Absolutely not.

In a shadowrun, a firefight usually means that you've screwed up.

Shadowrunning is about the people that fell through the cracks of society, the unseen operators that do the jobs that the corporations can't officially be seen doing themselves.

The ideal shadowrun means you got away with the objective of your mission without firing a shot or letting anyone notice you doing it. If you're REALLY good, the place you hit never realizes anything happened at all.

That FPS game? All it took away from the roleplaying game is the art and look from the covers. Nobody making the computer game bothered to look at any of the content inside the books.


-karma

I think you'd be hard-pressed to back that up from, well, basically anything in the fiction. In a shadowrun, a firefight that the other side knew was coming means you've screwed up.

Not saying that "ghost runs" don't exist, but, well, let's be serious, if they were plausible the corp could just use in-house talent to do it. Shadowrunners exist because they are deniable, and they need to be deniable because they will be seen and shot at and have their bodies recovered and occasionally be captured alive.

~J

wait.... what?

thank you

the producers were the owners
Micro$oft owns the videogame rights to BT and SR. They went ahead recently and dissolved the "company" and have of course kept the IPs.
most likely SR as far as videogames will sit and rot, since they have "proven it isnt viable in the videogame market" by making a game that:
1. Doesn't appeal to the actual SR fanbase (for the most part)
2. was sub par for the type of game it became(from most of what I've heard)
and
3. Was built as Vista only (w/o modifications) and cut out the smarter(IMHO) people who have stuck with XP vs Vista

true
I enjoy having a mac and a pc
as soon as I can afford it (both money and space) I'm going to setup a linux system as well

For those of us not in the know, care to share the flavour text?

true, microsuck doesn't care what they do to something as inspiring as shadowrun.. as long as they can strip it to it core and sell it to the mouth agape masses that believe that microsuck is God/ or some such nonsense....

It's actually not the flavour text—it's the combination of the card's effects and the means in which the name and flavourtext imply that they occur.

First, a word on the Shadowrun card game. You hire Shadowrunners and buy gear for them to have them go on Shadowruns, in which they must work their way through a bunch of challenges and then complete the objective to gain a stated amount of reputation (and sometimes other stuff). A player wins when his or her reputation exceeds a prearranged quantity. You have to explicitly select a group of Shadowrunners from your "safehouse" (they've been played but aren't immediately being used) to go on a Shadowrun, and while they can bail out, in general they can't receive additional assistance while underway.

There are cards, called IIRC "stingers", which are like Interrupts from M:tG. You play them whenever, and they do stuff. Other cards must be played during your turn, and they just do stuff, either instantly or continuously.

The basic resource is nuyen, and you get 4¥ a turn barring other sources of income.

Now, the cards. This is all by memory, so wording is not exact:

Block Party: for every 4¥ you pay, add a token to Block Party. While Block Party is in play, no Shadowruns may be attempted. Remove one token at the end of your turn; if there are no tokens remaining on Block Party, discard it.

The artwork is of a wild party in the street, with IIRC a Troll with a giant bottle of beer.


Green Apple Quicksteps: target Shadowrunner on a Shadowrun immediately returns to their owner's Safehouse.

Picture: a man with a very unpleasant look on his face clutching his gut.

Flavourtext: You should've gone before we left!


Saeder-Krupp: Picture: basic corporate logo.

At the beginning of each player's turn, roll a die. If the result is 5 or 6, Saeder-Krupp takes the lowest-valued objective currently visible. If Saeder-Krupp accumulates enough Reputation to exceed the limit, Saeder-Krupp wins the game.

Note that the player who plays Saeder-Krupp does not win when Saeder-Krupp wins.

~J

there WAS an MMORPG in the making called Shadowrun Online http://www.shadowrun-online.com/sro/ . . they had some sweet ideas for the game and were planning on starting out with Seattle(of course) and then do expansion Packs for for things like Denver, Hamburg and other Sprawls and maybe even whole countries . . an established time-line, cyber/bio/magic/nano . . astral space, matrix, meat-space, Rigger-Stuff . . oh how i wish the pages on where one could see what they had planned were still online . . it was awesome . . made by what is today http://www.sixthworldgames.com/ . . now that they god a cease and desist order from microsucks they are planning on making the game more on the traditional cyberpunk part of william gibson . . will probably still be one hell of a good game when it comes out . . and a little correction on my part, they were not actually in alpha but in pre alpha about to enter early alpha state in one or two months . .

