Dudes, you’re aware that Katharine Lee Bates, the writer of the song, was almost certainly a lesbian, right? And while undoubtedly Christian, Bates used her faith as a foundation for progressive social activism that would have given the conservatives of her time, and possibly some conservatives now, the shudders and shakes (she also nearly resigned her professorship at Wellesley when the school thought to force its faculty to profess their fealty to the Christian faith).
Bates was a pacifist with the dream of uniting people “from the Pacific to the Atlantic, around the other way… and that will include all the nations and all the people, from sea to shining sea.” Which is to say that it’s an excellent bet that Bates would be delighted to hear her song sung in as many different languages by as many different sorts of people as possible.
And as for the idea that “unity” requires all people to be the same and adhere to the same top-down political and social orthodoxy, there’s this useful quote:
In 1910, when a colleague described “free-flying spinsters” as “fringe on the garment of life”, Bates answered: “I always thought the fringe had the best of it. I don’t think I mind not being woven in.”
In their outrage about “America the Beautiful” being hijacked to represent something it does not, conservatives are perhaps missing the irony that the song has been hijacked at least once before, by them. Perhaps they’re just mad that someone had the temerity to hijack it back. I don’t think it’s entirely out of the realm of possibility that Ms. Bates would be amused by that.
The Polish government has a group called The Institute of National Remembrance, created in 1998. As an American, I must say the frank openness and purpose of the Institute is just incredible. Its role is to make known the history of the Polish people, which is often a grim truth, share the archives and secret records collected by the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, and educate the polish people.
I’ve always been an avid student of history. I know all too well what my history books taught me, or more often didn’t. Knowing there is a government agency whose entire job it is to discuss these things is just incredible. I’d love for such a thing in America.
This is a blog about games and game design, though. Thankfully, the Institute of National Remembrance has the foresight and knowledge that games are an incredible way to teach. Yesterday, I bought Queue, also known as Kolejkain its native Polish.
This game was created to entertain, but also teach people about the absurdity of a centralized economy, how it failed the Polish people (and others living in the Eastern Bloc nations), and what it was like to live in a nation where obtaining common household goods and groceries people like me take for granted wasn’t always easy.
Put simply, it is a game about waiting in line for groceries.
My copy of Queue, waiting for me to learn.
The game’s presentation is humble, and I mean that in the best of ways. It is clean and almost silly, as it features actual propaganda imagery, cartoons, and goods from the time period. It is lovingly crafted, right down to the fake coffee stain on the back of the board. Everything is top quality.
I haven’t played it yet, nor have I finished reading the rules, but I’ve begun and the game has already greatly interested me. It has affected me and I want to know more. I wish I taught a history class so that I could have my students play.
I’m an American, as is most of my readership, so I’d like to bring up the topic of how we as designers and Americans can inform, learn, and entertain with aspects of our culture other than our wars. This is already being done by others.
Academy Games releasedFreedom: The Underground Railroad last year. In it, players act cooperatively as abolitionists trying to bring down the institution of slavery. I’m a big fan of Academy Games and accolades for the game have been numerous, but I must admit the topic makes me so uncomfortable I haven’t been able to purchase it yet. This is very heavy stuff. In their review, the normally funny Shut Up & Sit Down reviewers only made a single joke about how they didn’t feel comfortable making jokes.
I am curious that if a game can be made about the institution of slavery, can one be made about something as dark as The Trail of Tears? This was the government sanctioned act of forcibly relocating and killing many Native American tribes as a result of the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
The experience and game could revolve around trying to survive under such hardships. Gaining food, shelter, and dealing with the oppressive conditions. It could also focus on the results at the end of the trail. How can one begin anew after such a trial?
A game could be crafted to tell the story of Japanese-American Internment during World War II. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the government forced over 100,000 Japanese-Americans to live in internment camps due to fears of sabotage and treachery. These people lost their homes, their belongings, their businesses, and their status in our culture.
Perhaps the game could be about finding happiness in the camp? Or rebuilding life after the war and camp life? The important thing is to teach about the hardship and struggles in a way that is interesting for players.
Something slightly less dark, that nonetheless had a questionable impact on the world, would be how the United States and its allies split and divided the world following the end of World War II. Many new nations were created and merged. Many were split and divided, not among cultural lines, but often arbitrarily, geographically, or as a result of political bargaining. Take a look at how this has affected Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia — pretty much every part of the world with combatants.
Players could play as members of the new Security Council, each with interests, each with a task and awkward duty of defining the new countries of the post-war world. This could even be a challenging Legacy-style game. What will be the repercussions of your decisions? What can you learn from them?
There are also positive elements to our history. Let this not be purely doom and gloom. The Marshall Plan helped rebuild war-torn, devastated Europe. Without it, World War III may have emerged from the ashes of a desperate and downtrodden people.
What about the desperate struggles of Hoover and Roosevelt during the Great Depression? What about the innovative, ridiculous, and sometimes unlawful moves to fix the greatest economic calamity our nation has ever faced?
Volko Ruhnke and his COIN (counter-insurgency) series of games let players live and experience history that is sometimes still happening. It is thought provoking and even painful.
What about how immigrants throughout our history have contributed positively to our culture with their cultural contributions, industriousness, and voice? The love of my life is a Cantonese-American and my great grandparents immigrated from Germany. There is an interesting story there and I want to know more.
What about the efforts of Martin Luther King Jr and the NAACP to stand up against oppressive laws throughout the United States in the middle of the 20th century?
My point, is that history is grand, dark, deeply important, and it affects our lives every day. I believe we often simply look to our wars and military conflicts for inspiration. As a result, we’re missing an honest, frank, and enlightening look at the decisions that made our country what it is today, for better or worse. I think there is a great wealth of inspiration to be found and once I’m finished with my current crop of designs, I’m going to try to do something with it.
Games can be more than just games. They can be fun, insightful, and thought-provoking.
What story would you tell with a design? What element of our history would you investigate?
John Schneider knows how to party. It doesn't involve smiling.
On Monday morning, Earl Thomas posted a very, very entertaining picture on his Instagram account of Seahawks general manager John Schneider in the locker room following Sunday's Super Bowl win. It featured a shirtless, slacks-clad Schneider wearing a WWE Championship belt, with a caption reading, "Lol GM swaggg"
Sadly, Thomas quickly deleted the picture. But since this is the Internet, we have a screencap for you. You're welcome.
No, that's not a buff Kenny Bania from "Seinfeld." That's the general manager of a Super Bowl-winning football team. So same thing, really.
