A Gamer's Stockholm Syndrome

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Sony is being targetted yet again, and the community of /r/gaming falls over each other to prove who’s the biggest tool.

So, over at /r/gaming, reddit gamers have got their panties up in a bunch once they heard the news that a pseudonymous hacking group is planning to assault Sony once more.Apparently gamers are none too happy that someone is assaulting their preferred corporation and they are under the impression that any downtime as a result of those hacks, will be solely the fault of those dirty hackers. Some have even taken it one step further, laying the blame for any potential erosion of internet freedoms (as a result of corporate lobbying and media fearmongering) on the hackers as well.

The whole discussion is littered with playstation gamers who are outraged, OUTRAGED, that they may have to suffer more downtime on their precious online gaming as a result of a possible new breach of Sony systems. The amount of corporate suckup-ery is disgusting.

However, any possible downtimes or erosion of civil rights is not the hacker’s fault.

One has to consider, who brought down PSN the last time. It wasn’t the ones who cracked themselves into the system and it wasn’t a denial of service attack. If was Sony itself who did it, as a reaction to their system becoming compromised. I doubt that the original crackers were politically motivated anyway but even if they were and finding user data was an unexpected freebie, the reaction of Sony was the fault of nobody but Sony. Had they encrypted their data, they wouldn’t have to take down PSN for everyone. It was a gross failing on their part of their lax security practices.

It was also Son’s fault because they explicitly poked the hornet’s nest. Nobody forced Sony to take away the otherOS which made the hacking community actively interested in hacking the PS3. Nobody forced Sony to start legally assaulting the hacking community. Nobody forced Sony to participate in political lobbying to erode internet freedoms. And while the previous crack might not have been a result of any of those, but rather an fortunate exploit for monetary reasons, the latest attempts seem to be pure retaliation meant to cause harm and lulz.

Basically, the hacking community seems to be sending Sony, and anyone else watching a message. “If you fuck with us, we’ll fuck your right back”. They don’t seem very aware of this, but it does look to me as a form of solidarity in the internet age. Remember that all this was caused by Sony going after a few individuals who cracked their system for their own benefit, causing no harm to Sony whatsoever.

Finally we need to remember that the reason Playstation users are being inconvenienced by downtime of PSN is again Sony’s fault. PSN is a walled garden if you remember. That means it’s centrally controlled and managed by Sony and alas, such are the faults of walled gardens. Had Sony allowed an open ecosystem, where PS3 machines could connect to the internet directly and used one of the many available means to play games online there as pioneered by PC gaming, then the downtime of PSN would have been unlikely to affect a lot of people. Had they allowed dedicated servers or direct connections, people would still be able to enjoy their games online. But centralization means that there’s a single and large point of failure. If you don’t want this to happen again, tell Sony to open their walled garden.

But of course the PS3 fanboys won’t do that because they’re incapable of thinking outside the box. In fact, I guarantee they’ll make excuses on why such a walled garden is not only reasonable for someone like Sony, but that it’s in fact better this way. It will be like someone defending the AOL network.

All that said, I’m not exactly agreeing with the direct action of those crackers. I’m not sure how effective they will be in the long run. At best, they might achieve that corporations might think twice from going after individual hackers and they might let more hacks to their system slide and perhaps be more open in their dealings in the future. But this actions has a chance to cause political backlash as well. The reaction of /r/gaming is typical in fact.

Could there have been a better way? I’m not sure and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, but I can’t blame the hacking community from retaliating against an oppressive entity like a multinational corporation with a rich history of questionable actions, which put them in their target sights.

However to blame the kneejerk reactions of the one with a history of abuse, on the ones retaliating to them is very much akin to a Stockholm syndrome. It’s like a kidnap victim blaming their family for not procuring the demands fast enough and empathizing with their kidnapper who as a result had to cut one of their fingers.

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Apparently the LackeyCCG admins don't like competition.

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The mods of LackeyCCG apparently don’t like people knowing about alternatives to their program.

Now that my Doomtown plugin for OCTGN is at a very good level, I decided to go to the LackeyCCG fora to let any Doomtown enthusiasts that may be using the (frankly inferior) Doomtown plugin there, about the one I have created. I was cautious that this might not be good netiquette, but both systems and plugins are free and there’s no real competition between them. It’s not like either of them will lose money from someone preferring the other version.

Well apparently the mods of the board don’t see it this way. My reply here was deleted without notice, one assumes because someone got upset that I was promoting a “competing” card engine. This is shameful on the part of the LackeyCCG admins who should be looking to help the community have the best experience in card games, not try to hoard it to themselves.

