I Saw Dasein

There wasn't one. It sounds like the ACLU is helping fund an appeal of that decision and the trial judge will almost certainly be reversed.

I'm not saying that publishers have an obligation to continuously print copies. As I understood it (and I paraphrase), you argued that Gamestop is capable of "picking winners" among limited release video games. You hypothesized that Gamestop realized that Nintendo published too few Xenogears games, and that demand for those games would drive up the price. You further argued that this practice would tend to lead to retailers "picking winners" more often and then drive up prices for consumers. I don't think that's likely, because I don't think Gamestop or retailers are good at "picking winners". Moreover, if it was indeed possible for companies like Gamestop to "pick winners" and figure out which games have been under-produced, it should also be possible for Nintendo to do the same and actually produce enough copies of the game. In short, Gamestop is demonstrating that there is excess demand for games like Xenogears. If Gamestop can figure that out, then so can Nintendo. If Nintendo still refuses to produce enough copies to go around, you should really be blaming Nintendo rather than Gamestop. Again, I don't see how Gamestop is taking advantage of the market (except to the extent that it is charging current market price for the game). Retailers are allowed to "hold back stock" if they want to do that (although I mentioned above, doing that carries a lot of risk). It is perfectly legitimate for a business to hold on to a good with the expectation or hope that the good will increase in value. That being said, it doesn't seem very likely that Gamestop "held onto stock" in this case, because of the thing with the cases suggesting the copies are newly published (or at least newly packaged). If there are a thousand copies of a game priced at $50 dollars each, and 10,000 people want to purchase that game at $50, then the game has been under-priced. The vendor could have charged more and still sold every copy. From the perspective of the publisher and the retailer, you want to charge the highest amount that still allows you to sell every copy. Assuming that Gamestop did have a stockpile of games, it's true that it could have put those games out and more people could have bought them at $50. I mean, Gamestop could also have chosen to sell the games at $45 (or $30, or $10) instead of $50, and that too would be good for consumers. It's also true of all goods in that retailers could always charge less than market price. But why would we expect retailers to do that?

So they do!

I have free copies of the following games. Send me a message if you want one. I will strike them out as they are taken. Dead Space Dead Space 3 Crysis 2 Medal of Honor (the dumb new one) Mirror's Edge All of these games came with the Humble "Origin Bundle", so I assume they only unlock on Origin.

I don't mean that the characters are far fetched, really, just that they are more archetypes or sketches than they are fully realized. Like the grad student felt to me like Williams just inserted "archetypal lazy grad student" rather than developing an actual character. Same thing with Edith: she just felt like the archetypal crazy house wife rather than an actual character. They're both more like plot devices than actual characters, in that they exist solely as foils to Stoner as opposed to being believable characters in their own rights. In terms of Katherine, I suppose you could say she fell in love with Stoner as a kind of hero-worship, but what heroism is she worshiping exactly? I guess Stoner is supposed to be a great teacher, but I never understood what made him great. I felt like the book kept telling me that he was a great teacher and that his students liked him without actually showing me why he was a great teacher. So when Katherine fell in love with him it just made no sense to me. Likewise, Katherine is such a bland character that I didn't understand why Stoner fell in love with her. In theory she wrote a really great paper that spoke to Stoner, but the book never really explains what was great about her paper or why Stoner felt moved by it. Katherine is such a non-entity as a character that I have trouble even remembering anything at all about her personality, even though I just finished the book.

Well, if it's easy to make educated guesses on which titles will sell out, then why don't publishers just print more copies? If Gamestop can reliably determine that there is excess demand for a game, then so could Nintendo. The fact is that purchasing a whole bunch of a good with the hope that the good will increase in value is speculation, and speculation is risky. And if it's the case that a game is likely to sell out and increase in price, that indicates that the original price ($49.99) was set too low in the first place. $49.99 isn't the "right" price for every game: some are worth that much, some are worth more, and some are worth less. I do agree that people make a livelihood on games and I have a lot of sympathy for those people, but in this case I don't see how those people are hurt. Nintendo sold every single one of the copies of Xenoblade that it published, as far as I can tell. The fact that some of those copies are being resold doesn't hurt Nintendo, since Nintendo apparently has no interest in selling additional copies of the game in the first place.

