Note to “Dr. E.”: any future posts on unrelated topics will be ruthlessly moderated into Objectivist ash. There is no shortage of links within this post for future acolytes to pursue the purity of your vision.

Surf has been up this weekend! And it’s finally hot out there!! The June gloom is gone, and the July sky is out en force.

This is quite a thread! But it’s a bit on the gloomy side compared to the weather out there.

If everyone could list three positive things they find about tomorrow’s Gold 45 Revolver / Ideas Have Consequences / Moral Premise games/technologies/patents, that would be fun!

We have so much to cool fun look forward to!

Anyone going to comic-con this week?

If you see me there, I will give you a free t-shirt or two if you speak the magic phrase, “broken toyz fiatocracy fanboyz.” Please whisper them softly as I do not wish for the word to be getting out just yet regarding the impending Great Books Renaissance in gaming. We should probably keep the secrets of our future games to ourselves, so as not to show up on the fiatcoracy’s radar just yet.

Soon, I can tell we will all be getting together and forming a gaming company to build out the new exalted technologies, serving ideals greater than ourselves, and heroically and selflessly rescuing the ailing gaming industry, where too, too many are being laid off, and too much cash is being lost by investors on visionless, massive groupthink corporations reskinning GTA and God of War and calling it Dante’s Inferno. We could go surfing every day (company policy) and have an IPO in a year or so, or maybe just sell the Gold 45 Revolver technology/games to EA or Bethesda, so they could exalt Fallout 3 with deeper meaning, more engaging stories, romance, hookers worth talking to, and Homeric character. Either way, we should all be driving Dodge Vipers in a year or so. Scott seems like he would make a great CEO. I’d offer to do it myself, but I probably would be out surfing too much; and it seems Scott has a better rapport with y’all than I do. Oh well, we all have our places in this world, and I am happy just to be a part of such a great team, and serve alongside y’all in this battle for epic idealism and video games wherein ideas have consequences, whence epic romance, battle, chracter, honor, story, and plot are all finally united in simple moral premises, and games finally gain soul in being exlated as classical, epic art.

We should probably draw up a corporate hierarchy flowchart soon, and form an HR department headed by geldonyetich and sheepherder. We will all have nametags with our usernames/handles, so that will be fun, and y’all can wear masks at the new company, so as to maintain your anonymity and keep mean-spirited ad hominem attacks easy & fun. I look forward to seeing you and your masks every day in our lavish corporate offices, complete with free eminems and soda pop to keep you happy in your cubicle as you work long/insane hours to bring the soulful games to life.

I know many of you have been thinking of possible games utilizing the novel technology. Many of you have pondered the possibilities of endowing the Gold 45 Revolver/Ideas Have Consequences/Moral Premise technology with your own thoughts, values, and belief systems, to varying degrees of satisfaction. Instead of shooting the Lenin-quoting, property-redistributing woman in the flowchart on the patent’s first page, for instance, many of you have replaced her with folks quoting the founding fathers or Ron Paul or Dr. E, whcne you shoot them and/or have them put away so as to serve the fiatocracy. I am sure some of you have already drawn this up–some might have made a fallout mod of this, incorporating my words. Perhaps there will be a market for such games–in fact–I am sure of it, and we will definitely devote company resources to your mods based on this theme, as after all, we own the tehcnology and might as well employ it across the spectrum, for, as many of you pointed out, there is no such thing as ideals and the Constitution, and as long as there is a market for debased debauchery, teh free market dictates that it is our holy duty to serve it. Rockstar/Bethesda/EA have the hooker-killing/Beatrice-in-Hell market covered, and our company will cover various other demands, such as those for epic story, romance, character, honor, and exalted meaning in gameworlds.

“Historians from England will say I am a liar, but history is written by those who have hanged heroes.” –Braveheart

“Again, purists must remember that 300 seeks to bring a comic book, not Herodotus, to the screen. Yet, despite the need to adhere to the conventions of Frank Miller’s graphics and plot — every bit as formalized as the protocols of classical Athenian drama or Japanese Kabuki theater — the main story from our ancient Greek historians is still there: Leonidas, against domestic opposition, insists on sending an immediate advance party northward on a suicide mission to rouse the Greeks and allow them time to unite a defense. Once at Thermopylae, he adopts the defenses to the narrow pass between high cliffs and the sea far below. The Greeks fight both en masse in the phalanx and at times range beyond as solo warriors. They are finally betrayed by Ephialtes, forcing Leonidas to dismiss his allies — and leaving his own 300 to the fate of dying under a sea of arrows.

But most importantly, 300 preserves the spirit of the Thermopylae story. The Spartans, quoting lines known from Herodotus and themes from the lyric poets, profess unswerving loyalty to a free Greece. They will never kow-tow to the Persians, preferring to die on their feet than live on their knees.

If critics think that 300 reduces and simplifies the meaning of Thermopylae into freedom versus tyranny, they should reread carefully ancient accounts and then blame Herodotus, Plutarch, and Diodorus — who long ago boasted that Greek freedom was on trial against Persian autocracy, free men in superior fashion dying for their liberty, their enslaved enemies being whipped to enslave others.”
–http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson101106.html

–http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DrElliotMcGucken/20090710/2366/That_will_be_6995_for_the_collectors_edition.php

–http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3143589

Best,

Dr. E

P.S. Get out and enjoy the sun & surf! And everyone needs to list three positive aspects of the novel technologies before our first official company meeting!

Which is kind of what I’m saying to Dr. E, the heroes we revere are often not the men they are made out to be.

To be fair, what Hitler or anyone else did with Nietzsche’s writings isn’t Nietzsche’s fault, nor does it indicate anything in itself about Nietzsche or the validity or value of his writings. Similarly, the Beatles aren’t responsible for Charles Manson nor is J.D. Salinger responsible for Mark David Chapman.

Whether or not he’s really out of it depends on if he honestly believe what he’s saying. However, either way, he should consider mental help, as being criminally inclined enough to file bogus patents or bilk institutions out of $125,000 is, in itself, a mental illness.

@Joshua Meadows
Its more the battle between the Dr. trying to crush this den of criticism with the sheer weight of his text walls and the critics trying to object the Dr. with the facts. Its not like he will recognize them anytime soon. BTW, using Hollywood for reference to the history instead of doing actual research didnt work to students trying to avoid reading books and like hell it work now.

Likewise, you might also have noticed – if you had payed attention – that rather than being vindicated in his right to speak as he chose, Socrates was put to death, the only mercy he was shown was the chance to take his own life rather than being deprived of it forcibly.

Of course, if you actually had any interest at all in the classics you might have stumbled upon these little gems. Similarly, you might also have noticed that the Boston tea party so beloved in American history actually occurred because the British were importing tea with lowered rates of taxation into the colonies (once it reached the consumer), against which the local smugglers could not compete – turns out a number of your “sons of liberty” were self-interested smuggling assholes.

Stop using specious retelling of history to front Nietzsche-ian Ubermensch philosophy dressed up as an idea for a game. Because a) Nietzsche was exceedingly naive as to the ability of a man to discern right from wrong (See: Hitler, NSDAP – who used Nietzsche’s work to justify totalitarianism and slaughter) and b) games already exist that give the player the ability to choose from several morality choices (limited at a systemic level). It’s not our fault that these choices don’t agree with you: because you’re a fucking fruitcake.

And going back: yeah, it’s a big issue that the choice is either killing hookers or saving hookers, all with a Golden 45 that shoots Zeus’ lightning. It’s not exactly a female empowerment story, what with all those helpless hookers just waiting for a man to come save them or kill them. Either way, they are just meat puppets. Not exactly a sterling position for feminist support.