The real question is how many lawsuits has O'Reilly - or a trade association in which O'Reilly participates - filed against people who copy O'Reilly books and share their copy with others? I'd suspect it's "none," which short-circuits any substantial accusation of hypocrisy right there.
This happens all the time. The buzzword for it is "coopetition." Companies will complete fiercely for markets, but cooperate to deliver products. SAP works with many would-be competitors; Oracle and Microsoft, who "hate" each other, still talk to each other all the time to make sure their products interoperate.
Nokia has been big and powerful for far longer than 5 years. You think they made their first cell phones in a garage in Helsinki or something?
Nokia is about 140 years old, has been Finland's largest corporation for decades, and started off by making paper. They are probably no more corrupt and decadant now than they were 5 or 10 years ago - they just made a crappy phone, that's all.
The blindspot you're having is that people want free software to make inroads into new markets, but are unwilling to consider the things that make that possible.
If you don't care about those "markets," (with scare quotes, since there is no money changing hands for the software per se), then you are correct. But those who lament Microsoft's domination of the desktop and then scoff at people who bring requirements to the alternatives are missing the point.
It doesn't need to be abandoned, any more than my parents' house needed to be abandoned. But if I stayed there, and my kids stayed there, it would get way too crowded.
I'm seeing the population explosion everywhere. Even if the rate of population growth is declining and stabilizes, the environmental effects - just from the habitat perspective - are obvious to anyone who has flown over Brazil, the US, or other countries. (I've lived all around the world, and my family is from Latin America - I suspect I know a lot more about "poor, starving people" than you do, but that's an aside) - frankly, I'd rather move some people off planet to preserve the increasingly few empty spaces we have.
And I don't expect to move off planet myself, and even if I did, I fully expect the problems of humanity - including poverty - to travel with me. That's not the issue. Even if I have some of the problems my parents do, I still think it's right for me to live separately from them.
Sometimes it's easier to build something than to fix something. There's also this little thing called the population explosion which really hasn't stopped.
I'm very environmentalist. I'm also extremely pro-terraforming, pro-colonization of space, and in favor of pushing out the boundaries of humanity both spatially and structurally (I'm a lefty green post-humanist). It hasn't come to this yet, but I do see a day in which the people willing to leave the planet as well as pursue self-enhancement and eschew mortality are simply going to leave the rest of the species behind, like someone going to the city and leaving the old folks on the farm. It's not a matter of if Mars is going to be colonized and settled, it's a question of who does it, in whose interest, and how. Those who balk are welcome to stay behind.
It's more like orderlies and nurses, really, with "neurosurgeons" being the handful of true researchers and/or EE's. It's no more arrogant than observing the difference in educational requirements (and status) in hospitals - if you're going to call for being egalitarian in IT, why do you implicitly reject egalitarianism in the health industry?
Besides, neurosurgery is pretty close to useless without clean tools and facilities, as well.
I've actually gamed with gay gamers. ("Gaymers?" Why, as a matter of fact, yes.) And some of them have used the gamer "gay", with a certain irony, but otherwise the same way that gamers have.
I'm a little uncomfortable with the use of the word "gay" to mean "dumb" or such, but in fact, some of the people who have used it as such - even cluelessly, without irony - are still tolerant, gay-friendly people who support things like gay marriage and the like. They're just a bit young and clueless about taste.
The best traumatizing-to-fragile-heterosexual-identities videogame characters was GGXX's Bridget - a gender-confused boy who fights with a yo-yo and was raised as, dresses as and acts like a girl. A pretty hot girl. as cel-shaded Japanese fighters go.
Bridget probably sent more than one fanboy to therapy.
People making TV shows et al. consider those factors only glancingly - after all the immediate concerns of the market and the interests of the producers and the most pressing aesthetic and technical concerns. And they make those considerations from a very interested, unobjective perspective: often seeping with defensiveness about the value of their work.
A good critical stance is informed by a lot of relevant historical, anthropological, sociological and other disciplines that even most producers don't have.
