Unfortunatly chere, It doesn’t Boggle my mind. I am all to familiar with this tactic. “When one has nothing of Value in the way of an opinion counter to what has been said, one attempts to Humiliate ones opponent into silence with shallow, meaningless personal attacks.”
These are the same sort of person who would publicly make fun of a persons accent or Physical appearance in order to attempt to discredit the speaker instead of attempting to deal with issues they are Ill equipped to address.

Tovars essay was well thought out, and though the style of presentation might be difficult to read for the Truely Illiterate, I found it very easy to keep the thread of his thoughts clear in my mind.

Since “Diary” inferes a continuing journal, I look forward to the next installment.
Keep writing Tovar, and Ignore the small minded.

Maria.

It was what he said that interested me, not how he said it.

Maria.

TSO is, first and last, a game. EA was trying to make a game … an online game to be sure, but a game nevertheless, an online entertainment service, in essence, taking place on servers owned by Maxis/EA. Human rights, per se, really don’t apply within that environment … you have the right to have the TSO applied fairly. If you do not like it badly enough, you can unsubscribe (a critical difference between this and rl!).
The interesting thing about TSO is that since it is not set in a medieval fantasy world or a futuristic sci-fi world, it seems much, much closer to real life … which makes people think that they are entitled to free speech, freedom of assembly and the like. After all, the Sims *do* look and act like contemporary people (or at least a somewhat tongue-in-cheek rendering of that). So the atmosphere of this particular game lends itself to that kind of confusion. You do not hear players in Dark Age of Camelot or Star Wars Galaxies complaining about human rights, freedom of expression, lifestyle choices and the like …. when they complain the complaints are about bugs, lags and the like. The environment it different … people are not there to live a simulated fantasy real human life, but that of a knight or bounty hunter or what not and are more interested in levelling, killing foes and the like. TSO’s atmosphere is very different, closer to real world than these others are, and therefore generates more expectation on the part of some participants to believe they are entitled to real world freedoms despite the reality that they are customers of an online entertainment service, in essence.

i agree that the devs seem to have really misunderstood in some basic sense what they were creating here due to the human element being present, and the fact that this human element would present itself in a really different dynamic given the setting of TSO as compared with most other online games. But the fact remains that this is a game, and as such the rules ouf real world rights simply don’t apply, in my view.

some have argued that this is more like a shopping mall, where you are entitled to human rights protections even though it is private property. Well, while that is an interesting argument, it isn’t particularly compelling to me because here you are charged admission to participate in an online entertainment service … there is no real element of “public space” here, in contrast to the shopping mall or a Hotel where the space is publically accessible and purposefully held open to the public and therefore in some sense within the public doman regardless of the reality of the private ownership of the land. perhaps the shopping mall analogy applies to the internet, or some parts of the internet, but it seems a different case from that of an online entertainment service like TSO.

kelli