New Updates

I'm currently making back end changes to the site. The commenting function that was using Facebook broke, so I have replaced it with Disqus, which allows users to login from a lot of different interfaces like facebook, or twitter and leave a comment. (Unfortunately any comments made through the old facebook comment system will not be recoverable.)

I have also fixed a few of the other broken functions and updated the code for others. I am considering switching to another theme to try and help with load times, but I won't do that until I am sure the result will be worth the effort, as it's time consuming and with the way I feel right now, very difficult at times.

I will try and do some more blogging as soon as I have stuff to talk about, but you can always leave me messages on twitter or facebook if there is anything you'd like me to blog about.

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Corporate Greed: How Verizon is Sticking It To Their Customers, And Why They Don’t Care…

Right now you feel like watching a movie so you decide to start up your XBox and watch a little Netflix, but for some reason it’s really slow, and it seems to stutter a lot. You assume it’s just some intermittent problem with Netflix, you’ll try later and it will probably work just fine. Well you are only partially right about this one. In fact, it is an intermittent problem, but it’s not really a problem with Netflix, rather it’s a problem with Verizon.

And I know what you are thinking, but I have FIOS, that doesn’t make sense. We all turn on our televisions and get inundated with speed upgrade requests, and commercials about Verizon FIOS being the fastest. I’ve even seen commercials from Verizon suggesting that video is so much faster when you upgrade from XFinity to Verizon FIOS.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love FIOS, and wouldn’t recommend any other kind of ISP service if it’s available, but there are some things they are doing right now that you may not know about, and it’s shocking to think this is even legal.

Is My ISP Peering at me?

Most of us have discovered that the internet is an integral part of our lives. So much so that almost every decision we make must be accounted for on Facebook or Twitter or some other social networking service. We don’t really think about how the internet actually works, because it’s become so integrated that it’s like an extra appendage that becomes problematic only when it stops working. I mean seriously, if you were walking along and your leg just stopped working, you’d notice, and you notice when you can’t reach Facebook or send an email in very much the same way.

We just expect the internet to work perfectly every single time we sit in front of the computer, or watch Netflix from our television, or play our favorite online game. With the exception of a few of us, the general public is in complete darkness as to how it all comes together and works in harmony to make getting that webpage to come up in Chrome as simple as 1-2-3.

But the truth is much different, and in this article I will try to explain the different aspects of what is going on as well as try to explain why you should take notice and complain, complain and complain some more.

Many years ago before modern fiber connections, most people used dialup, and the internet was kind of shaky at times, so when it worked it was great, but when it didn’t work… well that was just part of the internet. But today there is no reason to expect that the next time you turn on your computer that it should be hit or miss. Stating that your ISP should have a 99% uptime and service level agreement should be normal. Beyond the very rare occasions when the shit hits the fan, you should never think “well it’s just the internet being the internet.”

When you think of the internet it should be apparent from the word itself that it means: Large Inter-Connected Network. In fact it’s just the largest Wide Area Network in the world, as opposed to a Local Area Network, which covers a small location often using a single (non-public) IP space.

The logistics of running a network the size of the Internet using a single provider would be a nightmare if not impossible. It’s in fact, the very nature of it being many different networks inter-connected that make it so robust. Even when small networks go down, the Internet as a whole would never go down, and this makes it a very strong mechanism for commerce, and communications throughout the world. But it also creates a problem.

When many small networks connect together there is the potential problem that although no single network could bring the entire whole down, one could complicate a part of the network to which it provides end-user service, and this is precisely the issue many of us are having right now.

Before I get into the problem more, let me try and explain Peering because it’s an important part of what is going on at the heart of the issue.

Peering is the process by which multiple networks share traffic with each other. The internet could not work without it, because again the internet is one large network built out of multiple smaller networks. These smaller networks must agree to share traffic with each other, if that fails to happen the whole thing doesn’t work.

The internet is broken up into Tiers: Tier 1 being (AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, Qwest, Level 3, NTT, Cogent), Tier 2 being (Comcast, Internap, etc), and Tier 3 which would be any ISP that provides internet to your home, not already on that list. It gets muddled when you consider that small ISPs are virtually all gone now in favor of the big companies like Comcast and Verizon who have swallowed up the market share by providing direct access to the large pipes that provide broadband.

The way it all works is that Tier 1 providers have had a long standing agreement to provide uninhibited free data exchange with each other. That means no matter what comes through their network, it is passed along to the other Tiers without any interruption. If this wasn’t so, you could very easily find parts of the internet completely inaccessible, or accessible much slower than you could imagine right now. Tier 2 providers are not subject to this free exchange however, they must pay a transit fee to Tier 1 providers to exchange traffic between their networks. That means if a Tier 2 provider wants to pass along traffic on one of it’s networks to another part of the Internet, it’s going to have to pay a Tier 1 provider to do this.

Once that traffic is passed to the Tier 1 provider it’s then passed along to all the other Tier 1 providers free of charge. Tier 3 providers must also pay these transit fees to the Tier 2 providers. Typically the way it works is that Tier 1 providers have the very large data pipes, lots of bandwidth, Tier 2 have smaller pipes, but still much larger than a Tier 3 would have, which leaves the Tier 3 who might provide you standard speeds to your home. In the old days this might be your local ISP providing dial-up.

And then you get to the end-users, you and me who pay our ISPs a fee which of course includes these transit fees from the Tiers above us.

In effect, all ISPs are always peering, because it is the method by which traffic is exchanged.

And now the problems begin…

 

When Two Peers won’t play nice…

I have started playing this game called Star Trek Online, it’s an MMO, loads of fun for any old Trekker like me. But recently I began having issues when playing the game. You see inside the game when you transfer between maps, or load an instance for a battle, the game would suddenly time out and disconnect you. This happened to me last night, and I was unable to get back into the game. I had noticed some lag issues recently as well, but didn’t think much of them at the time. I shut down the game and decided to take it up this morning instead.

So I start the launcher and log in, and of course I’m presented with a message indicating the last map I tried to play had a problem. This is what happens when you are disconnected. So I try to log back in, and everything works just fine again. I begin playing and everything is working when suddenly during another map change, I am timed out, disconnected again.

This is getting frustrating now because twice this happened and at first seemed to be a problem with Cryptic’s (The game maker) servers. So I complain to Cryptic immediately, although I do not expect a quick reply, their tech support is on par with what’d you’d expect if you got your tech support from someone sitting in a datacenter on Mars. By that I mean communication with them is slow, don’t expect you will get something fixed quickly, it’s just not going to happen – but I digress.

It’s when I begin sifting through their forums that I notice an absurd amount of complaints over very similar issues. My immediate thought is “well if this many people are having issues, it will get resolved,” however upon further examination a theme begins to immerge. All the complaining customers use Verizon as their provider.

Verizon provides FIOS and DSL access to millions of customers, they are everywhere in the United States, but throughout the East Coast they are major fiber provider for basically everyone. If you are on the East Coast like I am, you have very little choice, in New England it’s either Comcast or Verizon, with smaller providers.

An odd problem indeed, Verizon customers complaining about issues in Star Trek Online relating to lag and connection? As a FIOS subscriber that in and of itself is an absurdity, as I’ve stated all of us are inundated constantly with ads telling us how fast FIOS is and how we can upgrade to an even more super speed of 50 Mbps download and 25 MBps upload for only $10 more a month. They’ve even named it Quantum, to compete with Comcast’s XFinity, I’m guessing.

I already have a 25/15 connection, which is so ridiculously fast already the extra bonus is unnecessary. People who do not have FIOS cannot understand how much faster it is compared to everything else out there. Having been a dial-up customer and switching to Comcast broadband and then to FIOS I can understand the differences immediately. So when someone is complaining about lag on FIOS, this tingles my Spidey senses immediately.

So I began to do a little digging, I wanted to see if there was any kind of issue between Cryptic’s authentication servers and my end user connection. On first glance running a simple traceroute nothing is apparent, everything looks tip top with replies from each hop coming in at under 40ms. That’s fast, very fast.  In comparison, on Comcast’s broadband services I could expect to see 70-100ms or higher.

Games that require a constant exchange of traffic you would expect to see much higher end point latency, which of course feels slower. The term “rubber-banding” in games refer to a lag felt in the game that causes your actions to be pulled backward. For example in STO: I am in a starship and I travel from one point of the Devron Sector to another when suddenly I’m back to where I’ve started. This happens because the latency between the server and I jumps temporarily, so that locally I am farther than I am when the server gets the data, and on reply it sets me back.

This is really only felt in games that rely heavily on network traffic that must remain constant, thus your game of Farmville would never have such an issue, however your game of Call of Duty might.

I had been feeling this rubber-banding over the last few days, and now these connection problems, what gives?

So after I ran my traceroute, I wanted to test the actual traffic throughput. There are many tools that do this one called Iperf, for example. However, in this case Cryptic has one of their own they use to help diagnose network issues called NetTest. So I download and run this tool and patiently wait for the results.

What is apparent very quickly is that the traffic to and from the Cryptic server is very low. So I wondered what if I ran a speedtest of my FIOS connection using Verizon’s speedtest servers…

29.47Mbps downstream

23.81Mbps upstream

Well that certainly doesn’t jive with the throughput I’m seeing. To make a little sense of it, if Bandwidth is like a Highway with six lanes, the throughput would be volume of traffic passing through. So if my six lane highway has a few accidents than you’d expect the bandwidth to be high, but the throughput to be slightly lower near the accidents. The best way to describe this is potential to actual volume.

So when I look at these number’s Verizon tells me everything looks fine, nothing is wrong. But when I look at my throughput numbers something just doesn’t make sense.

On many of the ports Cryptic is using to exchange traffic the throughput is 80KBps – 120KBps so when I see numbers like this I know that I’m only getting a throughput 0.37% actual compared to potential volume. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Something is hinkey. Obviously I wouldn’t expect the results to reflect my actual bandwidth because although a speedtest to a Verizon server would not suffer much of a loss due to caching and the obvious less hopping of moving data over a single network, I would still expect a number much higher.

