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This question really piqued my curiosity, because it reminded me not to take the things I know for granted. Being born in the early 80s, and having been introduced to videogames by older siblings and my parents in that decade, and then being involved with videogames either in the industry or as an avid enthusiast, the obscure (and most times useless) history of the medium is something I've taken for granted.

Recently, as older millennials and younger Gen X'ers have reached maturity (or middle age), there have been a surge in books, documentaries, and other materials about videogames... As they're seminal in many of our lives and so now we're looking back and writing these nostalgic retrospectives. Many are trash, even some of the best are still trash, but I'd recommend a few of them... The following are either entertaining, informative, or some balance of both:

• Blake Harris' Console Wars Amazon, a book released in 2014 that details the rise and fall of Sega of America. I think the writing is rough, at least, it tries to Aaron Sorkinize too much of the history and comes off insufferably cheesy at times, enough so that I just had to put the book down and shake my head with douche shivers, but because Harris' has one on one interviews and access to Kalinske, the head of SoA at the time, you get a lot of first hand details that just aren't available anywhere else.
  
• David Kushner's Masters of Doom Amazon, written in 2004 was one of the first contemporary books to get into the details of the videogame industry. This was mostly an untapped medium when Kushner was writing the book, as writing about a videogame company was just not in fashion in 2002 or 2003. Like Console Wars, the conversations are fictionalized but most match up to the actual events detailed in the book. It follows the origins and rise of id software, one of the most influential western developers who more or less invented the first-person shooter (even if they weren't truly the first, they certainly popularized the genre and most of what we take for granted in the first-person genre, id pioneered and introduced). id's fingerprints are on thousands of modern games, and the two founders of the company -- John Carmack and John Romero -- are often considered father's of modern action games, they also have a tumultuous relationship with one another, at the time often likened to John Lenon and Paul McCartney, and so the story of id software is also the story of their personal relationship.
  
• Gaming Historian YouTube Channel (google it, it should come up). Many of these videos are dry and some border on clickbait, but the majority are well researched and provide a good nugget of history into videogames.
  
• The King of Kong Documentary. It's not completely factual and it takes artistic license to make a better story, but it's probably the best videogame-focused movie ever made, even despite those inaccuracies. Why you should watch it? It's a great introduction into competitive gaming in the 1980s and how videogames worked. There are other materials that have informed this movie and you can start with the movie and just google questions, and because the movie was so popular there's a lot of interesting research that goes into the mechanics of it.
  
• NoClip, a Youtube Channel. NoClip has only been around for a year or a little more, but they're well funded and produced videogame documentaries... Most focus on some new aspect of gaming, but still walk back into the influences of the developers, which aren't cheesy... they're well informed and well made. Particularly, the interview with the developers of CD Projekt and how being under the heel of communism influenced how they built games and ultimately what makes a game like The Witcher so compelling.
  
• SuperBunnyHop YouTube Channel. Guy who does breakdowns of videogames and his informative retrospectives are some of my favorites. He introduced the concept of, "But what do they eat?" to me, which goes into a wider theory about creating realistic or believable game worlds. If you're in any game world, walking around, and there are creatures living there, if the game subtly answers the simple question "But what do they eat?" it makes the game world so much more believable because it's an indication that the developers/designers have really put more thought into the believability of their world. Most great games answer this central question or punt on it in a convincing way.
  
• Joseph Anderson YouTube Channel. His video breakdowns of games are just so good. He's probably most recently gotten notoriety by being critical of Super Mario Odyssey, at least, critical enough to say "the game isn't perfect..." And after playing Odyssey and feeling kinda meh on it after a while, I watched his video and it just felt so apt for me. He also does great analysis of mostly recent games, but most of those are informed by previous games, and goes into the mechanics of balance, pacing, mechanics, and the simple systems that inform most good game.
  
• RetroGame Mechanics Explained YouTubeChannel. These are typically technical breakdowns of how concepts in retrogaming worked, and are usually pretty involved. Not always light watching but informative.
  
• Mark Brown's Game Maker's Toolkit YouTube Channel. Breakdowns of videogame theories/concepts, largely.
  
  This is by no way supposed to be an exhaustive list, just a list of stuff that I enjoyed and others might too... Part of these videos/movies/books is video game theory, part is history, part is just sheer entertainment value, but I think anybody who is into videogames enough to talk on 'True Gaming,' would probably enjoy most of those.