This is one of my favourite items among the manuscripts found at Dunhuang even though only a small fragment of the original remains. It is a almanac or calendar dated to the ninth century and printed by the Dadao Family. It tells us that they were in the East Market in the capital of China, Chang'an (now Xian). The East Market was next to the imperial palace and mansions of high-ranking officials (merchants coming to Chang'an from the Silk Road traded in the West Market). Yet at the time the private printing of almanacs, such as this, was forbidden by law.
The New Year in China, which this year started on 31 January 2014, was traditionally the time for a new almanac to be calculated by the Imperial Astronomy Bureau and presented to the emperor before the official version was distributed. Almanacs were powerful documents in China as they could be used to predict political change. But they were also very popular and the law against private production was probably as much for economic as for political reasons. In either case, it seems to have been unsuccessful and there are a series of memorials throughout the next century reiterating the ban.
The memorial of AD 835 which led to the law mentions almanacs for sale in the south of China far from the centre of power:
'In the provinces of Sichuan and Huainan, printed almanacs are on sale in the market. Every year, before the Imperial Astronomy Bureau has submitted the new calendar for approval and had it officially promulgated, printed almanacs have flooded the market. This violates the principle that the calendar is a gift of His Imperial Majesty.'
Yet this almanac was produced under the noses of the officials who were meant to be enforcing a ban on such activities. The evidence of this fragment and the reiteration of the ban suggests that the private printing of almanacs continued, presumably because there was a profit to be made.
Under the Censor’s Eye: Printed Almanacs and Censorship in Ninth-Century China by Susan Whitfield is available to download as a PDF (12MB).
Note: A more complete printed Chinese almanac from Dunhuang dating from AD 877 will be on display in the British Library Treasures Gallery from 8 March 2014.
NYC avant-pop duo Cibo Matto went on hiatus almost 15 years ago and it’s been almost two decades since their late-’90s trip hop gem Viva! La Woman and the deliciously weird “Know Your Chicken” video. In that time, the two women have kept busy: in addition to their solo work, Yuka Honda produced albums for Yoko Ono and Martha Wainwright and Miho Hatori contributed vocals to the debut Gorillaz album. Hotel Valentine shows that the two are at their best when they’re working together. They’ve created their own world on Hotel Valentine, which they envisioned as a concept album about the love story between ghosts in a hotel. Technology and age have treated Cibo Matto well — it’s their most polished and mature album yet. You can listen to their comeback album over at NPR.
M Plummer Fernandez is a South East London artist who uses computers to push the boundaries of industrial design. I came across these pieces he made titled Digital Natives where 3D scanned a series of traditional objects and then abstracted and distorted them, turning them into new objects.
Everyday items such as toys and a watering can are 3D scanned using a digital camera and subjected to algorithms that distort, abstract and taint them into new primordial vessel forms. In some cases only close inspection reveals traces inherited from their physical predecessors. These are then 3D printed on a z-corp printer.
Vessels are arguably the lowest common denominator for man-made objects across all cultures, these objects however have no storage function other than to embody the stored digital data that describes them.
What I love about these objects is that they’re not only abstracted physically, but with a unique blend of colors. The faceted gradation really is a beautiful effect which gives each piece a sense of movement. I’m really looking forward to the day where I can buy a “recipe” for one of these vases and then print it out in a matter of hours. DIY will take on a brand new meaning for us all soon enough.
The Seattle Seahawks will hold a victory parade in downtown Seattle on Wednesday.
The Seattle Seahawks are Super Bowl Champions, and now it's time to celebrate.
Seattle is celebrating its first Super Bowl in franchise history, and one of the rowdiest fan bases in the league should have quite the turnout. Decibel records are consistently breaking at CenturyLink Field, which should make this one of the most memorable Super Bowl parades in recent memory.
Last year's Super Bowl parade was an elaborate affair in Baltimore. The streets of Baltimore were crowded, but fans also packed the stadium, which was the final destination on the route.
A victory parade is set to take place in downtown Seattle, and fans are being encouraged by the city to carpool or use public transportation to reach the area, due to lack of available parking. There will not be any access to the team at Seahawks practice facilities, unlike their sendoff trip to New York, according to The Seattle times.
Date/time: Wed, Jan. 5, 11 a.m. PT
Location: 4th Avenue, Seattle, Wash. (South of Denny Way), ending at CenturyLink Field.
Most marriages don’t last nearly as long as Irven Gordon’s Volvo P1800 has lasted. And most couples probably don’t spend as much time together as Irv has spent in his beloved car.
A few days ago I inadvertently caused a bit of a fuss. In writing about GOG’s Time Machine sale, I expressed my two minds about the joy of older games being rescued from obscurity, and my desire that they be in the public domain. This led to some really superb discussion about the subject in the comments below, and indeed to a major developer on Twitter to call for me to be fired.
I wanted to expand on my thoughts, rather than leave them as a throwaway musing on a post about a website’s sale. But I also want to stress that these are my thoughts-in-process, and not those of RPS’s hivemind. This isn’t a petition – it’s an exploration of my thoughts on the subject. Let’s keep that in mind as we decide whether I should indeed fire myself.
I said it frustrates me that games more than a couple of decades old aren’t entering the public domain. Twenty years was a fairly arbitrary number, one that seems to make sense in the context of games’ lives, but it could be twenty-five, thirty. It’s not the point here. My point was, and is, that I have a desire for artistic creations to more quickly (indeed, at all) be released into the public domain, after a significant period of time during which the creator can profit.
And it was this that caused 3D Realms’ George Broussard – a man directly involved in the story of Duke Nukem Forever – to say that it, “starts with the stupidest sentence I’ve ever read.”
Allowing myself to publish that, said George, should mean that I fire me.
It does seem a strong reaction. But not a unique one. Cliffy “Cliffy B” B retweeted Broussard’s thoughts, and went on to say,
Oh dear.
So before we move on to the nuances of the argument, let’s get one thing out of the way: Expressing a desire for a game to enter the public domain, let’s say twenty years after publication, does not in any sense whatsoever suggest a desire for developers to not get paid. I resent having to type this. It’s a bit like finding yourself having to say that you’re not in favour of gruesomely starving children to death because you expressed a thought that they probably shouldn’t get to exclusively eat at McDonald’s. What I am in fact saying is: “developers should get paid for the work they do, and then keep getting paid for the same bit of work, over and over and over for the next twenty years, even though they stopped doing any work related to it many years ago.” It’s not entirely apparent how the two sentiments are being confused.
Well, it is, actually – I’m being facetious. The two are being deliberately conflated by a contingent who find the possibility of cultural artifacts ever returning to the culture that spawned them to be so repellent that they must eliminate anything that treads even close to challenging what they see as their perpetual rights to profit from ancient work. (And let’s be clear here – creators from the tumescent Phil Collins to our very own Broussard are arguing for perpetual copyright here, far outreaching even the current grasp of the law.)
