The Gamer's Quarter

Ryan - SuperWes' Bane

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/fun.games/01/27/video.game.lawsuit.ap/index.html

They've always been the target or pointless lawsuits, angry parents, and ignorant lawmakers, but seriously, we should be praising Rockstar Games. The content and gameplay they have created has brought great attention to video games with a mature rating. In the past children were able to buy just about anything they wanted. I remember parents buying kids the first GTA when I worked at EB and the kids were like 9 years old. They would buy it just because the kid wanted it, and gave no thought as to what the game was about or anything. But now you have to be careful. Because of games like GTA, the ratings system on video games is no longer a joke. Parents are starting to heed it just like they do at movie theaters, and the video game industry is growing out of the days of Nintendo and Sega when we all had our Sonic's and Mario's to play.

The blatant ignorance of this change in direction for video games is what causes debates and lawsuits such as this one. Kids are not the only people playing video games, and video sgames are not just for kids. Who are we really trying to protect here? Adults have the money and are the ones buying these games en masse. We do not need to protect ourselves, we just need to be mindful of what's out there.

Mister Toups · Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 6:57 pm Post subject:

I'll leave this one to dhex.
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where were you when nana komatsu got a wii?

seryogin · Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 7:27 pm Post subject:

Every time, I see dhex, I think David Hexler.
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Ryan - SuperWes' Bane · Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 9:29 pm Post subject:

Well at the time this idea for a thread seemed like a good idea. I just hope that somebody doesn't find a huge flaw and rape my brain with facts and opinion again . .. . and turn this into a "I hate everything Ryan says" thread.

dhex · Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 9:45 pm Post subject:

eh. they gambled and lost. maybe the decision was made with only some information about what was and was not part of the distribution; perhaps that's just being charitable. but if they're worthy of praise, it is accidental praise they should get.

if anything it demonstrates that "mature" content is a fucking joke. har har, dildoes! wow, rockstar! you're just blowing my mind with your mature content and adult situations! are you going to stay up late at night and eat as much pie as you want? no bedtime for rockstar! rockstar's his own man, baby! rockstar don't let no one tell him how to live! yeah! woo!

reverse the fitted cap upon your head, sirs, and face the music; you are indeed the children of a lesser god.

then again, i could give a flying fuck what people do with their children; burn them, finger them, sell them into slavery (this is far more defensible than you'd think at first blush), throw them from rooftops. it's a choice, not a child; it's your spawn, we just pick up the tab. what remains, america? what remains? i can be forced to pay for childhood diabetes treatments and 12 years of remedial education for your budding criminal masterminds, but i can't pay to have you sterilized?

i can't even suggest sterilization - sure, it's ok for margaret sanger to have been all eugenically-minded and shit, but john q. public dares suggest the gene pool could use some bleach and everyone's all "oh, shut up you fucking nazi!" ha! nazis? puh-lease. the nazis totally derailed the movement - it was wildly popular with progressives and elitists alike (as if the two could be separated).

furthermore, margaret sanger took money from j. p. morgan? why? what would elite millionaires have to gain from whittling certain segments of the population down? oh, i don't know...all i know is i've never taken any money from any plutocratic industrialist, so associating my name with ms. sanger's is the worst form of sewer dredging this side of frisco. it's collectivism at the nadir.

what sort of fucking socialists are you people, you americans? the worst kind; half-assed. at least full on socialism can collapse under the weight of its own theft and vileness - this shit just chugs along until we might as well be fucking sweden. and after the chinese stop buying our debt, who'll be laughing then? i mean, the writing's on the wall, people! the folks who rely most on easily transferred liquid capital - i.e. drug dealers - stopped using greenbacks slowly over the past five years. euros are now the coin of choice for the narco black market. this isn't even about exchange rates - it's about a lack of trust.

but before we get into long term macro issues involving the international drug trade and what this means for our currency (think of drug laundering services using greenbacks - this acts as a temporary ballast against inflationary pressures by slowing the circulation of dollars) we have to consider why we care in the first place.

trust is magick; money is magick; creating trustworthy money is about as crazy as it gets. the history of currency underlines this particular technocratic fallacy - alternative forms of banking, like the mutual credit houses pushed by american individualist anarchists, have always been pushed out with force and fraud by the government. their hold on this particular ritualization is not entirely within their control, so efforts to keep themselves from realizing this particularly dangerous dilemma are always manifested - subconsciously - through armed violence against other currencies. this is ignoring genuine fraud, mind you - offering currencies not actually backed by their proclaimed wieghting system, like gold.