I left another reply. Looking forward to have it deleted now…

EDIT: I was correct in my assumption that my comment was deleted because I posted a competing plugin. The main developer of Lackey sent me the following PM
You aren't allowed to discuss competing programs on my forum. If you have a suggestion for me to improve Lackey, please post the suggestion.

How did /r/anarchists started becoming interested in Anarchism?

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Anarchists on reddit explain how they reached their political position.

Anarchists on march 3/14 (LOC)
Image by The Library of Congress via Flickr

I thought I’d point out a discussion going on in /r/anarchism where various subscribers explain what made them turn to this political theory. We’ve done one of these before, but it’s always interesting to see new stories.

This time we have more people who got radicalized by state violence.

Mayniac182:

I’ve said this quite a bit recently, but: police brutality. It was seeing students get beaten at the London protests that made me question the role of police, as well as realising how much money is spent protecting politicians who are no different than the ordinary person.

A lot of other expressed something similar to my coming out story, in that they were always ideologically anarchists but didn’t know it until they discovered the theory.

Nebula42:

It’s a bit complex but when I was younger my best friends were people of color but something bothered me. Their parents worked much harder than mine and longer yet they were poorer. It struck me as not equal and unfair so I sorta developed a rudimentary socialist idea from early on. Obviously I was a kid so it wasn’t anything impressive. I was pretty much a social democrat (although I labeled myself a liberal at the time). Around 2007 I became increasingly aware of how oppressive the government can be and sorta had a 2 month flirtation with Ron Paul until I realized that the ideology is tyrannical in it’s own sense. I wanted something that was anti government and anti capitalist to fit in with my views of inequality. Someone told me I was an anarchist around 2009ish and decided to explore it more. Read the philosophers..etc and pretty much had the same ideas that I developed on my own except a lot more refined. So here I am today!

And then others were affected by culture

Nondualbliss:

I’d say it was a combination of exposure to punk rock and academia. As a teenager, I was into Bad Religion and Propagandhi. I gravitated into more underground punk stuff that leaned quite left. Then majored in Sociology and learned about inequality on a global scale and read a lot of Marxist theory. Then a band I liked – Stanford Prison Experiment – included a 30 minute lecture by Noam Chomsky at the end of one of their albums, which lead me to his writings. For the past 15 years now, I’ve been reading up on Anarchist thought.

Apropos Chomsky; there’s quite a lot of people who were converted by Chomsky in there as well. Just shows how effective a popular anti-authoritarian/anti-imperialist face can be, even if they otherwise espouse some very contentious positions.

A game of Doomtown in action

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Managed to play a game of Doomtown on OCTGN and thought I’d share a nice screenshot of the game in action.

I just managed to finish my first Doomtown on OCTGN on the latest version ((I’d managed to play a few full games back on 0.2.7 or something and a few games where my opponent’s PC crashed in the middle of the game with recent versions)) with Eloi who is also a maintainer of games for OCTGN. In fact, the reason we started playing is because I found a way to create larger capital cards for Warhammer:Invasion ((OCTGN is limited at the moment in the sense that you can only have one size of cards.)) and I contacted him about it in case he wants to use it. I mentioned Doomtown and he was interested to try it, so we did.

Fortunately he had skype because otherwise my fingers would be raw from all the typing. As it is, I’m just really really thirsty from all that talking 🙂

So yeah, we did a learning session and it worked fabulously! So I wanted to share with all of you a screenshot I took as the game was nearing its end. I think it looks great.

 

I was playing Texas Rangers. He was playing my bicycle Sweetrock deck. MacNeil became an unstoppable beast!

So if any you out there manage to play a game and get into a nice situation, do take a screenshot and send it over for me. Maybe I can make a “best moments” gallery 😉

 

Full Bundle for Doomtown on OCTGN updated

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Torrent has been updated with newest rules and more High Quality scans. Gogogo!

I’ve updated the torrent for Doomtown to include the latest version of the game definition and markers and also the latest versions of the sets, which I’m glad to say, have finally started including High Quality scans.

For those who do not know, the Bundle includes everything you need to play Doomtown on OCTGN but it’s not updated as often, as usually only the game definition is updated. Nevertheless it’s the best way for a new player to grab everything they need, without downloading all the files 1 by 1 from the repository. Inside you will find the game and sets, plus pdfs with the rules, faqs and so on. Once you’ve downloaded it, you can simply direct OCTGN to install the files from that the directory, and if in the future you download a newer version of the bundle, your game on OCTGN will be automatically up to date (( Usually you don’t have to reinstall the files, but one occassion you do. I will let you know when you have to))

So don’t wait up, download the torrent file here and you can find information about the bundle in the forums.