And if you think that game developers don't care about this, you're wrong. Oh, the rank and file graphics-and-behaviours grunt coders don't care, but Will Wright, Peter Molyneaux and others of their ilk certainly do: it's why they speak at universities themselves and invite people like Janet Murry to speak at Maxis.
(It is a quirk of the game industry that the trenches are often more defensive about their position than their counterparts in the film industry: someone doing character art feels more entitled to priviledged, sweeping claims about the industry than a gaffer or assistant cameraman does about film.)
And in film, film-makers like Godard and Truffaut credited Cahiers du Cinema and Andres Bazin with making their type of cinema possible.
It's not a matter of having them "think for you:" that's a very simplistic "thumbs up/thumbs down" approach to their object of study. Have you actually read papers or books by the people mentioned in the article above, or are you working from an internal caricature?
1. Most of the current crop of academics working on videogames are gamers. This wasn't true, maybe, 6 years ago, but it's pretty true now.
2. "Flow." It's known. It's talked about. It's theorized about. Academics are aware of it.
3. There's always one difference between game-flow and real-life-activity flow: in the former, the consequences are negotiable. In the latter, not so much. Which is why people can game recklessly or casually: there's freedom to engage in the groove as much or as little as one wants. Even in skiing, this isn't so, much less for flying a jet. And there are existing domains in which a sense of flow is also part of the tradition: dance being the first that comes to mind.
Corporations aren't evil. They're simple. They will do anything they legally can get away with to increase their profits and the value of their shares. Most will not break the law. But if they don't pursue the most straightforward legal avenue to near-term profit, they will incur the wrath of shareholders and lose out to competitors.
Shipping vapor with promises is the best way to make profits in the long term. People have short memories. At least enough of them do. The ones who don't ship until they have all the features they promised will suffer in the marketplace against those who ship with vapor, and the fact that there's a handful of discriminating consumers out there won't change that.
The answer, then, is sensible regulation, so that even those corporations who would act ethically do not work under a competitive disadvantage against the others. One of these sensible regulations would be insisting that any manufacturer that ships a product with extensible functionality, when that functionality is not yet available, be committed to providing that functionality for free *if the product was marketed with that extensible functionality as a differentiator*. No more bait and switch.
It's why we have regulation in, for example, the food industry - we don't want a situation where producers are "playing chicken" with standards in order to reduce costs. Consumers could very well drive down the quality of food that way by being too willing to take risks in order to save money: I'd rather the law of supply and demand *not* work so well in that case.
I don't trust a feature not included with a shipping version to ever arrive. It's it not there when they ship it, I don't believe them when they say it'll be available in a "downloadable patch"; usually, it appears first in the next major version of software, for which you have to pay - which means that they have every incentive to not make it available for free, because that feature then becomes an upgrade-motivating differentiator.
Likewise with firmware in consumer goods. I don't trust them - if it's not there when I buy, I suspect they'll ship it in a "deluxe" version before they let me upgrade my DVD player/blender/mp3 player to get the same feature.
Academics from narrative-heavy disciplines need to resist the temptation to gravitate towards games which resemble what they already know, I think, in order to avoid HNS (Hammer/Nail Syndrome). For a while, this was misread as a "battle" between narratology and ludology, but in fact ludology has been developed to be able to address the game-specific elements which other types of interpretation aren't able to do, and then complement those other types of analysis (narratological, film, etc.)
The entire point of describing a discipline called "ludology" is to define a whole set of features of games which aren't like film or literature: those involving game play and interaction and feedback and game-learning (you certainly don't watch a movie over and over to improve your ability to watch it). So, to really get closer to the "gameness" of games, it's probably more helpful to look at games with minimal plots and a lot of game play. Super Monkey Ball was a popular game for study for this reason.
There's a generational difference, I think, too: older academics that "stumbled upon" games in mid-career chose those that looked most familiar to them. That's why there was a lot of work about Myst at one time - the people studying them weren't really gamers at all. Most of the current and upcoming crop of game-academics are real-life dye-in-the-wool gamers.
