Except we know where Apple stands on competition. They'd rather do it in the courtroom than in the labs these days. Which is why they're rushing to sue people for using black rounded rectangles, and rushing equally quickly to copy the 7" tablet form factor that they swore nobody wanted.

You'd be better off waiting for selenorhodanemod, azidodithiocarbonatemod or dicobalt-octacarbonylmod, maybe.

Well, it sure beats raising cattle.

There were no such court instructions. The 10 years claim has been thoroughly debunked. Three cheers for transcripts!

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120923233451725

THE COURT: Okay. Welcome back. Please take a seat. We had a few more departures in your absence. Let's continue with the questions. The next question is, have you or a family member or someone very close to you ever been involved in a lawsuit, either as a plaintiff, a defendant, or as a witness?

You need to read Samsung's reply, which is in the Groklaw article linked from the page. It answers all your points, and does it in a clear and definitive way. It also makes clear a lot of their other arguments, which you conveniently ignore here; that he indisputably failed to follow the judge's instructions, introducing inaccurate 'expert testimony' of his own that was wrong on just about every point of law that the jury ruled on. It's indisputable because he's been running his mouth off about it ever since.

Stop being disingenuous. It's pretty clear that Samsung stole the design for their shoe completely from Apple. How else would they have come up with a design that's black and roughly foot shaped? Coincidence?

Amen. This is why cases of intentional homicide per capita are four times higher in the UK than the US.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

Oh no, wait a second. It's the US where more people are intentionally murdered. Guess all that self-defence didn't really pay off...

This may be true. But the fact remains that you're making shit up, and recognising this doesn't imply any lack of smartness.

But ... that's not what we do. :) Rumblefish works specifically for independent artists, not labels or rights organizations.

I guess what you need to do now is get those specific birds to post on Slashdot about how happy they are with the service they're receiving from Rumblefish, then.

You shouldn't be 'working on resolving the issue with eeplox's video'. You should have released it immediately, apologised, and passed on a sum of money to compensate him for any advertisements you benefited from on his video and the inconvenience and insult you've caused him.

Then maybe you could look at putting the PR side of this to rights.

Aw. It's kind of endearing when idiots try to use logic.

Let's look at where the flaws in your argument are, shall we? From your list of statements:

1. This is irrelevant to your argument, as you don't use it in your later reasoning. You're trying to associate your argument with an obvious fact to strengthen it by its proximity to that fact, I guess.
2. This is a very incomplete statement - deliberately so to conceal the dishonesty in your approach. A fuller version of it is as follows:
"In some games, one player reaching a victory condition can trigger defeat conditions for other players."
3. This is a restating of what you're trying and failing to demonstrate.

The modified version of statement 2 is something we agree on, and we've already discussed some examples.

Your initial paragraph, though, contains a heinous logical flaw. What you're claiming is this: there are some victory conditions that also trigger defeat. Therefore, all victory conditions trigger defeat. That's a doozy of a logical fallacy. It's the "Some birds are green. A blackbird is a bird. Therefore a blackbird is green." argument.

Your claim that statement 2 leads to statement three is also utterly unsupported. Even if we accepted your definition of statement 2 rather than the accurate one, it's fundamentally the same logical problem; you're making an unwarranted generalisation from the fact that some defeat conditions can trigger a victory to a claim that all defeat conditions can trigger a victory, which isn't true.

You're trying to argue that black is white.

I'm also going to bring this up in every response to you from now on, because you're too much of a coward to address it. In support of your claim that all games must have victory conditions, you cited "Game Development Essentials" by Jeannie Novak. However, on page 185 of this book, Jeannie Novak writes:

Many puzzle games have no victory conditions. In Tetris, the game just gets increasingly difficult until the player decides to stop.

So, your options:

1) You are wrong. I am right. Games can have no victory conditions, and industry experts give Tetris as an example of such a game.
2) You claim to be right, and also accuse the industry experts you earlier said should be trusted are lying hypocritical asses who know nothing about games.

I'll give you a clue. It's option one. And if you had any intellectual integrity you'd apologise for your mistake and stop digging.

You're still trying to fudge things, I see? The first two victory conditions you describe exist in some modes of some versions of Tetris and yes, you can see them as victory conditions. The third thing you list is not a victory condition. It is a loss condition. This is why the industry expert you cited in one of your other replies says that such games have no victory conditions.