Ah! Looks like I saw this post a little late but I'll throw in some additional suggestions as I am year into a PhD on a games related subject area (social dynamics of online games are of particular importance to my work).

I would start off by suggesting Johan Huzinga's Homo Ludens and Roger Cailois' Man, Play and Games which often underpin so much of the game studies field. Although many of the assertions made here are often extremely dated in new technological contexts they do provide an excellent reference point to more pure notions of play (as problematic as the concept may be).

Keeping it specific to your interest of social games and mention of T.L. Taylors Play Between Worlds I would recommend Mark Chen’s Leet Noobs; Celia Pearce’s Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds; the recent Routledge compilation Online Gaming in Context: The Social and Cultural Significance of Online Games and also Mia Consalvo’s Cheating: Gaining Advantages in Videogames. All of these books approach the topic of sociality in and around games in different ways but I would highly recommend them all.

I would also recommend T.L. Taylor’s latest book Raising the Stakes: E-sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming for an important study into the burgeoning cultural practices surrounding e-sports in the West. This is a subject matter that is really close to my own personal interests and current work so I might be a little biased, but much the same as Play Between Worlds, it’s a fantastically informed and important book to the field.

I could go on for a while though.. If you would like any more suggestions or have any similar material to share yourself please don’t hesitate to drop a message!

Not totally sure about requiring a massive budget. You would for the full realization of your dream, but there are many intermediate steps that can be turned into games. Have you played Pandemic? It could be something like that, where there are a ton of choices, but in a very manageable manner. It has a sophisticated yet elegant underlying ruleset that makes it workable.

It all depends on how you want the player to interact with the game. 3rd person action? Implausable. Top-down city sim? Mid-core budget. (Think Tropico). Text-based adventure? Inde game.

As I said, the text-based can evolve. Even if it was simply a choose-your-own-adventure style game, it would be entertaining. Remember the lense of a toy (http://www.amazon.com/Art-Game-Design-book-lenses/dp/0123694965). First, you create a toy. See if the toy is fun. If it is fun, then you can create a game using the toy.

Excerpt from "Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World" by Jane McGonigal.

The book can be found on Amazon.com here: Reality is Broken

Ms. McGonigal's TED Talk can be found here: Gaming can make a better world


> ".... But beyond a certain playing threshold - for most gamers, it seems to be somewhere around twenty hours a week - they start to wonder if they're missing out on real life.

> Technology journalist Clive Thompson has a name for this phenomenon: gamer regret. And he'll be the first to admit that he suffers from it as much as any other gamer. Thompson recalls checking his personal statistics one day - many games keep track of how many hours you've spent playing - and was shocked to see that he had clocked in thirty-six hours playing a single game in one week - as he described it, "a missing-time experience so vast one would normally require a UFO abduction to achieve it." He found himself vacillating between pride in what he's accomplished in the virtual game environment and wondering if all that hard work had really been worth it.

> As Thompson writes: "The dirty secret of gamers is that we werestle with this dilemma all the time. We're often gripped by ... a sudden, horrifying sense of emptiness when we muse on all the other things we could have done with our game time." He admits: "The elation I feel when I finish a game is always slightly tinged with a worrisome sense of hollowness. Wouldn't I have been better off doing something that was difficult and challenging and productive?"

> This internal conflict plays out in discussion forums all over the Web. The twin questions "How much time do you spend playing games?" and "How much time is too much?" are ubiquitous in the gaming community . . .

> ... What's needed is for games to go beyond flow and fiero, which make us happy in the moment, to provide a more lasting kind of emotional reward. We need games that make us happier even when we're not playing. Only then will we find the right balance between playing our favorite games and making the most of our real lives.

> Fortunately, that's exactly what's happening in the computer and video game market today. Games are increasingly teaching us the four secrets of how to make our own happiness - and they're giving us the power to make it anytime, anywhere."


I'm still working my way through the book, but this seemed like a relevant excerpt to this discussion, esp. as to why this type of discussion is common on this subreddit.

Edit As an aside; the way I maintain interest in games is by playing a lot of online multiplayer stuff, mostly Team Fortress 2. As the situation is always changing and evolving it's easier to stay in the flow, and as I'm constantly running into players better them myself (difficult to overcome obstacles) the fiero stays pretty satisfying too.

