That second link, while not only being a useful explanation, is full of deliciously insane conspiracy theories in the comments section. For those that find entertainment in the insanity of others, be sure to check it out.

Here, have mine. I shook it up to dissipate all that dangerous pressure. You're safe now.

You don't scare me. That could be anyone's ass.

... because the mental image I always needed as of Steve Ballmer hot and sweaty in front of a crowd shouting "Penises! Penises! Penises! Penises! Penises!"

This whole situation does explain why my mother appeared to be sick on the couch at my parent's place on Thursday afternoon when I paid them a visit. With all the shaking and huddling under the covers and looking pale-faced I presumed she had come down with the flu or something.

They aren't addicts, that's patently unfair. They can stop any time they want. What is most admirable about them is that they are simply so time-savvy that they coincide those times at which they wish to stop with the periods during which their crops have to be left to grow. Once the crops are ready for harvest, they desire to play again. It's really very simple and implies no addiction whatsoever.

Seriously though, 2.5 hours? The experience I have with Farmville gives me vague recollection that there are a fair few crops that have a growth period of a hour or less, and given that the crops wither and become unusable in the same time they take to complete their growth makes me wonder how many people petitioned Zynga for free ... well, the game is free so technically (and literally) nothing of value was lost, but still, I'm sure they were crying about something.

Now shut-up, it's nearly 4:01 server time and my rogue still needs the Brewfest boss' dagger to drop for it. 5 times and all I've seen is the mace which I can buy for fuck all anyway. My warlock has had two daggers already; maybe it's payback for the Midsummer event when my rogue got the staff twice and my warlock never saw it. THIS IS SUCH BULLSHIT.

As per your request. It's a bloated* DRM platform which strictly speaking is worse than something like TAGES (ugh) which at least only calls home during installation.

*(love it or hate it, you can't deny that it's not a clean client)

A valid point I guess. The implication that you're a pirate via a persistent call home (less periodic if you use offline mode, yes, but still never non-existent) is clearly a much more subtle contempt than a link to a completely DRM free executable that installs a game that simply runs from it's own executable as opposed to being wrapped in a Steam-requiring header.

Steam goes down, and no-one in offline mode can play anything. GOG "shuts down" for a lame marketing stunt and it's only the people who hadn't already downloaded their games that didn't have access to them, everyone else can play regardless. It goes without saying that when Steam goes down people that hadn't downloaded their games don't have access to them either.

It sucked, yes, but it was a joke, and however pathetic a joke it was, it's over, so the time for internet drama has officially passed.

And you thought it was a moral dilemma as to whether or not you wanted to shake a Senator's hand before ...

Wasn't this sort of thing ruled legal a while ago for purposes of circumventing region encoding on DVDs, that was deemed anti-consumer or something else I can't be arsed looking up?

That's the key to get this ruled back the other way yet again, in case anyone is interested.

Opening admission: I'm coerced into playing Farmville and Fronterville by my Mother and a couple of friends who want me to send them gifts and occasionally do crap on their farms. Also, I willingly play the D&D Adventures FB game, and I've tried the 'just barely a game' type stuff like Mafia Wars.

To my knowledge, all the Facebook games are free. Lets assume that Farmville was an 'indie' game. If the game provides you with some level of enjoyment, how is dropping $15 once off for some extra game content any different from paying $15 for some indie game that you might play for a week or two on and off before finishing it or being done with it. I suppose once you start to spend a substantial amount of money it's a different issue, but then that's not specific to Facebook games. It does make me wonder if anyone I know has spent money on these games, I must admit.

Is the fact that the goods are 'virtual' such an issue? This will start an argument, but how tangible are any of the mp3s that you purchase from say, iTunes, or books via Kindle? Yes, it's an mp3 or a glorified text file, that provides entertainment, or whatever you want to define it as, but it's still entertainment in virtual form. Really, how different is it to purchasing goods for some subjectively entertaining virtual farm; at the end of the day is it still not simply entertainment in an intangible form? How is this not just a digital way of buying extra dolls for a dollhouse or some other real world to virtual comparison that might have not implied that I own dolls?

