Indigo

I certainly don't think it prevents rape. Any desire is only ever temporarily satisfied. And it doesn't really quell lustful desire anyway - if anything it stirs up more desire as people tend to get desensitised to the images and hence pursue ever more explicit and stronger images. Psychologically I think on the subconscious level it encourages us to see women as objects for our pleasure - and it seems only logical that such an attitude in a person would make it slightly more and not less probable that they might commit rape. Now I'm not saying there's then some direct causal link between watching lots of porn and committing a sexual crime, but I think it's naive to consider being regularly exposed to porn as having absolutely zero effect on our psychology. Just think how vulnerable we are to the messages of advertising infiltrating our subconscious and influencing our decisions (why do you think so many billions are pumped into the industry?).

I guess that's the consequence of my argument. Aside from the nature argument I'm just struggling to see another way of arguing that being attracted to children is wrong that doesn't appeal to conscience (personally I think moral intuition is a legitimate basis for an argument, but I'm trying to argue on the terms of the thread-starter). Harm arguments seem quite weak if it's all thought and there's actually no action involved. I think that's a weak parallel to draw. Obviously biology restrains all societies' notions of when someone is ready for sex. Attitudes have only changed in terms of us raising the age because societies have considered more when someone is emotionally ready for sex.

I can't even believe we need to debate this. Though I guess this is the inevitable conclusion of a culture that subscribes to the view that whatever gives you pleasure must be fine and healthy. Things aren't right or wrong merely because a majority of people believe so. We as humans are not so primitive as to be entirely conditioned morally and socially by our societies - we have deeper moral intuitions. In the case of this subject our moral intuition against it is derived from how obviously unnatural it is to be attracted to people who are not even by nature's design supposed to be attractive to us. Just think why physical attraction itself exists - it exists as a function to encourage us to reproduce, hence why we are attracted by signs of fertility in the opposite sex. Being attracted to children isn't simply wrong because it's weird in society's eyes, it's a subversion of our nature. Juliet was 14. She would have been fertile and capable of bearing a child. Cases like that are entirely different to having an attraction for someone who hasn't even reached adolescence.

There's no reason to remake the 3D games - the only alteration would be a graphical improvement, and the Wii just isn't powerful enough for that to be something impressive. One Zelda game that could possibly justify a remake would be Link's Awakening, but I'd be anxious about it 'cos they could so easily screw it up. I think it'd have to have quite a minimalistic art style, possibly with a slightly faded look with a pale colour palette to emphasise the whole theme of dreaming. Also fitting with that theme it could take the bold step of having no HUD (a la ICO) but admittedly that'd be hard to implement given how often Zelda games involve switching items. I think the game would have to be darker than most of the series, in the vein of Majora's Mask - seeming how Link is completely unfamiliar with Koholint island a sparse, mellow soundtrack could emphasise the feeling of loneliness and isolation. With the transition to 3D I wouldn't expect a complete recreation of the 2D world - but as long as it was mostly faithful to the basic layout and structure of the original then that'd be cool. Given Nintendo's current direction they'd never consider making a dark, atmospheric Zelda game - let alone it being a remake of a 15 year old Gameboy game - but I can dream anyway.

I have a good record. All my consoles are in fine working order, stretching back to my NES. Only things that seem to break are phones - I've had two phones become pretty much unusable because some of the buttons started being unresponsive most of the time. Sony Ericsson seem to be the worst for that with the little directional sticks they have on their phones, they just don't last.

It's not over yet.

Probably my NES.

The ironic thing is that it seems to have achieved the reverse, unleashing all China's authoritarian tendencies. Just look at the security operation and how quickly protest is being stamped out. Then in the press areas foreign journalists can't even access certain websites because of the government censorship. It's also been made known that Chinese intelligence services are using the opportunity these games present (ie. the concentration of foreign government officials in Beijing) to attempt to steal any information they can. It's just bullshit, the whole thing.