You made the appeal to authority; your authorities do not back you up. This is where you admit you were wrong, or demonstrate you are delusional. These are the only two options you have. Sorry.

Multiplayer Tetris does not have the same victory condition as single player Tetris, though. The condition for being the winner in two player Tetris is to still be playing when the other player has lost. At this point you have won the game. You are the victor, and nothing that then happens will change this fact. Some implementations will stop gameplay immediately at that point and throw up a "Player One Wins!" message. Others may allow the player to continue. But in both cases, that player is the winner of the multiplayer game.

We can extrapolate that for any number of players. In an n-player game of multiplayer Tetris, the victory condition is to still be playing when (n-1) players have lost. In a two-player game, one player must lose. In a three-player game, two must lose. In a 32-player networked monstrosity of a Tetris game, 31 players must lose before the last man standing is declared the winner. I take it you see the problem when we apply this to one player - the victory condition becomes that 0 players have lost. The game becomes 'press start to win'. Clearly that's not the case - you wouldn't accept a Tetris game that when you press start immediately throws up a message saying "Player One Wins!" and stops - so this victory condition isn't valid.

I'd like to deliver a bit of a killer blow to your argument now. You reference "Game Development Essentials" by Jeannie Novak. I'd like to quote to you from the top of page 185.

Many puzzle games have no victory conditions. In Tetris, the game just gets increasingly difficult until the player decides to stop.

Your industry professionals don't agree with you. They agree with me. She also mentions other types of game that don't have explicit victory conditions, but it's hard to get more specific than that statement. Many puzzle games have no victory conditions - exactly as I've claimed all along. She even cites the very same example as I did.

I'm editing this post to be less confrontational. When I feel that someone's being an ass to me, I tend to be an ass right back at them, and that tends to escalate into some sort of competition. Which you, of course, would lose, as I'm more of an ass than you are. :P

I agree entirely that most games should have fun, structure, goals and players. While there's some interesting work on the fringes of ludology to probe at exactly how much you can reduce the latter three elements, those are the basic elements. I largely agree with Gauthreaux on this. The issue, of course, is with the attempt to draw equivalencies with the terms in square brackets, which he does not do. For example, to claim that 'goal' is equivalent to 'victory condition'. Which, of course, it isn't, as we've already seen. You still haven't addressed the fact that there is no victory condition in an endless game like some versions of Tetris and other similar puzzle games. Your only response has been to continuously claim that since there are versions which have victory conditions, all versions have victory conditions, which clearly isn't the case. A game either has a victory condition, in which case the ultimate goal is to reach that victory condition, or it doesn't, in which case it tends to have an unending series of other goals, typically more abstract. The goals in an unending game of Tetris primarily revolve around reaching the next level, or clearing a certain number of rows. But reaching each goal doesn't win the game - instead it just sets the next goal, which should be of increased difficulty.

Since we're quoting game definitions, why not go back to Wittgenstein from that Wikipedia article:

Wittgenstein demonstrated that the elements of games, such as play, rules, and competition, all fail to adequately define what games are. Wittgenstein concluded that people apply the term game to a range of disparate human activities that bear to one another only what one might call family resemblances.

I think that sums up the problem quite nicely. You can try to provide a neat all-encompassing definition of what a game is, but the reality is that the edges of that definition will remain somewhat fuzzy.

I'll disagree with you in more specific and less adversarial ways on zero-player games. I think you're overreaching to make Progress Quest fit into those four categories. Interaction that's limited to starting the game up is not interaction in any real sense, in my opinion. There's also no real challenge, as score increases monotonically over time without anything that could be described as challenge. And as far as I know, though it's a long time since I've 'played', there's no 'maximum progress' except as defined by the limitations of the coding, and it's debatable as to whether that should be counted as a goal in the game itself, though it is set as a goal by players of certain games, with the top-rank goal being to play the game until it crashes due to coding errors. I'd say that Progress Quest doesn't meet most of those definitions, and I'd also say that as a result it isn't really a game. It's a parody of a game, and the nature of that parody is exactly that; to remove the genuine game-like features from a game while keeping the domain model. Sort of the reverse of gamification.