Each to their own, seriously.

Also, you can walk in and touch swampland in Florida. That's way more effort than dragging some fences and cows into a virtual lot on my PC. It's a totally different market ;)

And the laughter. Don't forget the laughter.

As the parent of three still bright, wide-eyed-at-the-world decks of cards, I was highly distressed to see a 'game' freely packaged with every single copy of Microsoft Windows that rewards the player, after dismembering and spreading out over the playing field children much like my own, by flipping those body parts carelessly all over the screen. Last time I watched that I almost cried. I can't bear seeing it again. I definitely didn't find it, as one heartless observer noted: "Ace".

The America's Army solution to this problem is widely unknown and elegantly solves the problem without any media attention.

The EA way has them as a big story on Fox and talked about on high traffic nerd sites like, well, this one.

Yeah, I'm a bit amazed too.

To appease/incite Fox, EA should have brought up Alien vs Child Predator. That would have given them weeks of content.

Whoa whoa whoa. BMX XXX had actual video of strippers as rewards. Stripping and everything. Bewbs. And one of them was smoking hot.

And to be perfectly honest, the game actually wasn't that bad. I even err ... tested the theory by using a cheat to unlock all the stripper videos, and found myself still compelled to actually play the game properly, even though the 'rewards' were already ... 'revealed'. /rimshot

You know, it kinda does. A real world analogy to your bucket story: there was an incident in Australia where an inattentive couple lost a daughter in their pool because they either left a gate open or had a crappy gate, I forget which. They immediately started a crusade to demand the government begin mandatory pool gate monitoring by a government agency. The fact that it was their own lapse in whatever (responsibility, attention, take your pick) that caused their own personal tragedy was apparently lost on them. Their initial grief caused them to act in a way that would, externally, appear irrational, and also, quite frankly, in a way that would imply an attempt to remove the guilt resulting from the fact that they were responsible. I have no idea what they're like now; this was a couple of years ago I think.

These people have lost a child. And yes, it's a different kind of loss because of the fact that it was to a war, and a child that might have volunteered for it. But regardless of circumstance, it would stil have to be a heartbreaking experience. Unfortunately, as you say, it doesn't grant them any greater influence or control of the right to develop this game. The problem is though, again, exactly as you say even if you don't appreciate it, for now at least they have lost the capacity to think rationally, and just like the person stuck in the middle of a cyclone who thinks this could be the end of the world when a couple dozen miles in any direction someone is admiring the bright sunny day, it's a personal experience and one which greatly and undeniably affects the mindset of the one in the middle of it.

It just makes it hard because while it can be understood that they are obviously struggling, at the same time we can't simply pander to their demands simply because they are in an emotional state. Although I would presume that it would be difficultly to politely get the point across. If that's you're style, at least. To be honest I'm personally of the mind to put forward the arguments raised right at the beginning of the posting; that it's not just Americans that are dying. How many heartbroken parents in Germany have been upset at the long list of Medal of Honor games up until this point that have been purely about slaughtering the sons of German mothers and fathers. I can't remember when their voices were ever heard. Not on the other side of the pond from them, at least.

Problem is, these people can't be ignored, because there are plenty of people like Fox News who will be willing to listen and paint the soft devs or publishers as the bad guys who aren't taking the considerations of the suffering into account. But they can't be conceeded to because, well ...we're talking video games here, and we need to look at this realistically. You mourn the dead, you fight for the rights of the living. Unless we're talking about rights that would endanger said living people, but again, we're talking video games. But Fox will paint the picture using their skewed brush, and sadly enough the completely valid point that EA make about someone having to be the bad guy etc will fall of deaf ears of the "video games are evil" brigade. And at the end of the day, how was that ever not going to be the case. As always, we're on a hiding to nothing.