Here's my view. I'm not claiming to be objective on this, so don't bug me for not qualifying every sentence with 'IMO'. I think videogames have the potential to develop into art-form, but in their present state there are very few games that I would consider to be works of art. Of course there are many films which I also wouldn't consider art either, but a significant proportion of films can be said at least to endeavour to present some kind of artistic vision/message to the recipient, whereas there are few videogames for which that can be said. For me art isn't only about being aesthetically pleasing, therefore to judge the artistic value of a game primarily from its graphical style is misleading. That's not to say it's not an aspect though. It's just one medium through which particular emotions and messages can be conveyed. Maybe it's like art is two parts of a sphere - the core which is the meaning/message, and the surface which contains the ways through which the core may be reflected and expressed. Videogames have plenty of surface, lots of ways through which meaning can be conveyed - interaction being the unique component - but without anything for those things to express we're left with an empty work. I mean what is the message/meaning of for example The Legend of Zelda? Ocarina of Time is usually considered the best game ever, and certainly appears more artistic than games like Pac-man or Mario Kart, yet you'd be stretched to claim it's anything more than an engrossing good versus evil tale with some great characters and landscapes. There's no real depth. One thing that is noticeable about videogames compared to established art-forms is that rarely are they the vision of one individual. Obviously with novels the novelist is god. With movies there are hundreds of people working on it, but (allowing of course for interventions from producers) it all comes together under the vision of the director, who has his name on the poster. It's 'a Stanley Kubrick film' or 'a Ridley Scott film' or whatever. With games this most often isn't the case. There's no visionary, no director - they're the kind of stuff born out of group brainstorming sessions. That's not to say there aren't exceptions. When MGS2 had on its box 'a Hideo Kojima game' people accused Kojima of pretension, and yeah there will have been some ego in that, but more than just being a signal of gaming 'celebrity', it was a bold indication that a game could express the vision of one person. That's definitely the way things need to go if gaming's going to develop as an artform, though I worry that with rising budgets the opposite will happen and it'll all become focus group fare. I have lots more to say but I need some sleep. Hopefully what I've contributed isn't too rambling and contradictory. I'll end this with a link to an interesting article that muses about MGS2, ICO and post-modern art. "dreaming in an empty room" (a defense of Metal Gear Solid 2) by tim rogers

My strategy is to buy up everything I land on apart from Waterworks and Electric Company, the idea being to prevent anyone from getting a set. If someone else does make a set I immediately start trading, making preferably a reasonable one-off deal to get a set of my own (I'm talking pink or above, the others aren't worth a thing once the game gets going). From there you gotta get the balance right between building and leaving yourself enough money to pay off rent if you have the misfortune to land on opponents' property with houses on. Don't offer any deals to anyone bankrupted by your property rents - take their cards and expand. Also be on the look out to prevent your main competitors from taking advantage of the weaker players with one-sided deals - offer them better. Have foresight as well - if say your main competitor has one orange card, and a very weak player has the two other orange cards, try and get your hands on at least one of those orange cards in case the weak player is bankrupted by your competitor's property.

Yeah the Dev is great - easily one of my favourite pubs. They have some really nice ales and obscure European lagers.

Wasn't my intention at all, apologies if you could took it that way. I was just trying to show how by placing something in relation to another event we can cheaply undermine the perceived significance of it.

The whole deterrent argument assumes that potential murderers are going to rationally consider the consequences of their actions. Whereas in reality most murders aren't calculated but rather occur in the heat of the moment, without consideration of consequences.

That's dangerous reasoning. By the same lines I could say Hitler committed genocide and yet you consider a few murders to be barbaric? We shouldn't judge barbarism relatively. Any rape or murder is a terrible and barbaric act, regardless of how it stands relatively to other crimes. It's for that reason (among many) that I'm against capital punishment - murder is wrong, simple as. Yes it may seem in some sense that the murderer deserves to be inflicted with the same fate as they bestowed upon their victims, but while that might satisfy our desire for revenge it doesn't make for a just course of action. Revenge is a shallow form of justice. Practically we can point to the injustice caused by the death penalty - many innocent people murdered for crimes they did not commit. I think the fact that even one innocent person could face death by fate of dodgy yet seemingly compelling evidence is enough reason to discard the idea.

"You know how things go." "Schmuck." And the answer to just about every question asking how you are or how good something is - "Not bad."

Well by shooters I didn't mean FPS. I meant the real thing.

We have to have a day dedicated to shooters, ie. Star Fox 64. It's a game that's often overlooked in retrospectives, but it's easily the best 3D shooter to have appeared on a Nintendo console and surely ranks as one of the finest sequels ever. It was also a landmark in that it was the first console game to feature rumble (the rumble pak was bundled with it). I still have the game's huge box on my shelf - I remember walking around town with it after I bought it, thinking how awesome it was. EDGE did a brilliant feature on the game in their last issue, it's well worth a read. http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10866&Itemid=51

I'm not saying joking about this stuff means you don't understand, I just think it's a way of ignoring the reality of it, as you say yourself. You see that as a good thing, 'cos you don't want to be depressed. I don't think that makes it justifiable. Sometimes sadness and reflection is necessary, no more so than in considering something like this; it's definitely more necessary than to joke about a tragic event and thus show disrespect for all those who died and those affected just for the sake of you not feeling a bit sad for five minutes. And people talk about feeling sorry - it's not for themselves, as you suggest, it's for all those bereaved people and families. Why would we feel sorry for ourselves because of September 11th if we're not involved? It's that kind of thinking where we can't see past our own emotions that is so destructive.

