Yes, I did. I wasn't incredibly specific, but I did say that it stifles creativity and innovation by rewarding greedy trolls over actual inventors. Sorry, man, but I'm having a hard time following your reasons for complaint...

Yes. It is. And the discussion was about how the west would struggle to capitalize because of terrible patent laws, and I was commenting specifically about the state of patent law in America. That, if it were up to us, nothing would likely be done. Your comment, while accurate, isn't really applicable to the…

Just as it is with campaign finance reform, patent and copyright law reform is a necessary first step to untangling the mess we've made of things. And, just as it is with campaign finance reform, the one step that must be made before any others can happen is the one step that will probably never be taken.

But it also shows that the government is terrified of stepping in and doing things when they could set up some private firm to make a fortune doing nothing instead. And besides, this is space exploration we're talking about - our government hasn't cared to really invest in NASA developmental science in ages.

I would give you a thousand stars, good commenter. The US patent system is the worst kind of disastrous, allowing greed to trump innovation and stifling the very spirit of creation and discovery it was meant to encourage. Just like copyright law does to intellectual property, patent law does to invention.

Look, intelligent people can disagree over how meaningful the decisions were in KotOR. I get it. But the fact that I can tell you why my Revan made the choices he made and did the things he did, and that that explanation can be completely different from yours or a dozen other people, means that some level of choice…

I agree that we could use another label. RPG is used too broadly, and frequently for games it doesn't quite fit. Hell, a lot of new shooters are incorporating "RPG elements," but to call them what they clearly aren't just weakens what it means to be a role-playing game in the first place.

Everybody's Revan was their vision of who that character was. As I said, video games are limited by the inability to provide infinite options, but even within those limitations I decided what Revan's motivations were. I looked at the dialogue options available to me, and decided based on who "my" Revan was what he…

...Aaaand we're done here.

The term first started being applied to video games in the early '80s with text parser games. Dungeons and Dragons even had a line of PC rpgs starting in the '80s. These were largely dungeon crawls, but they were called RPGs long before the FF series kicked off.

Leo! God, that poor bastard. I think I was taking my 15-year-old memories and merging the Leo and Celes stuff in my head. This game had So. Much. Content!

Right! I stand corrected. Still, though... great storyline.

I obviously don't mean when the term was coined in the general sense. I mean when it started being applied to console video games. Especially since there had been some PC parser RPGs early in the 80s that were much more role-playish than what later came to define the genre.

By that definition, every game ever made is a role-playing game. The thing that differentiates an RPG from any other kind of game is precisely that you DO get to define who the character is. You might have limits on the breadth of that definition in video games, where you can't allow for infinite choices, but there…

Celes. She was an officer in the Imperial army and an enemy of yours before you destroyed the crown she wore that was controlling her thoughts. She then has a long romance with Locke over the rest of the game. "Recurring" might have been a slight stretch, but I'd say it fits (if loosely).

Look, I love FFVI more than nearly any other game. I hold it in high regard as one of the very finest ever produced. But the FF series are not RPGs. You are not role-playing. It just isn't what it is. I'm not even certain how they were labeled RPGs in the first place way back when they started; maybe because they…

The Fallout series. Baldur's Gate. Knights of the Old Republic 1 & 2. For it to be a roleplaying game, you have to be able to make choices about how the story progresses. You have to have a character you are in charge of who acts, more or less, as you decide they should. Obviously it's never perfect because coding has…

The Celes/Locke love story remains one of my favorite fictional romances. Nice to meet another writer who drew such inspiration from this game as a kid. I don't know how any creatively-inclined young person could play this game and NOT fall in love with telling stories!

Games where you take on a role and play it. Final Fantasy games are like movies you watch that let you play the fight scenes. That isn't role-playing.