If Penny Arcade‘s version of the 1.9 WoW version patch were real, I’d be tempted to go back. “Shaman player characters no longer take damage”? Heck — that’d make them Paladins.

No, wait. They’re still Horde. They’d be Paladins who had some concept of the meaning of “fair fight” and “honor.”

Gamers Against Gun Grabbers

A couple of days ago, I posted a link to a thread on the X-box forums about a woman whose husband had his brand new X-box 360 stolen at gunpoint in his own driveway. The thread quickly spawned a few anti-gun nuts who claimed that this happened because America allows its citizens to own guns (or because America’s citizens refuse to allow the government to have the right to take those guns, depending on your POV).

The more I think about that, the angrier I get. This isn’t a random sampling of the population, it’s a gaming forum, primarily dedicated to a system whose games are fairly violent. Heck, one of the better (though allegedly short and not particularly replayable) games involves beating people to death (in self-defense) with various melee weapons.

Gamers are avid users of devices that provide increasingly realistic reproductions of violent activities and reward users for that artificial violence. Reports that video games “cause” violence have been coming at us for years. Gamers, as a whole, reject this theory, because we play violent video games, and most of us refrain from bludgeoning our neighbors to death. As a group, we should be intimately familiar with the fact that a person is responsible for his own actions. The entertainment he enjoys may, indeed, influence him, but in the end, it is the person who decides to commit a violent act who is responsible for that act.

We get angry when someone says that Grand Theft Auto causes people to do stupid, evil things, because we know better. For every gamer who snaps and performs a violent act, there are hundreds of us who have no problem beating an attacking addict to death with a 2×4 on Condemned: Criminal Origins and immediately turn off the game to spend some time with an 8-month-old cousin.

A quick Google search turned up no organization of gamers to oppose gun control, which I found kind of surprising. Am I the only person who thinks it’s self-contradictory to say that a gaming system that rewards you for pretending to commit violent, immoral acts doesn’t cause violence, but that a piece of metal that doesn’t actively encourage behavior of any type somehow does spawn violence? The gaming community and the gun owning community should be on the same side in any debate about blaming inanimate objects for the actions of an individual.

I understand why there’s not one using my GAGG acronym, because that’s just stupid, but why isn’t there any organization out there trying to lobby for not only the right of adult game developers to develop adult games for adult gamers (see: the Right of Expression), but also for the right of those adult gamers to own and enjoy firearms responsibly?

If you happened to visit the site last night (or if you have a onestackmind.com e-mail address and tried to check it), you may’ve noticed that my account was temporarily suspended. That’s because I hadn’t been paying my bill. If you’d asked, I’d've sworn that it was automatically coming out of my checking account every month, but apparently, I was wrong. That’s been taken care of, though, and I’m suitably embarrassed for having taken advantage of the nice folks at Hosting Matters without meaning to.

That’s not why I’ve not been posting, though. See, I’ve been busy. I’ve had video games to play and DVDs to watch (Got the first season of House, M.D. and the second season of The Pretender the other evening), and… well… I’ve not really been busy I don’t guess. I just don’t have much to write about. Or, didn’t. I’ve got a couple of posts brewing for this evening, though.

Suppose, for just a second, that your significant other picked up an X-box 360 at midnight on Tuesday morning. Now, suppose s/he gets home, and is robbed of said X-box 360, at gunpoint, in his/her own driveway.

What do you do? Report it to the police? Absolutely. Complain about it on the X-box forums? Sure, I could see that. write a post at the X-box forums blaming Microsoft and Gamestop for the robbery? That’s just silly.

I have to wonder, though, what kind of neighborhood she lives in. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if people were robbed near the stores that were distributing the 360s at midnight, but this was in their own driveway. Is it a crime ridden neighborhood? Is it usually unsafe at night? If not, then why the hell was there a mugger in the driveway at that time in the morning, just waiting to steal himself a 360? I’m not trying to blame the victim here, but it’s certainly his fault as much as (or more than) it is the manufacturer or retailer of the stolen merchandise.

The proper blame is placed on the mugger himself, not on anyone else. (By the way, I read through a couple pages of that thread before I reached a gun control comment. I was really shocked that it took that long.)

[Update: The story is apparently the 6th one down here, but because dialup sucks for viewing video over the internet, I didn't watch it.]

In case anyone is interested and not reading the comments on my X-box 360 problems post earlier, I tried a third game which doesn’t appear to be buggy. Unfortunately, I didn’t exhibit a lot of foresight in picking a third “test game.” Condemned: Criminal Origins is a great game, and isn’t giving me the same problems as the other ones, but it’s only single player, and PGR3 works fine in single player, too.

I’ll admit to having been extremely annoyed about this yesterday, but I’ve decided to take a more rational, calm approach. I stepped back (figuratively speaking), took a deep breath, and remembered that, really, the X-box 360 doesn’t matter. I was really looking forward to some of these games, and I still am. Our “immediate gratification” culture (which I contribute to in every way I can, normally) might tell us that it’s important to have these things now, but really, it’s not.

It’s not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. All in all, I’ve spent less on this thing than a single car payment. It’s made things tight now, but in the long run, it’s not the kind of expense that will kill my bank account. Microsoft hasn’t refused to fix the console, they’ve not denied having problems, and I still have my games and accesssories for when I get a console that, you know, works. I can wait a few weeks without being too put out.