If Game Stop started holding back substantial numbers of copies in the hopes that the copies will inflate, basically Gamestop would be taking on a huge amount of risk. Most games don't appreciate in the way that Xenoblade has; most games drop substantially in price after release. So I think it's very doubtful that Gamestop will deliberately hold back copies of games in order to gamble on the fact that they might appreciate. I really don't see how this is bad for consumers. A week ago if you wanted a copy of Xenoblades, you had to buy online from an individual retailer, with all the risk and inconvenience that entails. You would have spent around 90$. Today you can still buy online from those retailers, but you can also buy from Gamestop if you prefer, at around the same price: $90. Of course, if you think $90 is too much for a game, that's fine, you don't have to buy it. So no consumer is actually hurt, and some consumers are better off (those consumers who would prefer to purchase from Gamestop rather than EBay). I also don't see how it's bad for developers: developers presumably got exactly the same cut they would have gotten from a MSRP sale. So how exactly have developers been hurt? The only way this looks bad for consumers is if you assume that retailers have an obligation to sell all of the stock of a game at MSRP. I don't think retailers have that obligation, subject to the terms of their contract with Nintendo. e: For the record, I'm not a "rah rah capitalism" guy in general, but when it comes to markets for luxury consumer goods I do think a free market is pretty sensible.

I feel kind of the opposite. I always feel like I'm wasting my time when I play video games or watch TV or watch movies. But I do feel like I actively participate in the books I read: I struggle to understand them, I think about how and why the author wrote in the way he or she did, I try and find meaning in the text. That feels much more active, challenging, and interesting to me than does (for example) grabbing treasure in Spelunky. Maybe that is a function of the kind of games and TV and movies I tend to watch, which tend to be on the "escapist" side of things. But for whatever reason I prefer to read a hard book than to watch a difficult movie or play a thoughtful video game.

One possible theory would be that Gamestop is contractually obliged to pay Nintendo some portion of the sale of new games. This might be the case if Gamestop had some kind of consignment relationship with Nintendo. Nintendo delivers goods, Gamestop sells the goods on the part of Nintendo, then Gamestop gets part of the proceeds and Nintendo gets the rest. Unsold games are returned to the publisher. That's basically how books are sold, so it wouldn't surprise me if Gamestop had the same model. If that were the case, it might make sense for Gamestop to purchase the games from itself, then sell them used. Nintendo would still get its share of the proceeds (when the games are sold from Gamestop to itself), but then Gamestop could go on to sell the game at a markup. Or it may be that Gamestop originally had some unsold games from Xenoblade's original run, which it returned to Nintendo as remainders. One way or another, Gamestop managed to reacquire the remainders and sell them. I believe remainders are treated as "used" for the purposes of book sales (at the very least they are liquidated at deep discounts), so that theory also seems kind of plausible.

Could you explain why it matters whether or not the copies are "new"? Would Gamestop have been obliged to sell the games at a lower price if they were new? It seems odd to me that Gamestop would sell new games as used, since presumably a new game is worth more than a used game. I guess I don't understand what incentive Gamestop would have to sell a new game as used.

Yes.

Semi-colon easy mode: only use a semi-colon in situations where you could use a period instead. The semi-colon indicates a logical connection between the two sentences. Example 1: I was hungry. I went to town. Example 2: I was hungry; I went to town. In Example 1, the relationship between being hungry and going to town is a bit unclear. By comparison, Example 2 makes the relationship between my hunger and the journey clear. It implies I went to town because I was hungry (or at least that hunger had something to do with the journey).

It's probably OK as a semi-colon. In her example above, the semi-colon is being used to separate items in a complex series. Effectively she lists two possible uses for the semi-colon (separating items in a series and as a conjunction between independent clauses), and uses a semi-colon to separate the two items in the list. It's probably unnecessary and a comma would also have sufficed, but there's nothing wrong with it as far as I can see. e: if she intended to use the semi-colon conjunctively, she has a problem because the second clause ("for dividing two completely different thoughts that would still be considered part of the same sentence") is a dependent clause rather than an independent clause.

Thanks, that's an interesting way of looking at it. In that sense, The Sun also Rises is kind of existentialist, in that it is about the efforts of individuals to find meaning in a world that no longer has a clear moral order. But I'd still say that "let's drink and fuck and party" is a facile response to a crisis in values and doesn't make for very compelling reading (at least in my opinion). By contrast, take something like The Plague. That book is also about characters existing in a world that is dissolving into death all around them and a world that lacks a clear moral order. But in The Plague the characters actually do attempt to find some meaning in existence. I find the struggle to find meaning interesting, but I don't find the mere fact that someone could have an existential crises to be very interesting.