The tension between the two approaches - academic distance from the object of study vs. academic involvement with it - is very healthy, I think. "A blessing on both your houses."
But I think (Ga Tech MA program grad) Chaim Gingold's essay on academia and gaming for an overview of the benefits that would accrue to the gaming industry for a vigorous, independent and serious academic interest in gaming. The framing of a media - whether it's perceived as "mere" entertainment, as a speech form, as an art form, as advertisement, or as a sport/activity - is going to affect how the markets relate to it, how it gets regulated, how it gets covered (the more we talk about Heidegger, Althusser and Civ III, the harder it is to talk about "the menace to our children" unproblematically.)
Nonetheless, I think that at least cursory familiarity with not just programming, but even more importantly the game development process, would be good for any videogame researcher to have. When analyzing film, the Frankfurt school practitioners made themselves familiar with the structure of the culture industry; the production of videogames is a special case, ultimately, of software engineering and production; any institutionally-aware analysis of games should be informed by how those processes work in the real world.
Rather than go on much about this old canard myself, I'll refer to the research of the Economic Policy Institute about the minimum wage. Among other fallacies it debunks is that of the demographics involved: most minimum wage employees are adults, and about half are full-time.
Don't overuse the simple model of supply and demand, especially when issues like pricing, competition, floors, and perception are involved. The most useful models are far, far more complex. - because all other things are not equal. Additionally, my original point stands: if there is necessary work that is peformed at the minimum wage, increasing the minimum wage ensures that a greater percentage of net buying power throughout the economy is in the hands of the working poor.
In fact, the effects you describe have not been "demonstrated again and again." The last increase of the minimum wage actually accompanied a drop in unemployment. And the net effect of an increased minimum wage is what's important: the strengthening of the economy at its roots.
A not-steep distribution curve incentivizes better. If I'm in a group of 10 people, one of whom makes a million dollars a year and the rest of whom (including myself) makes about 20,000 a year, I'm probably going to be motivated to just keep going and instead find my sense of accomplishment in other areas of my life.
If, on the other hand, there's a more moderate spread - say, the slacker makes about half of what the super-achiever does, and the person next to me makes 10% more - then that curve is more "climbable." This latter curve is the sort of distribution we had in the 1950's. The former - one king and a dozen serfs - is the kind we are getting now.
I am not recommending a massive welfare system, and I think the evidence supports the claim that a culture of dependency is a real problem, especially over generations. But we're talking about labor minimums. Also, those multi-generational benefits you refer to aren't going to incentivize anyone currently working.
Making sure that working a full-time job can provide a better, more stable way of life than a life on welfare is vitally important to incentivizing that working life. As it is, it's too easy to lose meager medical benefits when one is in the working poor.
The lower rungs of working society are the ones that suffer the most for the lack of a reasonable safety net; it is they who are most likely to lose medical coverage, who are closest to being one check away from homelessness. Given that at least 3% unemployment at any given time is required to keep the labor market viable, it's more productive to maintain a certain amount of stability in those classes than to encourage the race-to-the-bottom.
The caveat you apply to Ehrenreich's book also applies to works on economics: it would be disingenuous to say that, for example, a Milton Friedman book didn't start with the conclusion that unrestricted markets are optimal. Ehrenreich's axe is less dogmatic than Friedman's - she was motivated as much by curiosity as anything.
And yes, it is possible that it be better that those 5 guys are better off without *that* job: that the pressure to stay in that (and the other 1 or 2) job masks the opportunity cost of finding better work. After all, those 5 guys could be replaced by 1 with a backhoe regardless.
70-hours of work to support a sustenance lifestyle is not a good situation. Your point about the ambiguity of a "decent wage" is well taken, and in good labor policy it should be defined well and in terms appropriate to local cost of living, etc.
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So, you're in Bangalore?
The real question is how many lawsuits has O'Reilly - or a trade association in which O'Reilly participates - filed against people who copy O'Reilly books and share their copy with others? I'd suspect it's "none," which short-circuits any substantial accusation of hypocrisy right there.