I think the best approach here is to address the most frequent questions directly:
People need a financial incentive to create. If you take that away, it will harm creativity.
I think this argument is so astronomically false that my hat flies clean off my head when I read it. It’s so ghastly, so gruesomely inaccurate, such a wretched perspective of humans – these wonderful creatures so extraordinarily bursting with creative potential – and it makes me want to weep. The idea that creativity is only feasible if there’s a financial reward is abundantly demonstrably false. For someone to make their living from creative pursuits relies on some sort of financial return, yes. Creativity is not dependent on its being one’s living. That’s enormously crucial to remember. And yet, it’s not even about that. An eventual transition to the public domain would in no sense take away the financial incentive to create.
An argument for a more imminent end to copyright periods than the current monstrosities like “life plus 70 years” doesn’t in any way mean anyone couldn’t make a living from their creative works. And it doesn’t even mean they couldn’t continue making a living from the creative works they produced after the copyrights have expired – that’s the magic of Public Domain! They just now share the ability to profit from those works with others. I’m going to get into this far more deeply below.
A more restrictive copyright model wouldn’t inhibit anyone’s ability to profit from their creative works. It might well stop Cliff Richard from being able to replace all the chandeliers in his mansions with money made from a song he recorded sixty years ago and hasn’t touched since. I’m okay with that (not least because at the time of his recording said song, he would have agreed to that song’s entering the public domain by now.)
But why shouldn’t someone get to own their own ideas? They created them, after all.
This is where things get a bit philosophical/metaphysical. But it comes down to accepting that there is a material difference (literally) between a game and a table, a song and a car. One physically exists. The other doesn’t. One is a thing, the other is an idea. And ideas is what this is all about.
Everyone has experienced the dribble-chinned tedium of various copyright industries screeching, “BUT YOU WOULDN’T STEAL A CAR!”* at us, as we sit in the cinema to watch a film while being told about how it’s our fault that no one’s sitting in a cinema watching a film, or indeed as we sit back to enjoy our legally purchased DVD. The comparison is false. And it’s a false comparison that it’s very much in the interests of the copyright industries to have us conflate. No, I would no more steal a car than I would tolerate a company telling me that they had the exclusive rights to the idea of cars themselves. However, there are things I’m very happy to ‘steal’, like knowledge, inspiration, or good ideas. And it was until incredibly recently that amongst such things as knowledge, inspiration and good ideas were the likes of literature and music.
The war for minds waged by the copyright industries over the last one hundred years has been so gruesomely effective that now the very suggestion that ideas are not immediately comparable with physical objects is met with violent anger. In a world where everyone alive has been raised in a system where Disney can pick the laws, it is perhaps not surprising that such contrary notions are met with such fury. What was once perceived to be a gross abuse is now ferociously defended by those abused by it.
Sudden changes occurred at the turn of the last century, where once ideas that were shared by oral and aural traditions, or indeed in copied texts, were confined to pieces of plastic. A couple of generations later, and these confinements were accepted as the only possibility. Then the relatively recent ubiquity of the internet has suddenly revealed this to be as transient and ethereal as it always was. However, vast industries had been built up around this temporary imprisoning of ideas, and they’re not all that delighted about their reign coming to its natural end.
Copyright has come full circle. Introduced in the 17th century as a form of censorship, an attempt by the monarchy to prevent the new-fangled printing press from being able to easily disseminate Protestant information, it was after a couple of hundred years eventually fenced into something vaguely useful. It stood to defend a creator’s right to protect their creations for a limited period, before they re-entered the public domain. Based in an understanding that creations are not uniquely birthed from the mind of a single individual, but rather the results of a massive collective sharing of cultural ideas over thousands of years, it made sense for their creation to be set free again at a later date. Those who found a demand for their creations, when they applied this shared culture to their own projects, would therefore receive recompense, either through patronage, or through payment for sales and performance. And they could (and can) continue to do so in perpetuity. Only, after that agreed period of time (different lengths in different nations), they would no longer exclusively own rights to that idea.
But now copyright seeks to protect individuals, not ideas. In fact, its purpose is to restrict the free flowing of ideas, to prevent cultural exchange, for the profit of the few. Copyright itself is the threat to future creativity, attempting to artificially restrict that most human of actions: sharing ideas. It has returned to its origins, and exists as a form of censorship. Not a censorship many are willing to recognise as such, so successful and endemic is the international brainwashing by the copyright industries, but the censorship of ideas all the same.
So why shouldn’t someone get to own ideas like they own a table? Because ideas don’t exist in an ownable form, are born of the shared cultural mass of humanity, and you can’t rest a coffee mug on an idea.
But why shouldn’t someone be allowed to continue profiting from their idea for as long as they’re alive?
Putting aside that an embracing of the public domain does not prevent someone from profiting from their idea, my response to this question is: why should they?
What I’ve found interesting about asking this question of people is that I’ve yet to receive an answer. I’m either told it’s on me to explain why they shouldn’t, as if I hadn’t just spent thousands of words doing that, or I’m told that they just should. I’ve noticed a complete unwillingness for people to stop and engage with the question. Why should someone get to profit from something they did fifty years ago? In what other walk of life would we willingly accept this as just a given? If a policeman demanded that he continue to be paid for having arrested a particular criminal thirty-five years ago, he’d be told to leave the room and stop being so silly. “But the prisoner is still in prison!” he’d cry, as he left the police station, his pockets out-turned, not having done any other work in the thirty-five years since and bemused as to why he wasn’t living in a castle.
What about the electrician who fitted the lighting in your house. He requires a fee every time you switch the lights on. It’s just the way things are. You have to pay it, because it’s always been that way, since you can remember. How can he be expected to live off just fitting new lights to other houses? And the surgeon’s royalties on that heart operation he did – that’s the system. Why shouldn’t he get paid every time you use it?
So why should a singer get to profit from a recording of his doing some work thirty-five years ago? The answer “because it’s his song” just isn’t good enough. It was PC Ironburns’ arrest. “But creating that song may have taken years!” PC Ironburns spent years investigating the crimes before he caught that pesky crim! The electrician had to study for years to become proficient enough to rig up lighting. The doctor spent seven years in medical school! Imagine if this system we wholly accept from creative industries were accepted elsewhere – the ensuing chaos would be extraordianry.
The answer, “Because they should” just doesn’t address the question. That instinctive response is one born of the capturing of culture by industry, bred into us from birth. To stop, shake it off, and approach the question anew takes considerable effort. But then once shaken, the light suddenly comes shining in.
