I have been playing The Castle Doctrine over the last week, collaboratively using one license. It's been great fun. With a lot of trial and error we finally managed to build up a house that wasn't easy to rob from.
The last time we logged in the house had been destroyed. Watching the security tapes we saw that back when the house was intact, one robber 'Christopher S. Haskins', attempted a few robberies in a row, finally dying in one of our traps.
The next few robberies were carried out by a series of different robbers carrying exactly $2000 worth of tools each time, even though our safe had dramatically less money in it than that at the time. Each robber deliberately destroyed many sections of wall even though the path to the safe was clear.
It looks to us very much as though the one player who was killed in the trap restarted many times with the intention of destroying our house. We thought the game had a system in place to prevent this kind of abuse, but if so it looks as though the player found a way around it (multiple accounts?).
The possibility of this happening in the future has reduced the incentive for us to keep playing at the moment. We think it's a great game and we'll be watching its progress with interest.
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