Yeah, we could call it, I dunno... Difficulty levels maybe? Yeah, that's the future of gaming.

What's your opinion on downloading ripped movies you already own, because ripping a DVD is (arguably) illegal and in some cases more time consuming than actually downloading?

Ripping a DVD actually has more than a snowball's chance in hell of being considered fair use. Restrictions on distribution are part of the heart of copyright law, and offering ripped movies to "only people that own the DVD" is ridiculous on its face. No one seriously believes that, even if limiting distribution to those who only own the DVD was the actual intent, that it's even slightly feasible to design a system that proves only those people could do it. Sure, people do download the movie because they don't want to take the time to rip it, but not a single person I know that downloads movies off the Internet does that. I didn't when I used to. It's a convenient lie. It was a convenient lie for the old-console ROM sites before Nintendo's virtual console for Wii. If you actually believe that this kind of theoretically high minded activity comprises the bulk of content downloads, you need your head examined.

What's your opinion on downloading cracks for the games you own, just because DRM makes you want to cry and requiring the original DVD on the drive is JUST PLAIN STUPID?

What's plain stupid is downloading cracks that might have the gods know what buried in them. The kind of trust that theoretically intelligent people place in the cracker community is insane. I have friends who regularly download games they haven't bought and play them with cracks. They refuse to buy the games, whether they can afford them or not. Their PCs are also among the most spyware/virus/malware infested piles of crap I've ever had the misfortune to try and clean up. I don't bother helping them any more because they'll only go and screw the computer up in a few days time.

The real answer is to not buy the game if it has DRM you can't abide. No video game is worth the hassle, no matter how good. People have survived for millennia without Spore, or Fallout 3, or whatever. You will too. Show some self control. Pirating the games is playing into the hands of DRM proponents. Buy games that meet your standards. There are some out there, no matter how strict your standards are.

How about people who want to acquire a work that there is no legal alternative for them to buy?

I do this plenty enough, and it basically comes down to the fact that being prosecuted over it is next to impossible, as long as you stay within the unwritten rules. Like not going more than 10MPH over the speed limit is going to keep you reasonably safe from getting a speeding ticket, pretty much everywhere I've driven in the US. Abandonware that actually is abandoned (that label gets slapped on pretty damn quick these days for quite a lot of things I can still buy easily) has no one to sue you, by definition. Lots of people conveniently miss the fact that some abandonware gets found again. I haven't seen Nintendo or Sega ROM sites evaporate very fast post-Vitural Console. Foreign TV shows (anime is the most prominent example) is still illegal, but unless it's a multinational that owns it, they have to come over to your jurisdiction and sue you, and that's prohibitively expensive. Most of them (at least in the anime space) also get the fact that it helps build a market, especially in the short term. Naruto and Bleach would have been a shadow of their current popularity if it wasn't for the fansub action they saw. And lots of shows will just never see the light of day are just not worth sending the lawyers after people over. Most of the big fansubbers have a kind of detante with the production companies, a takedown notice gets it taken down from the above-board sites (since it usually means a localized version is coming).

Actually, the reason it wouldn't be fun anymore is because every single in-game action would be instantly and irrevocably boil down to money. You don't really need a whole lot of trust to deal with people in a non-legitimate-RMT game. Sure, plenty of people don't care about legitimacy, but enough people do that you don't have to chew your fingernails off nightly in worry that your guild leader is going to run off with the guild bank. It might happen, and does happen often enough, but it's not a big deal. It's just a game, even if some people sell the pieces they have to other players.

When there is real, hard currency, simple-to-obtain value associated with that high-demand epic BoE ring that dropped last night during a raid, it becomes a very VERY different situation. Especially in tough economic times, that small database entry could feed me for quite some time. The corrupting influence it exerts would be staggering. The cultural shift would be staggering. If WoW suddenly legitimized and brought in-house RMT, I'm good enough at the game that I would probably use it as a source additional income, but it would stop being fun very, very fast. It'd start being a game like the stock market, and that's not an especially fun one.

