Thursday 16 October 2014

capitalist

The following are tweets concerning The Westminster Media Forum event:
"The 1st gen of students from games courses emerge next year with £60K debts we have no idea if they're appropriate for industry"

"More than 7000 people in the UK studying games design, development and production. But are we producing the right skills? "


"If you don't think big, you're never going to get big. Listen. Learn. "


"Games devs are not special & unique snowflakes. They're businesses. The sooner they realise this. The sooner they find investors"


"Shocked that the whole of Steam (estimate: $1.5-$2bn in revenue) is about the same size as Puzzles & Dragons ($1.7bn in 2013)"


Can you see how capitalism poisons everything? The pursuit of knowledge is now worthless if it doesn't provide skill-sets that can be applied to make money. Might not seem like a problem at first but look at everything you cherish; music, art, nature, the well-being of those around you, the area in which you live. I've got news for you, the skills that maintain these things are not financially worth pursuing. Lawyers working against discrimination get paid considerably less than corporate defense attorneys. The people who give company, hand massages and an ear to the 5 million lonely, older people in the UK who say their main companion is their TV set do so voluntarily. Musicians, writers, artists and graphic designers, those who colour our grey existence, work for "experience" and "exposure". Imagine if this was applied to any other profession, a cleaner working to enhance their portfolio.


We need a steady state capitalism that doesn't allow continuous growth. Our resources are limited.


Money & Happiness


Avoid monetary gain temptation. So what if the mobile game made more than Steam? The only relation money has to happiness is that the result of having no money is negative. It is not a spectrum. The outcome of being filthy-fucking-rich isn't (necessarily) positive, more is the chance that a wealthy person is morally bankrupt or of the mind that it was something other than luck that allowed them to be well off, pride. A person who wins the lotto and a person who loses their legs will return to their prior state of happiness within a year. (If you understand that freewill is an illusion, pride and pity dissipate). The Beatles were only happy that they became rich young because they realised early in life that money doesn't make you happy.


It isn't binary

It isn't binary: business or delicate flower.Take umbrage with the idea that developers ought to be businesses. If that were the case then there would be no Lake of Roaches. All dangerous ideas would be erased unless they had marketing value (see: the dishonest use of racism in Bioshock Infinite, the implied then removed I Spit On Your Grave aspect of Tomb Raider). Never say it enough: pandering to an audience removes all social function. The incredible work that is disseminated for free. Do you want endless derivation or plurality?


Review of previous pieces:

Language

Language: a matter of taste, Shakespeare made verb forms of nouns, noun forms of adjectives etc more than any other writer (polluted, pollute, pollution). The problem with the popular patterns mentioned is that there are better ways to use the language (see use of "super" as adverb). Examples of language being flexible that I have enjoyed: the prefix-less "evitable", the coinage "wismical", the abbreviation "hope'ly".

Crisis

Heidegger: an overall retreat from an authentic way of life/ being. 20th century skating and skitting on the top, relatively unchanging culture. What might be wrong: a technologised way of living and a reduction of what is an objective way of living, molded by the earth.

Compound crisis: a shallowness. If we were grown ups we would see the problems we ought to see coming. People would rather be watching... can't blame people. Historic rape cases, tax fraud appeal more than Ebola killing over half of those infected because we can feel morally outraged with the former. Eternally pubescent, domesticated by media.


Reactions

The reaction to ironic culture might be the metaphorical "turning the TV off". Not taking part. By simply being we add to culture. The epiphany of looking at the people on the street and seeing that everyone is wearing exactly what the should be wearing. How the world is.

Anti-intellectual is like being anti-mountain gorilla.

the dividing thing between what is ok and what is not ok isn't a definable thing. There can't be rules. It's the spirit in which a thing is made. (see the creative joy of Texas Chainsaw Massacre - tree of watches, skull with horn pushed through eye socket, arbitrary generator - compared with set-piece based horror).


Dark Souls and libidinal urges

Dark souls is not an anti-libidinal game, it is a sex denial game. The ladies with spider-like bottom halves are not as previously stated but in fact very sexy. That they have no human sexual organs brings about the idea of denial.

Final Thought

Infantilisation feeds culture/ media, culture/ media feeds infantilisation. It is a circle dance. The music is provided by capitalism.

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