For me it's not the inherent graphics (assuming you meant graphics to mean technically impressive renderings) themselves, but rather the general "look" of the game that matters. Part of that is the obvious response, "I like things that look good over things that don't," but I think there's another factor here that often gets overlooked, one which I find to be very important: gamefeel (there's a book about it that uses that term)

The virtual sensation of playing a game, I think, matters a lot more than it's given credit for, and the way a game "feels" to play is—as far as I know—entirely based on the sensory feedback the game provides, a large portion of which are its visuals. There's a reason action games use all those particle effects when you land a hit: the visual feedback changes the sensation of the hit. In other words, the aesthetics strongly affect the gameplay.

The Errant Signal episode "Kinaesthetics" articulates the concept of gamefeel (which he likes to term "kinaesthetics") very well. You should consider checking it out.

It's been on my mind again, so I'm happy to see it here on Truegaming. But there's this video that might help out a bit or at least be a bit entertaininly-interesting.

It might be awhile until we are at the point where we can have entire schools based around this kind of discussion. But hopefully someday. There's plenty of interesting books outthere that have already been suggested here. There's some books based around game design like Raph Koster's "A Theory of Fun". There're YouTubers like aforementioned MrBTongue and Satchbag that fondly talks about games or themes in games and how it affects them and those around them. Then there's /r/truegaming that talks about these things as well, albeit a bit more fanatically.

But sadly I got nothing to fit exactly your category that you want to see, though I'd love to see it myself. Perhaps a start for finding some stories of interesting user interactions in MMOs can start with Eve Online. Check out The Mittani. Although I haven't read it in a long while I do remember its launch when I still flew with Goonswarm/Goonwaffe and the cool pilots and writers of the site. Some great stories and unintentionally interesting insight into the mindset of players interacting in an MMO space.

Finally home and having a chance to reply. I pulled five books off of my shelf that I would recommend, but there are doubtless more that you should read.

Raph Koster's Theory of Fun for Game Design

Janet H. Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace

Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan's First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game

Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan's Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media

They wrote a Third Person as well, I just haven't gotten the chance to read it yet. You might be able to find PDF copies online somewhere, but if you have the money, you should try to support the writer's by buying. Show them that people are interested in critical discourse about games.

Next week I think I'm going to order a few new texts (after payday), and I'd be happy to let you know what I think once i have them in hand.

I'm not really sure what sort of book you're looking for here. The study and thought of games written in long form is sort of broad. I would recommend Replay: The history of videogames for just long form analysis of videogames in general. It's all really interesting stuff that gets into such detail you wont read past the Nimrod computing machine from the 1940s world fair until a chapter or two in, but again, I don't really know what you're looking for other than "very in-depth book about videogames".

I don't want to undersell replay though, it's a fantastic book. There's no way you wont read it and come away with some impossible tales to tell your friends and it does get pretty deep into just how the technological limitations, economic conditions, and corporate culture of the 70s, 80s, and 90s shaped what we know as genres today. It's good stuff.

Maybe not a direct study on the medium, but The Ultimate History of Video Games is a very good book with a ton of good content and does address the abstract medium to some degree. It's also just a super interesting book.

I believe OP only has the MGS HD collection so he only has MGS 2, 3 and Peace Walker. OP if you're reading this and have a PS3 i highly recommend the MGS legacy Collection.

It has all the games you could possibly need, including the MSX games but they're not required for a playthrough, but just as UsoInSpace said, best play it in release order: 1->2->3->4 and then peace walker since it's the latest one.

This question is covered extensively and IMHO accurately in the first half of Jane McGonigal's book "Reality is Broken". In short, games are not simply a 'better' version of books and movies. They are a 'better' version of real life. Comparing games to books/films/music is comparing apples to oranges.

Games are engineered to provide reliable and reasonable reward for the player's effort in ways that real life does not provide, and in ways other mediums do not even attempt to provide. Succeeding at a goal in a game and getting the corresponding reward has absolutely no corollary in books or film (no agency). In real life, we often work hard for no payoff, and that is a negative feedback loop. Games are (pretty much by definition) constructed as as a positive feedback loop where smart choices and hard work lead to success. They feed that deep-seated need in us as human beings. Books and movies can entertain (passively, statically), but they are a completely different animal than games, which respond to the (active, dynamic) hard work of the player and reward them (actively, dynamically) when they have accomplished their goal.

[Edit: Competing in a sport is a game exactly as much as a video game or a game of chess. They are all artificial scenarios where you are presented with challenges and the agency to overcome those challenges.]