Quite rightly, as Microsoft owns the content, and they were blatantly and knowingly violating copyright.

Except that the very existence of copyright is a blatant and knowing violation of basic moral principals. It is an artificial right created to abrogate a natural right. It is like making a law against breathing the air and then selling selling bottled oxygen for hundreds of dollars per cc.

That's their problem. There were plenty of submissions to Microsoft for the rights to the game, in many and varied stages of production. Each one was met with a firm refusal, with (as far as I know ... at least in the 3 separate replies that I have seen) nothing to mislead people into thinking those rights would be available in the future.

ShadowrunOnline was developing their product in an open environment, for all the world to see, using someone else's copyrighted material without prior consent. That doesn't seem to me to be a very viable way to go about endearing yourself, or even making yourself look professional to the copyright owners.

Here's another you can look over, managed to keep active for 9 months so far. They claim to have a non-commercial permissions from Microsoft to use Shadowrun Intelectual Properties.

http://awakenedmmo.org/

edit: too many acronyms!

That was true of the Halo RTS which neared completion before receiving a cease and desist letter.

Please enumerate the natural rights.

~J

Copyright as a concept is there to protect the rights of the creator of a work.

So you make an artwork or writing or whatever.

Without the copyright protection, anyone could take your work and sell a million copies without your permission or paying you a cent. And you legally wouldn't be able to do a damn thing about it.

Basically, stealing all your hard work.

You are claiming that theft is a 'natural right'?

On a larger societal scale, Intellectual Property protections like copyright, trademarks, and patents help encourage and drive innovation.

Without these protections we revert to a state where all new developments are kept secret by their creators, and tended to die with them. This stunts the development of societies as a whole.

The current state of IP law and whether or not it achieves these goals is a different question.


-karma

So polluters are stealing from me by destroying potential productive years of my working life? Interesting take. I've always personally felt that the Chicago School of Economics was horse shit myself.

-Frank

Define "benefit".

Only if you introduce as a basic assumption that the creation ought to produce profit regardless of how the market values it, which seems antithetical to capitalism.

~J

mfb did state "among other factors".

Regardless, the assumption is that the original creator should have the rights to the POSSIBLE profit or gain from his work, not that a work automatically should be profitable. Even if the market values a work poorly, that value should be the creator's right to claim, not anyone else's.

If my work generates zero profit, that zero is mine to claim (in a philosophic sense), not any else's.


-karma

Why? Unless I missed something, you're petitioning the principle—the creator should have control of his or her creation because the creator should have control of his or her creation.

Say you put out a work. I could potentially purchase floor((amount of money I have)/(cost of work)) copies of your work—assuming I am your total market, that is your possible profit. Do I steal from you by not purchasing your work, or by purchasing fewer copies than I possibly can? If not, how do you determine what "possible profits" are, and if they exist and are gained or lost?

The selectivity of capitalism comes exactly from the inability of certain creators to profit from certain creations.

Absolutely. But why, after you have transferred your work to another, do you retain the ability to dictate its fate in any manner?

~J

that's not capitalism, that's a food chain. in capitalism, a person is supposed to be able to profit from his work, according to the perceived value of the work. in a food chain, the strong take from the weak because the weak are... well, weak. they can't stop the strong. the weak don't profit, they simply get eaten.

that's a moot question, because it assumes that you are the one doing the transferring. if someone comes along and transfers your work without your permission, you need some sort of legal recourse to get it back, or at least its value.

And how does that not happen? So long as the creator is a monopoly, which for an easily-copyable product essentially means as long as they don't distribute the product, they can set the price however they like. When they sell a copy, they introduce an alternative supplier into the market, who may compete with them on price. In some cases, the market's valuation of the work will drop to zero. That's how the market works.

The market does not have to treat easily-copyable works as fungible, and indeed, some sections of the market do not and choose to find sources that exhibit certain properties (like proximity to the creator). However, in the general case, it does.

If you didn't transfer your work to them, they would have had to still obtain it somehow—most likely by a preexisting crime. Do you have a theoretical example of this happening without the commission of a non-intellectual-property-related crime?

~J

You are missing the distinction between a work, and the potential gain that distributing that work.

No, because the amount of profit is irrelevant to the argument, only the right to attempt to gain said profit is.

Transferring a copy of a work is not the same as transferring the RIGHTS to that work.

They are separate things.


-karma