This happens all the time. The buzzword for it is "coopetition." Companies will complete fiercely for markets, but cooperate to deliver products. SAP works with many would-be competitors; Oracle and Microsoft, who "hate" each other, still talk to each other all the time to make sure their products interoperate.
Nokia has been big and powerful for far longer than 5 years. You think they made their first cell phones in a garage in Helsinki or something?
Nokia is about 140 years old, has been Finland's largest corporation for decades, and started off by making paper. They are probably no more corrupt and decadant now than they were 5 or 10 years ago - they just made a crappy phone, that's all.
The blindspot you're having is that people want free software to make inroads into new markets, but are unwilling to consider the things that make that possible.
If you don't care about those "markets," (with scare quotes, since there is no money changing hands for the software per se), then you are correct. But those who lament Microsoft's domination of the desktop and then scoff at people who bring requirements to the alternatives are missing the point.
Well, they say that a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged. Maybe a liberal is a libertarian whose job has been off-shored.
It doesn't need to be abandoned, any more than my parents' house needed to be abandoned. But if I stayed there, and my kids stayed there, it would get way too crowded.
I'm seeing the population explosion everywhere. Even if the rate of population growth is declining and stabilizes, the environmental effects - just from the habitat perspective - are obvious to anyone who has flown over Brazil, the US, or other countries. (I've lived all around the world, and my family is from Latin America - I suspect I know a lot more about "poor, starving people" than you do, but that's an aside) - frankly, I'd rather move some people off planet to preserve the increasingly few empty spaces we have.
And I don't expect to move off planet myself, and even if I did, I fully expect the problems of humanity - including poverty - to travel with me. That's not the issue. Even if I have some of the problems my parents do, I still think it's right for me to live separately from them.
Sometimes it's easier to build something than to fix something. There's also this little thing called the population explosion which really hasn't stopped.
I'm very environmentalist. I'm also extremely pro-terraforming, pro-colonization of space, and in favor of pushing out the boundaries of humanity both spatially and structurally (I'm a lefty green post-humanist). It hasn't come to this yet, but I do see a day in which the people willing to leave the planet as well as pursue self-enhancement and eschew mortality are simply going to leave the rest of the species behind, like someone going to the city and leaving the old folks on the farm. It's not a matter of if Mars is going to be colonized and settled, it's a question of who does it, in whose interest, and how. Those who balk are welcome to stay behind.
It's more like orderlies and nurses, really, with "neurosurgeons" being the handful of true researchers and/or EE's. It's no more arrogant than observing the difference in educational requirements (and status) in hospitals - if you're going to call for being egalitarian in IT, why do you implicitly reject egalitarianism in the health industry?
Besides, neurosurgery is pretty close to useless without clean tools and facilities, as well.
Except that housing has been removed from the CPI. You put housing back in the CPI, the picture changes dramatically.
Don't think so. The designer is Daisuke Ishiwatari and it was produced by Arc System Works, based in Yokohama.
I've actually gamed with gay gamers. ("Gaymers?" Why, as a matter of fact, yes.) And some of them have used the gamer "gay", with a certain irony, but otherwise the same way that gamers have.
I'm a little uncomfortable with the use of the word "gay" to mean "dumb" or such, but in fact, some of the people who have used it as such - even cluelessly, without irony - are still tolerant, gay-friendly people who support things like gay marriage and the like. They're just a bit young and clueless about taste.
The best traumatizing-to-fragile-heterosexual-identities videogame characters was GGXX's Bridget - a gender-confused boy who fights with a yo-yo and was raised as, dresses as and acts like a girl. A pretty hot girl. as cel-shaded Japanese fighters go.
Bridget probably sent more than one fanboy to therapy.
People making TV shows et al. consider those factors only glancingly - after all the immediate concerns of the market and the interests of the producers and the most pressing aesthetic and technical concerns. And they make those considerations from a very interested, unobjective perspective: often seeping with defensiveness about the value of their work.
A good critical stance is informed by a lot of relevant historical, anthropological, sociological and other disciplines that even most producers don't have.
