Sandsday

The Violent Video Games Debate

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As a stopgap measure until SiteMeter allows one account to hold multiple counters later this year, I have added a Bravenet counter to Sandsday (NOT the rest of the website yet), similar to Da Counter from January through August 2007, so I know just how many people are enjoying the strip each day without wondering just how reliable Freehostia’s stats are. I have 26 separate hits for the webcomic’s title image this month, and at most 13 of those are mine (15 last month but I don’t even know how many of those are mine), hence why the counter starts at 13. But the mere fact that I have to go by the title image is not a good sign. And because I’m not entirely certain how many people really read Sandsday before now, I’m hoping I can set SiteMeter to only display the number of people to visit in the last 24 hours.

This is the last strip in the ongoing debate on violent video games, and because it ends ambiguously, I want to cover some points not made in the strip. First, I want to make clear that “Break the law as much as you can” is not really a plot. If you think it is, you can have your empty action movies.

In itself, video game violence is not wrong. It’s a damn sight better than real violence, and real violence is enough of a fact of life that we should not be censoring video games if the violence is to be expected. But it depresses me to think violence is an actual selling point for games, and for games like GTA and its clones, the violence is basically the point. What I don’t like is the idea of the violence sandbox that’s basically “Kill as many people as you can. Why? You don’t need no steenkin’ why!”

Not that there’s a problem with pointless games. I don’t have a problem with mind-numbing time sinks, because you need one of those once in a while, and I don’t have a problem with violence in video games, but I do have a problem with casual violence as a time-killer. It doesn’t reflect well on the mindset of video gamers, it’s more subject to the desensitization effect than deeper games, and there’s nothing to distract from the fact that you’re basically ending the “life” of simulated people. And people don’t play video games to have moral dillemas, so the conflict gets swept under the rug – if there’s a conflict at all, which is even worse.

I hope I’ve made my position clear, but I fear I haven’t. In fact I may be back to clarify my point.

A blatant attempt to get Sandsday on the search engines

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If you saw yesterday’s strip, you know I’ve started to engage in a blatant attempt to rope in video game geeks by commenting on current events. But today’s strip is only different from other video game-related strips I’ve done because it specifically mentions the Wii, at least at first. What happened? Did I realize just how much it was begging?

Well, let’s face it. The one thing most video game geeks want to do with the Wiimote, more than anything else, is aim it like a gun. Maybe sometimes swing it like a sword. But mostly aim it like a gun.

Hey Fox News: If you really want to take an unsubstantiated shot at the video game community, try painting them as potential murderers. Of course, everyone and their mother has done that already, but there’s still something to be concerned about…

Thoughts on the Super Bowl of the Ultimate Answer

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I was going to write a post that explored what might have happened if Brett Favre hadn’t thrown an INT in OT of the NFC Championship Game, which would have basically resulted in the greatest Super Bowl in history no contest, but I came under the weather in the middle of last week, and I can’t really concentrate on much of anything under such circumstances.

As it is, this game is definitely one of the greatest Super Bowls in history, but I’m not sure it’s the hands-down greatest. Part of it is also part of the reason I didn’t want to coronate Super Bowl XXXVIII, which XLII is definitely greater than: the slowness of scoring in the first quarter, in this case the entire first half and third quarter, during which most of the scoring effectively came in the first quarter.

But another part of it? No one (well, maybe except people in the Big Apple) is going to remember this Giants team as Super Bowl champions, unless maybe they turn it into a dynasty of their own. They’re going to remember them as the team that dethroned the perfect Patriots.

