Don't mistake the "illegality" for a deficit. That's a crummy argument.

Uh, there's a pretty long history of these laws being fairly transparently anti-LBGT. I'm sure this dude isn't exactly all feminist, either, but the target is overwhelming so they can bring junk charges against homosexuals (mainly men) and scare the rest into silence.

Me too, I don't think anyone is really that happy about it. But the point is that there's no choice when you're in the torrent business. Adblock is a godsend.

Well, pretending everything is peachy and just a'ok is totally the mature, reasonable reaction from a culture. Heads and sand and the like.

Just as a clarification, sites like piratebay don't have much choice in advertising. Not saying that I support or enjoy their ads, but due to the nature of their business, porny/scammy ads are really the only sorts of advertisements that can be run on such a site.

"Novelty" is probably a better word, absolutely. It was new and exciting for a game like GTA.

I have to agree that I can only see actual positives in this story, and I think it's a touch unfair to go to such lengths to put down these actions because of a disagreement in political/social belief.

Domestic violence often exists in reciprocal cycles. It doesn't change that he's a violent scumbag, but it can shift away from focusing on zero-sum blames and actually engaging with the fact that these environments are simply toxic.

Hah! You have to remember that when GTA4 was released, the sort of open world like "hanging with friends" and "going on dates with your girlfriend" was supposed to be new and groundbreaking. It ended up working poorly and was, pretty much in that incarnation, a failure.

Saint's Row has always been satire. Nothing is sacred to them. I played the third game and enjoyed it moderately enough to put in 20 hours. Everything is over-the-top as-offensive-as-we-can-make-it. The whole mission in the S&M club ending with using the human ponies to race after your target just made me sit there…

I'm a HUGE KotOR fan and I still think they're both some of the best experiences I've had in the last decade or so. However, TOR was just... underwhelming. I subbed at launch for a few months and tried to pick it again when it went f2p.

As an MMO player, especially in games with more of a European playerbase, men play as women characters really, really, really frequently.

If only SWTOR were a better game. Sigh.

You know, it's really great that this whole image of game design has changed so rapidly. However, prior to 2000 (or so) making games was pretty much a "failure" by any reasonable economic standards. We didn't get to the bloated, huge budgets or the general mainstream acceptance of games until, really, the mid 2000's.…

There's a big difference between objecting to sensationalist and flavor-of-the-moment content and condoning harassment. The majority of non-troll (outliers in bad faith) individuals exist in the former and not the latter camp.

I ran my FLGS (RIP) for a while after I graduated from my undergrad and needed a job (any job) quick. During that time (and before and after) I got to know pretty much every semi-regular and regular customer we had, ranging from the pleasant to the nasty and the genius to the dumb-as-a-rock.

Edit quick before MRAs get a screenshot!

We like to downplay religion as a dominant theme in life, when we should (perhaps?) do the opposite.

I agree to an extent. This is how democracy works... slowly. Checks and balances to take into account that huge, seismic shifts don't destroy the foundations of law (whatever that's worth).

What about the "chick" who is pestering your drunk "dude" friend? Because, well, that happens a lot, too. But god forbid anyone include it in a campaign.