Why do we, as people who likely make money by working a regular job and getting paid for the time we spend doing it, so vigorously defend this peculiar model that is the antithesis of our existence?
I can’t believe you’re arguing that developers shouldn’t be able to profit from their games.
My poor head. But yes, let’s bring this back to videogames. Games feel different from songs, even films, don’t they? They’re modern. They weren’t even a concept before copyright had so grotesquely morphed into its current form. The industry was born into a world where creators already assumed a life-long possession of their particular manipulation of the culture they’d received from others. It is, perhaps even more than film, music or literature, an industry that has grown up most at odds with the concept of the public domain. (Which anyone over the age of 30 will recognise as quite a grim irony, as they recall the days of public domain gaming in the early 90s.)
And unlike music, theatrical productions, or story, they never pre-existed in a plastic-free form. (We could of course argue about snakes & ladders, hopscotch and ‘it’, of course, but for the sake of simplicity, we won’t.) I accept that it’s perhaps a far bigger cultural shift to accept that the whizzy graphics and explosions are, when all is pulled apart, ethereal concepts, ideas of 1s and 0s bouncing off our retinas, as possible to hold in our hands as a memory of an aunt’s house. But as much as it may not instinctively feel like it, it remains entirely true.
But games, unlike some other creative pursuits, are often made by huge teams of people. While there may be a project lead, this isn’t like a book’s author. This is a company. People getting paid to do their job, to make a game. The rights to the game, the ownership, lies with the publisher that funds it, not the creatives who create it. When a 20, 30 year old game is still being charged for, not a single person who was involved in its creation is getting a dime.
When it is more like book with an author, an indie developer and their self-published project, then yes, there is a greater chance they’ll see the money. But then we return to the my larger, more significant argument: that after those decades of getting paid for it, it’s time to return it to culture.
But people who work deserve to get paid.
I’m being as patient as possible. And this is where reasonable copyright laws to protect creative pursuits can step in. Agreed standards within the culture from which the ideas were born where we bestow financial worth upon the action of a creator generating those creations. Because despite the question that is still bursting from some people’s minds about how I don’t want anyone to get paid, I ADORE to see creative people getting paid.
I even adore the idea of people getting paid for their work after copyrights have expired. Further, I absolutely believe that it is right and fair for anyone who works to make that public domain material available to me in a convenient form to be free to charge what they like for doing so. To those who interpreted my previous article as claim that GOG shouldn’t be able to charge for much older games, that’s entirely not the case. I’d just like GOG to be able to charge for their own work, and not to have to then include costs for the license they’re paying to whichever corporation owns the copyright on the game for which they had nothing to do with the creation.
You’re a hypocrite, because writing is a creative industry, and you don’t give all your writing away for free, and you get paid, and you’re ugly.
It’s polite to wait to find out if someone’s being hypocritical before calling them a hypocrite. However, despite there being little demand for videogame journalism written twenty years ago, and therefore not something I have to face too often, I do consider my older work to be in the public domain. I wrote for Future Publishing for about ten years, where my contract stated they had exclusive rights to the work for six months, and thereafter we shared rights to it in perpetuity. I have always immediately revoked any private rights to that Future work, and while I maintain the right to be recognised as the creator of the work, I’m delighted for anyone to use it in any fashion they see fit. If that person wanted to pay me for doing so, I’d be even further delighted. I believe in what I’m saying here.
So what do you want to see changed then, apart from developers not getting paid for their work?
There are very few cases of developers making their living from the profits of games made 20 years ago. Gaming, as a medium, has a far more rapid expiry date than music, film or any other of its contemporaries. Despite rich retro scenes, and dedicated emulator projects, getting an old game running at all can be quite the ordeal. Sites like GOG do a wonderful job of preserving old games and making them easy to run, but this doesn’t directly translate to astonishing sales that will keep the original developer in caviar-coated Jaguars for the rest of their lives – in fact, it’s phenomenally unlikely that a penny of most sales will reach the developers at all. Other sites dedicated to getting forgotten games working again – abandonware, as it’s known – are fiercely threatened and shut down not by the creatives who designed the games, but by the company that bought the company that merged with the company that had the IP rights. And if you don’t like 20 years, because that’s the mid-90s, and it feels too dangerously close, then make it 30 years. Make it a sensible length of time that ensures that developers are richly rewarded for their efforts, and then it is released into the cultural wild – people’s to share, copy, remix or add to their own peculiar retro project’s catalogue. People who are, you know, actually doing some work to make it playable.
And no, of course I don’t believe that gaming should be treated differently from other mediums. I believe other mediums should be rapidly reigned in to the same standards, before we see the cultural wells dry and crack.
But hey, here’s a thing: I don’t have any power. My saying this, my believing in returning creativity to the pool from which it came, doesn’t mean anyone has to. Shocking news. I have no delusions that writing all this out is going to spark a world-wide revolution in copyright law. Again, stunning revelations. But what I do hope is that some people, an odd few, might connect to this in some way, and see fit to opt to let their games enter the public domain. Or commit to publish their games with a promise that after a certain amount of time, they will do so. Even opt to publish their games under Creative Commons copyleft licenses, in order to maintain all the legal rights and protections they need, without stifling the cultural world from which they so richly drew.
I’m a romantic.
And just in case, let’s do this one more time: I love it so much when talented people get handsomely rewarded for their great creative work. It brings joy to my heart when I see stories of the likes of Garry Newman or Marcus Persson becoming fantastically wealthy in response to their brilliant creations. Little makes me smile more broadly in an average day at work than reading the indie developer who’s reporting their game’s sales mean they can give up their day job and focus on what they love.
Further, I would so enormously love to see a situation arise where we can see truly patron-led creative funding, where gaming communities put forward their money so that creatives producing truly wonderful gaming projects can do so without the need for commercial success.
I want money flowing toward those whose talents warrant it like we’ve never seen before. I want developers to get paid.
*I do also wonder if it can be the most effective campaign against people who do steal cars.
Crucial armor to help defend against the deadliest monster of all: chilly weather. You don’t even have to kill and skin Felynes to get them! You just have to pay $7.50 at J-List (yellow, pink).
'they found the rules "clunky and boring". They loved OD&D to death'
lol
All right, here's the backstory. I purchased Mouse Guard off the shelf, loving the artwork and the concept. Playing mice who were part of a wandering guard? Awesome! I didn't even know there was such a comic, and have gone on to read and enjoy it. From there, I sent off my money and got a copy of Burning Wheel mailed to me (the edition right before the Gold edition).
