Weird, though - are you saying there's a difference between "mainstream" and "mass" now? The "hardcore" will become "mass" and the "mainstream" becomes "high culture?" I think that's what's going to happen - what are currently the tastes of the hardcore enthusiasts will become the grist for the mass-culture market, but structures will change (from long to short, from very repetitive to fairly condensed).
I think what I'm getting at is that gamers act as if this shift is the one from an elite era to a mass-popularization one, when I think it maps better to an earlier stage in cinema, the shift from a somewhat-marginal entertainment practice to a full-bore media form that produces high art - for different people.
Spielberg and many other "mass market" film-makers actually grew up on a diet of Godard, Bunuel et. al.
The first stage of cinema was as a coin-operated novelty, with nickelodeons and zoetropes accompanying carnivals. It was associated with seediness and the demimonde, although a group of researchers (Melies, Lumiere, etc.) were very excited by its possibilities.
The subsequent phase of cinema was that of the movie house that should serials, to which young people would enthusiastically and uncritically congregate. These series might go on for years, but despite their scope, they were often aesthetically limited. A few auteurs worked to expand the form, but it was generally the provenance of people with a lot of spare time and not very much cultural capital.
The third phase was the "breakthrough" - the arrival of the film house as a place for everyone to go. This is the era of Cecil B. DeMille, Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton, and the other early silent stars. What changes is the format: instead of long serials, there are 2 hour-long films that are meant to be enjoyed by busy, intelligent people.
This is where I see games going - into the era of DeMille, and out of the "Lone Ranger" phase. The one quirk I see is that the kids who spend all Saturday at the movies which the serials are considered the "hardcore" enthusiasts. I think this will change, when it becomes those who appreciate games like Flow who are identified as the more advanced gamer. Notice that the high age of film-as-art comes after the DeMille period (it varies to time and place: German expressionist film in the 20's and 30's, French new-wave film in the 50's and 60's, American New Hollywood film in the late 60's and early 70's, etc.)
But what happened to that enthusiast who spends all day watching Lone Ranger serials, but who could never really get a Bunuel, Godard, or Kieslowski film? He loses his status as a cinematic connoisseur, and is instead seen as kind of lowly figure. I imagine that could happen to the people we call "hardcore" gamers now.
Some rights aren't waived by the kind of implicit contracts that just buying a ticket entail, and in Canada, apparently, the right to a certain level of privacy is one of them. I think that's a good thing.
You're right, I somewhat mistook the gist of your original post. At the same time, there is that fascinating design niche - interface, aesthetics, product design - which, for some products, the US has some strong advantages. Apple seems to be pretty popular around the world.
He wants to run Linux as his primary OS, or at least experiment with it. There's nothing wrong with it. That you see this as a kind of homicidal impulse is bizarre to say the least - is this a symptom of your fanatical devotion to an OS?
But it does: in-depth understanding of the target market and its culture. Which is why I'm confident Apple hires a Japanese advertising firm when doing business in Japan.
The "design" bit as an interesting one. It fuzzes the line between that which is easy trans-nationalized and that which isn't. An interface is half-pure-technology, half-cultural-artifact.
Actually, smooth syncing with my cell phone is pushing me back to Outlook. Firefox has really overcome almost all compatibility hurdles - Thunderbird (particularly the address book and calendaring bits) not so much. Also, Thunderbird still seems to get confused about offline copies.
Ultimately, I just wonder if it has enough developer person-hours to compete with Outlook. Firefox definitely does.
The differences are that you can only buy chips from the casino, and there is a one-to-one correspondence between the value of the chips and the value of the dollar, and the casino is making money from the gambling itself. Without spiraling into a cycle of analogies, see my post above. The real situation is fuzzier: players agreeing that the chips are worth money before they play, but the person hosting the party at which people are playing for chips not necessarily signing off on it.
See, the reason this is interesting is that Linden Labs was never in the gambling business per se. Unlike online casinos, they do not get a cut of every gambling transaction as such. In a sense, what they are doing is providing a table, cards, and chips. Except that they have a website that reports the going dollar rate for those chips.
Take away the website, and what do you have? If they introduce different chips, and then let the community decide what they do with those chips, they are completely out of the gambling business. Or are they? And if they aren't out of the gambling business, in theory, couldn't any game that has a posssible win-lose outcome become gambling?
