It’s Free Speech Mother @#%$#@!!!

In 2005 California passed a law to prevent the sale of violent video games to children under 18. This law however has as been blocked by a federal appeals court, which says the ban is an unconstitutional infringement on free speech. The law itself is slowly working its way to the U.S. Supreme Court in which they will make a final ruling on if video games are a form of speech like movies or books. Yet this hasn’t stopped organizations like MAVAV(Mothers Against Videogame Addiction and Violence) from attempting to get the sale of violent video games banned in other states. So lets take a closer look as to why we as gamers want video games to be classified as a form of speech. (more…)

Mobile Broadband Gaming- Part 2

“…a story of one gamer/podcaster who refused to give up.”

Part 2- Math

As I have discussed in Part 1 of this series my main goal in my search was to find a applicable solution to be able to play online multiplayer games, mainly at that time, World of Warcraft. My first venture was to actually attempt to try Dialup. In theory it started out pretty well. Our phone lines aren’t very good here in WV so at most you were getting around 24kbps. Not that great however you could log into WoW and move around. Your ping was actually pretty low in comparison to something like satellite. Usually in a major city I would get around 350 or so, something I could actually work with.

The problem however is that dialup suffers from the exact opposite problems that satellite has. With Sat, you have a fair amount of bandwidth (The amount of data you can send and receive), but extremely high latency ( how fast that data takes to get from your computer to, say… blizzards server). With Dialup you have an extremely small amount of bandwidth but a better amount of latency. Dialup is actually fine if your just doing nothing in wow but daily quests and farming. Wow running by itself only uses about 2kb/s worth of data, which a dialup connection can handle. However when you decide to go into a group or zone the amount of data required to be sent to and from your computer is increased and overtakes the dialup threshold. Resulting in a complete freeze up.

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Chat with Polygamerous!

Can’t get enough Polygamerous? Well, you’re in luck, because we have a chatroom you can pop onto, and all you’ll need is a Google Talk (or other Jabber) account.

These instructions are for Pidgin, but can probably be adapted to other IM clients (for instance, Andy has managed to get in using Trillian, I believe).

1. Create a Google Talk or other Jabber/XMPP account. The easiest possible way to do this is just to sign up for Gmail. If you already have a Gmail account, congratulations: you’ve already completed step 1. Creating jabber accounts for other services is outside the scope of these instructions, but here’s some instructions from WikiHow.
2. Add your Gmail account or Jabber account to Pidgin. Go to the Accounts menu, then Manage Accounts, then Add – choose Google Talk for a Google Talk/Gmail account, or XMPP for a Jabber account. Sign in and all that jazz.
3. Once you’re signed into your account, from the Buddies menu, click Join a Chat. Choose your Google Talk or Jabber account. The information you need to join is:
   • Server name: conference.thestoppableforce.net
   • Room name: polygamerous
4. Feel free to change your handle. Or don’t. It’s your call, really.
5. Success! (Hopefully.)

I can try to do a limited amount of troubleshooting if people can’t connect. If you can’t use third-party clients at work, I do know you can use Meebo – most of the above instructions apply, with the exception that in addition to being signed into a Google Talk or other Jabber account, you also have to be signed into Meebo – otherwise the option to join a Conference never appears. Not that I would ever suggest you do something like sign into a videogame podcast chatroom from work.

*cough*

Hope to see you join us soon!

BONUS ROUND: Mike’s instructions on connecting via Meebo.

Episode 36: Autotuned Kirk Sex Robot

This week we go to the dark side! We made a choice. Polygamerous is now an “explicit” podcast. What does that mean? It means we aren’t going to be going out of our way to keep it without da swears. We won’t purposefully be explicit but we aren’t going to bleep out the bleeps.. Oh yeah, we also talk about some games and such.. You know.. The normal thing. Madden released this week and there was some news and such too.

Don’t forget to email us your questions, comments and reviews to info@polygamerous.com OR call in to our voicemail at 407-584-POLY (7659).

 Ep 36: Autotuned Kirk Sex Robot [99:03m]: Play Now | Download

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It’s Not Stealing It’s Progress

(Sorry for the short editorial this week. Between my career and having a cat I didn’t have much time to write this week. And I may have put this together in the last 15 minutes.)

Some days it’s truly amazing what people complain about. For example I was reading a chat dialog between two people in which one of them was claiming that Halo Reach stole the jetpack idea from Resistance 2. They then began to add obscenities to their dialog and questioned each other’s sexuality. I guess neither of them had played Star Wars Battlefront because they had a class that used jetpacks. Before that there was a game called Tribes that used them. And if you really want to get into it Jetpac for the ZX Spectrum was the first to really “revolutionize” gaming by adding a jetpack. When a developer takes and idea and improves on it it’s not stealing, it’s progress.

Almost all inventions are made by someone taking someone else’s idea and improving on it. You may have heard of how Marconi “stole” the idea for the radio from Tesla. However what you may not know is that while Tesla discovered the principles of radio he couldn’t actually get it to work(flame away Tesla fanboys). So when someone says that Microsoft stole Kinect from the Playstation Eye-Toy they didn’t; they took an existing idea and made it better. Now there are a few exceptions of truly original ideas like what Goodyear did with vulcanized rubber, but that was a total fluke on his part(it’s a cool story, Google it).

So the lesson here children is that if someone takes your idea don’t get pissed. Look to see what they did and improve on their model. Before you know it you’ve created a competition between the two of you that will last for decades. Oh sure both of your products are basically the same thing but you’ll try to distinguish them from each other by getting console exclusives like Halo and Uncharted–oops. You were suppose to make that connection on your own, my bad.

Any opinions expressed in posts on Polygamerous are not necessarily the opinions of Polygamerous or the other Authors/Editors/Podcasters of Polygamerous.