Even if the Cryptic server were dogshit slower, which I would expect they would be, they would need to be fast enough to support major traffic from a lot of users being they are supporting an MMO with a lot of users, each by themselves requiring a potential throughput.

This would not work if such a server or servers were being hosted somewhere on a smaller ISP, something in the Tier 3 range, so we would expect them to be much higher, even Tier 2 being too small. So where is Cryptic you ask? Well it’s servers are being hosted on Cogent Inc networks, which is a Tier 1 provider, a giant pipe, which means that the traffic to and from it should not be having lag issues.

So this is a bit of a mystery. We know that I’m on Verizon, and Cryptic servers are on cogent and both are Tier 1, which means they have the most bandwidth and a free exchange of traffic to each other.

It’s then when I begin researching this problem and I come across some interesting posts regarding issues between Cogent and Verizon.

Verizon is arguing that Cogent is in violation of this free exchange agreement because the agreement relies on relationship of give and take, equilibrium if you will. What Verizon contends is that although they have been freely exchanging traffic to and from Cogent, Cogent has not been reciprocating by balancing this equation.

According to Verizon the agreement is only valid if all partners maintain a balance of give and take. If Verizon is sending 1GBps of traffic from their network to Cogent they expect Cogent will reciprocate this by sending back in exchange 1GBps from their network, thus keeping things in balance. The agreement then goes on to basically say that partners are expected to pay transit fees for excess. Now for years the number were similar going back and forth, spikes would be forgiven at no cost, because essentially things were balanced.

However, video traffic accounts for more than 50% of all traffic on the Internet in North America, specifically traffic coming from Netflix and YouTube, both of which get their bandwidth from… Cogent, according to Verizon this is causing a major issue. The only video service Verizon provides is to it’s customers, therefore all traffic of this nature is internal to their network and incurs no additional costs.

To the people in charge of Verizon this is a breach of that friendly agreement they have, and it would seem Verizon is unwilling to compromise on this issue.

So what does this mean exactly? I don’t even use Netflix myself, and I rarely watch YouTube but I do like Star Trek Online, and Neverwinter another Cryptic game, which both seem affected by these connection problems, so what’s up with that?

 

Greedy Tactics

When Verizon demanded Cogent pay them for the additional traffic they were sending them, Cogent flat out refused. Now Verizon would like to tell you they had no other choice, that they wanted to take the high road, but principle dictates otherwise. Let me first say, no company should ever allow a dispute between corporations to affect end users, that’s for conference rooms, not living rooms. Second, in order for Verizon to claim the so-called high road, they would have to prove they did not allow their own principles to dictate an end that was harmful.

So what did Verizon do when Cogent refused to pay them these transit fees? Well they certainly didn’t cut off traffic to Cogent, no that would instantly turn off internet for a lot of US customers, and would affect any downstream data provided on Cogent networks and below going out over Verizon. I’d imagine such a thing would raise the ear of every congressman and have capital hill baring down on both of them like a lion on a zebra.

The calls from constituents alone when Congress wanted to pass SOPA would pale in comparison to the people who suddenly couldn’t watch YouTube videos or Netflix or any of the other services they require for their daily lives. No instead Verizon just balanced the equation…

Yes, Verizon taking the high road instead decides that the best course of action isn’t to cut service entirely, like a phone company would if you stopped paying your bill, instead they throttle, something many of them are being more and more frequent about.

Throttling is a process by which someone downgrades service temporarily. Some of you may be familiar with AT&T’s court loss over their claim of unlimited data which they began to throttle when customers suddenly thought unlimited meant “UNLIMITED.” Comcast now routinely throttles it’s customers unlimited internet service when a customer goes over the imaginary limit.

This whole thing stems from the notion that one customer is taking too much, and must be downgraded so that other customers get some as well. However, this is a fallacy that companies like Verizon, Comcast, and AT&T are only too happy to promote. Let’s be clear, data is limitless. There isn’t a giant warehouse out there with only so much data that must be equally split between everyone. The only limit that exists is the virtual limit imposed by these companies designed to force consumers to pay more for service.

When Verizon complains that Cogent is giving them more data than they are giving Cogent, it isn’t that Verizon is suddenly inundated with more traffic than they can handle. Let’s get this one thing clear. When someone refers to the internet backbone as a pipe, its not really a pipe. Pipes are fixed, only so much water can fit through a pipe. The backbone is so much more flexible than that.

The internet backbone which is the Tier 1 network all inter-connected is comprised of fiber connections, and what makes it so robust is that if you need more you just add more. It’s not something that reaches a certain point and “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!” In fact, although 50% of all traffic in North America is video related traffic, that number in and of itself should tell you we are no where even approaching capacity. If 90% of traffic was routinely video, I’d be a little more worried.

So what this basically comes down to in the end is nothing more than greed on the part of Verizon, and maybe a equally on the part of Cogent. In fairness Cogent only argues that Tier 1 agreement is that traffic is meant to be freely exchanged and that Verizon’s interpretation is nonsense. But even if Verizon was completely correct and Cogent was completely wrong, it’s Verizon’s obligation to target Cogent, not it’s customers, or their own customers for that matter.

You go into Wal-Mart and decide you want to buy a brand new vacuum cleaner, and you find out they are all out of vacuum cleaners. The salesman tells you that the vacuum cleaner manufacturer wants to raise the price of vacuum cleaners and instead of Wal-Mart refusing to raise the price of vacuum cleaners by a few pennies to their customers, they stop carrying vacuum cleaners from all manufacturers of vacuum cleaners. This creates a problem if you need a new vacuum cleaner and Wal-Mart is the only place in your area to buy one.

Now maybe Wal-Mart should just eat the extra few pennies, they have a lot of money, as does Verizon. Verizon is a billion dollar company, the cost of additional data *loss* is negligible. Let’s get this straight because it’s important. They have a free exchange agreement, that means they make $0 from the exchange of that traffic, which means they have no potential gross on it. So their only complaint rather is that they are losing money they would only gain if Cogent violates this friendly agreement. I know confusing. Basically they are quoting a cost for something that doesn’t already have one.

It would be one thing if the deal was one-sided as it is between lower tiers. Then if someone started sending you more traffic that you already meter you could figure out a cost, even though in reality that too is nonsense, since bits have no actual cost. Transmitting data costs nothing, don’t ever let someone tell you that it does.

And the worst part of all of this is that Verizon doesn’t settle this in a conference room or court room where it belongs, it throttles customers connections, all in an attempt to make Cogent feel the pain by making it’s customers and Verizon’s customers suffer. But the pain can be felt elsewhere because what Verizon is doing is essentially holding hostage the Internet for many people anytime they want to access a resource that touches one of it’s routers, if that resource also touches Cogent’s. This potentially affects millions of people, this isn’t hypothetical, its real and its happening right now.

Now it’s easy to blame Netflix or YouTube, and you’d be wrong if you did. This is why we have Tiers much like we have manufactures and distributors. Netflix buys their bandwidth from Cogent, it’s Cogent’s job to work out a reasonable rate for it’s customers, like Netflix must work out a reasonable rate with it’s customers. So blaming the guy down the street for watching too many cat videos on YouTube for your connection problems in game, makes little sense. He pays for a service and expects it to always work. The same way Netflix and YouTube pay their provider for a service and expect it to always work.

At some point you reach the top, and at the top it’s the job of those guys to work those problems amongst themselves in a way that will never affect the customers below them.

 

Build Bigger Roads

The problem with these services is that we allow corporations to run them at all. Corporations should be limited to products that have no utility value to them, thus their loss does not affect a person’s way of life. The same should be true of healthcare, electricity, phone, cable, internet, etc. Let companies innovate, make widgets and leave the important stuff to the government, because frankly that’s why they exist at all. Because losing my electricity is a whole lot harder to deal with than not being able to afford a bottle of Coca-Cola, or a roll of Duct-tape.

And you think that sounds like Socialism not a free market economy. And well yes because we don’t live in a true free market economy, some things are socialism, some things are not, and there is apparently no rhyme or reason as to which ones are which. Calling 911 for help doesn’t cost you a penny if you have a heart attack, but the second you get into the ER, you better have insurance or you’re going bankrupt.

Governments are good with these types of tasks, how do I know? Because we’ve already done it. In the 50’s Eisenhower decided we needed an Interstate Highway System, so he built one, now imagine life without one now. And in many ways Eisenhower’s roads are like Internet backbone. Because the answer to congestion isn’t reduction, it’s production. That’s right, when your 2-lane road isn’t able to handle the traffic demand, they don’t start preventing cars from accessing it, instead they build bigger roads.

When that 4-lane isn’t enough, they make a 6-lane and so on. But if companies like Verizon were in charge of those same roads when too many trucks clogged their 4-lane highway, they’d simply restrict access to all cars. Imagine that? You are driving along and you see a sign that reads “These assholes are taking up too much room, so you have to leave or we’re just going to slow everything down until you decide to leave, or the trucks decide to leave.”

It’s nonsense. But then Verizon will claim the cost is too prohibitive to just lay more fiber. Companies today are more concerned with turning more profit every quarter, a cycle which cannot go on forever, at least without affecting service to the consumer. When is too much profit at the cost of services too much? When does a reduction in service become so bad that it costs that customer entirely, and therefore potential profit?

Companies like these don’t care, all they really care about is “What have you done for me lately?” That means getting a customer in, and getting as much money before that customer hates the service enough to leave. This is in fact the entire reason why contracts exist at all on services. When companies just provided their customer a good service they didn’t need to offer them anything more. But now they feel like they have to offer them whatever they can, and once they get them in make them sign a contract that forces them to stick with them even as their service becomes shittier over time.