Go buy this:

http://www.amazon.com/Metal-Gear-Solid-Collection-Playstation-3/dp/B00CTKHXFO

And get ready for some awesome gaming. Highly advise in playing the order the games were released due era of gaming each iteration came from. This helps you appreciate the games a bit more as they change control wise.

I produce a talk show about gaming culture from a retrospective, analytical focus that covers different subcultures, collections, and play history each episode. (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpnBpHVI5tHdXvlSVlVqO6ggUWCrU4ICQ). There's a lot of reminiscing about game culture before today's current state and I made it to fill the missing hole you're asking for. I definitely want to see more content that treats gaming culture with a broader respect instead of hyper-topical news stories and marketing that will be completely irrelevant within weeks. All my interviews are meant to be evergreen. If you're interested, check out the Heather or Rocco episode.

Outside my own work, the only great Games Literature I've read is Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307474313?keywords=Extra%20Lives&qid=1449403420&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1

The Legacy Collection comes out next month (July 9th). I'd wait and get that if I was you.

It includes Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2, Metal Gear Solid 2: HD Edition, Metal Gear Solid 3: HD Edition, Metal Gear Solid 4 Trophy Edition and Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker HD Edition.

And you should play all of them in order. Maybe skip the first 2 if you're not big on retro games.

Edit: Just noticed it doesn't come with the first MGS. You can pick that up on PSN like you planned and play it while you're waiting for the Legacy Collection to come out.

Edit 2: Actually, it comes with a voucher for MGS1. So it's up to you if you want to wait or not.

Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter, a book by Steven Johnson, would fit well into your research. Also, you definitely need some empirical data if you want to draw any meaningful conclusions, so look for published studies and objective articles on topics like aggression, physiological arousal, and prosocial development in game-playing demographics. The best thing for your thesis is to find some credible academic papers that arrive at a conclusion you disagree with ("games are bad, mmkay") and use them, as well. Biased research isn't valuable research.

Besides the obvious standards, there's quite a bit out there. Reality is Broken is quickly becoming my go-to book for introducing people to talking about video games. If you're less focused specifically on video games, then Hamlet on the Holodeck is basically required reading for any discussions about interactive narrative and Pervasive Games: Theory and Design gives a great introduction to pervasive games, which are definitely different from video games, but there's a fair amount of overlap in good design principles there.

These are leaning towards the design and development side, but I would recommend The Art of Game Design and Designing Virtual Worlds. The former is a reference of patterns and questions for game design (including board and tabletop games), while the latter is focused on the design of MMOs and MUDs but the concepts can apply to other things like your typical shooter multiplayer.

This book has some pretty great insights into the topic. I would recommend reading it to anyone, regardless of how the view gaming.

The article in that link's also by Tom Bissell, whose book, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, is an excellent (if sometimes pretentious) book that definitely talks about games the way truegaming thinks about them. At the very least, it'll help us defend our hobby from the General Population.

(It also includes the CliffyB piece as a chapter somewhere in there.)

if your interested in an over-all history of video games The Ultimate History of Video Games by Steven L. Kent is a good read with a focus on arcade and early console games while Tristan Donovan's Replay: The History of Video Games has more of a focus on the development of pc games.

The debate shouldn't be about console vs PC as PS3 does support keyboard and mouse combo provided the developer has added the code for the same. I think Unreal Tournament and CS:GO support them from what I have heard and then there are peripherals like this and this for people who are more comfortable with a mouse.

I had a little luck on this wiki page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_balance

Namely, there is a reference in this article to this book, which sounds interesting:
http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Virtual-Worlds-Richard-Bartle/dp/0131018167

I suggest you take a look through that book and check it's list of references for more publications like what you want. To study this stuff seriously, though, you are going to want to be up on your calculus and statistics.

If you're interested in this subject, I'd recommend checking out Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better, a great book detailing many of the ways that video games can convey benefits to people.

You have quite a bit of research to back you up. James Gee out of Wisconsin is one of the more outspoken advocates of what you just said. Learning takes place through video games, even if it's not the kind found on standardized tests. In fact, the sources are endless. On top of that, don't even be so quick to dismiss edutainment. Some 2004 research suggests that those trivial edutainment games still increase learning. It's probably because even though the content is dry, simply being a video game is enough to increase motivation and self-efficacy. Practically any well-designed video game has potential, with some especially interesting work happening right now with Portal.