But Nintendo isn't selling new copies of the game (which is why the price for used copies is so high), so I don't see how Nintendo loses out.

I read Stoner, by John Wililams. I read this book based on recommendations in the Book Club thread from Osmosisch and Thyroid. It is a short novel about the adult life of an academic. Williams writes in a very plain style that is restrained and elegant. The book is told entirely from the perspective of Stoner, a farm boy who goes on to lead a mostly undistinguished life as a professor in a small mid-western university. I didn't really like this book much. Parts of it are very beautiful, particularly the way Williams writes about the progress of Stoner's inner life. The moments early in the book when Stoner learns that he could be an English teacher touched me very much. I also loved the end of the book. My problem with the book is that while Stoner and a few other characters are very well drawn, other characters seemed totally one-dimensional. Stoner's wife is one of the coldest harpies I have ever encountered in any book, who seems to live only to tear down Stoner. The book treats her with very little understanding or empathy, and I never really understood what her motivations were. Another example is Katherine, Stoner's mid-life fling. She is a much younger woman and one of Stoner's students. The book portrays their relationship as sort of a Platonic ideal of romance, both utterly passionate and compassionate for one another. But I have no idea why Katherine and Stoner fell in love, and I found their relationship inexplicable and hence unbelievable. It also made me feel uncomfortable, in that to the extent that the book considers what might be wrong with a relationship between an older teacher and a younger student it seems to say there is nothing wrong with it, and that society is wrong for opposing it. I guess I felt like the book felt too hagiographic. It doesn't portray Stoner as a saint, exactly, but the book sets up certain characters as unmediated villains (one of Stoner's graduate students, Stoner's wife) and other characters are not well drawn. I'm still glad I read it. Out of the many, many books written about English professors, I'd say this is one of the better ones.

I don't understand why it would be unethical to sell a new game as "used". The used-game purchaser ends up with a better product that he or she actually wanted: he or she gets a video game without any depreciation (the new game) instead of a video game that may have significant wear-and-tear or damage (used game).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlIMs0iqCyo

One thing that is weird about the whole "barbarism of the Soviets" thing is that the Nazis are treated pretty neutrally in the CoH games, as I remember. Like when you play as a Nazi you don't have to round up civilians and ship them off as slave labour or something. You aren't really confronted with the basic inhumanity of the Nazi regime, or the atrocities that the Wehrmacht helped inflict on the countries it invades. I guess I think it's weird and gross that historical war games don't seem to really address the atrocities that have accompanied most major wars. It would probably be weird and gross if those atrocities were made into game mechanics, but the absence is also disturbing in a different way. Has TMA ever done an "ethics of wargaming" podcast? I remember reading or hearing something from Troy about him not liking to play as the Germans, but I don't remember anything else. There are a LOT of episodes though, and I haven't listened to them all. A ha! there is an episode. I should have known. http://flashofsteel.com/index.php/2010/10/27/three-moves-ahead-episode-88-ethics-morality-and-motivation/

Ok, fair enough. I generally don't view pricing as something with an ethical dimension. If (for example) Louis Vuitton wants to charge a thousand dollars for a pair of jeans, I really don't care--I just won't buy the jeans. I tend to view video games through that same lens, and so I used excessively strong language in my original post. Sorry.

The company doesn't control the whole market for the product. First, there's probably other used copies available from other retailers (there's a bunch on ebay, at similarily high prices). Second, Xenoblade is eminently substitutable: if you don't want to buy that game at the current price, there's approximately a million other video games you can buy instead. So what is "bullshit" about the market for this product? If they can find buyers at the current price, good for them. If not, too bad, they will have to lower their price.

People are such babies about video games. No one has an inherent right to buy a video game at $59.99. Gamestop should charge whatever the market can bear. I don't understand what is supposed to be "shitfy" about that. This: strikes me as pretty unlikely, too.

Not strictly TV or movie, a short documentary/PSA from Werner Herzog on texting and driving. Weirdly Herzog's style is a really good match for PSAs.

You should just stop smoking and starting eating seafood. The latter is delicious and the former is not.

I finished Wind-up Bird Chronicles a few days ago. I really ended up liking it a lot, and I keep finding myself trying to puzzle out the relationship between the characters and "solve" the ending of the novel (although it may not be solvable at all). Some thoughts: Anyway very cool book. Not a lot of clear answers but tons to think about.