Theory

[Afterburn]

http://stevenpoole.net/trigger-happy/wo ... r-the-man/

I can't quite pinpoint what it is, but something about this article strikes me as entirely off the mark.

Thoughts?

[icycalm]

I lolled with this for about 15 seconds:

It is, you might say, a malignly perfect style of capitalist brainwashing.

Thanks.

But, really, the source of your misgivings must be here, I think:

In this way, adding insult to injury, the player is cast as a wage-slave in her leisure activity as well as in her daily life.

Anyone who uses "her" when referring to some random player must surely be gay, and therefore whatever they write must be rubbish.

[icycalm]

Serious answer:

The man is trying to tackle a very difficult subject without having the necessary knowledge, nor the capacity or desire to attempt to acquire it. All he wants to do is offload his random, directionless musings on a page in order sell it to a magazine or post it on his website, then move on to the next subject on his list of topics to muddle up. He is, in short, a journalist.

I could heap ridicule on almost every paragraph in there if I wanted to, but you'd have to pay me to do that. Here's an example anyway, which might give you an indication of his level of ignorance:

On this definition, obediently following a game’s narrative or challenge-reward structure is nothing but work. Only when the player does something that isn’t mandated by the system can she be said to be playing.

The player can NEVER do anything that is not mandated by the system. A videogame is a closed, sealed-off possibility space, every possibility of which has been determined from the start. This is Videogames 101.

Later on, the fuckhead says:

The recent Echochrome draws a perfect allegory of the player’s usual relationship to a videogame. The wireframe wooden puppet character represents the player, led by the nose through a series of arbitrary contortions according to the artist-designer’s purposes, in a weightless dance that soon fades into nothingness. “Congratulations”, the videogame says at the end, “you adopted all the poses that were required of you. Now you can climb back into your cardboard box until the next time”.

This can’t be the only way.

Whereas the obvious truth is that it can, and indeed it is.

In replacement, we might imagine a new videogaming manifesto inspired by the Slow Food movement. It would speak of games where you really could choose your own adventure, but also where, if you preferred, you could just take time to smell the coffee

LOLWTF

If you want to take time to smell the coffee, fuckhead, just put the game on pause and smell some fucking coffee for fuck's sakes.

It would be called Slow Gaming.

Indeed it would.

Gamers of the world unite: you have nothing to lose but your boring virtual jobs.

If only HE would lose his REAL job. THAT is a subject that would be worth writing an article about, I think.

[JoshF]

Someday, someone will invent a game where you contort a multicolored gas against music visualization backgrounds by saying words like "synergy" into a microphone on a controller with a win button and a kleenex dispenser. On that day, new games journalism will smile.

Gamers of the world unite: you have nothing to lose but your boring virtual jobs.

This is fun.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your VIDYA GAAAAAAAAEMS.
- Marcus Antonius

An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world PLAY VIDYA GAEMS.
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

[Bradford]

But... I like my work. Is... is that allowed?

Also,

Below is the text, more or less, of the keynote presentation I gave at the very awesome F.R.O.G. conference, which took place in Vienna, October 17–19 2008.

Really? Hasn't Eastern Europe suffered enough?

[JoshF]

But... I like my work. Is... is that allowed?

It's the design-slumlord paradigm don't you see? Like when you walk down the stairs and lower your foot to the next step, shifting weight onto that foot while lowering the other to the step after that? That's just what the designer wanted you to do maaaaaaaaaan. Now you're a slave, stuck in an endless spiral staircase of complacency, just like Mario was in Mario 64! It's capitalist brainwashing pure and simple. I mean, I just got done reading a book about anarcho-sydicalism, surely this stuff still applies to my boyhood fancies like vidya gaems and micro machines and dinosaucers right? Surely it wouldn't be an insult to all the people throughout history who gave their real 1-ups struggling against real forms of oppression and tyranny.

Now that I think about it, maybe Francisco Franco really was a video game boss. Wonder why the people didn't just jump over him and grab the axe?

[icycalm]

Seriously, though, if you wanna know exactly where the fuckhead journalist went wrong, I'll tell you where. There's no point in arguing specifics in his wretched little article: the man hasn't even sat down to try and think through the concepts "work" and "play" before beginning to write. -- But the entire article is based on these two concepts! If you understand fuck-all about them, how can you use them correctly to arrive at a conclusion, which, by definition, is going to be even more complex than them, and therefore more difficult to get right! (Not that he actually tries to arrive at some conclusion: conclusions are the bane of journalists. If they ever concluded anything conclusively (lol) they wouldn't have an excuse to keep churning out their little articles, and they'd be out of a job.)

At the heart of the matter is the fact (a fact which, along with all the most important facts of philosophy, no journalist will ever be able to grasp) that the distinction between "work" and "play" is largely spurious. Put another way: what marks an activity out as work or play is not intrinsic to the activity -- it is determined by our viewpoint. A single activity can be viewed by some people as work and by others as play, and not even the matter of remuneration always has the final say on the subject (someone could be doing something for free and still consider it work, and someone else could be paid to do something and still consider it play). All this is so obviously true that I don't even need to give examples: we should all easily be able to come up with dozens.

So again, if we want to seriously examine the distinction between work and play, and understand why people sometimes label one and the same activity as work and others as play, we must turn to the philosophers. And to give you Nietzsche's view on the matter in my own words, and in condensed form:

Play is whatever the masters do. Work is for the slaves.

[icycalm]

Haha, this shitty article was also linked on SB, and after two pages of posts the retards hadn't managed to raise a single point against it:

http://forums.selectbutton.net/viewtopic.php?t=17040

Almost all posts are off-topic too. Fucking retards.

[BlackerOmegalon]

You think a games journalist would be required to know how games are developed (the good ones at least). If only they could make an analog computer that runs on human feelings so we could break free.

Haha, this shitty article was also linked on SB, and after two pages of posts the retards hadn't managed to raise a single point against it:

http://forums.selectbutton.net/viewtopic.php?t=17040

The first reply in that thread is great.

I feel like World of Goo has something to say on this subject, although I don't really know what it is.

Indie games are so deep, man.