Once you’re done, hit me up for a game 😉

 

Doomtown on OCTGN

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Doomtown on OCTGN is now very feature rich and playing it should be a blast for most. Here I explain how to set it up and why it’s so cool.

So my updated on the Doomtown engine for OCTGN continue at a rapid pace. I mentioned it before shortly but I thought I’d make a proper post about my progress with this and how to go around playing it.

EDIT @ 27/06/2013 : I’ve moved the installation instructions on to the dedicated page for this game definition. Please follow the step-by-step installation instructions for Doomtown there.

A Doomtown game in OCTGN in action. Currently in the middle of a shootout
A Shootout at High Noon

Not especially tricky as you can see. The trickiest is finding someone to play with. You can try subscribing to the Doomtown Facebook Group and see if anyone is available for a game. You can also create a game and hope that someone is online to join it since anyone who has Doomtown installed will see open game lobbies.

However I guarantee that if you like card or tabletop games, you will find this one a blast. In the recent weeks I’ve spent a lot of effort in automating away most of the more tedious stuff one has to do when playing card games online, such as modifying counters and typing each action that they do in the chat. I’ve literally spent the latter half of my vacation (while staying home sick) to code some pretty nifty stuff to use the powers that playing on a PC gives us in order to make the game easier to play.

For example, the game will let you know if you cannot play a unique card, because someone else has it in play (or it’s dead). It will automatically calculate your poker hand rank, taking into account jokers and what kind of poker you play. It will update your various totals (influence, control) as you play and lose cards and you can even force it to recalculate all your totals in case you lose track. It will pay your upkeep and receive your production at the start of the turn, and refresh your cards and hand at the end of the turn. It will even remember if you permanently modified a card before and add the same modifications in case that card leaves and comes back into play later on.

There’s still a lot of automation I’d like to implement soon and I keep thinking more as I work on it so I end up adding new features practically daily. You can follow the development in the forum if you so wish and I would really appreciate any feedback such as suggestions or problems you’re having.

 

Mortal Kombat is good fun, but oh my gawd the sexism. It burnsss!

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The new MK is back to its roots, but their representation of females is patently absurd and the story needs a lot of work.

I was planning to write an incenced post about absolutely ridiculous the female outfits of the new Mortal Kombat game are and then I saw this comic and I just had to do it now.

Seriously, the mortal kombat clothes are DoA-level absurd (Did they take hints from Team Ninja?), not only are they practically pieces of strong but because of the cloth destruction that happens in the game, those must be literally glued to their bodies. I cannot otherwise explain how a “breast cover” (which is basically a glorified string), which is hanging destroyed on the right side of the body can somehow defy gravity in its quest to cover up those nipples.

And what is with the high heels? Would any woman in her right mind think that running around in high heels is a good way to fight in close combat? Most ridiculous of course is Sonya who is supposed to be a hardcore military person and is still running (literally running) around in high heels rather than jackboots.

Oh, and how difficult is it to come up with female outfits that are at least different than each other? Jade, Kitana and Mileena all wear the same string-outfit, only with a different arrangement of strings, while the men not only have varied ones, but if their main outfit is bare chested (I don’t remember anyone going bare-legged, except Goro) they have also been provided with a fully-clothed alternative.

As much as I love the new game, the absolute ridiculousness of how females are repressented is a complete turn off.

Given this new trend, I’m waiting now for Mortal Combat Xtreme Outworld Basketball to follow, where it will be just the women competing for the skimpiest outfit while dribbling.

And since I’m on the subject of MK, can someone please advise them to hire a competent storyteller? Cheezus fuck those people can’t tell a good story if their life depended on it. I honestly hope the next estabilishment of the series will be based on the lore of the excellent MK:Legacy…including outfits!

 

So much rage!

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I’ve been volunteering for a sideproject and I just got told that my idea for a strong transexual character in a fantasy-wild-western setting was out of the question because it’s “unrealistic”. The setting has zombie cowboys and poker magicians FFS! Apparently an unashamed and deadly transexual character strains the imagination but towering demons levelling whole cities are AOK…

The Smurfette Principle and Sexism in PvPonline

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As the feminist frequency brilliantly explains the smurfetter principle, Scott Kurtz apparently decides to remind us how sexist he is.

She says it much better than I could really.

And since I’m on the subject of feminism, can someone explain to me what is going on with all these old school webcomics starting to show more and more sexism? I was going through my PvPonline backlog of the last week and I came upon these two “gems”

Men who are afraid of scary movies are like women while screaming in fear is stereotypical of a married female in “hysterics”

“Women are competitive and catty and generally unkind to each other” (Said by the only main female character – i.e. the “smurfette” of PvPonline)

What the fuck is this shit people?