It’s almost certain that if you are signing a contract you can expect to get fucked at some point. That’s why all phone companies make you sign one. It’s not because they supplement the phone, because if their service was perfect no one would ever leave. No one ever lost a customer providing them a good experience. Remember this when you are thinking about signing into one of these contracts.

So what is the answer? What can you do about any of this?

Well a call into Verizon will result in a run-around claiming they don’t see any kind of problem on their end. They won’t even mention anything about the Cogent problem even if you bring it up, because in their minds it’s a secret that should never have gotten out. A call to Cogent produces a similar result, however if you are lucky and talk to the right person you might get them to tell you the problem is with Verizon, but don’t hold your breath. Instead a common thread when referring to the traffic in an affected application like Star Trek Online is to tell you that you should take this up with Cryptic, knowing full well Cryptic cannot fix the problem.

But why do they do this? Is it to generate more of a run-around for you? Not at all. Verizon hopes that your complaints to Cryptic will result in Cryptic complaining to Cogent, which may bring them to the table for negotiations. Verizon knows that Verizon customers calling Cogent will fall on deaf ears, but if enough services the end-users pay for become affected it will be incumbent upon the businesses that provide said services to pressure their ISP into fixing this problem. Because a few dollars a month per user is chump change, complaints from someone who pays the bills is another thing.

It is the hope of Verizon that companies like Cryptic, and Netflix, and YouTube and a host of other companies whose customers are pressuring them will go on to pressure Cogent. I’m sure this entire thing would be resolved pronto, if Netflix negotiated a deal whereby they become a new Verizon customer, and suddenly Verizon’s bandwidth issues for Netflix customers no longer exist… because they never existed in the first place.

First rule of creating a solution that you can make money off of, is creating a problem that doesn’t yet exist.

 

Double Dipping

In the end, nothing pisses me off more than someone trying to get more than they need or more than they deserve. I’m all for capitalism, but there comes a point when enough is enough. No one wants to pay for the same thing twice, and Verizon is trying to double dip here. Let’s say you are a Verizon customer and all you wanted FIOS for was so you could watch your Netflix movies on their super fast connection. Well what’s the problem then? Isn’t it incumbent upon Verizon to be up front and include those kinds of costs into their bundles?

If you are paying for a service like Verizon FIOS and you are paying for a service like Netflix you expect it to fucking work on Verizon FIOS. No one is suggesting that if you go to Starbucks with your IPad, not order a thing and try to watch something on Netflix that it should be perfect, we all understand that this is one of those two-part service things. You need the access, and you need the content, just having one without the other is useless.

But when I pay for both, when should I expect them to just work? ALWAYS! That’s why you pay for them. If Netflix suddenly offered a free version that mostly worked but didn’t offer HD content during peak hours or something else, you knowing going in what you are paying for, because it didn’t cost you a thing. But paying for two services and not being able to use either of them?

Because this comes down to more than just Netflix after all I don’t actually use it, I’d be more fuming than I already am. But as a paying Verizon FIOS customer I should assume that everything on the Internet that is available without an additional cost should just work as part of the cost of the Internet service Verizon is charging me for. But Verizon doesn’t see it this way, they want to get it not only from you, but from Cogent as well, and I imagine if they could figure out how to make Netflix pay some kind of fee they would want that as well.

But wait a second? To prove my point that it’s not the service itself, but rather just greed all I would need to do is prove that this doesn’t affect a video service that say doesn’t use Cogent’s bandwidth?

Well how about Redbox? You mean the Redbox service owned by… Verizon? That’s right Verizon owns it. And magically if you choose to sign up for that to watch your movies and not say Netflix, you are completely unaffected by this throttling nonsense. So what is Verizon really doing here? They are using an unfair tactic to incent customers looking for video on-demand services into using their video on-demand service because it just works, as opposed to Netflix which is malfunctioning through the malicious throttling of traffic going through their network.

How the fuck is this even legal?

It’s probably not, (screams of Anti-trust) but more over even if it were positively illegal Verizon has no incentive to stop doing it until a Judge orders them not to, and then Verizon will appeal, and if they lose, appeal again, etc. The entire civil justice system is designed to allow corporations freedom in skirting the law as long as there are no real complaints, and by real complaints I don’t mean a few pissed customers. And even if they lose in the end any reparations they must pay will be a pittance to the profits they have made whilst fucking people over.

This is why the entire corporations are people argument is purely nonsense, because corporations have no morals, or a necessity to adopt them. Their existence is purely to fuck over as many people as possible making as much money as possible until they are stopped from doing so, and sadly that rarely occurs, instead they are left to arbitrarily raise capital without consequence. People have morals, people feel empathy, corporations do not, they are not people and as such should never be trusted with anything important.

This is why the only corporations that should exist are those that sell us unnecessary items on infomercials at night, because we can buy if we want but we’ll be okay if we don’t.

It’s only when a corporation has the ability to take hostages, grabbing the consumer by the proverbial “short and curlies” and yanking until they give in and pay the ransom demand, that is until next time when they decide to do it all over again for more profit.

 

*UPDATE #1 (8/4/2013, 9:36PM): Upon finishing this article I thought I would spend some time in STO killing some Borg or Tholians, but upon trying to connect to the game, I was simply unable to. The Launcher wouldn’t even connect to the server to Launch the game for login. I wanted to give you a shot of what I am basically dealing with right now.

You can click on the picture to see a big version making it easier to read. Earlier in the article I indicated I was getting numbers around 110KB/sec average which is slow, really slow. But when you see what the numbers are right now you can see that on all these ports that number is cut in half now. There is now even less throughput then there was when I started writing the article to begin with. When I click Login, nothing happens at all. I see a blip where it should indicate its connecting, and nothing. And if you look in Nettest you can see it’s ping indicated as 1000.2 ms which equates to 1 second(should be around 40ms).

You can also see that ports that Cryptic uses to pass traffic completely time out all together. The application crashed because it was unable to keep a stable connection with their server. Verizon doesn’t care about their customers, they only care about money. I have been a loyal paying FIOS customer since it was available to me, and this kind of shit really pisses me off.

 

*UPDATE #2 (8/8/2013, 7:32AM): Just figured I’d give a little perspective of what it should look like by comparing the throughput of an off-peak connection, the difference is startling, and proves without a doubt that Verizon is throttling traffic from the CogentCo. network.

You can clearly see that my ping has dramatically improved, where it should be, coming down from over 1000. More importantly the throughput for example on port 7202 has gone from 54 KB/s  to 2542 KB/s an increase of over 4607%. Those numbers are impossible to dispute. Remember the numbers here are my average numbers, what I should be seeing every single day, at all times, compared to what I see when Verizon is throttling traffic from CogentCo.

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Xbox One and PS4, New Consoles, Old Ideas

Tuesday, Microsoft revealed their new console to the public called the Xbox One. Although they did not give an official release date they did clue us all into some of it’s features, and in more than a few ways gamers are getting fucked.

When Microsoft released it’s first Xbox back in 2001, they wanted to compete with Sony’s Playstation 2, but gamers found that the Xbox was more of a problem than they had bargained for. For one, it was buggy as hell. Much like most Microsoft software of the day, the OS that ran on the Xbox first generation was prone to game freezes and the occasional kernel panic. Many modder’s who have examined the APIs noted their similarity to Windows 2000, and it was believed Microsoft had modified the OS to create a version just for the XBox.

Although the Xbox was a moderate success, the XBox 360 released in 2005 was a bona fide hit. Over the past eight years it has dominated the gaming console market, but with the announcement of Sony’s PS4, gamers wondered if Microsoft would be able to repeat their success with the XBox competing against the proposed PS4. Gamers wouldn’t have to wait very long, Microsoft immediately announced they were developing a new generation of XBox, and rumors aside today’s reveal tells us a lot about the direction Microsoft is heading in, and for the gamer—it’s a downward spiral.

The Past

When Microsoft released it’s successful XBox 360, they were primarily competing against the proposed, Sony Playstation 3 console, which featured, at the time a cell processor capable of nine independent threads of execution, unheard of in console gaming. But where the PS3 relied on Sony’s proprietary architecture, Microsoft went straight to Intel for theirs. This alliance benefited Microsoft greatly because it meant that developers would be able to access a CPU core architecture they would be somewhat familiar with.

Unfortunately, for Sony the cell processor proved to be difficult to develop for, and costly. Games that might otherwise be released across platforms would instead be limited on release to either one or the other, and depending on the partnerships, this could benefit or hurt them. What it meant for gamers was that most of the games they wanted to play were being released a lot faster on the XBox than on the PS3. And although the PS3 featured a blu-ray player the XBox did not, Microsoft focused on their online sales, after the failure of HD-DVD as a standard.

It also did not help that Sony was incapable with keeping up with the demand in production their blu-ray players would need, and by the time Sony was able to get a successful release and run of the PS3, the XBox 360 had already sold more than 10 million units.

While over the years most gamers would end up buying a PS3 and an XBox 360 because of exclusivity release agreements, generally most gamers prefer the XBox 360 for their gaming needs.

Whether Sony lost the 7th generation console war or not is debatable, but they seem poised to win this war if Microsoft’s planned release of the XBox One continues without any significant changes. When Sony announced it’s proposed PS4 earlier this year, they wanted to make sure there would be no confusion as to what the PS4 was.

As such, the PS4 is a gaming console, marketed to gamers, and designed for gamers. And although it features some of the usual stuff included with gaming consoles today, like online features and video and audio streaming, it’s primarily designed to be a gaming machine.

The New Generation of Consoles

Along with ditching the cell processor and moving to the X86-64 architecture found on modern PCs, which will allow developers to more easily develop on multiple platforms, the machine itself features 8-cores, and 8GB of ram along with a GPU capable of 1.84TFLOPS which puts it higher than most modern graphics processors of today. The GDDR5 ram that will clock in at around 5.5Ghz along with the GPU will make the PS4 one of the most advanced, and fastest gaming machines of it’s time.