Core Wars is a different story. It isn't a zero-player game. The gameplay in Core Wars isn't in running the game engine (which looks like a zero-player game). It's in developing the redcode programs that fight in the game engine. There's no equivalent to that in Progress Quest, but in Core Wars it provides interaction and challenge. Each battle or set of battles has victory conditions. It's really a multiplayer or solitaire game. Though again, the victory conditions become a little less well-defined in solitaire mode; how do you, the player, 'win' when you're pitting two of your own creations against each other? Another of those fuzzy edges...

I take your point about MMOs and Skyrim, but I think we have to bring in sandbox games (again), because there's actually a discussion to be had there. Most traditional games that have a victory condition end when that victory condition is reached, and any players who reached it have won. MMOs have no victory condition except those set by the player for themselves, which are only likely to be temporary at best. Skyrim does have a victory condition, but doesn't end when it's reached - instead it drops into a sort of sandbox mode. And true sandbox games don't have a victory condition either; they're just environments for continuous play. All of them are likely to have explicit and implicit goals, but none of these impact on any final victory condition. You never win the sandbox game. You never win the MMO. You've already won in Skyrim, so the victory conditions have been met and will not be unmet. Again, we're in a case where the goals keep on coming (either from the game or from the player) but aren't part of a victory condition.

I wouldn't go as far as to say 'most' (difficult to tell, given just how many Tetris variants and clones there are out there), but yes, some Tetris implementations have a defined end with victory conditions. Some offer multiple game modes, in which some have victory conditions and some don't.

So even though I correctly assert that loss avoidance is not a victory condition in single-player continuous play Tetris, I happily agree that when you introduce victory conditions into it in other ways (through the multiplayer game or through setting arbitrary points at which the game ends) it has victory conditions. It was, however, pretty clear that this wasn't what we were discussing, or the point would have been raised earlier and I'd have agreed with it. So yes, I would be wrong to claim that all versions of Tetris have no victory conditions, and I wholeheartedly agree that some versions and some game modes of it do. But to be specific, single-player continuous-play Tetris (ie. with no artificially imposed game end) does not have victory conditions, because there is no victory state for the game.

You're moving the goalposts again rather than addressing the points. Yes, of course multiplayer Tetris has a victory condition. The change from single player Tetris to multiplayer Tetris involves adding such a victory condition. This makes your argument "Tetris has a victory condition because if you add a victory condition to it it has a victory condition" which is, unfortunately, not a very good argument. There are universities that have programs that award degrees including modules on basic logic; perhaps you could consider one.

There are whole classes of games that thrive on not having victory conditions. What good would an MMORPG be that had victory conditions that allowed you to reach a state where you'd 'won' the game? At that point there's a real option of stopping playing. So you don't provide victory conditions; the game remains open ended and unending.

You say that the Wikipedia page lists loss avoidance as a victory condition, but unfortunately you haven't read it properly; it refers to that specifically in a competitive game such as your Tetris example. The victory condition isn't avoiding loss, it's avoiding loss while the other players fail to do so. The victory condition is being the last player standing, which is a perfectly valid victory condition. At this point you have won the game. The game is over. You are victorious. The same does not apply to single-player Tetris. Avoiding loss there does not make you the victor. You have never won the game, because the moment your attention is distracted you promptly lose. It's still a perfect example of a game that neither has nor needs victory conditions.

You seem to have failed to understand what that section of the Wikipedia article is actually describing. Let me quote it for you.

These mechanics control how a player wins the game.

Their emphasis, not mine, though if they hadn't done it, I'd have had to. When we're talking about video games, not all games have the concept of winning. Ironically, since you grouped the two together as necessary features of games, it's quite often score-focused games that don't have such a concept; a perfect player could continue playing forever in theory, but in the real world a player will always lose.

Let's look at another quote from this article that you put so much faith in:

Other examples include the availability of a sandbox mode without predefined goals nor progression

Worth mentioning because you still wrongly insist that games must have predefined goals. Any sandbox game will tend not to, allowing the player to set their own goals should they wish to. Stepping out of the realm of video games, any well-run RPG (to my mind) is unlikely to have hard and fast goals; it's also unlikely to have victory conditions.

Is this a good time to point out that in the past I've written and received payment for a number of games, both pen-and-paper RPGs and computer games? Some of those had victory conditions. Some of them had scoring. Not all of them had either, though. So yes, I have experience on the subject, in a more practical way than a theoretical university course. I've also played plenty of games, and I can recognise a victory condition when I see one. Unfortunately, it appears, you can't.