I've tired to run this game a few times. I creeped the BW forums. And I've come to the conclusion this game is just... wrong. There's something about it that doesn't flow in play like the game suggests. I'm trying to put my finger on it, but I keep coming to the dice pool. My sons played a session of Mouse Guard yesterday, and were so dissapointed, it was demoralizing. I just couldn't transform that system and it's rolls into fun for them. They didn't want to play another game, as they found the rules "clunky and boring".
They loved OD&D to death. So what is it? I know people love BW a lot, and I found reading it informative to my story craft, but the system itself has never thrilled my players when I got around to running it.
Since the Packers won the first Super Bowl in 1967, the rings have been evolving into something almost larger than a house.
On Sunday night, the Seattle Seahawks took home their first championship by crushing the Denver Broncos 43-8 at MetLife Stadium in Super Bowl XLVIII. Seattle's dominance has earned them one more task: designing their own Super Bowl rings. Each player on the roster along with every coach and front office member will receive one.
Winners of the Super Bowl collaborate with the company commissioned to create the ring and work together to held design the ring. The NFL gives teams an allowance of $5,000 per ring, with the team picking up any additional cost. That cost has increased throughout the years, as you might expect.
I don't like writing negative articles that don't include a solution to the problem, but in this case, there is no solution. The state of in-app purchases has now reached a level where we have completely lost it. Not only has the gaming industry shot itself in the foot, hacked off their other foot, and lost both its arms ... but it's still engaging in a strategy that will only damage it further.
Why are these gaming studios so intent of killing themselves?
We have reached a point in which mobile games couldn't even be said to be a game anymore. Playing a game means that you have fun. It doesn't mean that you sit around and wait for the game to annoy you for so long that you decide to pay credits to speed it up. And for an old geezer like me who remember the glory days of gaming back in the 1990s, it's just unbearable to watch.
With the help of NerdCubed (great guy), let me illustrate just how bad in-app purchases in games have become. Let's compare a game from the 1990s with the same game on the iPad today.
I think you will be as shocked as I am.
Dungeon Keeper, 1997
Back in the 1990s, one of the best game developers in the world was a company called Bullfrog Productions. It created some of the best strategy games. You might remember games like Syndicate, Theme Hospital and Dungeon Keeper.
Obviously, the games' graphics look horrible today, considering that the high-res screen resolution back then was only 640x480. Your iPad is running at 2048x1536.
But let's look at one of these games: Dungeon Keeper.
It's a game that you can buy today (full game, everything unlocked + all expansion packs included) for $5.99 over at GOG. It takes place underground. Your task is to build up your 'dungeon' by digging out rooms and battling other dungeon keeps around you.
Below is a (long) video from NerdCubed of what it is like to play. You don't have to see the whole video, just go to 2:20 and watch how fast and easy it is to build a room.
He is building a treasure room to store all his gold and jewels. It's 45 squares big, and it takes the game about 2 minutes to complete. It's fast and it's fun. You feel the energy and the rhythm of the game.
So this is the old days:
Full game price + expansion packs included: $5.99
Build a large treasure room of 45 squares in just 2 minutes.
Just remember that.
Dungeon Keeper for iPad/Android, 2014
Now let's look at exactly the same game, but reimagined for the iPad/Android and in-app purchases.
And once again, NerdCubed reviews it. The review below is 8 minutes long, but you have to watch it all the way to the end. It perfectly illustrates just how mind bogglingly bad things has gone.
The modern-day Dungeon Keeper is not even a game. It's just a socially engineered scam. And since people don't remember what real gaming was like in the 90s, they are giving it the highest rating in the app store.
It's just unbelievable.
Two things before you watch it:
Remember the original game play. The total price: $5.99, and it only takes 2 minutes to dig out 45 squares.
Also, Nerdcubed does have a rather liberal use of words, and you probably shouldn't listen to it in the office.
But you *must* watch this because most people don't know how bad things are today.
What EA has done here has nothing to do with gaming, and the same is true for pretty much all other 'free-to-play + in-app purchase' games. We don't have a mobile gaming industry anymore. We have a mobile scamming industry.
There is no game here. And you know what the worst part of this is? Let me show you.
This crap is featured as one of the five top picks on the front page of Apple's app store, as an Editors' choice.
How absolutely f*cked up is that? (...sorry for my choice of words, but this is one of those times where profanity is justified).
As NerdCubed said in his review, the problem is that all the future generations of gamers are going to experience this as the default. They are going to grow up in a world, in which people actually think this is what gaming is like. That social engineering and scamming people is an acceptable way of doing business.
It's not!
It's a scam... done by sick people who have nothing left in their lives other than selfish greed. They should be thrown in jail for deceptive business tactics, and not featured in the app store as an Editors' Choice.
This is outrageous.
You and I have a responsibility to speak out against it. This is not what we want our future to be like. This is completely unacceptable behavior.
As I started out saying, I wish I could end this article on a positive note and a constructive solution. But there is no solution here. There is no way to fix this other than stop doing it.
So for you mobile game developers I simply ask this of you. Walk into the closest bathroom and look yourself in the mirror. Do you like the person that you see? Is this what you want to be remembered by? Or do you want to be remembered as a game developer like Bullfrog, whom everyone loved because they made real games worth playing?
And if you are one of the very few developers who are still making real games (without the in-app purchase crap), I salute you. You are my heroes.
Games like Oceanhorn, Minecraft, XCOM and others. You guys are freaking brilliant, and I absolutely love you for having the courage of sticking to your principles.
Note: In response to the many wonderful comments, I will write another article tomorrow of how to do in-app right (without the element of deception).
Update: I made this short comic to visualize the real problem. The problem is not asking people to pay, but the deception in that game developers promises that we can 'play' for free'. Waiting is not the same as playing.
Let me declare what many already know: 2013 was a landmark year for men’s facial hair. From flamboyant beards to the proliferation of “old-fashioned” shops, evidence of the trend abounds, embracing groups as diverse as the Boston Red Sox, the men of Movember, and the Robertsons of Duck Dynasty. In dens of hipsterdom, one can hardly throw a PBR without hitting a waxed moustache. And the online craft marketplace Etsy now sells a limitless variety of wares imprinted with images of mustaches, from wine glasses to electrical outlets.
This is not the first time in recent memory that American men have sprouted facial hair in great numbers. The 1960s bristled with sideburns and beards—pared down, in the 1970s, to the decade’s iconic mustache. But one characteristic distinguishes this revival from previous ones: Today’s facial-hair enthusiasts share an affection for the ornate practices of the 1800s—the exuberant beards and ostentatious moustaches, as well as the elegance and “manliness” of the shops where those styles were cultivated.