Unfortunately for Microsoft they seem to have gone a different route with the XBox One. Although the XBox One is a gaming console, this is not it’s primary feature, a fact conceded by Microsoft during a recent interview with Wired Magazine.

“The decision wasn’t ‘we need a gamebox,’” Xbox executive Marc Whitten told Wired.  So in the grand scheme of things, Microsoft isn’t any more interested in hardcore gamers than it is any other potential consumer.

So if Microsoft isn’t really interested in gamers per se, what are they interested in. Well according to their big reveal, the XBox One is a multimedia machine that is capable of doing all sorts of things, but in general it will be an entertainment machine capable of playing games, as opposed to a gaming machine capable of other types of entertainment.

If this really is the case, and gaming is to take a backburner to all the other stuff Microsoft plans to do with the XBox One, than Sony has a real chance at cutting into Microsoft’s sales, and defining itself as real competition, and maybe thus far the only true 8th generation gaming console.

Now in either case, Sony or Microsoft both consoles look like an advanced piece of hardware, and many gamers are chomping at the bit to get their hands on one, but any true gamer, should reconsider.

Microsoft’s XBox One

Tolkien's DRM: One Console to rule them all…

When Microsoft announced their new console a few things were leaked about it, and in the modern post-DMCA error following suit after EA’s always online nonsense, Microsoft seemed likely to also feature just such a thing with their new device. When gamers caught wind of it, of course there was a huge backlash, and an internal leaked memo later stated that an “Always online” feature was merely hogwash… or is it?

Well for one, XBox One will feature direct access to Microsoft’s Azure cloud-computing model of 300,000 plus servers giving developers the ability to transfer computing directly to the cloud, rather than using the XBox to handle it’s processing. Although this may sound really cool, and may open your gaming experience up to many new possibilities, it also limits you as well. Because of Azure’s always online requirement, any game developed to take advantage of this feature will also be required to be always online.

A Microsoft exec recently admitted that although this does not mean that game developers are required to use this feature forcing users to remain online, the ability to compute in the cloud gives developers advantages they might be willing to take. I would even go so far as to say that Microsoft will likely encourage it’s developers to use this Azure cloud computing over computing on the XBox, which means for gamers you will have to be online to play your favorite game.

But most startling was the announcement by Microsoft that games purchased on disk in stores will require being installed to the XBox One, something the XBox 360 makes optional. This proposes two main problems.

1. The XBox One will feature a 500GB HDD which although seems like a lot, modern games can be very large especially when you include content that must be downloaded over the internet after install. This can make a game that is 8 to 10GB bloat to 30 or 40GB.

But since the XBox One features a blu-ray player instead of a DVD drive games are no longer limited to 8GB, and can be as large as 25 or 50GB. That means that the default hard disk that comes with the XBox One will run out of space fairly quickly, requiring either an upgrade, or an uninstallation of installed games.

2. And most egregious, Microsoft has disclosed that users who install the games on their XBox One will find the game becomes tied to their XBox, or XBox Live account. A person who then tries to install the game a second time on a different XBox will be prompted to pay an additional fee, now being called a “pre-owned fee.”

What makes this problematic is that such action first, decimates the the pre-owned gaming market, and  second prohibits the doctrine of first sale, which would allow a user the ability if they have the disc to be able to play it on any machine, and third violates anti-tying law as I will explain.

If Microsoft is allowed to apply a fee and lock your game to your console, in the event you choose to sell your game, you will no longer be able to do so or be able to do so by paying an exorbitant fee, which will surely be covered by you, the seller. Because of this, companies like GameStop will be forced to change their model, which will then kill their sale of pre-owned games. Less and less pre-owned games will be sold, which will most likely contribute to the demise of such companies like GameStop.

Imagine for example you spend $60 on your new game. You play your game but it sucks, or you get bored, it’s not your thing, or you just want to try something else out. So you decide to sell your game at Gamestop. Now normally they might give you $10 value on said game so they can then resell said game for around $40, a significant discount over a new game purchase of the game.

Except Gamestop will not be able to give you $10 value on your game now. Let’s suppose that Microsoft applies a 60% pre-owned fee to all games. That means buying that $60 game new would instead cost $36 pre-owned. That is the fee that Microsoft would apply to the game, 60% of its retail value. This poses quite a problem now, because in order to sell that game, Gamestop will either have to charge that fee as part of the sale of the pre-owned game, reducing their profit margin, or charge you that fee, which becomes impossible if you are only get 25% of the value of whatever they would sell it for.

This means that if that $60 new game were then sold by GameStop at $40 which they might normally sell it for, they only make $4 on that sale instead of the $30 they might make, losing 65% of their margin to whomever gets this said fee.

In either case, either you will be unable to sell the game to GameStop, or GameStop will be unable to sell it at a discount, effectively killing their pre-owned sales, something companies like GameStop rely heavily on.

With respect to the doctrine of first sale, it has always allowed the exclusive transfer of media from device to device as long as the device is playing it. What Microsoft hopes to do here is destroy this doctrine by forcing gamers to install the game to the XBox One instead of allowing it to be played from the disc. Since the days of VHS corporations whose sole business model relies on intangible items they can freely copy, but restrict others from doing, have tried, unsuccessfully to restrict people from sharing, as long as only one person possesses the media on which the copy resides.

This means that if I buy a CD listen the shit out if it and want my friend to enjoy it as well, I have to physically let him borrow the CD so I no longer possess it, to allow this. This is the fundamental scheme that allows things like video rental, and even rental of games to be allowed as a business model. Blockbuster would not even exist if this doctrine wasn’t in place.  USC section 17, 109, A reads:

“Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106 (3), the owner of a particular copy or phonorecord lawfully made under this title, or any person authorized by such owner, is entitled, without the authority of the copyright owner, to sell or otherwise dispose of the possession of that copy or phonorecord.”

Interestingly enough an exemption exists in section b(1), B ii. that reads:

“a computer program embodied in or used in conjunction with a limited purpose computer that is designed for playing video games and may be designed for other purposes.”

Unfortunately for Microsoft although the first generation XBOX may qualify for this exemption, it was meant solely for gaming consoles like the NES, or Genesis, maybe even the Playstation 1 and 2 class of consoles, which were legitimately limited to playing games.

However, no coherent argument can be made in favor of extending this exemption to consoles like the XBox 360, or PS3, and certainly not the PS4, or XBox One, which by their own admission is anything but a gaming console. When Microsoft and Sony decided to bloat their consoles into something that more resembled a modern PC, they were no longer allowed to claim this limitation.

Because of this they too must adhere to the law of first sale, which states that you are authorized without the authority of the copyright owner, to sell or dispose of the possession of your copy. And although the law was written to apply to records it has as since been applied to Compact Discs and other media with the time. After all, if copyright holders can adapt a three-hundred year old law written to protect the author of books alone, to mean “anything I create,” so too must they allow adaptation of laws to apply to new technologies.

And on the point of Anti-tying laws, and this is where it gets hinky folks. The term "tying" is used to refer to a situation where one benefit is tied to the person or entity doing something else. In 1970, Congress attempted to limit unfair competitive practices by providing that a bank shall not extend credit to a borrower on the condition that the borrower obtain some other service from the bank or an affiliate of the bank. This has since been applied to U.S. code and is found in almost every state of the union to apply to all forms of tying.

This prevents any company from tying a product to another product thereby requiring the purchase of said product to use another product. Now before I go into this, I’ll play devil’s advocate and say, “Well what about the XBox 360? You would have to purchase an XBox to be able to use an XBox game right?

Well someone would, but you specifically wouldn’t have to. And that by it’s nature defeats said practice, also in no way does this game become tied to said device, thereby being part of its altogether defacto purchase price after the fact. If Microsoft intends to tie games to an XBox One, then by it’s very nature the sale of an XBox with games tied to it become mandatory as one cannot be disjoined from the other. A person trying to sell their XBox or their game, cannot without selling the other, or paying a fee, both of which are not allowed by anti-tying laws.

If Microsoft continues on this course, and they so far appear to be doing so, they may find themselves in court, and it wouldn’t be the first time for such things. These kinds of unfair practices have been fought by them before, and they have lost previous cases, an example of which is the case in which they were sued for tying Internet Explorer to Windows 98 and claiming that one could not exist without the other, a fact dismantled in American court, and later by the EU forcing Microsoft to unbundle Windows Media player from Windows.

As Microsoft is no stranger to court, it is unlikely that a lawsuit would dissuade them from moving forward with this nonsense, however, as they have buckled previously to public opinion, gamers might still affect this outcome.

Microsoft whose attempts to often push software on to the public has often been rebutted in terms of loss of sales, something that will affect their plans as it did with Windows ME and later Windows Vista, and the recent flop Windows 8.

What strikes me isn’t that Microsoft doesn’t bend to public opinion but that they have not learned from their mistakes yet, which makes me think that even if they bow to the gamers and release this next XBox DRM free, it is only a matter of time before they can convince them it’s in their best interest.

PS4, Maybe the Answer After all?

If Sony wants to pivot themselves into a great position here as the anti-Microsoft, something they have always been happy to do, they need only advertise their PS4 as DRM free, free of “always online” gaming, free of pre-owned fees, and they will kill the XBox out of the gate. Although you may not think it a  big deal, just imagine if Sony said “we’re not going to force pre-owned fees,” and then entered some kind of deal with companies like GameStop.

GameStop would be forced to sell more PS4 games as opposed to XBox One games, and could legitimately explain why the PS4 was a better choice for gaming.

It would not take long for Microsoft to drop their DRM requirements from the XBox One, or face dismal sales, and another round of firing executives. Sony has a real chance here to do something correctly, and not repeat the mistakes of the past. We are not talking about piracy, we are talking about fairly selling something you purchased, and not being forced into a DRM scheme that will not only turn people off to your console, but have the opposite effect, causing people to turn to piracy and cracking mods to make the console they purchase run the way they want.