PIFTS = Personal Internet Firewall Tracking Service?

The only real value you get from using Amazon instead of Gamestop to trade games in is that you can use the proceeds on non-game items. IE, trade in my games and console and buy a Kindle, or a rice cooker, or whatever. Even then, you'd stand to make far more money if you sold those games on Amazon, and that cash can be used anywhere, not just Amazon. Perhaps they're seeing a market from people who don't trust Marketplace buyers and/or sellers. I know I was turned way off of the whole concept of participating as a seller after dumping a collection about a year ago, when the bulk of the buyers tried to talk me down on price after the sale, or refused payment until I went through the motions on a dispute, which took forever.

Amazon is probably just making a very modest bet on long odds that this is going to turn into a real market for them. A third party partner of Amazon is managing the operation, so Amazon's outlay is probably extremely modest. Development time to implement the web interface, postal systems, linking to the partner's internal systems, etc, but Amazon has quite the head start in all those areas. I expect they just skim some profit off the top as their fee for the use of their name and storefront. If it all falls down it's the partner that eats the bulk of the cost, not Amazon.

It's become part of the buzzword bingo of the games industry, and on the whole the concept has become tarnished by publishers and developers trying to lift what they can from GTA3 (the free-roaming, side quest and hidden stuff laden setting) into their games as a shortcut to their own success. Why not relabel the entire RPG genre as "open world" games? The only effective difference between GTA3 and Fallout 2, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VII, or WoW is the combat system and camera angle (and even the latter isn't the case anymore). What is the real, effective difference between missions in GTA-and-friends, and quests from any console or PC RPG? What's the effective difference between hunting down all the sidequests and extra easter eggs in and hunting down all the hidden items and stunts in GTA3 and its children?

So why don't we just call them action RPGs, because that's really what they are when you boil it down. Very good and interesting twists on the action RPG concept, certainly, but not all that different really. So if you want to make a good action RPG we know what works and what doesn't. Good story and dialogue, even if there isn't much of it. Responsive controls. Lots to do. There are lots of examples out there. Zelda: A Link to the Past. Sid Meier's Pirates!. Secret of Mana. The Dark Alliance console games. I could go on, but you get the idea.

Most of the pack of so-called open world games have few if any of that. Crackdown was an entirely plot free collection of street races, roof races, and scavenger hunts. Assassin's Creed was a gigantic scavenger hunt and parkour simulator set in the time if the Crusades, with an absolutely horrible story. The "True Crime" games were bad action games stuck in an utterly pointless virtual real-life cityscape. Anything with a really big room you can run around in for a bit is called an "open world" which is ludicrous.

I own an iPhone and my main hobby is video gaming. I thought when I first got the iPhone that it was going to be a great platform for games, and for some types of games it is pretty good. Puzzle games work well, even "action puzzlers" like Monkey Ball, Topple, or the innumerable wooden-box Labyrinth games which use the accelerometer work well. Turn-based strategy, as well as card and board games are a great fit for the touch screen.

Most other kinds of games (action, platformer, rpg) fail miserably on the platform. It doesn't take well to button mashers, and the multitouch isn't good enough for anything with any twitch required. I've tried quite a number of demos, and nothing really works well enough for me to shell out any money for the full versions. I'm not one of those people that thinks the lack of a physical qwerty keyboard on the iPhone is a bad thing, but games are one are where discrete buttons are a must. I play WoW on a Mac, and I tried for about 30 minutes to play with the buttonless "Super Mouse" with different pressure sensitive areas, and it was a nightmare. It's far too easy to hit the wrong area on the iPhone screen and walk your character off a cliff or into the scything blades of doom. Give me my PSP or DS with discrete buttons and/or stylus any day of the week over it for most console-style games.

The only applications on my desktop/laptop that I use on a daily basis are Apple Mail, Firefox, iTunes, and Adium. I'm not a major hunter for new cool utilities or applications (partly as a holdover from using Windows, unless I REALLY need what an application does, I don't bother with it) but even then that's 60 other things in my Applications directory that see little if any use (though a fair few of them are pre-installed iApps I never would bothered to have installed in the first place, and other 'built in' stuff). There are some of those that I paid money for (though they're all games).

