Arguments and Complaints

I like to watch sports. Not all sports (I'm not that fond of hockey, and baseball can get a little slow), but some – especially football. My team is the Saskatchewan Roughriders of the Canadian Football League. They were 5 - 13 last year, so I didn't like watching them as much as I usually do.

When watching football, often the announcers will hesitate to criticize any player. That may be because they may lose access to that player if they slam them too much, or it might be that announcers believe you can't criticize without playing the sports yourself (which doesn't make sense for announcers who have played the sport, but I think they think they're part of some sort of fraternity and have to stick up for members of it, even if they do play poorly).

Now, that excuse doesn't really fly in sports, because we have a lot of points of comparison. We can use statistic to find average quarterbacks, and measure poor ones by that. Obviously, we can't make the plays they do, but if a bad quarterback is not doing a good job, we can pretty much prove it, and thus have a valid point of complaint.

However, the announcers do make a good point when you talk about things outside of sports. We should try to make an effort to at least understand things before we go off ranting about them.

I like Mass Effect 3. I like the whole Mass Effect universe, actually, and if they made an MMO, I'm pretty sure I'd get fired for not showing up to work. But Mass Effect 3 has gotten a lot of flack for having a bad ending. Which is alright. I think they went high concept, and nobody really got it. Or they finally reached such a large audience that it included people who weren't unabashed Bioware fanboys (In complete honesty, I am an unabashed Bioware fanboy).

But people then started complaining about other things as well. One that stuck in my mind was someone furious that all the aliens were humanoid. Which is a pretty dumb complaint to make after Mass Effect 3. You probably should have spoken up two games ago, bud.

Anyway, I'd like to take a moment to explain why most aliens are humanoid. It's a similar reason why aliens on TV are very human as well. It's because you can slap makeup or prosthetics on a human and have them be alien, while still having an actor underneath it. In computer games, you can take the human skeleton and body movements, and just reskin it to get different aliens. Play with sliders to get fat aliens, thin aliens, tall aliens, short aliens. The point is that the company can re-use large chunks of code, which allows them to concentrate on other things. Starships, space stations, cool alien planets.

We really can't complain much about how these games are put together until we've actually seen the goings on behind the scenes. How can we justify criticizing an AAA game if we have no idea how it's made? We need to learn more about them before we blow up, or our rants will just make us look stupid.

As another example, take the RIAA (Recording Industry Artist of America). They represent pretty much everyone in the USA that makes recorded music professionally, or holds a music copyright. They've made news in the past decade suing little old ladies who accidentally downloaded music. Which is a bad tactic from a PR department (maybe you should go after the big pirates who look worse, guys), but there may be more going on behind the scenes than we know about.

Copyright law is a tricky, finicky thing. It can be argued (by good lawyers who know their stuff) that if you don't protect your copyright, you can lose it. Which is one of the reasons Nintendo sues anyone who tries to put Mario in anything. If they didn't, and a little mom & pop shop used him as a ringtone, Sony or Microsoft could swoop down and start putting him in all their games. So Nintendo scours the planet, ready to serve anyone who tries to use their trademarks without their permission.

The same can be said about the RIAA. By suing people who're illegally downloading music, they're proving that they are protecting their interest holders (in this case, all the artists they represent). If they didn’t sue, people could start using their music all willy-nilly without paying a cent. Not only that, but the artist they represent would probably end up suing for breach of contract (the RIAA, in this scenario, would not have protected the rights of the people they represent). So they'd get hammered in court, with no source of income.

Yes, some artists want to release music for free (Radiohead's example of In Rainbows comes to mind, but two thirds of people paid nothing for it, so what does that tell you), but I would be willing to wager small amounts of money that they want to get paid for what they do, seeing as how it's their job.

No, copyright infringement isn't theft. Stealing a car is way worse (Seeing as how you're depriving somebody of a car, not the manufacturer of a car sale). But there's more going on with the RIAA than we give it credit for.

So keep in mind, whenever we complain or argue, maybe we should look at what's really going on, before we open our mouths and insert our feet. Remember "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool that to open your mouth and remove all doubt."