Other MMOs have (player-run) casinos, because they don't support exchange between their virtual currencies and real-world cash. Now, here's a couple questions.
If Linden introduced a "play money" currency in the game that wasn't officially convertible to cash, but allowed players to decide to accept it for whatever they wanted (including in-game cash), would that also be illegal in the US?
Sony Online games are divided into two, with a minority of servers for games like EQ2 allowing real-money transactions and the majority disallowing it. Is gambling legal on the majority of those servers, but illegal in the minority?
This really does push the question of how virtual these virtual worlds really are.
The question is whether these statistics play out within concentrated geographic areas. What about the state of California, or of New York, or of Massachusetts or Washington?
At times, I wonder if the "spread out America" card gets played a bit too much. Most Americans live in fairly concentrated regions. How much of the difference between US, European and Japanese broadband adoption is really about density?
The English were, to some extent, trying to create a famine, by enforcing distribution contracts that the Indians had signed (under some duress), obligating farmers to export before local needs were met.
At this point, I think that the term "hardcore" really means "catering to crude adolescent power fantasies and sexual frustration" more than anything else.
Did Abraham Lincoln? Or Jefferson Davis? What about Theodore Roosevelt?
I distrust these crude moral polarities. Why are some famines called the responsibilities of the dictators, while others (such as those during the Raj) just acts of God? I recommend the book "Late Victorian Holocausts" as a point of reference.
Not calling Mengitsu an angel, but he was found guilty of genocide by the (also Communist) regime that ousted him, not by a neutral international board. His defense is that it was a civil war which raged over years - compare with the death toll of the US Civil War.
China's actions are hardly comparable to those of the major Western powers - they simply blocked a UN sanction in order to preserve their oil trading partner. Not admirable, perhaps, but hardly on the scale of intervention.
The figure for Ethiopia is 1.5 million (and is better termed a democide than a genocide.) The casualties of the pre-Derg, Halie Selassie era famine were higher. While you are right to note that the USSR did back a regime (against its own allies, mind you, the Somalians, who were actively invading it) there is no indication that the Soviets manufactured the ouster of Halie Selassie to begin with, which is the issue at hand.
That calculus, of putting economic interests ahead of stopping genocide, is not limited to dictatorships, by any means.
The USSR backed the Angola rebels, otherwise I don't recall them being that active in coups, revolts or the like. What did China do in Africa that compares with any of the others?
The original post, however, is still historically a wreck. The West has only been relatively "hands-off" since the late 1980's. It's 500 years before that have been the problem, not the past 20 years.
I hate to break it to you, but OLPC is being run as a business. Which means that if the Nigerian Ministry of Education comes up with the funds for the laptops, they get the laptops.
If patronizing naivety could be harnessed as an energy source, the OLPC would be able to light up the eastern seaboard.
I'm afraid that your choice to limit your own exposure to critical discourse is showing. You misunderstand me completely if you think I am opposing escapism just to art engage, and my references to Tolstoy and Delaney should make that obvious.
That you would cite the "roller coaster" ride as the point of the work sugests, to me, that you view art just as a sub-category of entertainment. I'm afraid that you really just don't get it - it's like trying to explain integral functions to a day-care instructor.
The most reflective and philosophical people I've known have been readers of, primarily, Russian literature, in my experience, and readers of poetry in English and Spanish. Most fans of escapism that I know of are often stimulating in their mental enthusiasms, but often lack insight into the workings and constraints of the human condition.
I think you don't understand why I chose the Harlequin romance novels: its fans are as put off by challenging and nuanced stories of intimate relationships just as much as Star Wars and Harry Potter fans are likely to be put off by Delany and Disch, and for the same reason. They are fans in order to find reassurance. There's something a little sad when reassurance really is the driving force for one's engagement with art.
It is disingenuous to bring in essentially non-narrative forms: fiction is discursive in a way that music and, in some ways, painting is not. There are other aesthetic criteria and barriers in those forms, too - that which separates a simple lullaby from a Berg sonata. It isn't quite right to say I dismiss it: I've seen the Pirate films and been swept away (at least by the first one.) However, it is like junk food: indulging in it as a pleasure occasionally is harmless, but as a constant diet, it's a problem. What I hear from fans who defend their commitment to their favorite works is analogous to the person who insists that eating at McDonald's everyday is harmless and no less healthy than eating anywhere else.