The story writes itself fairly well, but I just can’t shake the feeling that the better team did not win this game – that the Giants are champions more by dint of their role in a fantastic story, one that really stretches out over the whole season, than by any actual achievement. Part of it is the rather nondescript nature of the Giants. There’s a definite story surrounding Eli Manning but he needs to show that he really does have his brother’s genes in subsequent seasons. It’s nice that Michael Strahan, Plaxico Burress, and company get rings, but none of them are stars the way the quarterbacks and, sometimes, backs and receivers are. Green Bay would have had a better story: Brett Favre winning a Super Bowl in the twilight of his career and almost certainly pulling a Jerome Bettis afterwards. (Which is why I have less of an issue with the Steelers’ Super Bowl XL win than the Giants’ win here, despite the officiating controversies in the former game and the fact that I myself am a Seattlite.) The Cowboys… well, if this were a youth league or even college, a Cowboys-Patriots Super Bowl would basically have been a ready-written sports movie. But the Giants… the Giants are boring. Let’s face it.

About today’s strip: I did, of course, make the strip before the game, but it did cross my mind that the Giants could win the game. I decided I would keep the first panel regardless of the outcome because… well, you’ll see when you see it.

Making life a little bit better…

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I learned some basic PHP in a day and scrapped together a PHP script to handle the archive of the strip. Before, I uploaded an updated index page, an archive page for the new strip, and the strip itself when it was time to post. Now I simply upload the strip and add needed metadata to a database. It’s not much more work, but it will be an infinitely lesser hassle if I need to make changes later, and it will facilitate a future archive search function, as well as other cool archive functions. The only change you’ll notice is in the URLs. The strip is still accessible from the old URL.

Also uploaded a change to the title image I had thought I’d made already.

Okay, maybe I’ll be alerting you to new comics every day after all.

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I’ve started to waffle on the issue of whether to post on Da Blog every time I post a new strip. Each strip page is mostly images and the content of each strip does not appear on the page itself, and neither does “Sandsday” (except for, effective today, the main comic page). Although I have noted a growth in readers of Da Blog, it’s been fairly uneven; although December 29 was the last day I had no readers of Da Blog at all, I’ve had two days of only getting one hit since then. Moreover, it hasn’t really carried over into readers of the strip, and I may be suppressing the growth potential of the strip by not opening it up to the scrutiny of search engines. And if I’m not getting at least one reader every day, there’s hardly any point in me making a strip every day. I made this first batch of strips well in advance, so I’m not exactly entertaining myself with them, at least not on the basis I’m posting them.

Which means it’s time for another Da Blog poll! I want to find out if you think – at least for the time being – I should post on Da Blog whenever I have a new strip. It would be more than just a line saying, “there’s a new strip”, but it would have some sort of background behind it and might serve as a supplement. The exact content would probably vary on a case-by-case basis.

This poll will run until it’s time for the 2/3 strip to be posted.

Last time you can rely on Da Blog to tell you there’s a new strip up

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I’ve posted the new navigational interface. Now you can look at any comic in the short 3-strip history of Sandsday. Of course, it’s going to get a little hard as time goes on, so tomorrow I’m probably going to add a way to punch in a number and be taken to that comic. I do not intend to announce that change – it’ll be up by the time the fourth strip is up.

Building a brighter future… today!

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Okay, in my last post I said I would have a new comic at 11 PM every night. And this is a lot closer to midnight. Well, you see, I’m busy designing a whole navigational interface for the comic (now called “Sandsday”) and I was hoping to get it up tonight. It might still get put up later tonight, and it’ll be up tomorrow night at the latest. But for the moment, if you didn’t see yesterday’s first strip, you’re out of luck.

Drumroll please…

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…and this is what I was hinting about earlier.

Okay, it’s not exactly anything impressive right now. In fact at one point I was considering hosting it on Da Blog until I realized there wasn’t much point to that and hosting it on the web site allowed more potential functionality.

New episodes will appear each night probably around 11 PM PT, with some leeway. Although I had originally intended for the “web site news” tag to refer to every single change I made to the web site, part of the reason I’m not hosting this on Da Blog is that I don’t want it to take over Da Blog. Therefore I won’t post every time I put up a new episode. They’ll be going up like clockwork every night sometime after 11, so you know where and when.