@emptyplatitudes: I try to take advantage of as many Steam sales as I can. A lot of people do, even those willing to pay $150 a year to play a game that they spent money to buy in the first place or someone who puts up $100 for Koenigsegg CCX "Elite" Edition in NfS World. Willingness does not lead to blindly throwing away money. I have faith in gamer's intelligence. Gamers are not being tricked into these new schemes, they simply accept them. Well, in this case that remains to be seen.

D**n good writing, Brendan. Truly most gamers who rile against the current state of their rights need to look no further than a mirror to find one to blame. Truth be told, I too have committed many of the same fallacies, through both greed and resignation, that brought about the fall of early independent game companies and the rise of the corporations. In all fairness, the giants that have trampled the old gamer's rights merely recognized that gaming is a business, and in business Machiavellianism beats Idealism any day. They should be at least applauded for their courage to seize the initiative and capitalize on that opportunity. Fortunately, this erosion of rights isn't really a long term problem for society or gamers. You cannot lose something you never had. While the oldest gamers remember a better time (even that's only in certain ways), most younger gamers can't care less. They do not know a time without DRM or DLC or no-used game (not quite yet) or pre-order bonuses. They do not bemoan their presence. Some others, like me, have stopped caring as we get older and play less. The distinction between resenting being slowly boiled for a meal and enjoying a hot bath before a death inevitable is only a matter of perspective.

Unfortunately for old schoolers like myself, the world of gaming is a very different place. Not worse, just different. One very prominent evolution is that gamers are willing to pay a lot more for a game. You see it in DLC, in subscription fees, in paid memberships. If gamers are willing to pay more, why shouldn't businesses milk them for all their worth. The guy who's willing to spend $1,000 on Diablo 3 should be given that opportunity, but the $60-only initial buyer should still be permitted to enjoy what he can and given an chance to provide meat for more affluent gamers' consumption. You don't like it, don't play. After all, this brave new world is all about choice. Objectively, there is nothing wrong with what Diablo III's Auction House, or things even more diabolical. People can tailor gameplay to their financial means. Those with time can make a bit of living in Diablo III. Blizzard profits. If it succeed, players happy with the setup make it happen. Who is to say that those players have less valid preferences about gaming than those against it? If there is not enough support, Diablo III will fail and no taint will spread to other games. Blizzard will come up with a different model and no harm done in the long run. It really is win for everyone.

That is everyone except those with a specific notion of how Diablo III should be, including old schoolers like me. However, I am getting old. I shouldn't stand in the way of progress even if I think it's progress in the wrong direction. That's not for me to decide. I do my bit to support companies that still have some of that old "by gamers, for gamers" spirit, companies like ArenaNet and CD Projekt and Bethesda. However, I have no illusions; eventually they (meaning their current team), like me, will be swept way in the name of progress and crushed in the machinations of corporation. This is a great article for bringing the controversy to the surface. My time has passsed, but perhaps the younger generation of gamers will be pricked by it.

My last post didn't really answer the question directly. I think the moment has come and gone for gaming, around the time of Doom and early Interplay RPGs, lost in the mists of creation. Plenty of pieces are missing as gaming has not nearly reached its full potential. Kinect 2, as some have brought up, is merely one more step. Comics did not lose out because it didn't get its "moment," nor has it lost its validity as an art medium. Like it not, the vast majority of people prefer moving pictures to still ones, and there is more money to be made catering to the masses. It would have happened regardless of any movie or comic that did or did not come out. Once games can truly virtualize life, and I am talking about feeling the blood dripping down your hands when you kill someone, forgetting that you are not actually wandering in an impossible nightmare landscape, and kissing (and heaven forbid what else) Princess Zelda or Liarra or so many GTA prostitutes, then game will supersede movies like movies superseded books. However, film will not die out as a medium just as comics has not died out as a medium. There are a lot of comics to buy and read even on PSN. Give it another a hundred years, I am sure this same same conversation can be repeated for movies, games, and a yet-undiscovered art form.