Egalitarianism about taste is almost always selective, and unidirectional: people like to be egalitarian when the critique of taste comes from above, and less so when it is a comparison with something less respected. Are you seriously going to tell me that you think Harlequin romances are "just as good" as Tolstoy? That a Harlequin author is trying to do something different, and so that they shouldn't be compared to what Tolstoy is trying to accomplish? Or, more to the point, that you aren't going to have somewhat different expectations about the depth of thinking of someone who only reads Harlequin romance novels than you would of someone with a background in world literature?
So, really, we all make important judgments of people based on taste, because taste isn't arbitrary - it reveals a great deal about a person's temperment, education, background and aspirations. I think a lot of fan culture is about escapism - a desire for "another world" which both reassures them and gives them possible identities that they can't experience in real life. As such, it is an art of resignation. Reassurance is, to be blunt, something for children. It shows little spiritual courage.
It isn't a matter of genre either. There are writers who create speculative fiction that doesn't reassure, but provokes: Thomas Disch, Stanislaw Lem, and Samuel Delaney come to mind. They ponder possibilities in order to provoke new ways of understanding our own world and lives, not to provide a kind of narcotic relief from a day-to-day life that ultimately goes unexamined.
Non-fans - that is, people who don't have loyalties to series but simply look for quality stories - will want a good film that stands on its own, instead of engaging in self-absorbed world-building.
I'm really getting to hate fan-think. It's cheapening the way we think of narrative. Too much adolescent desire to inhabit an imaginary world, not enough use of art/narrative to think reflectively about our own world and lives.
I normally wouldn't be so abusive, but the way that you framed it actually valourized escapism over the creation of powerful cinema, and accused those of us who weren't playing as-if of having poor attention spans.
Slashdot Mirror
Weird, though - are you saying there's a difference between "mainstream" and "mass" now? The "hardcore" will become "mass" and the "mainstream" becomes "high culture?" I think that's what's going to happen - what are currently the tastes of the hardcore enthusiasts will become the grist for the mass-culture market, but structures will change (from long to short, from very repetitive to fairly condensed).
I think what I'm getting at is that gamers act as if this shift is the one from an elite era to a mass-popularization one, when I think it maps better to an earlier stage in cinema, the shift from a somewhat-marginal entertainment practice to a full-bore media form that produces high art - for different people.
Spielberg and many other "mass market" film-makers actually grew up on a diet of Godard, Bunuel et. al.
The first stage of cinema was as a coin-operated novelty, with nickelodeons and zoetropes accompanying carnivals. It was associated with seediness and the demimonde, although a group of researchers (Melies, Lumiere, etc.) were very excited by its possibilities.
The subsequent phase of cinema was that of the movie house that should serials, to which young people would enthusiastically and uncritically congregate. These series might go on for years, but despite their scope, they were often aesthetically limited. A few auteurs worked to expand the form, but it was generally the provenance of people with a lot of spare time and not very much cultural capital.
The third phase was the "breakthrough" - the arrival of the film house as a place for everyone to go. This is the era of Cecil B. DeMille, Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton, and the other early silent stars. What changes is the format: instead of long serials, there are 2 hour-long films that are meant to be enjoyed by busy, intelligent people.
This is where I see games going - into the era of DeMille, and out of the "Lone Ranger" phase. The one quirk I see is that the kids who spend all Saturday at the movies which the serials are considered the "hardcore" enthusiasts. I think this will change, when it becomes those who appreciate games like Flow who are identified as the more advanced gamer. Notice that the high age of film-as-art comes after the DeMille period (it varies to time and place: German expressionist film in the 20's and 30's, French new-wave film in the 50's and 60's, American New Hollywood film in the late 60's and early 70's, etc.)
But what happened to that enthusiast who spends all day watching Lone Ranger serials, but who could never really get a Bunuel, Godard, or Kieslowski film? He loses his status as a cinematic connoisseur, and is instead seen as kind of lowly figure. I imagine that could happen to the people we call "hardcore" gamers now.