Possible look for Sony PS4

Why This Kind of Nonsense Hurts all of Us?

Imagine for a moment that you buy a car, but when it comes time to sell it, Ford or Honda want a piece of the action? Do you think you would stand for that? How is this any different? Game developers want to hide behind EULAs and say you don’t purchase a copy of the game, you purchase a license to play it. Really? So this seems fair to you? Sorry guy, you didn’t buy that car, you bought the right to use it, and only I can sell it for profit. It wouldn’t work in real life, why do we allow these dodgy asshats to force us into this nonsense?

The funniest thing about EULAs is they are mostly invalid on principle alone. Should anyone ever challenge one, they should win, if they properly challenge it. Example: I walk into a store and buy a copy of some software off the shelf, go home, begin to install. Suddenly, I’m presented with a EULA, to which I can agree and install or not agree and… ?

That’s right, they already have your money. When you purchased the product that is a contract, you agree to hand them money, they agree to give you some software, at no time do you need to agree to any EULA. Once you begin to install the software and are presented with the EULA, they are attempting to modify the contract which is not allowed. Therefore the contract becomes invalid if I choose to disagree. Once this happens I am entitled to a refund. So go ask for one, see what they tell you…

If they refuse, they are in breach and the entire contract goes poo-poo, at which point you may disagree with the EULA and install said software, or they can give you a refund. Once they are in breach they can’t hold you to the contract. Every contract requires a meeting of the minds, whereby each person is getting something. I get software, they get money, at no time is EULA discussed, therefore it is invalid.

Please forgive my little tangent here, but it provides a valid point for the sleazy lengths at which a corporation will go to take your money and give you the least possible services they can get away, sometimes even violating the law, because it only counts if it is challenged and they lose in court.

It’s been 15 years since the DMCA was signed into law, and since that time we as consumers have been forced into DRM as a consequence. As long as we are willing to suffer the ill of deficient gaming, and a hard-coded craptastic forced medium, nothing will change. And maybe the worst has yet to come.

I’m reminded of A Christmas Carol, the character of Scrooge who suffers blindly a terribly selfish, and lonely life, given the chance to see his past mistakes, and the future to come, ultimately deciding to correct his fate before it’s too late. This can be corrected, we are not too late. As consumers we have the all the power. So long as corporations, no matter how much they spend to develop, must still yield to consumers to purchase their products, we have the control, we have the power.

We can say “yes” and we can say “no.” What has become the norm is that we are more apt to say “yes” not because we want said product, but because we are too lazy to know what we are buying, and apathetic to knowledge. If you doubt what I am saying, consider for a moment Windows 8. Referred to as mostly the OS for noobs, it’s geared toward those not with an interest in technology, but rather an interest in convenience, and sadly, Microsoft believes the majority of you fit this description.

Ignorance isn’t the end of knowledge. The end of knowledge, is indifference.

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30 Years in Review: My Experience With The History of Violence in Video Games

For as long as I can remember playing video games, there has always been violence, whether it be inconsequential or direct, or merely abstract. In this article I will attempt to list some of the games I have played in my lifetime which I consider to be violent and explain the difference between mild or gratuitous violence, as well as attempt to get to the real issues in violence, specifically in video games and movies and the relation between what we see on our screens and what we see in real life.

Not that I ever hold back when I write anything, but this will contain many references to violent video games, movies, and other media, as well as depictions through video and images, so you are warned!

The 1980’s: For the graphically challenged

Growing up as a kid I played a lot of video games, starting with our first computer, the commodore 64. To my recollection the Commodore wasn’t much of a gaming machine, as much as it was a computer you could do some basic programming on.

10 print “FUCK YOU!”

20 GOTO 10

We did own a few games, in those days it either came on a large 5 1/4 inch floppy diskette or on a cassette tape. In either case the sophistication of such games was lacking, and I would be surprised if in its list of games there was anything that could be remotely considered violent. Later on I would own an Atari 7200, and it would introduce me to some games that may have been considered violent for the time, but in retrospect pale in comparison to anything made today. For instance, a game I played endlessly during my youth was a game called Pitfall.

In Pitfall you are a guy named Harry who must run across the screen avoiding rolling barrels, snakes, scorpions, and alligators, all in an attempt to get to the end before the timer runs out. It’s a great game, but in fairness if you touch a scorpion or an alligator you die. Is it violent? Well the technology certainly isn’t available at this point to make it look anything as violent as today’s standards, but you certainly die, and in the example of the alligators you fall into the alligator’s mouth, presumably becoming it’s meal.

Activision’s 1982, Pitfall

Now some would say that calling this violent isn’t really fair, after all Donkey Kong picks up barrels and flings them at Mario, and if one hits you, you are killed, but is Donkey Kong violent?

Well I would ask you a simple question? If you were watching TV and saw a man getting eaten by an alligator or someone tossing something at someone else in an attempt to kill them, would you not consider these to be violent acts? Our understanding of violence is obviously determined by perception. In these two examples I have given you, it’s apparently ok in video games, but not in real life, so is it that we only consider them violent if the depiction includes gore?

If this is true, than its unlikely that any game on an 8-bit system could qualify as anything violent, even if murder were part of the game. The graphic depiction of blood in gaming was quite limited, literally to the amount of pixels that could be dedicated to one thing. Dedicating pixels to blood for example meant that in a limited space cartridge, something more important would not be included. For fun, let’s look at a really controversial example of an Atari game called Custer’s Revenge.

In Custer’s revenge, you control a naked, erect, General Custer and the objective is to cross the screen dodging arrows all in an attempt to rape a naked, Native American female tied to a pole.

Mystique’s 1982, Custer’s Revenge

 

Is this violent? Well the idea of raping anyone should be considered violent but it contains no actual depiction of gore. So let’s see what it looks like when you reach your target.

 

As you can see, Custer takes the woman doggy style, though what it looks like is anything but a porno. In terms of pixelated violence this can be considered very tame when compared to a more modern version of violence, as I will show later, but when it was released this game was banned in several countries and attacked by many parent groups. But looking at this, one wonders other than the implied violence of rape, or the picture on the box itself, where is the controversy? It’s Lego sex for a better term.

 

The box is so much worse than anything in the actual game. In fact, the only thing that would make you think this is anything but sex is that the girl is tied to a pole, implying the sex is anything but consensual.

As a young child I can say I never really saw games like this or played them. However, as for games where someone was murdered, or involved in a fight, or near something that exploded, I played many of these. In fact, I challenge you to find many games from the 80’s era of gaming where the objective of any game involved no violence at all. I’m sure you can, but it’s very rare. For the most part, violence is a part of gaming as much as it is a part of movies, or books.

Moving past the Atari we come to 1985, which brought for me the Nintendo Entertainment System. The NES was a vastly superior gaming console to the earlier consoles like the Atari, but it still lacked the kind of definition in graphics that would give rise to the more violent games including gore, however there are examples of violence even on the NES, which many people consider to be relatively “clean” of this sort of thing.

Duck Hunt, released in 1985 employed the use of NES Zapper, a light-based gun to shoot ducks as they fly away.

 

Nintendo’s 1985, Duck Hunt

This was the first game I ever played where I was given a pistol, and told to shoot as a moving target all in an attempt to kill it. It’s cartoonish graphics, and complete lack of gore hide the fact that this game is completely violent. You are a hunter whose sole objective is to fire your gun at as many helpless ducks as possible, to get a high score. I am a person who has lived in a city his whole life. I have never fired a gun at another living thing, nor would I want to. I consider it to be violent, and amoral, and an affront to civility. But each and every day people do this sort of thing all the time, with real guns, and real animals.

Yet no one considers them to be killers, with the exception of PETA, or other extremists of this sort. My own personal preference is to not kill animals unless I have to, but I enjoy meat, I enjoy fish, and enjoy poultry, as long as I do not kill it myself. But let’s be clear, it’s violent, no matter how it’s done. And despite everything I’ve said to the contrary, I enjoyed playing Duck Hunt. It still remains a memory of better days playing Nintendo as a youth. I loved the fun I had trying to get the high score, and hated the snickering Dog, every time I failed.

The NES had many fighting games, but one I remember playing a lot was called Kung Fu, and the basic premise for the game was that you were a kung fu artist who had to get through levels fighting your way, kicking and punching enemies as they appeared in front of you.

Nintendo’s 1985, Kung-Fu Master

 

Your score was determined by how badly you beat your enemy up through the various kicks and punches you could actually do using a two-button controller. Simple? Yes, very simple. Again, no gore whatsoever, but your objective is to beat your opponents up endlessly by kicking and punching them. If this were a television show it would certainly receive at the very least a TV-14 rating because of it’s depicted violence. But in those days, this was considered suitable for everyone.

In 1985 the NES was a gaming system that was specifically marketed towards kids, with classic games like Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong. Games like these had no gore whatsoever, and so considered completely safe for children. However, even in a game like Super Mario Bros. the objective is to save the princess, but to do it, you have to kill turtles, and koopas, not to mention Bowser who is a large reptile who spits fire at you while you attempt to jump over him all to hit a switch that sends poor Bowser to his death in a fiery pit of lava below.

 

Nintendo’s 1985, Super Mario Bros.

How is this not violent? Of course it is, but lacking actual gore, it’s again considered tame, even then. So the question is why are some games that depict acts of violence considered tame and non-violent, however others doing the same, not considered in the same way?

Let’s consider LJN’s 1989 release of the NES game Friday the 13th, based on the film series. In Friday the 13th, like the movies, Jason Vorhees moves around Camp Crystal Lake killing off children. You play the role of a camp counselor who must stop Jason at any cost. The game is clearly a shit game in retrospect, but its totally violent. Jason actually kills children in this game if you do not stop him.

