WANC 55: Sex Dongle

I would just like to point out that having not many people in a postapocalypic MMO is a feature, not a problem. How many people do you expect to be around after an apocalypse?

So, you’re perfectly comfortable with going on and on (and on) about how handicapped people should know their place and keep to it, but if race is mentioned all you have is uncomfortable silence?

[save vs troll]

I agree that they are not analogous, but it wasn’t that long ago that it was commonly held that “lesser” races weren’t as capable as the whites. As late as ww2 blacks weren’t allowed combat capacity in the military because of just that attitude that their race was a handicap to their performance.

But, you have gone back to the wellspring of humor at the expense of the handicapped several times. You deliberately misunderstood and exaggerated the guy’s disability and never once (to my knowledge) tried to get his side of things. Even here you are mis-stating what he wants as if he wants everyone else to stop playing EQ-2 if he can’t play. All of which is OK to the extent that you are exaggerating for humorous effect. But you won’t go for the humor if race is involved? What’s up with that double standard? Why is it not ok for you to make fun of black people as a white person but it is ok for you to make fun of the handicapped when you aren’t handicapped? If your position is that blacks aren’t disadvantaged then they should be a suitable target for barbs, after all they can take care of themselves.

Someday you should get me to tell you about taking care of my mother and making accommodations for her as she lost her sight to glaucoma. About what sort of human costs are on the other side of the equation. There was nothing about limiting others there was only the idea of helping her to do things that she needed and wanted to do, including playing games on her computer.

For closing I’ll invoke Hitler and the eugenicists of Nazi Germany who rounded up the handicapped along with the undesirable races and exterminated them all in the name of their perfect society.

I am perhaps a little more sensitive to the race issue because I have encountered it more frequently. And I am not making fun of people with disabilities in general; I am making fun of specific people or groups because of specific actions they have taken. I’ve said time and time again that I have no problem with making accommodations to help those with disabilities. The problem I have is when this is elevated to the level of needlessly hampering what everyone else is doing.

In the case of someone that sues a game company they are taking resources away from a business. If the company loses too much money to the lawsuits, or it costs too much to make the accommodations, or fundamentally changes the game to make it playable for a small number of people, then everyone else loses. If it is no longer profitable to make the game or keep it running, it will go away. The hundreds of thousands of other players will just be out of luck. As will many of the employees of the company that publishes and runs the game. You are right, I never tried to get his side of the story. Perhaps I’m closed minded, but I just don’t see a point where suing Sony because I can’t play Everquest becomes a reasonable topic of discussion.

In the case of the Council of the Blind suing over the use of the Kindle in universities, I fail to see how this helps anyone but the lawyers. By law accommodations have to be made to provide educational materials to those with disabilities. So this was never a question of someone visually impaired being unable to get an education or access the textbooks. It just meant they would have to do it in a different way. I’m not totally convinced that the Kindle is the best format to deliver a textbook, but I don’t see what business it is of the Council of the Blind to block its use. This is a clear case of them preventing progress and making sure that nobody else can enjoy the use of technology that they are unable to use themselves. By this same logic, books could not be used either, even though Braille or audio versions are made available. If you want to carry the logic out to a ridiculous point, then even Braille and audio version of books are not acceptable since amputees and the hearing impaired can not use them.

Here’s a quote on the textbook/kindle settlement:

Per the settlements, according to the Justice Department, the universities agree that if they do use dedicated electronic book readers, they will “ensure that students with vision disabilities are able to access and acquire the same materials and information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as sighted students with substantially equivalent ease of use.”

Also this from Amazon:
“With some key modifications, we believe Kindle can be a breakthrough device for the blind, and the team is excited about making these enhancements,” the company said.

You may read these differently than I do, but I see this as positive. If sighted students are all able to download new course materials at 8pm the evening before a 7am class on their kindle and the blind students can go to the bookstore and special order the book sometime the next day and receive it a week later then you really aren’t providing the same educational opportunities to them both. The advantages of speedy delivery and flexibility in regards to book choices that an electronic delivery system brings is lost when you have to wait for a braille printing or an audio edition. It comes down to an argument about providing the same educational opportunities for everyone and whether you think it is a worthwhile venture or not. That the suit got Amazon to see the advantages in making Kindles that blind people can use is probably the consequence that was the goal of the lawsuits.

There are all kinds of rules that businesses have to follow to do business. Safety and health codes and even handicap accessibility codes. If a restaurant was built in such a way that it couldn’t comply with health codes for food preparation and then they were forced out of business by the cost of retroactively complying would you think that business ill used by the system or would you think that they should have been smarter about setting up their business? This is how I see the case you used about the school with the sunken area in the commons. Someone should have caught that early and either not built it that way or filled it in or something. Barring that sort of foresight, when the handicapped student complained rather than telling him that he didn’t need to go there anyway they should have said that they would look into it and get back to them and consulted some lawyers who know disability access law and found out that they would have to fix it in the end anyway and then come to some kind of agreement. Whoever in that school’s administration thought that they could just decide for that student whether he needed to go there or not was letting their ego get in the way of good business and was to blame for a good bit of the money that you considered wasted on the fix.

If EQ2 closes because they are forced to allow mods for visually impaired people then they probably would have been shutting it down soon anyway. If US courts decide that the law says that the cost of doing business with an MMORPG in America includes having to make it accessible to legally blind people then yes, that’s one more barrier to those businesses. I can live with that just fine, just like I can live with the rules that mandate a certain number of handicapped parking spots or wheelchair ramps or braille spots on drive through menus.

In the end, you don’t sue Sony because you can’t play the game. You sue Sony because you’re an obnoxious, self righteous, asshole with enough money and connections to sue Sony. You sue Sony because by suing Sony you make every other game maker out there consider making their games that are in development as accessible as they can in order to avoid being sued. You do that because you can and because there are other people out there who would benefit from having these games to play who can’t or won’t make the stand themselves. You do it for the same reasons that you stand up to a bully or step in for someone else, because you can and they can’t, because if you don’t yell your head off and make a big rude stink about it and bust some heads then it won’t be fixed. You do it because it really isn’t about you playing EQ2 it’s about people who make games taking the time to consider making their games accessible to people who could use a little more fun in their difficult lives. You do it so Amazon will make changes to the kindle so blind people can use it or some other group of bright product engineers will do it and sell their e-book to the universities instead of kindles. You do it for the old lady trying to bump her husband’s wheelchair up a curb with no wheelchair cut in it, so that he can go shopping with her because it’s the only time he gets out of the house anymore and he looks forward to it for days. You do it for the blind kid that already has to work many times harder to stay in school than his sighted classmates who just found out that things got easier for the people who have it the easiest and harder for people who have it the hardest. You do it because your values dictate that the strong stand up for the weak and being a litigious, complaining, stubborn, loudmouth happens to be your strength.