Some rights aren't waived by the kind of implicit contracts that just buying a ticket entail, and in Canada, apparently, the right to a certain level of privacy is one of them. I think that's a good thing.
You're right, I somewhat mistook the gist of your original post. At the same time, there is that fascinating design niche - interface, aesthetics, product design - which, for some products, the US has some strong advantages. Apple seems to be pretty popular around the world.
Pre-coffee, I tend to be overly literal, so I guess we're even. :-)
It's a little funny as hyberbole, except that the sentiment which informs it is itself hyberbolic, making it, um, less funny.
And yes, that's the point. He wants to stop dual-booting. So what?
...
No way. You didn't... just... compare...
He wants to run Linux as his primary OS, or at least experiment with it. There's nothing wrong with it. That you see this as a kind of homicidal impulse is bizarre to say the least - is this a symptom of your fanatical devotion to an OS?
But it does: in-depth understanding of the target market and its culture. Which is why I'm confident Apple hires a Japanese advertising firm when doing business in Japan.
The "design" bit as an interesting one. It fuzzes the line between that which is easy trans-nationalized and that which isn't. An interface is half-pure-technology, half-cultural-artifact.
The fact that you don't see competitive pressures in design, advertising, and marketing is a stellar indication that you'd be bad at it.
Actually, smooth syncing with my cell phone is pushing me back to Outlook. Firefox has really overcome almost all compatibility hurdles - Thunderbird (particularly the address book and calendaring bits) not so much. Also, Thunderbird still seems to get confused about offline copies.
Ultimately, I just wonder if it has enough developer person-hours to compete with Outlook. Firefox definitely does.
The differences are that you can only buy chips from the casino, and there is a one-to-one correspondence between the value of the chips and the value of the dollar, and the casino is making money from the gambling itself. Without spiraling into a cycle of analogies, see my post above. The real situation is fuzzier: players agreeing that the chips are worth money before they play, but the person hosting the party at which people are playing for chips not necessarily signing off on it.
See, the reason this is interesting is that Linden Labs was never in the gambling business per se. Unlike online casinos, they do not get a cut of every gambling transaction as such. In a sense, what they are doing is providing a table, cards, and chips. Except that they have a website that reports the going dollar rate for those chips.
Take away the website, and what do you have? If they introduce different chips, and then let the community decide what they do with those chips, they are completely out of the gambling business. Or are they? And if they aren't out of the gambling business, in theory, couldn't any game that has a posssible win-lose outcome become gambling?
Other MMOs have (player-run) casinos, because they don't support exchange between their virtual currencies and real-world cash. Now, here's a couple questions.
If Linden introduced a "play money" currency in the game that wasn't officially convertible to cash, but allowed players to decide to accept it for whatever they wanted (including in-game cash), would that also be illegal in the US?
Sony Online games are divided into two, with a minority of servers for games like EQ2 allowing real-money transactions and the majority disallowing it. Is gambling legal on the majority of those servers, but illegal in the minority?
This really does push the question of how virtual these virtual worlds really are.
The question is whether these statistics play out within concentrated geographic areas. What about the state of California, or of New York, or of Massachusetts or Washington?
At times, I wonder if the "spread out America" card gets played a bit too much. Most Americans live in fairly concentrated regions. How much of the difference between US, European and Japanese broadband adoption is really about density?
The English were, to some extent, trying to create a famine, by enforcing distribution contracts that the Indians had signed (under some duress), obligating farmers to export before local needs were met.
I recommend the Davis book for more insight.
At this point, I think that the term "hardcore" really means "catering to crude adolescent power fantasies and sexual frustration" more than anything else.
Did Abraham Lincoln? Or Jefferson Davis? What about Theodore Roosevelt?
I distrust these crude moral polarities. Why are some famines called the responsibilities of the dictators, while others (such as those during the Raj) just acts of God? I recommend the book "Late Victorian Holocausts" as a point of reference.
Not calling Mengitsu an angel, but he was found guilty of genocide by the (also Communist) regime that ousted him, not by a neutral international board. His defense is that it was a civil war which raged over years - compare with the death toll of the US Civil War.
China's actions are hardly comparable to those of the major Western powers - they simply blocked a UN sanction in order to preserve their oil trading partner. Not admirable, perhaps, but hardly on the scale of intervention.