And if you think that game developers don't care about this, you're wrong. Oh, the rank and file graphics-and-behaviours grunt coders don't care, but Will Wright, Peter Molyneaux and others of their ilk certainly do: it's why they speak at universities themselves and invite people like Janet Murry to speak at Maxis.
(It is a quirk of the game industry that the trenches are often more defensive about their position than their counterparts in the film industry: someone doing character art feels more entitled to priviledged, sweeping claims about the industry than a gaffer or assistant cameraman does about film.)
And in film, film-makers like Godard and Truffaut credited Cahiers du Cinema and Andres Bazin with making their type of cinema possible.
It's not a matter of having them "think for you:" that's a very simplistic "thumbs up/thumbs down" approach to their object of study. Have you actually read papers or books by the people mentioned in the article above, or are you working from an internal caricature?
You can identify some districts as "heavily Democrat," "heavily Republican," etc and tamper accordingly.
I need to respond to a couple elements here:
1. Most of the current crop of academics working on videogames are gamers. This wasn't true, maybe, 6 years ago, but it's pretty true now.
2. "Flow." It's known. It's talked about. It's theorized about. Academics are aware of it.
3. There's always one difference between game-flow and real-life-activity flow: in the former, the consequences are negotiable. In the latter, not so much. Which is why people can game recklessly or casually: there's freedom to engage in the groove as much or as little as one wants. Even in skiing, this isn't so, much less for flying a jet. And there are existing domains in which a sense of flow is also part of the tradition: dance being the first that comes to mind.
Corporations aren't evil. They're simple. They will do anything they legally can get away with to increase their profits and the value of their shares. Most will not break the law. But if they don't pursue the most straightforward legal avenue to near-term profit, they will incur the wrath of shareholders and lose out to competitors.
Shipping vapor with promises is the best way to make profits in the long term. People have short memories. At least enough of them do. The ones who don't ship until they have all the features they promised will suffer in the marketplace against those who ship with vapor, and the fact that there's a handful of discriminating consumers out there won't change that.
The answer, then, is sensible regulation, so that even those corporations who would act ethically do not work under a competitive disadvantage against the others. One of these sensible regulations would be insisting that any manufacturer that ships a product with extensible functionality, when that functionality is not yet available, be committed to providing that functionality for free *if the product was marketed with that extensible functionality as a differentiator*. No more bait and switch.
It's why we have regulation in, for example, the food industry - we don't want a situation where producers are "playing chicken" with standards in order to reduce costs. Consumers could very well drive down the quality of food that way by being too willing to take risks in order to save money: I'd rather the law of supply and demand *not* work so well in that case.
I don't trust a feature not included with a shipping version to ever arrive. It's it not there when they ship it, I don't believe them when they say it'll be available in a "downloadable patch"; usually, it appears first in the next major version of software, for which you have to pay - which means that they have every incentive to not make it available for free, because that feature then becomes an upgrade-motivating differentiator.
Likewise with firmware in consumer goods. I don't trust them - if it's not there when I buy, I suspect they'll ship it in a "deluxe" version before they let me upgrade my DVD player/blender/mp3 player to get the same feature.
Academics from narrative-heavy disciplines need to resist the temptation to gravitate towards games which resemble what they already know, I think, in order to avoid HNS (Hammer/Nail Syndrome). For a while, this was misread as a "battle" between narratology and ludology, but in fact ludology has been developed to be able to address the game-specific elements which other types of interpretation aren't able to do, and then complement those other types of analysis (narratological, film, etc.)
The entire point of describing a discipline called "ludology" is to define a whole set of features of games which aren't like film or literature: those involving game play and interaction and feedback and game-learning (you certainly don't watch a movie over and over to improve your ability to watch it). So, to really get closer to the "gameness" of games, it's probably more helpful to look at games with minimal plots and a lot of game play. Super Monkey Ball was a popular game for study for this reason.
There's a generational difference, I think, too: older academics that "stumbled upon" games in mid-career chose those that looked most familiar to them. That's why there was a lot of work about Myst at one time - the people studying them weren't really gamers at all. Most of the current and upcoming crop of game-academics are real-life dye-in-the-wool gamers.