What follows is the lost story of American facial hair. Like countless other histories, it is rife with contradictions. It begins with white Americans at the time of the Revolution who derided barbering as the work of “inferiors.” It continues with black entrepreneurs who turned it into a source of wealth and prestige. And it concludes with the advent of the beard—a fashion born out of desperation but transformed into a symbol of masculine authority and white supremacy.
*****
It may seem strange that barbering, which required practitioners to hold razors to their customers’ throats, was dominated by men of color in Revolutionary America. But the reasons for this were simple. Before the American Revolution, free white workers were few and their was labor expensive—especially in the southern colonies. So slaveholders in need of grooming often turned to their enslaved workforces.
"A Barber's Shop at Richmond, Virginia," from The Illustrated London News, March 9, 1861
After the Revolution, a different set of factors compelled African-Americans to work as barbers. In a new country that prized personal independence, service work seemed abhorrent to many white citizens. At the same time, the Revolution caused many Americans to rethink the morality of slavery, which led to emancipation in the Northern states and waves of manumission in the South.
Thus, thousands of former slaves—many with experience as valets, manservants, and barbers—were foisted upon a market that offered them little in the way of employment, apart from dangerous jobs in manual labor and demanding positions in household service. One of the few jobs that presented even faint hopes for prosperity was barbering. Not surprisingly, it was open almost exclusively to men.
Barbering was hard work. High-end barbers labored long hours and mastered a range of skills from shaving, cutting, and styling to making and marketing hair and body products. Barbers also typically made and repaired wigs. Even after elites abandoned the powdered wigs of the colonial era around 1800, barbers continued to do a healthy business in toupees as well as false whiskers, although they now fitted these in discreet side rooms. They even groomed the dead.
But barbers’ most difficult work was cultural in nature. Especially in the upscale venues for which African-American barbers were best known, customers demanded a high level of gentility from their surroundings. Thus, barbers were also expected to excel as interior decorators. The best of these shops were what historian Douglas Walter Bristol, Jr., author of Knights of the Razor, a painstaking history of African-American barbers, called “first-class.” And they looked much as their modern imitators reimagine them.
Barbers cultivated personae to match these surroundings. Refined in dress and graceful in movement, the best offered practical instruction in the gentlemanly arts. They were also expert conversationalists, engaging and entertaining their customers while they worked. A Salem, Massachusetts, barber, according to the Salem Gazette, was “the essence of good-nature … [His] conversation consists of what Wordsworth calls ‘personal talk.’ He deals with men, not principles. Every flying bit of news, every anecdote, and in fact, every good thing said by the leading wits of the day, seems to come right through his shop window, and to stick to him, like burs to a boy’s jacket.”
Not every interaction was so amiable. If barbers’ embodiment of gentlemanliness was too seamless, their knowledge of politics too extensive, or their jokes too pointed, customers might accuse them of overstepping racial boundaries—with potentially disastrous consequences. A Nashville, Tennessee, barber, for instance, found himself sharply rebuked by a customer when he had the temerity to ask about a piece of legislation his customers were discussing. Chances are, he didn’t make the same mistake again.
But appearance and conversation were just the tip of the iceberg. One of the barbers’ most vexing tasks involved maintaining order in their segregated workplaces. While the gentility of many shops helped restrain customers’ worst behavior, lapses were frequent. In moments like these, white patrons might squabble over politics, grow belligerent when “full of drink and insolence,” or even light each other’s hair on fire.
Keeping the peace required the lightest of touches. The laws of white supremacy—both written and unwritten—effectively forbade men of color from giving orders to customers or physically restraining them. Besides, many barbers understood the cruel reality that customers’ ability to flagrantly disrespect them was part of the space’s appeal.
“All this may be easy,” wrote Frederick Douglass of the barbering profession. “But is it noble, is it manly, and does it improve and elevate us?”
But perhaps barbers’ most difficult challenge was the simple intimacy of the shop: the physical closeness of barber and patron. Here, men of color listened in on the schemes and foibles of the American elite, keeping their secrets in confidence.
Little did his customers suspect that Natchez, Mississippi, barber William Johnson was studiously recording the rumors that permeated his shop—from vicious acts of violence to white citizens’ gambling losses and marital infidelities. Johnson’s diary even refers to a moment of unexpected intimacy between two townsmen: “Mr [Blank],” Johnson confided, “attempted to suck Mr [Blank]s El panio.” Just as Johnson had intended, no one discovered this record until long after he had died.
That barbers successfully navigated these situations speaks to their discretion and grace—though many of America’s most-influential free people of color often proved harsh critics. Frederick Douglass, for example, wrote a scathing critique of the tonsorial profession in an 1853 edition of Frederick Douglass’ Paper: “To shave half a dozen faces in the morning and sleep or play the guitar in the afternoon – all this may be easy, but is it noble, is it manly, and does it improve and elevate us?”
Despite these criticisms, a number of 19th-century barbers parlayed their work into economic independence, and in a few cases, investments that brought them extraordinary wealth. In a number of U.S. cities, African-American barbers ranked among the richest and most powerful members of the free black community. By 1879, James Thomas, a former St. Louis barber who had become a real estate mogul, possessed an estate worth $400,000 (some $10 million in contemporary terms), making him the richest man of color in Missouri. His friend and neighbor, another former barber named Cyprian Clamorgan, was similarly affluent, penning a paean to black wealth and respectability entitled The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis.
Barbers were also figures of considerable influence. Despite Douglass’s criticisms, barbers occupied positions of authority in African-American organizations. They accounted for 13 of 45 delegates to Ohio’s 1852 African-American state convention. Boston barber John Smith welcomed Massachusetts antislavery Senator Charles Sumner into his shop. And countless others played humbler but crucial roles in churches and community organizations.
But barbers did more than that. They made the barbershop an iconic American space, with an appeal that, as historian Quincy T. Mills documents, endures to the present. Thus, when we think of the “old-fashioned” shop, we ought to recall the likes of James Thomas, Cyprian Clamorgan, William Johnson, and thousands of others—men who, despite fearsome limitations, shaped an American institution and left their mark, quite literally, on the men who patronized their shops.
*****
White men’s fondness for their black barbers didn’t last. The reasons were varied: The temperance movement and the evangelical religious revivals of the “Second Great Awakening” caused many customers to frown upon the barbershop’s liquor-fueled conviviality.