LJN’s 1989, Friday the 13th

Jason’s got a fucking clever in his hand and he swings it at you. At the top you will notice Crissy’s health, that’s you. But beside that is the amount of children left in the camp that Jason hasn’t killed. If you manage to survive this encounter and Jason does as well, that number will go down. A fucking mass-murdering psychopath is killing children with a clever. There is no blood, but death is obviously implied here. What makes this game any different than Super Mario Bros? Is it the fact that Jason is supposed to be a real person, as well as the kids?

What if Bowser were just a bad dude like Jason? Would dropping him in a pit of fire suddenly make it more violent, in-line with Friday the 13th?

Let’s look at 1986’s NES classic Rampage. Rampage is a game that depicts three humans who become mutated into large creatures that violently rampage cities by destroying buildings. The objective in this game is to kill a building’s inhabitants by knocking down the building while they are still inside. You achieve this by climbing up it’s side and hitting it repeatedly until it falls to the ground.

Midway’s 1986, Rampage

There were 709 licensed games over the NES’ nine year run, of which looking at the list more than half have some kind of violence in them. As a kid, nothing I would see on the NES would ever register with me as violent. After all, I had been watching violent movies, and especially horror flicks since I was very young, so none of that would have much of an effect on me. But as an adult I can easily recognize violence in games, and look back it becomes apparent just how violent most of these games actually were.

But the question still becomes without gore, do any of these games reach a level that would be comparative with many of the modern games that feature a Mature rating? I don’t think they would. If this were true, than the only suitable games for children featured on the NES would have been Barbie, Sesame Street 1-2-3, and Golf, and maybe a few others.

Although I would own a Master System, I never got many games for it, so I can’t really talk about it with any kind of expertise. However, later I would get a Sega Genesis, which changed everything.

The 1990’s: A decade for gore… and porn?

Technically released in 1988 and 1989, the Sega Genesis became a mainstream success with releases like Sonic the Hedgehog, Revenge of Shinobi, Ghouls’n Ghosts and Altered Beast. However, it was 1993’s Mortal Kombat that changed everything.

I was an arcade kid growing up, as much as a console kid. no matter how much fun you could have sitting at home on the Nintendo, the arcade featured games that were way better graphically than anything you could get at home, and so I would often get on my bike and take a short-cut through the local cemetery miles away from my house, across a highway into a large strip-mall area where the local arcade T’s fun center was. All because I loved playing video games, and loved arcade style games.

One of my favorite arcade games was  Capcom’s 1991 Street Fighter II, which featured a 2D style fighting game. In the game you would play one of eight characters which you could choose from, to play against AI characters all in an attempt to get to the Boss man, M. Bison. Each level featured a new character you would have to fight in order to move one step closer.

What made the game so awesome was that each character featured special moves that were different than any other character. This meant you could learn all of the special moves of a character, and chose another, and all the moves would be different. It literally meant having to learn hundreds of different moves in the game. As an adult, this sounds horrible, but as a kid, that’s all it was about. It was status, it was everything. Being able to achieve a move against a character you had just learned was awesome.

But what made Street Fighter II so fucking awesome, was it’s multi-player feature. You and a total stranger or friend, could pop in your quarter, and each one of you would choose a character, and with the moves you know attempt to whoop the shit out of the other person. As an adult I can appreciate the total violence of such a game, but as a kid, it was pure awesomeness.

I remember playing Street Fighter over and over, mastering all the moves, and beating the game with each character to secure a different ending. On one of the days I was set to play, a new game appeared behind me. I remember them carting it in, but I wasn’t really paying attention. But I could see a crowd amassing behind me so my attention was turned from Street Fighter II to the new game. I turned and stepped toward the crowd trying to get a glimpse of all the excitement, but I couldn’t actually see the screen, only hear the sounds coming from the box.

“Get over here!” I could hear, then “Ahhhh!” To say I was intrigued is an understatement. So I pushed my way through the crowd to see what everyone else was seeing. One of the adults was standing there on controller one, and one of the kids on controller two. A row of quarters lined the section which separated the screen from the joysticks themselves, which was customary when someone was queuing to play next.

Popular games were always going to have people wanting to play them, and because T’s was deep, but not very wide, games would be lined along the walls going deep, on both sides making the middle really the only place to stand. This made it difficult to actually form lines, and so a system was formed, I don’t know by whom, whereby you would put your quarter up on the game’s screen signifying your intent to play next. This game screen had quarters the entire length across. When a quarter was placed into the game, another was quickly put in its place.

The game: Midway’s Mortal Kombat. I had never seen anything like this game in my gaming life before this. Not only did it feature a fighting style similar to Street Fighter II, in that you selected your character, of which each had a bunch of different unique moves, but hitting an opponent caused them to bleed. That’s right, when you punched someone in the face, unlike in Street Fighter II, but like in real life, blood would appear. Though remembering it now, it was more like something out of Kill Bill than an actual fight.

But the real appeal was that when you had used all your special moves to defeat an opponent, unlike in Street Fighter II where the match just ends, in Mortal Kombat you would hear and see the words, “Finish Him!” at which point if you knew the move, you could end the match by murdering your opponent in one of the unique ways each character was given to kill their opponent.

The first time I saw Kano used to remove the heart of an opponent was awesome, but it was nothing compared to seeing Sub-Zero pulling the head off his opponent, leaving only the spine attached, swinging below, blood dripping profusely as the words “Fatality!” could be heard. I remember thinking this might not be a game I tell my parents about. Even then, I obviously knew there was something different about this game.

All my friends played the game, even kids who never went to the arcade would show up just to play Mortal Kombat. It was exciting, it was magical, it was violent, and fulfilling. Beyond being able to execute an opponent there was something mystical about the game. It was difficult to explain to an outside observer, who could only watch in horror at the things seen. Many a kid would be dragged from T’s kicking and screaming by a parent who saw exactly what their child was playing. The game got such a reputation that at one point the blood was turned off.

I imagine this came because of parental complaint, but as soon as it was, the game stopped being fun, could this have been a sign that violence is addictive in nature? I’m not sure if I have the answer to this, though my gut tells me it is. In any case, the bloodless version didn’t last long, and by the end of the week, it was back on, and violence ensued again, in the game at least.

For all the violence Mortal Kombat had in it’s game, kids were not running around trying to rip the heads off their brothers and sisters as Congress might have you believe. I spent a lot of time at the arcade playing Mortal Kombat, perfecting the moves, the fatalities, and plain whooping the shit out of anyone who thought they might just be better than me.

So of course it was only natural that when Acclaim decided to release Mortal Kombat for the Genesis, I was getting it. I remember I was a teenager at the time so I didn’t really need permission to get the game, so I didn’t bother even talking to my parents about it. I had worked summers doing a paper route so I asked my dad to take me up to K-Mart where I walked into the electronics department and asked for the game. The guy behind the counter said I was lucky they only had a few copies left, it was apparently very popular.

I remember the game was fairly expensive for the time, around $59 or so. Considering prices haven’t really changed much in the last 20 years, with inflation the price of games have actually gone down.

So I get the game home but immediately I realize something is off? The blood is not in the game. Not only that but it’s hard to play the game because the arcade game was designed with 5 buttons in mind, and the genesis controller only had 3 buttons. You see in those days there was no internet to fall back on, so I couldn’t run to Google and type in, “How do I turn blood on in Mortal Kombat for Genesis?” So I did the next best thing, and really the only thing available to me, I walked down to the local convenience store and looked through the rack of gaming magazines.

To my surprise a full cover ad for Mortal Kombat on GamePro, so I slapped down another $4.95 and was on my way home.

 

GamePro cover, September 1993

“A,B,A,C,A,B,B” and you hear, “Get over here!” And blood was enabled. But I was still having difficulty with trying to figure out the controls, so I continued to read the GamePro and found an article relating to a new 6-button controller designed for games like Mortal Kombat and the upcoming Street Fighter II: Special Edition, so it was back to the store I went. Another $30 bucks later and I was all set.

I can remember in those days that both Blockbuster and the other local video rental store allowed gaming rentals, both with various lucrative tier offers. The one I really liked, though I can’t for the life of me remember the name of the place offered you the ability to rent any game for $5 a week, but you could bring it back anytime in the week if you wanted to, and switch it for another game. So if you were like me a fanatic, you could spend day and night beating a game, returning it, and getting another. I could rent 3 or 4 games for the price of renting one game, which was fantastic.

It was how I was able to play so many games, and decide which ones were actually worth buying. One game I purchased in this way was a game called Streets of Rage. Streets of Rage was a 2D game where you chose a character and if you wanted to, bring a friend, and you both could walk through the streets kicking the crap out of street thugs. Yes, you actually walked down the street, a thug would approach and you would proceed to punch and kick him, until he disappeared.

Sega’s 1991, Streets of Rage

One of the most surprising things about consoles in general, but the genesis specifically was the amount of fighting games found on the console, of which I owned quite a lot. A lot of the games were 2D style games where the objective was to either kill someone or at the very least beat them to a bloody pulp. But in fairness, not many games, even on the genesis rivaled the blood found in a game like Mortal Kombat.

But there are a few, like Probe Entertainment’s 1995 release of Primal Rage based on the hit arcade game with the same name or Sega’s 1993 release of Eternal Champions, an alternative and clear rip-off of the mega hit Mortal Kombat. Both games featured buckets of blood, but both are very different games. Like Mortal Kombat, Eternal Champions centered around a bunch of characters competing against each other in a to-the-death competition. Much like Mortal Kombat it featured special moves and kill moves, but although I enjoyed it, Mortal Kombat was still my favorite.

Sega’s 1993, Eternal Champions

Primal Rage on the other hand while still a 2D fighter style of game, it’s characters were, well not human. Instead of killing your friendly human counterpart, you could select one of seven dinosaurs and murder the shit out of them with jumping claws, and bites, and all the shit you would expect from a dinosaur fight. And when you are done, you are given three seconds to perform… you guessed it, a fatality. What’s interesting about these games were that they were essentially clones of Mortal Kombat, but not really Mortal Kombat, at least in the case of Primal Rage.

