I was talking about everyone who trades games into Gamestop - there's a goddamn epidemic in that store, and I can't understand it. And I'm willing to bet only a small fraction of gamers actually trade stuff in but remove the inserts before doing so. The overall majority are from stupid people who can't keep their sh*t together.
The problem with your assumption that "Nintendo could tell people" is two fold. The first is that Nintendo does tell people. They have instruction manuals, they have ESRB warnings on their games (physically and before the game boots), they have official stuff on nintendowifi.com. So they are already doing this.
The second problem is that it doesn't matter if Nintendo does that - no one listens anyway. People could easily learn that there's no way a molester could derive a child's information (address, etc) from Pictochat seemingly out of nowhere, but they don't want to listen to that. No one wants the responsibility. It is that pure and simple.
Nintendo is seeing the world pretty much regress into retardedness at the hands of idiots by the day, and their lawyers know that there's a lot of money at stake and a lot of asses on the line, and unfortunately they are doing these actions to the best of their ability. And even then they sit back and think "That's not enough, we've got to do more." And so they do more but STILL that's not enough. For outrageous hyperbolic examples, please keep reading.
You know what, Kairon? There is a solution. The solution would be to have the Wii boot up everytime and determine who was using it and what they were using it for. So somehow it would have to have an automatic way of determining the user and what they ought to be allowed to see.
However, for that to work, the parents have to go in - or whoever the legal guardian is, or lack of one if the user is over 18 - and modify all the settings to say "Alright when my 12 year old son is playing, he can play Call of Duty, but my 5 year old can't."
Obviously, however, this will never happen because it would be impossible for the Wii to make that judgement, and then it still relies on the parents.
So then, the obvious extension? Somehow test the user right then and there as to their age. Leisure Suit Larry - an adventure game on the PC from Sierra that was playfully adult in nature, maybe about as bad as a Playboy - used to do this by quizzing the users on a variety of information it was assumed only adults would know. Like it might ask who Richard Nixon was and such, and was designed to keep a kid from getting access to the game. But even this has pitfalls - the Internet would allow us to share information.
So what's the next step? Maybe take the test further - maybe it forces the family who owns the Wii to gather around on the first boot up, and it quizzes all of them on their technical know-how on general Internet use, online gaming, what Nintendo is liable for, etc etc etc. It gets ages and what they can be exposed to. It rates them on if they are total dumbasses or reasonably intelligent people. Then IT - the Wii itself - makes all the decisions on what can be done. Guess what - you turn it on and you're the father? Well, you already proved yourself an idiot when you said an IP address was 4 digits long, so now the Wii already cut off anyone under the age of 18 from all online activity.
I mean sh*t. Let's say the father is halfway intelligent and he knows about parental codes, so he locks them out. How easy do you think it is to crack his password? I remember reading a story on the net and the guy said the following: "My parents had a lock on the Playboy channel when I was younger. My brother and I took 3 minutes to crack it. What was the password? 4444. I was surprised it wasn't 0000 or 1234, actually."
So even when the parents KNOW about it, THEY DO IT IN SUCH A HALF ASS WAY, that it doesn't even MATTER. So it's got to be even MORE secure! Maybe the Wii shuts itself off after 5 minutes of gaming PERIOD! No questions asked!
Now, clearly, the above solutions I have proposed is pure nonsense and could never be done. So can ANYTHING be done? Well you could be like Apple and simplify everything, but this pisses off the PC types who want to get in immediately. Or you could do the Vista thing and just ask an endless barrage of questions, but this is horribly annoying.
So none of the above works. None of it. So the only option is to do two things - 1) make the information available and easy to access, and 2) allow control to be present in the form of restrictions. Nintendo, unfortunately, has chosen to rely more heavily on the second as a way to save its own ass by doing things like FCs, even though they've satisfied the first about as exhaustively as they can (not to mention the endless amount of information on the 'net any damn fool could look up).
The bottom line is that THERE IS NO SOLUTION RIGHT NOW unless we could somehow FORCE people to not be idiots about EVERYTHING. If judges threw out the cases immediately and fined the person for bringing their nonsense into the courtroom to begin with, and if everyone were responsible about what the machine was being used for, and if everyone had the technical knowledge to mask out MAC IDs, and if everyone knew what could and could not be done with Pictochat, and if everyone knew what Nintendo was and was not liable for, and about a billion other things, THEN Nintendo might pony up and have no damn reason to choose this moronic system they've decided to use.
Or, Nintendo could just bite the bullet, fess up "we think it's not profitable so we're going to baby step our way into it and hopefully piss everyone off enough such that they will not want to PLAY online anymore, and then we will call it unprofitable, and thus we'll drop all drive to have it on our system, and you f*ckers can go get a rival system to do it because we feel our first party single player games are worth the price of admission alone," and THEN ALL OF THIS BULLSH*T WOULD BE OVER.
And I don't think that's going to happen either, unfortunately.
So instead I'm just going to waste more time entering FCs, knowing the world is full of idiots that ruin MY fun because they can't get their sh*t together, and HOPEFULLY be able to kick my friend's ass with a Home Run bat.
And that is about everything I have to say on the matter on FCs. I do believe I have covered every last base I can possibly cover.
Topic: Wii to feature same online structure as the DS (Read 30932 times)