I disagree. The reason the terrorist attacks are remembered is foremostly because of their sheer evilness and disturbing nature. Natural disasters are tragic but they're not evil. We may interpret them as such, but it's only because we instinctively personify these things in order to try to understand them. The consequences of natural disasters are terrible, but the disasters themselves are completely neutral and value-less. With terrorist attacks it's not solely the loss of life that we perceive to be most significant - it's the intent. That's why murder is obviously recognised as much higher a crime than manslaughter. As we know, the attacks on September 11th were no accident - they were the calculated actions of a number of people who saw no wrong in indiscriminately murdering thousands of innocent people. This was not only one of the most abhorrent acts in humanity's ugly history, but quite unprecedented in other ways - whilst the murdering of the innocent is never reasonable, it could be said that the terrorism of the I.R.A. and other such groups were at least in a twisted sense somewhat reasonable in that it tended to be public figures (with political influence) who were targeted, and if not then warnings would often be given to people before the bomb detonated. Also significant is that it could always be counted on that the attackers would try to preserve their own life and thus prevention was easier. As we know, the September 11th attacks marked the arrival of a new form of terrorism - a wholly irrational, unreasonable and indiscriminate evil. What could be a more disturbing thing than that? And what is most disturbing is that contrary to how we often would like to think - these terrorists were people, just like you and I in our common humanity. And so it raises so many questions. For one, just how is a person capable of such evil? Just think, if you or your family would have been in those towers, you would have been murdered, no matter what your politics or identity, you'd have been murdered for the sake of murder. My point is it's an equivocation to compare the September 11th attacks with deaths caused by natural events - the body count isn't the only significant factor in evaluating the significance of events leading to mass death, it's the motives and nature of the death too. More people died fighting WWII than in the Holocaust but the latter is certainly more evil and demands even more recollection than the fighting of the war itself in terms of the issues it raises. On a side note, I can't help but feel that people that see fit to joke about these kind of things are just in denial of the true nature of them and the questions they raise. It's not only heartless but delusional.

I think there are some things which are intuitively wrong, cannibalism being one of them. To suggest that an incentive might sway me to abandon that principle would render cannibalism as merely something unpleasant rather than as being plain wrong as I see it. It's in the same way as I wouldn't commit incest for any price - it's not just unpleasant, it's contrary to our intuitions and morally wrong.

I'd refuse to do it for any sum.

You guys shouldn't dismiss particular aspects of the videogame/animé sub-culture as automatically having no influence over people's actions. Obviously there isn't a direct causal link, but when a terrible crime such as this occurs the logical thing to do is to examine the man's lifestyle and wonder how he could have ended up with such a twisted perception of the world. From the sound of things, videogames and animé encompassed this guy's lifestyle, and so it's hardly unjustified to examine the culture of those things. We shouldn't say 'some people are just insane' and leave it at that - that would be naive. At the least I think regular exposure to very violent media (be it films, videogames, animé or whatever) does desensitise people to actual physical violence. That's quite plain.

I'm not sure we should object to people trying to contact these tribes. Forcing technology and 'progress' upon them is one thing, but simply making contact is quite another. We share the most fundamental thing in common - our humanity - and I believe that can bridge all differences. Do you not think that maybe they look into the night sky and wonder if there is anybody out there beyond the jungle, perhaps even wish that there was something more? And of course there is something more, so how is it right to withhold that from them? It's not as if they have all made a wilful choice to live in isolation. Their 'isolation' is not isolation for them at all - it's all they know, it encompasses their known reality.

In principle I don't object to a strong regional supranational institution such as the EU. What I do object to however is the lack of meaningful democracy in the EU. Our only opportunity to have a say as citizens is to vote for members of the European Parliament, which as a body has so little power compared to the other parts of the institution that it would be quite fair to say that it exists merely to maintain an illusion of democracy. The EU hence lacks the democratic legitimacy to be able to justify its current power, let alone the new powers that this treaty demands. What should be on the agenda then is greater democratisation of the EU, but it isn't going to happen - the bureaucrats down in Brussels have expressed only contempt for the people they govern. They know what's best for us, you see.

Clearly a two-state solution is the only way. The nature in which the modern Israel state was founded was clearly wrong, but it would be just as illegitimate to try and right that wrong with a similar use of force and aggression. The fact is most established states were originally founded by war and conquest, so if we were going to appeal to who was in a particular territory first then very few modern nations would have legitimacy. You also have to consider the context after WWII. The Jewish people experienced genocide, and had been a target of hate and oppression in Europe for generations beforehand - the Allies wanted to prevent something like that ever happening again. It was a different world then - Britain, France and the other powers still had their empires, and so we lacked the post-colonial mindset that we now have.