Probe Entertainment’s 1994, Primal Rage

All three of these games followed a similar type of model which was beat the shit out of your opponent until they can no longer fight back, and then murder them in the most horrific way possible. Even looking back, although I can clearly identify such games as violent now, it would have been impossible for me to think they were anything but just a game. But I wonder than what all the nonsense about game violence is really all about?

If a kid can play games like this and know clearly they are fake, overly violent to the point of ridicule, and still have no feeling of violence toward others, then whether games are violent or not, bares no effect or whether they are violent or will be violent in the future.

I only know this because I myself played not only each one of these games, but many hundreds of other games for the genesis, all as bloody violent as these, and I never walked into a school with a gun, or armed myself with a weapon and beat someone senseless. I was no more violent than any other child growing up at the time, and like kids my age, we got in fights for much more moronic reasons than because we saw it in a movie or played it in some game.

But it seems an easy target for parents to claim their children are being turned into mindless zombies with a propensity for violence, than to believe either their child is apathetic, or violent because they have a mental problem. Many psychologists will tell you that teenagers mimic the many of the qualities of a sociopath merely because their brain isn’t fully developed, but does that mean playing violent video games leads them to do bad things?

I would think the answer to that question lies in another question: Does every child that is abused grow up to be a serial killer? Of course they do not, and so the answer should be that one does not correlate with the other. However, parents worry as parents do, and governments love to brand things, or create laws to prohibit them, and are always looking for a new target. And video games have always been a great target.

People will probably say that for every violent game there was probably three or four that were not, and that’s probably true, but how many of those games were as successful as something like Mortal Kombat? We consumers are the fuel that feeds the fire that are these game companies. Our purchasing habits directly control the types of games a company will produce, because success in a genre or particular style of gaming over time will show a clear pattern they can latch themselves to.

Midway for example whose many hits during the 80’s paled in comparison to Mortal Kombat and it’s subsequent sequels, so much so, that it’s probably what caused their eventual downfall. It’s hard to release something so controversial and amazing that changes the face of gaming forever, and then try to release anything that isn’t the same and be as successful. So they did what they needed to do, pump out more Mortal Kombat games, but in the end it would not be enough.

In 1992, Sega released their first CD-based console with the Sega-CD, which was an attachment that you added to the Sega Genesis. Now model 1 was a beast, and really expensive. I remember asking my mother to buy me one for Christmas but it was $299, which was really hard to justify. So when the model 2 came out, and the price dropped to around $189, I asked my mother to purchase it for me for Christmas again.

And to my surprise Christmas morning, there was a large box under the tree, and when I unwrapped it, my brothers and I immediately stopped what we were doing, leaving countless presents unopened to hook the system up. She had purchased a few games for the Sega-CD, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Ecco the Dolphin, but for me the only two games I wanted to play were Sewer Shark and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula was a game based entirely off the hit movie released in 1992 with the same name. What intrigued me was this was the first time in a game I could see cut-scenes from a movie, and it looked amazing, well as amazing as a 1x CD-ROM drive could look in those days. I had never seen anything like that before and I was dying for more. The game itself was not really all that good and didn’t really have much to do with the movie. I remembered I played it a few times, and then tossed in Sewer Shark.

Now the plot of Sewer Shark takes you, referred to as “Dogmeat” as a pilot of a ship in a post-apocalyptic world, into the sewers beneath that world flying around killing mutants whose goal it is to kill and suck out your brain. You pilot your ship through the sewers in real-time moving left and right when faced with forks ahead of you. As you encounter these mutant creatures you must blast them away. A pilot who achieves legendary status gets the chance to move to Solar City.

What I remember of this game is that it totally kicked ass. It was fast-paced, faster than any game I had previously played, and required quick fingers to prevent instant death at the end of a tunnel. There really wasn’t much to the game, but it was brutal, it was fast, and I could not stop playing. But that was normal, since it didn’t have a save feature. If you wanted to get all the way to Solar City, you were going to have to do it in a single run.

So for the next three days, none of us slept much, and when we did, we would leave the system plugged in and powered on, paused. And after three days, victory!

Another interesting thing I remember about the Sega-CD was that it was the first system I can remember that actually had foul language in it, something that is considered normal now, but very rare then. The first fuck, and shit I heard playing Sewer Shark floored me, as it wasn’t the first time I had heard it, but certainly the first time in a game I can remember.

Now although there wasn’t any blood at all in Sewer Shark its content was certainly violent, after all it was scripted like a movie, which was clearly intended for a more mature audience. Dracula on the other hand had plenty of blood in it, a lot of fighting, kicking, punching, biting, and violent cut-scenes from the movie. By this time of course, I was quite used to these types of games, and blood and violence were just normal.

It was Sega’s 1992 release of Night Trap that really changed everything. I remember playing this game as a rental first, and then having to find the game, which I did, on sale for something like $15. Night Trap was a survival horror game that featured full-motion interactive gaming where you play a Sega Control Attack Team(SCAT) member assigned to watch over some girls at a slumber party. You are told previously five girls went missing and were never found, you must figure out what happens before the next group suffers the same fate.

The game centers around these girls staying the night in a home filled with vampires , and you must capture them all before the girls are killed. Now the most interesting thing about this game isn’t its gameplay, or the fact that it has half-naked slumber party girls running around screaming. Rather, what makes it special is that this game, along with Mortal Kombat are directly sighted by Congress in 1993 as being grossly violent and shameful. These games sparked hearings that ultimately resulted in the formation of the ESRB rating system that all games now feature.

But what are we talking about? How bad is Night Trap? Well if you listen to Congress it must be the most brutally violent game ever made. So I give you below all the Death scenes available in Night Trap, you be the judge.

Nothing worse than anything you would see in a shit 50’s horror movie right? Yet, because it’s a game that was targeted toward children as most games are, than it must be the worst thing ever made. However, there is nothing to suggest this game was ever targeted toward children. In fact, a quick examination of the front of the box reveals on the right side the words, “CONTENT ADVISORY: May not be suitable for young children.”

Remember, this was created even before there was an ESRB rating system, which will feature a more familiar symbol.

So if the manufacturer never intended children play this game, despite it being about as violent and sexual as the campy 60’s B-movie Barbarella, than why would there be such a stink made? The answer is simple, parents who refused to be actual parents and take some control over what their kids were doing were aghast to find out that as absentee parents, their children were playing games that might have gore, sex, and… obscene language. Oh the humanity!

The prude nature of this country, founded in-part by the Puritans still haunts all of us, as if a seeing a breast or hearing someone utter the word FUCK! somehow means the devil is upon us. The sheer ignorance of a mother who’s okay with sticking her breast into her infant son’s mouth until he is three years old but then denying the child ever see another breast until he is eighteen is utterly moronic and obnoxious. Kids are kids yes, but they are not stupid, and they were looking at boobies and vaginas long before you thought they ever would.

Not to mention your husband taught them every word they needed to learned by the age of five, and you always wondered where that language came from?

So after the ESRB rating system was formed, nothing much changed. I was able to get any game I wanted, whether it bared an M or not. The only difference it made was that some parents began checking the box when purchasing a game for their kids, however since stores had no policy on sale to children, there would be no way to actually stop the sale of any game to minors.

Much of the rest of the 90’s I spent playing various systems, but late into the 90’s my brother got a PlayStation and gaming really changed with that system. For whatever reason, playing anything prior to this console just didn’t interest me anymore, and games like Crash Bandicoot, and Madden were the wave of the future for me.

I remember that very few games released for the PlayStation were rated Mature, or my brother was just not interested in buying those kinds of games, being someone who enjoyed more sports-type gaming. It would be another four or five years before my brother would get the PlayStation two which blew the first one out of the water, but for me, I was already gaming on the PC by this time, and that will take us into a new millennium.

 

2001: A Gaming Odyssey

While my brother would focus his gaming on the PS2, I would move toward the PC for my gaming needs. Although I had owned a PC for many years prior and played many violent video games on the PC, the graphics to this point on the PC were still kind of shit. Games like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D were great games but compared to games of today they really looked shitty. But there was a theme with PC games of that type and it might have started with doom back in 1993, creating this kind of 3D type shooter game, now referred to as the First Person Shooter(FPS).

But it was actually around 1998 that things began to change for me, a little game called Half-Life was released, and oh FUCK was that a seriously fucked up game. Released by Valve Corporation, you play a guy by the name of Gordon Freeman who is employed as a physicist at the Black Mesa facility in New Mexico. During an experiment at the facility working on an alien artifact, a rift is opened between two worlds and aliens pour into the facility.

From this point forward it’s all “BLOW THE SHIT OUT OF EVERYTHING!”

Valve Corporation’s 1998, Half-Life

To say that Half-Life changed my life is an understatement. Until this point, I had never been immersed in anything as well made as this game was. It was story driven, it was gory, it was crazy. I loved every minute of it. It was terribly violent, and I cannot imagine too many parents would have been happy with their kids playing a game like this at that time. The best example of the game would be like comparing it to the movie Aliens which was of course Rated-R.

This of course was when games were still released on disk, there was no steam and your box featured the Sierra Games logo when they were still in business. As much as I loved Half-Life, it was actually a year or so later that a small developer creating half-life mods released one that would forever change FPS gaming and create in my opinion the military-shooter genre: Counter-strike(CS).

Counter-strike is a half-life modification that uses the half-life models, and code but creates a new experience by changing the way the original game looks and feels and turning into a brand new game revolving around a Counter-Terrorism team and a group of terrorists. These terrorists attempt to plant bombs or hold hostages, all the while the CTs hunt them down, kill them and defuse the bomb or escape with the hostages alive.

It was a super-hit immediately. What made Counter-strike so popular was that here was an FPS, but it wasn’t just point and shoot, it required strategy by completing objectives. Not only was it superior to all FPS games at the time, but it featured a large multi-player experience that was really unprecedented.  Quake was really the only game I can think of that featured such an experience but it lacked the kind of objective system that could be found in CS.