The figure for Ethiopia is 1.5 million (and is better termed a democide than a genocide.) The casualties of the pre-Derg, Halie Selassie era famine were higher. While you are right to note that the USSR did back a regime (against its own allies, mind you, the Somalians, who were actively invading it) there is no indication that the Soviets manufactured the ouster of Halie Selassie to begin with, which is the issue at hand.
That calculus, of putting economic interests ahead of stopping genocide, is not limited to dictatorships, by any means.
The USSR backed the Angola rebels, otherwise I don't recall them being that active in coups, revolts or the like. What did China do in Africa that compares with any of the others?
The original post, however, is still historically a wreck. The West has only been relatively "hands-off" since the late 1980's. It's 500 years before that have been the problem, not the past 20 years.
I hate to break it to you, but OLPC is being run as a business. Which means that if the Nigerian Ministry of Education comes up with the funds for the laptops, they get the laptops.
If patronizing naivety could be harnessed as an energy source, the OLPC would be able to light up the eastern seaboard.
I'm afraid that your choice to limit your own exposure to critical discourse is showing. You misunderstand me completely if you think I am opposing escapism just to art engage, and my references to Tolstoy and Delaney should make that obvious.
That you would cite the "roller coaster" ride as the point of the work sugests, to me, that you view art just as a sub-category of entertainment. I'm afraid that you really just don't get it - it's like trying to explain integral functions to a day-care instructor.
The most reflective and philosophical people I've known have been readers of, primarily, Russian literature, in my experience, and readers of poetry in English and Spanish. Most fans of escapism that I know of are often stimulating in their mental enthusiasms, but often lack insight into the workings and constraints of the human condition.
I think you don't understand why I chose the Harlequin romance novels: its fans are as put off by challenging and nuanced stories of intimate relationships just as much as Star Wars and Harry Potter fans are likely to be put off by Delany and Disch, and for the same reason. They are fans in order to find reassurance. There's something a little sad when reassurance really is the driving force for one's engagement with art.
It is disingenuous to bring in essentially non-narrative forms: fiction is discursive in a way that music and, in some ways, painting is not. There are other aesthetic criteria and barriers in those forms, too - that which separates a simple lullaby from a Berg sonata. It isn't quite right to say I dismiss it: I've seen the Pirate films and been swept away (at least by the first one.) However, it is like junk food: indulging in it as a pleasure occasionally is harmless, but as a constant diet, it's a problem. What I hear from fans who defend their commitment to their favorite works is analogous to the person who insists that eating at McDonald's everyday is harmless and no less healthy than eating anywhere else.
Egalitarianism about taste is almost always selective, and unidirectional: people like to be egalitarian when the critique of taste comes from above, and less so when it is a comparison with something less respected. Are you seriously going to tell me that you think Harlequin romances are "just as good" as Tolstoy? That a Harlequin author is trying to do something different, and so that they shouldn't be compared to what Tolstoy is trying to accomplish? Or, more to the point, that you aren't going to have somewhat different expectations about the depth of thinking of someone who only reads Harlequin romance novels than you would of someone with a background in world literature?
So, really, we all make important judgments of people based on taste, because taste isn't arbitrary - it reveals a great deal about a person's temperment, education, background and aspirations. I think a lot of fan culture is about escapism - a desire for "another world" which both reassures them and gives them possible identities that they can't experience in real life. As such, it is an art of resignation. Reassurance is, to be blunt, something for children. It shows little spiritual courage.
It isn't a matter of genre either. There are writers who create speculative fiction that doesn't reassure, but provokes: Thomas Disch, Stanislaw Lem, and Samuel Delaney come to mind. They ponder possibilities in order to provoke new ways of understanding our own world and lives, not to provide a kind of narcotic relief from a day-to-day life that ultimately goes unexamined.
Non-fans - that is, people who don't have loyalties to series but simply look for quality stories - will want a good film that stands on its own, instead of engaging in self-absorbed world-building.
I'm really getting to hate fan-think. It's cheapening the way we think of narrative. Too much adolescent desire to inhabit an imaginary world, not enough use of art/narrative to think reflectively about our own world and lives.
I normally wouldn't be so abusive, but the way that you framed it actually valourized escapism over the creation of powerful cinema, and accused those of us who weren't playing as-if of having poor attention spans.