The tension between the two approaches - academic distance from the object of study vs. academic involvement with it - is very healthy, I think. "A blessing on both your houses."
But I think (Ga Tech MA program grad) Chaim Gingold's essay on academia and gaming for an overview of the benefits that would accrue to the gaming industry for a vigorous, independent and serious academic interest in gaming. The framing of a media - whether it's perceived as "mere" entertainment, as a speech form, as an art form, as advertisement, or as a sport/activity - is going to affect how the markets relate to it, how it gets regulated, how it gets covered (the more we talk about Heidegger, Althusser and Civ III, the harder it is to talk about "the menace to our children" unproblematically.)
Nonetheless, I think that at least cursory familiarity with not just programming, but even more importantly the game development process, would be good for any videogame researcher to have. When analyzing film, the Frankfurt school practitioners made themselves familiar with the structure of the culture industry; the production of videogames is a special case, ultimately, of software engineering and production; any institutionally-aware analysis of games should be informed by how those processes work in the real world.
No, the crackdown is limited to the real threats: Star Trek fan sites, algorithms, and trademark-menacing sites.
Rather than go on much about this old canard myself, I'll refer to the research of the Economic Policy Institute about the minimum wage. Among other fallacies it debunks is that of the demographics involved: most minimum wage employees are adults, and about half are full-time.
Don't overuse the simple model of supply and demand, especially when issues like pricing, competition, floors, and perception are involved. The most useful models are far, far more complex. - because all other things are not equal. Additionally, my original point stands: if there is necessary work that is peformed at the minimum wage, increasing the minimum wage ensures that a greater percentage of net buying power throughout the economy is in the hands of the working poor.
In fact, the effects you describe have not been "demonstrated again and again." The last increase of the minimum wage actually accompanied a drop in unemployment. And the net effect of an increased minimum wage is what's important: the strengthening of the economy at its roots.
I said flatter, but not flat.
A not-steep distribution curve incentivizes better. If I'm in a group of 10 people, one of whom makes a million dollars a year and the rest of whom (including myself) makes about 20,000 a year, I'm probably going to be motivated to just keep going and instead find my sense of accomplishment in other areas of my life.
If, on the other hand, there's a more moderate spread - say, the slacker makes about half of what the super-achiever does, and the person next to me makes 10% more - then that curve is more "climbable." This latter curve is the sort of distribution we had in the 1950's. The former - one king and a dozen serfs - is the kind we are getting now.
I am not recommending a massive welfare system, and I think the evidence supports the claim that a culture of dependency is a real problem, especially over generations. But we're talking about labor minimums. Also, those multi-generational benefits you refer to aren't going to incentivize anyone currently working.
Making sure that working a full-time job can provide a better, more stable way of life than a life on welfare is vitally important to incentivizing that working life. As it is, it's too easy to lose meager medical benefits when one is in the working poor.
The lower rungs of working society are the ones that suffer the most for the lack of a reasonable safety net; it is they who are most likely to lose medical coverage, who are closest to being one check away from homelessness. Given that at least 3% unemployment at any given time is required to keep the labor market viable, it's more productive to maintain a certain amount of stability in those classes than to encourage the race-to-the-bottom.
The caveat you apply to Ehrenreich's book also applies to works on economics: it would be disingenuous to say that, for example, a Milton Friedman book didn't start with the conclusion that unrestricted markets are optimal. Ehrenreich's axe is less dogmatic than Friedman's - she was motivated as much by curiosity as anything.
And yes, it is possible that it be better that those 5 guys are better off without *that* job: that the pressure to stay in that (and the other 1 or 2) job masks the opportunity cost of finding better work. After all, those 5 guys could be replaced by 1 with a backhoe regardless.
70-hours of work to support a sustenance lifestyle is not a good situation. Your point about the ambiguity of a "decent wage" is well taken, and in good labor policy it should be defined well and in terms appropriate to local cost of living, etc.