Most people would agree that much of that $31.8B in movies cannot be considered as art in the narrow layman's definition. On the other hand, all movies are technically art; it is arrogant and presumptuous to say that no skill or creative imagination went into the making of Battlefield Earth. It simply did not appeal to its audience whereas Citizen Kane did. Just try Limbo or El Shaddai or Flower and it is evident that video game is an artistic medium, even in the narrow sense of the word. On the other hand, I am not sure what would constitute a The Birth of a Nation moment in gaming. Should someone make a game that's longer than current ones? Should it be a great financial success? Should it portray Adolf Hitler or Osama bin Laden in a heroic light? Should it be a combination of these features? If anything, The Birth of a Nation did not set a great example. It effectively started a trend that eventually locked the movie medium to its current cookie cutter format of approximately 2 hours, a sex scene somewhere between 1:00 to 1:30 (though this is more of a 90's thing), and centered around one of several predicable themes for the most part. Thank goodness for independent films. Games exhibit so much greater diversity, do they not? There was no reason to bash MW3. Film is no less artistic a medium because of Transformers 3. Just as well, gaming is no worse off for MW3. Instead of bemoaning the perceived lack of a Birth moment, how about just making one on your own?

I vote for Sony to drop out. The Xbox is too successful to be abandoned. The Japanese will not permitted Nintendo to fade so easily; it legacy runs too deep. Besides, it has a following not fully threatened by the competition from Sony and MS. PS is in-between. It's not as popular in the West as the Xbox and in Japan as Nintendo. The defining feature of gaming has moved away from hardware and toward paradigm: social, casual action, competitive, etc. Unless Sony defines PS's paradigm more clearly, it's not beneficial to continue pouring resources into developing the next console. However, Sony has found success lately with Uncharted, which reinforces its single-player line-up alongside MGS and God of War. Gran Turismo also continues to dominate the racing game genre, though Forza on Xbox 360 is catching up fast. If it manages to introduce more of this type of PS-exclusve games, to re-define itself through them instead of trying to be a hardware competitor, it may yet find a comfortable place in the market. My advice? Give up the Playstation brand and partner up with Nintendo. Sony provides the hardware and the more high-end story-driven games. Nintendo provides the ingenuity and social games. An easier transition might be toward Xbox; however, there is a indefinite chasm that separates games popular on the Xbox and games that define PS, yet they compete for a similar audience. I do not want to see this diversity subsumed on a unified Xbox console.

I rather welcome this article. It merely states the personal reservations that one journalist has about playing military shooters. It encourages the reader to explore his/her own feelings about these games without hiding behind the too-often abused high ground of God, country, or morality. His personal conscience forbids him from playing more, and the reader can agree or not. It is precisely because these games remind me of the real American military of today that I play them. I want to be reminded of the soldiers who have died in Afghanistan and Iraq. I see the faces of men and women, most younger than I, who have lost their young lives, and I say to myself, "Don't turn your head away! Look at them! This is the reality of the modern war. These are the fellow Americans that you helped to kill."

Yes, in a totalitarian regime, citizens most often and with good reason dump the responsibility of poor governance on their leaders. This is not true for Americans. Say what you want about any fault, real or perceived, in Washington, the ultimate responsibility for these 6,328 deaths falls squarely on the shoulders of every voting citizen. For those who voted for President Bush and the GOP in general, how else did you expect them to react to 9/11? For those who didn't, we should have tried harder--lobbied harder, criticized harder, protested harder--to prevent the start of the war and to bring the soldiers home after. I am a bit of a war enthusiast, so I love the story and the gameplay of military shooters. I would like to think at least some, if not most, of all the soldiers who went to war did so voluntarily for a cause they believed in, and those who lost their lives died believing they died for their country. If not, then we should always be reminded of how we failed them as fellow citizens. Not to turn away.

Overall, I agree with the spirit of this article. I think the title is misleading, Brendan. We do care about censorship, in both directions. Many GS users don't care about BF3 in Iran because (1) it doesn't affect us and (2) there is nothing we can do about it. I am sure many Iranian gamers care a great deal. I've seen at least one in the comments already. Although I am strongly against censorship, there is a substantial difference between censorship as policy or law as opposed to censorship as a byproduct of other social processes. The ESRB is an uneasy compromise because by US law, minors are not permitted to enter into any contract on their own, including all purchasing contracts. The ultimate buyer of games, legal guardians, want a convenient tool to judge the propriety of potential purchases. Ideally parents would do their own research on games, but many do not have the resources or desire to do so. Thus we get rating boards.