While DRM issues are becoming more and more publicized, it's still very unlikely that your average Joe is going to forgo the latest shoot-em-up or whatever just to try to make a point about DRM.
Unless it makes their PC stop working properly. DRM or no DRM, they might become very hesitant to buying PC games.
The "video" word is somewhat limiting, so let's use the term "electronic entertainment". I think auditory cues, like ambient noise, sound effects and tactile feedback, in addition to voices or TTS, could be interesting alternatives. At the very least is a challenge in game design.
I suppose stereo headphones or surround sound could help to create immersion.
I always thought how sad it is that people with certain disabilities can't experience gaming, even thought it wouldn't take much to make those experiences available to them. In this specific case it isn't so easy, but I can't see why there aren't adventure games for blind people, as an example.
Better keep looking.
Why in the world would anyone want to buy that, even if it was cheap?
Who thought those taxidermized squirrels would be a good idea?
Be glad that lord Steve still allows you to surf for porn.
You wrote "cannot be purchased".
What you meant to write is "cannot be as easily pirated by people who don't know what they're doing".
Emphasis mine.
With a google search and a little effort, most people can bypass almost any DRM*. Yet they still cause inconveniences to legitimate players. Some time ago, I had a problem of unstable connection. During this time I couldn't be sure if I would be able to play (single-player) the games I legitimately purchased, since if I were online during a connection problem and tried to start a game/Steam, it wouldn't let me. Even in offline mode some games would refuse to play, which is even worse, since my main gaming equipment is a laptop and it doesn't always have a connection available. At the same time I had games from other places(GamesGate and such) that just worked once activated.
Currently I don't have problems with my connection or Steam anymore, but I can see why a legitimate game buyer would be annoyed. Maybe even more annoyed than a pirate, since they paid for it. Steam might be one of the less inconvenient DRM systems, but it is far from perfect.
* The ones that can't be bypassed tend to be the most inconvenient for legitimate players.
Feel free to ignore it then, but I still think to say the reason of it is that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship sounds too much like a conspiracy theorist rambling to be something I could take seriously, especially because it's from a fictional book. Even if they could create such hysteria, how could they be so sure it wouldn't backfire and make even more people oppose them. The would be going against one of the primary urges of every human being
They do have a problem with overpopulation. They aren't capable of managing the sexual life of their entire population and it wouldn't be any good if they simply convinced people to stop having sex(even if they discovered a way to do so), since they could end up having a population decline problem instead. People take time to change(and often avoid it). You can't flip a switch and change the entire population's mentality instantly, regardless of what 1984 says.
I said I can't see any other reason, but it doesn't mean there aren't others. I just think that Orwell's fictonal works are taken more seriously than they should, since their explanations not necessarily apply to reality. In this specific case, I don't think that the quoted explanation applies.
I think Orwell is taken far more seriously than it should. His works serve as a warning of some kind, but hyperbole is strongly present that I can't see why so much people rely on what they say so much. Other than stating that "Power is not a means; it is an end.", everything else you quoted is either obvious, an exaggeration or downright misleading.
"There was a direct intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy." Well, correlation is not causaton. The same polygamy-allower Middle East religion that you mentioned often shows to be incredibly strict.
The only reason I can see for China trying to control sex is because of overpopulation.
But that doesn't mean that Flash is necessary for normal websites.
I never said that, but I did say this:
Flash is often misused, but it doesn't mean it doesn't have legitimate uses.
Some people seem to be too eager to see the death of flash, but once flash is gone, the misusers will just move to another tool. And it won't be necessarily better.
Flash benefits are not limited to games and animations, but also things like the Aviary web apps, Pixlr and others, which don't have HTML5 alternatives as good as them yet.
Or perhaps you are missing the point that HTML5 is not adequate for every purpose, at least not yet. It's specs are yet to be finished, there are divergences in the implementation among browsers, it doesn't perform as well and it doesn't have good authoring tools for designers and such. Flash is often misused, but it doesn't mean it doesn't have legitimate uses.
I also want HTML5 to replace Flash, but it's too early to ditch Flash yet. HTML5 isn't mature enough to fully substitute Flash. It wouldn't even be beneficial to drop Flash before HTML5 becomes more capable.
And like wtmoose said below, there is nothing stopping them from substituting Flash ads with HTML5 ads.
Feel free to mod me down.
I was going to argue, as usual, how there are legitimate uses for flash, like animation, games and webapps, that HTML5 either doesn't have adequate authoring tools or isn't mature enough to fully replace. But since even the stated intention is to use this for displaying ads, I agree that it is bad news.
Oh well. Since I use adblockers, I don't have much to worry. Hopefully it will have some better uses.
It seems to be very slow to load. I wonder how it works with Flash preloaders, and to what extent it supports ActionScript.
I have played through all of them. Every single one is undeniably preachy and cleary centered around the theme. Their mistake is not being more subtle, because few people would go out of their way for playing a preachy game. People actually involved in a abusive relationship would probably actively avoid it, by of the abuser. Even if they were trying to escape, they would probably seek help, not play games. The only way it could help someone is by making the friends of the victims aware, but even then they would have to choose to play a game about it, which is somewhat unlikely to happen.
The winning one, "Grace's Diary", in a very short visual novel with nice aesthetics(IMO) abou a girl trying to prove to that her friend that she is in an abusive relationship and to convince her to seek help. It isn't very interactive, but visual novels don't tend to be.
The second one, "A Decision of Paramount Importance", is kind of interesting. It's about a victim of a previous abusive relationship investigating his new boyfriend's house to figure out whether he is a good guy before they have a dinner. Then she gets to choose whether she stays with him or leaves him. Some elements are randomly choosen, like names, background, weather and the boyfriend's behavior. I think it's nice that the boyfriend isn't always abusive, but it doesn't go beyond that. He is either perfect or a complete jerk and almost every single object in the house will indicate which one he is exactly.
The last two ones have little merit. Either the preachiness was the primary judging value or there weren't any other entries, because they are badly designed, unpolished, amateurish and uninteresting.
Jellia's Friends is a top-down exploration game with shabby art in which a jellybean princess, victim of an abusive relationship, goes to seek her friends. Avoiding the animal enemies is annoying because they are fast and sometimes move unpredictably. Every single dialogue is so artificially preachy it seems to be something taken out of a pamphlet.
The villain is black. How politically correct of them
Knowledge can be your bulletproof vest is a generic plataformer with graphics made out of letters in which you have to collect the letters of the 10 signs of stuff or whatever. Boring, annoying and badly animated.
The game incentives you to fall on pits to get letters. Is that the right thing to incite abuse victims to do?
"Our vision is to speed up time, eventually eliminating it." -- Alex Schure
