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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: October 26th, 2025

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  • The basic concept wasn’t “there and then left” though, like I feel as though you’re implying. Games came with extra content like maps and guides, sure, but regardless you always bought and owned the game. This has been the case with board games, card games, other physical games, and even digital games since until recently.

    Would you suffer the same emotional trauma if you had a leaky roof and your physical game collection got damaged and was unplayable?

    That would be pretty upsetting, yes. I owned those, though. I very well may own that roof, too. There’s a lot to be said, considering a leaky roof may even be my own responsibility. You can loose access to a downloaded digital game, however, while maintaining the console fine.

    Why would your favourite game that was still saved on your console not be playable but putting a disc with the same data on it somehow would be?

    Because of how the licensing framework operates with digital games. It’s no longer in your control to protect your access. Governance of your access isn’t owned by you anymore. When a game is designed to require purchase validation, which many are and they can be changed to retroactively, but the validation server goes offline, you can’t play it without modifying the system—assuming you can modify the system.

    You’re getting a little too upset over the potential that you might not be able to play some games you deleted

    Games have become inaccessible in the past and will continue to do so. Requiring all games be virtual pretty much ensures all games will, sooner rather than later.

    It also goes without saying, it’s a lot easier to protect a disk collection than it is a console. Consoles have many more moving parts that can fail, for obvious reasons.

    I don’t think it’s too far fetched to be upset by this.


  • Easy access isn’t the problem and hasn’t even been tried. There isn’t easy access. There’s illegal access through shady networks with unverified merchants and products. That’s the result of the prohibition… that and decades of a stupid war on drugs.

    “Opening it up more” presumes that I mean “give more people more access to more drugs in the same way they do now.” That’s not at all what I mean.

    There are some social crises in people life where policing themselves gets lower focus

    Sure. Then they can just go to their local gas station drug dealer and buy some meth then. Your solution doesn’t seem much better. I don’t see how this really argues against a utilitarian approach to drug regulation.


  • Easy access isn’t the problem and hasn’t even been tried. There isn’t easy access. There’s illegal access through shady networks with unverified merchants and products. That’s the result of the prohibition… that and decades of a stupid war on drugs.

    “Opening it up more” presumes that I mean “give more people more access to more drugs in the same way they do now.” That’s not at all what I mean.

    There are some social crises in people life where policing themselves gets lower focus

    Sure. Then they can just go to their local gas station drug dealer and buy some meth then. Your solution doesn’t seem much better. I don’t see how this really argues against a utilitarian approach to drug regulation.


  • I have a rather interesting view on the matter. Typically even my in-group doesn’t agree with me on this. Yet I think all drugs should be legal. Access to drugs should be strictly regulated (imo), but easy. Therapists should be able to obtain license to administer psychedelics. There should be therapeutic centers specializing in use of psilocybin, ketamine, and MDMA. There should be other types of therapeutic centers where you can get access to methamphetamine, opioids, and other drugs—as prescribed necessary for addiction treatment. There should be places to buy recreational drugs like cannabis.

    Everything has a place, in my view. Banning something outright is naive, creating more problems in the long run. If you swap from enforcement of prohibition to a more utilitarian approach, you can get a lot more done. That doesn’t mean you give drugs away and create addicts. It means you be a grown up and stop acting like everything is the boogie man, while also acting like anyone who touches it has caught cooties.

    People do a pretty good job policing themselves when the system is established in a manner to empower them with good choices. It’s the same idea as the panopticon, as old as Jeremy Bentham, but in reverse. People aren’t going to go get their free meth when culturally it’s known to be for addicts who are at a bad place in life. People who do just want free meth are now surrounded by psychologists who can help.


  • It’s not just that experience in and of itself. That is only one experience derived from the lifetime benefit of ownership. You own the things that you enjoy. Hell, I remember playing the Wii… then I remember finding exploits in the Wii, providing replay value… then I remember learning how the Wii works in interesting ways… then I remember hacking the Wii… then I remember discovering a world of community content for hacked wiis… then I remember sharing that with my dad… then I remember regifting that Wii to my mother in law decades later…

    Prior generations had the same benefits, be it with cars or whatever. The standards for ownership have been pretty consistent for consumers in the consumer market for centuries if not thousands of years. Suddenly, everything is being locked up and licensed back on fragile infrastructure you don’t own. That’s not tech advancing. That’s you loosing shit.

    Sooner or later, people won’t be able to get physical medium at all for the games they enjoy. Favorites will be predestined to be a faded memory, not something you can choose to cherish over time (in a box somewhere, of course). Thats fragile.

    What about when life gets busy and you’re suddenly out of touch with modern games? Want to bust out an oldie and kill some time? Tough luck… you never owned those old favorites you’d poured money and time into… That’s where it’s headed. I don’t call that advancement.


  • I don’t want games that aren’t going to end up in my attic within the decade, so that I can rediscover them in another half decade, and spend several hours trying to boot the legacy hardware to play them.

    That whole experience of actually owning your stuff is gone, if you go digital. It’s not just the theoretical risk that they turn the server off. It’s the constant dependency on Sony servers, licenses, accounts, and digital catalog. Those dependancies precede even being able to look at what titles you own.

    Do you remember finding your old WII as a kid? Jailbreaking it years after it became irrelevant, and showing your dad that you loaded all his favorite childhood games onto it for him? Contra, Russian Attack, … my son will never have that experience.









  • It really seems like the idea is to create walled gardens where you profit from every part of the ecosystem. The ecosystem gets augmented with surveillance because surveillance provides the information necessary to fine tune the ecosystem. The surveillance gets augmented with automation, scaling techniques, and machine learning because they believe that better data continues producing better results. Results being anything that effectively drives profit: vendor lock in, sales, monetizing resales, monetizing game sharing, reducing labor costs, …

    At a certain point, the rest of the world should decide that the American bar is too low and easily competed with — right? I mean, who wants the fruits of late stage capitalism? I imagine nobody who hasn’t been raised and educated within a culture which pre-accepts these things as normal.

    When the rest of the world begins competing better, do they thing foreign gaming consoles will be banned like foreign cars?