Hey readers, thanks for checking out Tekno-Logic this week.
Hopefully by now, if you're a regular reader of my blog, you'll notice that I'm familiar with games and most of the culture within video and computer gaming. With that said I wanted to talk to you about something that really impressed me this past week that had to do about gamers, and more specifically an online community of gamers in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas, The Speed Gamers.
This group of gamers came together in attempting record-breaking speed runs through all sorts of different video games with emphasis on efficiency and quickness, and they've ran a number of marathons in the past demonstrating their skill in role-playing games, action titles, and other such genres. But what makes them really remarkable as a community of gamers isn't their impressive speed runs of the Legend of Zelda series, or their quick advancement through Metal Gear Solid, but that they take this time to raise funds for various humanitarian efforts. With most marathons, they've selected a charity for which they would represent, and repeatedly ask viewers and their friends to donate what they can to that charity, with the gamers being entirely selfless and asking for nothing in return for their time spent.
In their past marathon, a week-long (over 168 hours non-stop) marathon spanning most of the Final Fantasy RPG series by developer Square (now under the name Square Enix), the community chose to represent the Autism Care and Treatment (ACT Today) in Austin, Texas, and broke through their original goal of $20,000 within the first three days of the marathon. By the marathon's close on Friday evening, the team had just passed it's next goal of $50k, with over $50,600 raised for ACT Today, and it may still rise throughout this weekend! This single marathon easily trumped any previous fund-raising record they held for their last twelve events, and went beyond their overall fund-raising total of $32,469.62 for all fund-raising events in their history.
Although in the past gamers and the gaming culture have been viewed upon and called as the cause of violent outburst in response to tragic events like the school shooting in Columbine, Colorado, or the Virginia Tech massacre in more recent years, it's refreshing to see a community turn things around in a different light, and to read some positive and uplifting news related to gaming. So congratulations to The Speed Gamers. I'm looking forward to your next marathon featuring the Mega Man series by developer Capcom, which starts in August.

In other news, we'll look at what Amazon had screwed up recently with one of their latest devices, the e-book reader series: Kindle. Amazon first brought the Kindle to consumers a couple years back in 2007 and the device has performed decently well in allowing readers to carry around a vast amount of literature with them on a small tablet device. I'll admit that it's use of e-ink is impressive in the way that it doesn't expend energy to display text on the screen, but instead uses power to shift the characters on the screen from page to page. But the device itself isn't what's under fire here, instead we need to look at the service that delivers the literature to the e-readers, via Amazon's online store. Just recently, Amazon had taken a bold step and remotely deleted multiple copies of various books from individual Kindle devices, including notable titles by George Orwell like Animal Farm, and Nineteen Eighty-Four. These titles had been paid for entirely and were rightfully owned by their readers, but Amazon had taken them away and left a full refund for their customers to their accounts.
Amazon had explained that the publisher for the titles did not own the correct publishing rights for these exclusive electronic mediums of literature, and Amazon C.E.O. Jeff Bezos also left an apology online to those that felt wronged by the removal. However, some people were not easily quelled by the act, Gizmodo blogger Adam Frucci hypothetically compared it to Barnes & Noble breaking into his house to steal his copy and leaving money for the mistake they've made. Granted, Frucci's example is extreme but equally it's the same thing.
Now, I've often found myself on the side of promoting technological advancements and moving things to electronic mediums much like the Kindle does, but this is an example where things just don't go to plan. Amazon has said that this is an odd happening, and that users should not expect the same treatment in the future, but I'm losing confidence in their ability to manage this system, especially since they've broken their own Terms of Service agreement in doing this remote removal, which states:

“Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon.”

In other words: what's mine is mine, and keep your hands off of it, Amazon.