That second link, while not only being a useful explanation, is full of deliciously insane conspiracy theories in the comments section. For those that find entertainment in the insanity of others, be sure to check it out.

Here, have mine. I shook it up to dissipate all that dangerous pressure. You're safe now.

You don't scare me. That could be anyone's ass.

... because the mental image I always needed as of Steve Ballmer hot and sweaty in front of a crowd shouting "Penises! Penises! Penises! Penises! Penises!"

This whole situation does explain why my mother appeared to be sick on the couch at my parent's place on Thursday afternoon when I paid them a visit. With all the shaking and huddling under the covers and looking pale-faced I presumed she had come down with the flu or something.

They aren't addicts, that's patently unfair. They can stop any time they want. What is most admirable about them is that they are simply so time-savvy that they coincide those times at which they wish to stop with the periods during which their crops have to be left to grow. Once the crops are ready for harvest, they desire to play again. It's really very simple and implies no addiction whatsoever.

Seriously though, 2.5 hours? The experience I have with Farmville gives me vague recollection that there are a fair few crops that have a growth period of a hour or less, and given that the crops wither and become unusable in the same time they take to complete their growth makes me wonder how many people petitioned Zynga for free ... well, the game is free so technically (and literally) nothing of value was lost, but still, I'm sure they were crying about something.

Now shut-up, it's nearly 4:01 server time and my rogue still needs the Brewfest boss' dagger to drop for it. 5 times and all I've seen is the mace which I can buy for fuck all anyway. My warlock has had two daggers already; maybe it's payback for the Midsummer event when my rogue got the staff twice and my warlock never saw it. THIS IS SUCH BULLSHIT.

As per your request. It's a bloated* DRM platform which strictly speaking is worse than something like TAGES (ugh) which at least only calls home during installation.

*(love it or hate it, you can't deny that it's not a clean client)

A valid point I guess. The implication that you're a pirate via a persistent call home (less periodic if you use offline mode, yes, but still never non-existent) is clearly a much more subtle contempt than a link to a completely DRM free executable that installs a game that simply runs from it's own executable as opposed to being wrapped in a Steam-requiring header.

Steam goes down, and no-one in offline mode can play anything. GOG "shuts down" for a lame marketing stunt and it's only the people who hadn't already downloaded their games that didn't have access to them, everyone else can play regardless. It goes without saying that when Steam goes down people that hadn't downloaded their games don't have access to them either.

It sucked, yes, but it was a joke, and however pathetic a joke it was, it's over, so the time for internet drama has officially passed.

And you thought it was a moral dilemma as to whether or not you wanted to shake a Senator's hand before ...

Wasn't this sort of thing ruled legal a while ago for purposes of circumventing region encoding on DVDs, that was deemed anti-consumer or something else I can't be arsed looking up?

That's the key to get this ruled back the other way yet again, in case anyone is interested.

Opening admission: I'm coerced into playing Farmville and Fronterville by my Mother and a couple of friends who want me to send them gifts and occasionally do crap on their farms. Also, I willingly play the D&D Adventures FB game, and I've tried the 'just barely a game' type stuff like Mafia Wars.

To my knowledge, all the Facebook games are free. Lets assume that Farmville was an 'indie' game. If the game provides you with some level of enjoyment, how is dropping $15 once off for some extra game content any different from paying $15 for some indie game that you might play for a week or two on and off before finishing it or being done with it. I suppose once you start to spend a substantial amount of money it's a different issue, but then that's not specific to Facebook games. It does make me wonder if anyone I know has spent money on these games, I must admit.

Is the fact that the goods are 'virtual' such an issue? This will start an argument, but how tangible are any of the mp3s that you purchase from say, iTunes, or books via Kindle? Yes, it's an mp3 or a glorified text file, that provides entertainment, or whatever you want to define it as, but it's still entertainment in virtual form. Really, how different is it to purchasing goods for some subjectively entertaining virtual farm; at the end of the day is it still not simply entertainment in an intangible form? How is this not just a digital way of buying extra dolls for a dollhouse or some other real world to virtual comparison that might have not implied that I own dolls?

Each to their own, seriously.

Also, you can walk in and touch swampland in Florida. That's way more effort than dragging some fences and cows into a virtual lot on my PC. It's a totally different market ;)

And the laughter. Don't forget the laughter.

As the parent of three still bright, wide-eyed-at-the-world decks of cards, I was highly distressed to see a 'game' freely packaged with every single copy of Microsoft Windows that rewards the player, after dismembering and spreading out over the playing field children much like my own, by flipping those body parts carelessly all over the screen. Last time I watched that I almost cried. I can't bear seeing it again. I definitely didn't find it, as one heartless observer noted: "Ace".

The America's Army solution to this problem is widely unknown and elegantly solves the problem without any media attention.

The EA way has them as a big story on Fox and talked about on high traffic nerd sites like, well, this one.

Yeah, I'm a bit amazed too.

To appease/incite Fox, EA should have brought up Alien vs Child Predator. That would have given them weeks of content.

Whoa whoa whoa. BMX XXX had actual video of strippers as rewards. Stripping and everything. Bewbs. And one of them was smoking hot.

And to be perfectly honest, the game actually wasn't that bad. I even err ... tested the theory by using a cheat to unlock all the stripper videos, and found myself still compelled to actually play the game properly, even though the 'rewards' were already ... 'revealed'. /rimshot