My friends and I played the game endlessly, and I even joined a cs clan where I played basically every moment I was awake. Much of my time was shifted to development when I began developing scripts and modifications for CS that could make the game more enjoyable and allow for a different experience than the standard one.

For more than six years I devoted much of my free time to playing CS, and random other games like it. It would be a time in my life where I would play many, many FPS games. But this might also be because of the huge success of games like Half-Life and CS, that caused game companies to develop all these games.

Another favorite of mine would be a 2002 Electronic Arts release, Battlefield 1942. However, it became a way better game with the Desert Combat mod. Like most FPS games, violence is just part of the territory. It would be impossible to make such a game without an aspect of violence, due to the nature of the style.

You run around with a gun in hand, shooting other people. I cannot see another way that such a game could be made and not have it involve in some way some kind of violence. But it should be noted that it is around this time that there is a shift in gaming, those who grew up on the old gaming consoles are now teenagers and adults, so as more and more become older the shift toward adult style gaming would become more prevalent.

Graphics would also take a giant leap forward with the release of Valve’s hit sequel to Half-Life with Half-Life 2, which featured it’s own engine called Source in 2004.

Valve Corporation’s 2004, Half-Life 2

The familiar jagged pixilation found even in Half-life is replaced by the smooth anti-aliasing of the Source engine. This huge step forward would require a new machine for most, and I too was one of them. I remember trying to play this beast of a game on the same machine I once played CS on, and it was simply impossible. The graphics card and processor being insufficient, it was time for an upgrade.

Very few games have ever made me actually purchase new hardware but this was one of them, and I never regretted it, because shortly thereafter a whole new host of games based off the Source engine were released all dazzling gems but requiring a hell of a machine at the time to play. One game I remember that was particularly violent was a game called Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines.

Rated Mature for good reason, Bloodlines was a game full of not only violence but sex and gore. Compared to Night Trap which resembled a cheesy 60’s film, Bloodlines was the real deal. More like a modern horror classic bloodlines pushed the envelope, and challenged your thinking of what a horror game should look like. If being brutal was your thing, this game would fulfill that need and more. Whether you enjoyed snacking on the throats of homeless, or teasing and murdering hookers, this game had whatever you liked.

But I can’t talk about violent games and not refer to Rockstar Games, a leader in violent gaming for sure.  In 2001, Rockstar released a sequel to the hugely popular Grand Theft Auto series and third in line. Grand Theft Auto 3 would turn out to be one of the most violent games ever made, and I played it a few times, but it wasn’t something I become interested in until I purchased Grand Theft Auto IV in 2008 for the PS3. That game rocked my world. Unlike any other car-style racing game before it, this game was sadistic to a point.

You play a thug who can steal cars, shoot people, attack the police, even murder hookers for fun. If riding over old ladies gets you off, this game is for you. Never had I ever played a game where running over pedestrians was so much fun, and completely insane at the same time. What maybe made it so different then other games in the genre was it’s mix of racing and combat, as well as it’s “DON’T GIVE A FUCK” attitude, that really appealed to the gaming community. I myself played it for quite a while before I finally got bored with killing people and finally put it away.

When you see a game like this and see what they put into it, you have to wonder if they know some kids are going to play this game. But again, I question parents whose parental skills lack any assemblance of normality, that their kid be exposed to something as off the wall as Grand Theft Auto. After all, it’s called Grand Theft Auto, not Barbie’s Adventure Land.

In what other game do you get to drive up to a strip club, walk in, and get a lap dance in the game? And what purpose does this actual serve? I wonder this myself, as a man who likes girls, why would I want to play this kind of game instead of finding a girlfriend? But then it occurs to me that this specifically whether they care to admit it is marketed to teenage males who maybe don’t have girlfriends because this is exactly the kind of shit they like in games. And to keep it to point, the violence, when you are done with your lap dances you can murder all the strippers like a maniac if you choose to.

But I’m not quite done with Rockstar just yet, because in 2003 they also released one of the sickest games ever made called Manhunt. In the game you play a person who is forced to participate in a series of snuff films. You go through various scenes executing people in various manners, with no remorse intent on getting a good grade, which you do based on the kills. It’s one of the sickest games I’ve ever seen, and exists seemingly for no other reason than do simulate murder.

With respect to violent games in general, games like Counter-strike or Half-Life or even Bloodlines do involve an aspect of murder, however it’s not all there is. There is an objective to playing, other than murdering someone. Even in a game like Mortal Kombat which relies on you kicking the shit out of your opponent to the point you can kill them, there is still an objective that isn’t actually the murder itself. Beating down an opponent and maybe (your choice) killing them, is secondary to the primary goal of reaching the end and defeating Shang Tsung.

But in Manhunt, you cannot complete your goal without murder, because murder is the goal. Even in GTA IV, you don’t actually have to run pedestrians down or shoot hookers, that is all secondary to the goals in the game. I don’t quite understand what would possess Rockstar to make such a game, even if it is their right to do so.

In 2004, Traffic Software released one of the most offensive games ever made called JFK: reloaded. In the game you play the role of the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. You are scored by how well you can match the Warren Commission account of the events of that day. If you are able to replicate with accuracy as close as possible, your score will be higher.

Turning a tragedy into profit like this turns my stomach, and I remember it being referenced on an episode of Law and Order: SVU by Detective Munch. The game is fucking twisted, but a psychopath’s wet dream. Why anyone would want to play this game, I don’t know.

But even this game pales in comparison to the next two on my list. Illusion Soft’s 2006, RapeLay, and Danny Ledonne’s 2005, Super Columbine Massacre RPG! In RapeLay you play a man whose objective is to stalk a mother and her two daughters all in an effort to rape and torture them. I’m not kidding, this is a real game, developed in Japan.

In Super Columbine Massacre RPG! you control the actions of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold; the pair who entered Columbine High School on April 20th, 1999 and killed 13 people before turning the guns on themselves. Though I am a huge proponent of the first amendment, even trash like this drives me crazy. Mr. Ledonne would like to claim that this type of game is an emerging art form and tries to describe the game as a way to turn gaming into art.

This game intended to be cultural commentary on school violence, but instead it comes off as merely a game that’s existence reinforces mass shootings as profitable. What is to stop another asshole from releasing trash like this and calling it art? Probably nothing.

I only wish I were finished, and that brings me to quite possibly the most violent video game ever made, a game released in 2003 by a company called Running with Scissors: Postal 2. In Postal you take on the role of a Postal dude who lives in a trashy trailer park in a small town in Arizona. At the beginning of each day you are given tasks to complete. You can choose to complete them peacefully or violently, but the game constantly taunts you and pushes you toward violence.

Not only are there dozens of ways to kill someone, but some are the most violent and gruesome I’ve ever seen. Pouring gasoline on someone and setting them on fire, and putting them out by pissing all over them, and then striking them in the head with a shovel or just letting them die in agony. It’s twisted, but then when you think it’s reached it’s most twisted point, no you find out, its so much fucking worse. Yeah this game is terribly violent, but I ‘m sad to say I played the shit out of this game.

Yes, twisted as fuck as this game is, I enjoyed it. It’s devilishly crazy violence is so over the top, that it borders on being too ridiculous to believe, again like watching Kill Bill.

Postal 2, The Most Violent video game of all time.

What’s clear is that there is definitely a progression of violence over the years, but what should be most clear is that violence isn’t new, it’s not something that has suddenly appeared but rather it has always existed as long as games have existed. Violence doesn’t change, only the technology. And the more advanced we make games the easier it is to make them seem realistic. And that’s really what is so different than games like Custer’s Revenge. Though the content of that game being offensive for sure, what is worse, that or a game like RapeLay, which puts you at the controls over a rapist, and not merely a pixelated example of what looks like two dogs fucking.

I have played a lot of violent, and offensive games over my life, and not one of them ever made me go out and hurt someone else. So the lesson here is that games while possibly the tools of a sadistic person to focus their sadism in the virtual world, they can also be harmless in the hands of those that do not suffer mentally. As I’ve said not all abused children grow up to be serial killers, not all gamers grow up to be Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

While I still enjoy the occasional game of Assassin’s Creed III or BioShock: Infinite, in my later years I tend to play more relaxed games like Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, or SimCity. I guess those kinds of games don’t really appeal to me like they once did, or maybe I grow weary of violence in general whether it be on the television, in the theatre or in my games. It simply doesn’t appeal to me as it once did, and that gives me some hope that maybe some of us just become more passive with age. But it’s scary to think how that works in reverse.

According to The Entertainment Software Association, 20% of video game players are boys under the age of 17 and 26% are men and women over the age of 50. The average age of a video game player is 37. And maybe that shows a trend in what I’ve already stated, that most gamers tend to be those who grew up on the old systems and have continued to just upgrade as time passes.

If this is the case, more and more games will become adult-based games, and the trend of violent video games will not stop. There will always be non-violent video games aimed toward children, but if this trend continues than those numbers will shrink because as most adults tend to dislike PG and PG-13 movies in favor of rated R movies, so too will their choice in games.

But I’ve always believed that a good game transcends gender and age preferences, it becomes something everyone can enjoy and appreciate equally. And maybe what we really need are game developers willing to push the boundaries and refrain from pushing on all of us the same old shit, repeating the mistakes of the past and resorting to a rehash. When game developers refuse to innovate we are given the same old crap in a new box: Diablo 3 being a prime example.

Every game developer before starting each day of work should ask themselves whether what they are doing has ever been done before? Whether they are being different? Whether they are challenging conventional wisdom? When a developer chooses to be different, you are gifted with a real gem, it doesn’t happen often enough, but it does happen. And it doesn’t have to be gory, or violent, it must simply be unique, because that ultimately that is what we all strive for, and in a environment of immersion, the same old, same old just won’t do.

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