Extra Lives by Tom Bissell is pretty good. I'd recommend checking it out.

Maybe this is a little too longform for you, but Masters of Doom is a great book about the rise of id Software.

The Thrustmaster T-Flight HOTAS X is rock solid and goes for less than $50. More than enough buttons for a beginner, acceptable build quality, and it has a proper throttle.

If you want to go premium, I heartily recommend CH Products. The Fighterstick and Pro Throttle are probably the most reliable and accurate flight controls out there. Comes at a price, though - they're ~$130 each.

This is definitely a worthwhile purchase. It also works well with the wireless headset, which is what I predominantly used it for.

You are correct that it isn't really 3d, it is lots of 2d shapes rendered to look like 3d.

The DOOM Engine did something unique though which made it so much faster than the other games. In other games, the rendering process would be like you said; start from things farthest away and rendering until you get close to the player. Abrash and Caramack implemented Binary Space Partition (BSP) tree creation that was used to quickly figure out which part of the maps did not even have to be considered to render.

This is a great link showing how the BSP was referenced all the time during gameplay and how the calculations worked.

http://fabiensanglard.net/doomIphone/doomClassicRenderer.php

I think you also might be interested in buying my fav book, Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book. It has a lot of discussion on 3d engines including how the DOOM/QUAKE engines were built and their weaknesses but also includes anecdotes during their development. Quake still used BSPs, but built a whole new process (QVIS) where the compiling calculated exactly what surfaces a player could see from any position in the map and know which surfaces to load because they might see it soon (like rounding a corner).

https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Abrashs-Graphics-Programming-Special/dp/1576101746

You mean this adapter? Looks like it's still being sold to me. What has that got to do with battery efficiency?

If /truegaming were a seminar, Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens and Roger Callois' Man, Play and Games would be the first two books on the syllabus, though they well predate modern video games.

There is a book called Game Feel (which I thought your post title was referring to). It's well regarded in the game design community. It goes into elaborate detail on all the points you brought up. Just if you're curious about going down this rabbit hole a bit further.

Thrustmaster flight sticks cost about half the price of a game controller and are mechanically better than some $$$ sticks.

Smaller model $27

Larger model $34

She might be interested in this:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Video-Games-Pac-Man/dp/159962110X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1381262117&sr=8-1&keywords=video+games+are+art

Or even this:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Game-Design-lenses/dp/0123694965/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1381262117&sr=8-6&keywords=video+games+are+art

Possibly even this:

http://www.amazon.com/Theory-Game-Design-Raph-Koster/dp/1449363210/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381262296&sr=1-4&keywords=games+are+fun

I am a 65F gamer - let her know she's missing out if she ignores video games. Not only fun but uses the mind in ways older people tend to use rarely or stop using at times. The challenge of video games keeps the brain firing on all circuits. Puzzles, quests, challenge, etc., all combine to not only entertain but also to teach and to broaden thinking in general :)

All do if you buy something like this: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0040UAYI4

Also read up on Abrash's book.

http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/1576101746

The last couple chapters goes into when Abrash was with iD and was there with Carmack when he was coming up with the following: " Optimized solutions to 3-D graphics problems from texture mapping, hidden surface removal, and Binary Space Partitioning (BSP) trees are explained."

I think you need one of these.

http://www.amazon.com/Xbox-360-Wireless-Gaming-Receiver-Windows/dp/B000HZFCT2

4 players on PC. You can hook a PC up to any HDTV.

Yep they're all there including Metal Gear 1 and 2 from the SNES

In regards to the keyboard/mouse, I'll just leave this here

It will, you should read Everything Bad is Good for You

Good arguments for the upsides to gaming.

Somewhere in the $22.00 US range. I think I found mine for cheaper off ebay or some such nonsense, and you can use any wireless xbox 360 controller for it, just reconnecting it to the reciever to the computer (that is, changing from the xbox - i presume as i do not own an xbox)

>Bullshit.

Your brain doesn't work like you think it does, you can be manipulated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ


Orwell comes to america the science of manipulation (whole thing)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOdJMuCreDA

http://www.nypl.org/live/multimedia/orwell

Democracy incorporated.

http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Incorporated-Managed-Inverted-Totalitarianism/dp/069114589X

"This game about flying jets doesn't support common flight sticks" is a totally valid criticism. Especially since they're selling a branded flight stick. That stick is no more "controller-like" than, say, a T-Flight.