An 1846 lithograph promoting the temperance movement (Nathaniel Currier/Library of Congress)
A series of urban public health crises also had dire consequences for the shop. Sanitation in American cities remained haphazard to say the least. In New York City, for instance, monstrous pigs continued to bear responsibility for garbage disposal throughout the early 19th century. Not surprisingly, cities were ravaged by epidemics, making many Americans newly cautious about interpersonal touch. Health writers D. G. Brinton and George H. Napheys advised men to shave themselves, for “it is not pleasant to be lathered with the brush which the minute before has been rubbed on the face of we don’t know whom.”
The most important explanation for whites’ anxiety about the shop, however, involved black barbers’ growing wealth. For many, the success of leading African-American barbers seemed to threaten the social order. As white customers were shaved by men with fortunes worth many thousands of dollars, some must have wondered who was serving whom.
In a 1847 vignette entitled “A Narrow Escape,” a wandering sailor watches helplessly as an Alabama barber slashes the throat of a customer.
But the real problem ran deeper. During the 19th century, intellectuals increasingly subscribed to pseudo-scientific theories of race. Some even believed that people of different races had been the result of separate acts of creation. The German biologist Karl Vogt called whites and blacks “two extreme human types” and wrote that people of African descent “remind us irresistibly of the ape.” All of this helped buttress notions of African-Americans as primitive and intrinsically violent.
White fears were further fed by a string of slave rebellions, from present-day Haiti to Nat Turner’s Virginia. For many whites, these seemed to confirm not the injustice of slavery but blacks’ “innate” propensity for violence. As a result, some white customers began to cast a wary eye on their barbers, who commanded resources and occupied positions of authority within their communities. Few seemed better poised to lead an insurrection.
These fears were made powerfully manifest in American fiction, where the figure of the murderous black barber became a fixture during the 19th century. Among the character’s more vivid appearances was a little-known 1847 vignette entitled “A Narrow Escape,” in which a wandering sailor enters an Alabama barbershop and watches helplessly as the shop’s barber slashes the throat of a customer. But the figure also appeared in better-known works of fiction, including Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno.
The results of these fears were dramatic. Between the turn of the century and 1850, American elites abandoned black-owned barbershops in considerable numbers. In major American cities, the number of barbers relative to the populations they served declined dramatically, as demand for their services plummeted. Ambitious young African-American men began to view barbering as a dead-end career.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the social spectrum, immigrant barbers—many of them Germans—catered to a growing population of working-class customers: men too poor, and in many cases too resentful of black barbers’ success, to patronize the best black-owned barbershops. Thus, while whites, according to Douglas Bristol, constituted a mere 20 percent of Philadelphia’s barbers in 1850, by 1860 they represented a near majority. A handful of elite black barbers continued to prosper, but the days when African-Americans dominated the trade were coming to an end.
*****
At the same time black barbers were falling out of favor, many elite white men were radically changing their views on grooming. Where the enlightened 18th century had favored a civilized, clean-shaven look, men of the mid-19th century preferred the untamed appearance of the rugged conqueror. But while facial hair ultimately became a potent symbol of mastery, it didn’t start out that way. If anything, men first adopted beards in a desperate attempt to alleviate the painfulness of their morning toilet.
Without the assistance of their former barbers, shavers had to contend with the 19th-century straight razor. A delicate and temperamental tool, its paper-thin blade required regular, careful maintenance. Even the simplest misstep could ruin it, turning the morning shave into a tug-of-war between men and their facial hair. Still, this was preferable to the alternatives. Men were known to die of tetanus after using an ill-kept blade—Henry David Thoreau’s brother John was one of them. And many lived in fear of cutting their own throats.
Even those who mastered the razor faced other trials. Despite the proliferation of pamphlets on the subject, straight-razor shaving remained a craft secret, largely confined to barbers. And home-shavers lacked many of the materials necessary for a comfortable shave—from clean water and good lighting to quality accoutrements like creams, oils, and brushes.
So it should come as little surprise that many men began avoiding shaving. Between 1800 and 1810, a mere 23 percent of grooming-related articles featured complaints of painful shaving. By the 1840s, that figure had ballooned to 45 percent. What had once been a mere annoyance turned into a veritable scourge. It was time for radical solution: Men eschewed razors in numbers and embarked, for the first time in centuries, on an era of beard-wearing.
In an 1853 Punch magazine sketch satirizing the "beard movement," an old lady is approached by helpful railway guards and "concludes she is attacked by Brigands."
The beards of the mid-1800s were different from earlier styles of facial hair, including the mutton chops sported by Presidents John Quincy Adams and Martin Van Buren. They were more unruly than the waxed mustaches and “wreath beards” of the 1820s, trends that had been inspired by the French aristocrat Count d’Orsay. Mid-19th-century facial hair was big and robust, reflecting a near-total independence from scissors and razor.
At first, these untamed beards proved controversial. Many Americans continued to harbor 18th-century fears that beards marked maniacs, fanatics, and dissimulators. But by the late antebellum period, they were more widely accepted, thanks partly to a strenuous public relations campaign that reimagined the beard as a symbol of white, masculine supremacy.
A 21-part series in Boston’s Daily Evening Transcript, published in late 1856, was typical of such efforts. In these wide-ranging articles, pro-beard polemicists argued that the beard represented a rugged and robust ideal of manhood, proving white Americans’ dominion over “lesser” men and “inferior” races. The pseudonymous “Lynn Bard,” for instance, claimed that men took up shaving “when they began to be effeminate, or when they became slaves.” Ancient Britain’s manly Anglo-Saxons, he claimed, “wore their beards before the conquest; and it is related as a wanton act of tyranny, that William the Conqueror compelled the people to shave; but some abandoned their country” rather than submit.” (Incidentally, Victorian Englishmen were going through a beard revival of their own at that time, though for different reasons.)
An anonymous “lady on beards,” writing in an 1856 issue of the New York Tribune, made the case even more succinctly. The “bearded races,” she proclaimed, “are the conquering races.” And in “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman transformed the case for beards into poetry: “Washes and razors for foofoos … for me freckles and a bristling beard.”
Elizabeth Cady Stanton at the
Seneca Falls convention
(Library of Congress)
These appeals were especially persuasive at a time when America was in an active period of exploration and invasion, ranging from the U.S.-Mexican War to the ongoing Indian relocation and genocide. These projects were aimed primarily at peoples whom white Americans believed to be incapable of growing facial hair.
But the “manly appendage,” as one commenter grandly called the beard, also served a number of important functions closer to home. As historian Sarah Gold McBride contends, beards were one response to a growing women’s rights movement, typified by the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention. Faced with threats to their prerogative, men grew beards “to codify a distinctly male appearance when other traditional markers of masculinity were no longer stable or certain.” The 19th-century beard may have sprouted from a fear of razors and a distaste for black barber shops. But it grew into a symbol that set white American men apart from smooth-faced foreigners as well as powerful women at home.