I will never understand how you can have full confiance in someone you never meet and with who you never shared a beer, but well, maybe it is just me...

I'll never understand why people think they know someone merely because they've met them or drank with them in a bar. Being too trusting didn't become an issue just at the launch of the Internet. Not by a long shot.

What ho-hum, run-of-the-mill RTS games are they referring to? Starcraft? Warcraft III? C&C? Warhammer? Just because those games don't use 360 Pad controllers?

While I agree that this is pretty much a worthless fluff piece, you're failing to actually read what they wrote. Those RTS games you names are NOT "the pack", they're the influential A list (whether you like them is another story, two of the games you mentioned I don't think are particularly impressive). Empire at War, the non-movie-licensed Lord of the Rings RTS, Age of Empires 3, Warlords Battlecry, Rise of Legends and many more B and C list RTSes that I've played and thrown away, and a lot more that I didn't buy. Many of them are quite serviceable games, some have a minor devoted following, but they are most certainly still "the pack" and if Halo Wars is merely serviceable, then it's going to end up being a really big dud, despite the pull the Halo brand has with many Xbox gamers. Think Onimusha Tactics or Dynasty Warriors Tactics as the kind of pitfalls Halo Wars has to avoid.

No, the ethical option would be to do your research on what your buying, and if it has strictures you aren't willing to live with, you don't buy it.

Piracy != theft, but just because it isn't theft doesn't mean it isn't as ethically incorrect as stealing an apple from a fruit stand. It also doesn't mean that the DRM is ethically correct either. Two wrongs are two wrongs, neither of them becomes right at any point in the discussion.

The Darkness Falls dungeon, as well as the "dragon zones" in the old world, and the underground pvp dungeons in the old frontiers were also free and added to the old world, though they didn't really call them expansions at the time.

the same thing goes on on news aggregator sites all the time

Depends on what you mean by "the same thing". First off, Boston.com is not a news aggregator. They are a news generator. They make money selling ads because theoretically someone wants to see the content they generate (and up until now at least, the Boston Globe staff has produced quite a lot of important news that people want to read, the whole expose on presidential signing statements was broken by a Globe reporter). The main problem here is that the people that run Boston.com decided that they have the right to sell ads next to content that they do not own, nor have a contractual right to sell ads next to.

Google News (since it's the only news aggregator I use) sells no ads next to any page under the news.google.com subdomain that I've been able to find. Yes I just looked. No ads on the news search pages, no nothing, not even when I turned javascript on for google.com. That does 2 things that favor Google in this regard. First off, they aren't directly profiting from the link, and this preserves a lot of goodwill on the part of the people they link to, so they're less likely to be viewed as a direct financial parasite and sued. Secondly, it's a lot more likely that a fair use claim is going to be upheld in the event that someone decides to sue (remember, no use is fair use unless a court rules that it is), if it even gets to that point, since Google has set up systems for you to exclude your site from index/display on anything Google if you happen to think they're the devil and a thief.

...and there is no one to hear it, does it make a noise?

He didn't, I moved on, and from what I've heard of people who have tried running service shops catering to businesses, its a damn rough game to be in these days. Businesses will pay for lawyers and accountants to come in and help as necessary but they seem to think that computer people should be paid the same rates as the janitorial service.

That depends on the business you're dealing with. We charge $90/hour, and in general the people who you've got to wrestle payment from are the big businesses (who have recently instigated payment policies that have us waiting 6 months or more to get paid) and regular Joe Schmoes (who on the whole treat you like you're stealing their money, and do things like "I want to buy 1 hour of your service time, will that fix the problem I've vaguely described to you over the phone that could be damn near anything?"). Small companies can't afford to hire their own actual IT, and they enjoy getting paid too, so they tend to be pretty forthcoming about payment themselves. The ones that aren't don't get their computers fixed until they pay.