Violence long predates videogames, not only that, gamers are weary of the whole topic for good reasons. Videogames are a scapegoat for more fundamental problems with the world and society at large. It's deflection from real criticism of the political economic order, if you want insight into the world's problems go pickup "War is a racket".

http://www.amazon.com/War-Racket-Antiwar-Americas-Decorated/dp/0922915865/

>Am I missing something

You are, in the 90's, pc games you had entire control of the game software and files, you could mod things for free and people could make levels and share stuff for free. Ever since mmo's and steam, the corporate world has been doing a full court press against software ownership.

Pre mass high speed internet penetration they had to give you the entire game to run on your PC. Ever since they discovered the average gamer is tech illiterate and not very bright, they've been doing horrible stuff to the game files like encrypting stuff and making them difficult to mod.

Paid mods is further erosion of control of game software so they can remove your rights completely to own anything you are paying for. They are basically theives at this point and it would take a long discussion of intellectual property law and the mass corruption of capitalist society to fully flesh out.

Your post speaks to your political and historical ignorance of how corrupt the world really is, you don't really understand how evil the companies around you really are.

IP law is corrupt and is never going to be non corrupt, capitalism is not compatable with rule of law. You do not live in a democracy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYFxtNgOeiI

Book:

http://trilateral.org/download/doc/crisis_of_democracy.pdf

Before I begin your brain does not reason nor see reality as it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349

Manufacturing consent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwU56Rv0OXM

https://vimeo.com/39566117

Testing theories of representative government

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf

US distribution of wealth

https://imgur.com/a/FShfb

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

What goes down in the US goes down in all capitalist western states, they all follow the same model of "politics as show" where the public has no input if you look at the research.

From war is a racket:

"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil intersts in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."[p. 10]

"War is a racket. ...It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." [p. 23]

"The general public shoulders the bill [for war]. This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations." [p. 24]

General Butler is especially trenchant when he looks at post-war casualties. He writes with great emotion about the thousands of traumatised soldiers, many of who lose their minds and are penned like animals until they die, and he notes that in his time, returning veterans are three times more likely to die prematurely than those who stayed home.

http://www.amazon.com/War-Racket-Antiwar-Americas-Decorated/dp/0922915865

No it's not a "non sequitor". Big business has a history of being criminal, note that the commercial history of mankind is violent with slavery, feudalism, serfom, and capitalism, which is just modified feudalism/slavery. Did you not know there was a cold war still going on? Do you know why NATO was founded? DO you know how many countries the USA empire has meddled in their internal affairs all for profits of their corporations? Do you know where the 8 hour day comes from? AKA you really come off as having no understanding of how your society came to be at all and what is currently on going.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day

The average gamer is historically ignorant to how the world works. Why we have crap like abusive/orwellian copyright/intellectual property laws, etc. You have to understand the profits is politics, the goal of any state is to maximumize their upperclasses share of the worlds resources vs others. Usually by any means necessary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

Why would you ever pay for a program that doesn't entirely run on your computer? MMO's are just drm'd rpg's and when people make their own private servers they get hit with legal bs because the whole concept of paying for a subscription game over the net is a scam when we had quake/unreal.

Note that before high sped internet, we got dedicated server and local multiplayer came WITH the game, not cut out and held hostage at corporate HQ. So when people try to get their rights back to a game they paid money for to be able to play it when and where they want to forever they get hit with shit like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11444122

Before the internet game companies had to give the game so that it could be run on your computer, the last 15 years they've upended that by keeping control of some part of the game code on their servers hundreds of miles away. That means games are "broken" on purpose and defective by design, aka they "stop working" because of stupid bullshit laws and the general ignorance of technology and history like you for example demonstrate.

I can tell you the facts and how they all relate and you won't reason to the right conclusion. The history of business/capitalism and how the world works is directly related to why gamers have had their rights as gamers taken away from them (aka you don't get a complete game anymore). AKA you can still play diablo 2 multiplayer over lan without internet with your friends, you can't do that with diablo 3. That because how they underhandedly coded the game. Note that all games before the internet could not be locked down in such a way. We've basically had our games stolen from us and people like you buy that you live in a legit society and not a corporately run authoritarian society where you have no input in how things are run. You don't live in a democracy.

https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Incorporated-Managed-Inverted-Totalitarianism/dp/069114589X