*****
This may not be the story bewhiskered moderns would like to hear. It’s easy to imagine the 19th-beard and barbershop revival as an homage to a quaint, innocent fashion trend. But today’s revival presents a chance to redeem the legacy of facial hair with a more complete understanding of the men who shaped it—a better grasp of what to keep and what to cut.
The original PC version of Minecraft has sold 14 million worldwide, a figure that takes the game's total sales past the 35 million mark, at the very least. That 35 million figure is based on numbers previously given by Mojang for other platforms, ...
The OKCupid statistics blog, by Christian Rudder, is amazing. Sadly, it hasn’t updated since 2011, around when OKCupid was bought by Match.com. (Rudder says the timing was a coincidence—he took time off for another project, and the blog may return soon!)
In the meantime, I’d like to recommend another unexpectedly engrossing blog: The Baby Name Wizard blog, by Laura Wattenberg (creator of the amazing Name Voyager graphing tool).
I find the Baby Name Wizard blog fascinating because, like the OK Cupid Blog, it combines two key ingredients:
Access to rich data about something that comes up all the time in our lives
The ability to find and tell the stories in that data
The reason I like the blog has nothing to do with naming babies. (I’m not allowed to name babies, anyway.)
I like it because we all encounter names every day, all the time, in every part of our life. We all have feelings and opinions about what names mean, but if you’re like me, they were mostly unconscious, unquestioned, and never subject to any statistical rigor. (Freakonomics has a well-known chapter about naming trends, which Wattenberg takesissue with).
Nevaeh (“Heaven” backward) is currently a more popular baby name than Sarah. Brooklyn is more popular than either, and Sophia is more popular than all three combined. In 20 years, those names will conjure up images of college kids, and Brandon and Sarah will sound as much like Mom and Dad names as Gary and Debby do to my generation.
If you’re like most people, you probably had some opinions when you read the names in the last paragraph. But maybe the biggest thing I’ve learned from reading this blog is that the reactions and stereotypes that names provoke often reveal more interesting stories than the names themselves.
For example, you may have heard the urban legend about a mother who named her daughter Le-a, pronounced “Ledasha”. Wattenberg dissects this urban legend in an insightful essay (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), which explains how apocryphal names like Le-a serve, across a wide variety of communities, as proxies for talking about race.
Here are a few of the other things I’ve learned from the blog:
The All-American name Samantha was virtually unknown before it was used in Bewitched—for 1960s viewers, it would have sounded as obscure as Permelia.
The popularity of Ava and Oliviaaren’t signs of a Victorian revival in naming—they’re 40 times more popular now than they ever were in Victorian times.
Alexander Bradley, an associate of Hernandez who has been called to testify in both of the ongoing criminal cases against the former New England Patriots star, reportedly shot up the exterior of the club as retaliation before being detained by police and rushed to the hospital. He is being treated for multiple gunshot wounds to his right thigh and is expected to be released Monday morning.
Bradley was shot by an unknown assailant after security pushed a fight to the outside of the club. He then went to his car to retrieve a gun, which he fired several times. No additional injuries have been reported. He fled the scene but made it only a short distance before being stopped by police.
The gun was found in the car. Police have not yet released the charges they plan to bring against Bradley.
Bradley filed a civil suit last June against Hernandez alledging that the former NFL star shot him in the face outside of a Miami strip club in February of 2013. The incident cost Bradley the sight in one of his eyes, but because he refused to identify Hernandez as the shooter to police, the criminal case was dropped, according to the Hartford Courant.
Hernandez was charged in June with the murder of Odin Lloyd, who prosecutors claimed was shot to death by Hernandez in North Attleborough, Mass. Hernandez is also being investigated for a 2012 double murder in Boston. In mid-January, police indicated that they have "probable cause" to believe Hernandez shot and killed Daniel Abreu and Safiro Furtado in Boston's South End.
Bradley, who one prosecutor described as a "former right-hand man" of Hernandez, has been called to testify to grand juries in both cases.
Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri had already ordered the group in May 2013 to disband and return to Iraq, and announced that another jihadist group, the Al-Nusra Front, was Al-Qaeda's official branch in war-torn Syria.
The general command of Al-Qaeda rammed home the point in its late Sunday statement.
"Al-Qaeda announces it is not linked to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, as it was not informed of its creation... (and) did not accept it," the statement said.
ISIL "is not a branch of Al-Qaeda, has no links to it, and the (Al-Qaeda) group is not responsible for its acts," it added.
Jihadists were initially welcomed by some rebels in Syria's conflict, but allegations of brutal abuses against civilians as well as rival opposition fighters has sparked a backlash.
Rebels have accused ISIL of seeking to consolidate power rather than fighting the regime, and even suggested the group was serving the regime's interests.
Al-Qaeda also criticized ISIL's mode of operations, saying jihadists should "be part of the nation" and avoid "any action that could lead to the oppression of jihadists, Muslims or non-Muslims."
Jihadists must "not rush to announce emirates and states... and impose them on people," said the statement.
In recent weeks, ISIL consolidated its grip on the northern city of Raqa, the only provincial capital to fall out of regime control since the outbreak of Syria's uprising in March 2011, imposing their strict version of Sharia law on residents.
It also issued four statements ordering women to wear the niqab in public, forbidding the sale of cigarettes and narghile (water pipe) products, banning music and making attendance of Friday prayers compulsory.
The tensions erupted in early January into armed clashes between ISIL and other rebel groups, including Islamist fighters.
"We affirm our disavowal from the sedition that is occurring in Syria between factions of jihadists, and from the blood that was shed by any party," Sunday's statement said.
In some cases, Al-Nusra Front participated in clashes against ISIL, though it has largely remained out of the fighting and has called for reconciliation.
In an audio message on January 22, Zawahiri called for an end to clashes between groups fighting to oust Syria's regime.
More than 1,400 people have been killed in the rebel-jihadist clashes.
Nintendo has been a family business. After the company's former president Hiroshi Yamauchi died last fall, he left his stake in the company to his four children. And now, Bloomberg reports, they're looking to sell stock.
djempirical
hodad
The original PC version of Minecraft has sold 14 million worldwide, a figure that takes the game's total sales past the 35 million mark, at the very least. That 35 million figure is based on numbers previously given by Mojang for other platforms, ...
Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri had already ordered the group in May 2013 to disband and return to Iraq, and announced that another jihadist group, the Al-Nusra Front, was Al-Qaeda's official branch in war-torn Syria.