which brings us to the gold standard; strange how this phrase can be used to describe the very best of a particular kind of thing - the yardstick by which all other things within that particular kind are judged - but does not describe our fiat currency. the problem with the gold standard people, aside from their complete lack of interested in deflationary chaos, is that they misunderstand what trust and value are truly all about. people trust and value gold abstractly - it's use as an investment is, at best, purely of a placeholder nature. if the amount of gold in the world doubled tomorrow, it's price would be cut in half, or more - because of a loss of trust! and trust is the only kind of value that matters in the case of investing. and shit, in the case of everything else, too. trust is the only thing separating us from the wolves, my boy.

for example, people trust nintendo. they trust this company. they believe in it. this intangible quality is what makes or breaks an organization, an institution or a movement. people trust the gamer's quarter to be a certain kind of thing; a payola scandal would change the way we're viewed by our constituency; past, present and future - that is to say, the accumulation of trust, the maintence of trust and the potential trust to be grown - are all factors in how much trust (t) an organization invokes in others.

for trust is not a quantifiable tangibility - though for our purposes (t) will suffice - but something that emerges, organically, from a body of people. leave the adbusters line at home for a minute and really think about it - why does anyone care what any of these fucking companies do, as an industry? why, furthermore, do people emotionally attach themselves to these forms? that, truly, is the rosetta stone of brand identity, and religion, and politics and anything else that's unreal yet completely hyperreal.

the intersection of trust with belief. it is one thing to trust an organization to make a game you can play; it is another entirely to defend them. and yet, it's another entirely still to take apart their financials.

but even more importantly - i cannot stress this enough - people feel obliged to DEFEND the financials of a company they don't work for, own stock in or otherwise care about aside from the development of a few intellectual properties (another example of the mythopoetic encroaching on real life). shit, these poor bastards feel emotionally attached to companies and products and the completely unreal.

it is a lot like nationalism, in that it'd be funny if it weren't true, and if it weren't true it wouldn't be funny. you are the product of accident and incident; accident is in the hands of god, the zog and the tsar - incident is up to you and everyone else to figure out in your free time.

the free time we fill with games. which brings us full circle - beyond trust, beyond attachment, beyond space, time, death, rebirth, beyond life everlasting and unwilling, everlasting and unkind, everlasting and ever wrought; beyond all these things is the very reality that games are legitimate because people find them to be. the reverse is also true. either way, rockstar/take two will cease to exist as an entity five years from now, or less, but i'd still take a job with them anyway.
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seryogin · Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 11:30 pm Post subject:

Mike "dhex" O'Connor

The Beast that shouted "I" at the heart of the world.

I'll respond to and agree with and refute a lot of this later, when I am not eight hours behind deadline and still without a trace of an article written.
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Mister Toups · Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 11:37 pm Post subject:

You should post drunk more often.

And if you aren't drunk, well, even if you aren't, you are.
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where were you when nana komatsu got a wii?

Ryan - SuperWes' Bane · Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2006 1:50 am Post subject:

So the failure of America is the failure of Rockstar?

Haha, just kidding ... great post. I'm slightly smarter now for reading it ...

Dracko · . Joined: 10 Oct 2005 Posts: 2613

I will be unable to conceal my throbbing mental erection for the remainder of the day.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

Ketch · . Joined: 17 Sep 2005 Posts: 420

I've seen at least 8 parents buy their kids GTA: SA. And the store-clerks can't do anything, and wouldn't dare to anyway. What? you think someone is going to say "are you buying this for someone under 18! You can't do that". Get real, they don't want to be beaten up, or b. lose their job.

Anyway, what does it matter.

Szczepaniak · . Joined: 19 Feb 2005 Posts: 770

I'd just like to point out the makers of the GTA games (Rockstar North) are Scottish, not American. They also made Lemmings, another game about death.

So.. erm, big up the UK! Or some such nonsense.

dhex · Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2006 8:20 am Post subject:

the game was to see if i could write unconnected paragraphs using on the closing and opening lines as thematic links. the end result is entertaining. the actual response ends with the third paragraph.

though the stuff about drug lords moving over to euros from greenbacks is both interesting and worrisome.
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Lackey · . Joined: 11 Jul 2005 Posts: 1107 Location: Canada

seryogin · Posted: Tue Jan 31, 2006 2:59 am Post subject:

Oh, Mike, I can tell you exactly why trust mixed with faith is so important. In fact, I can tell very succinctly, with a single word:

Death.

Now, since we don’t happen to be in the Sengoku Jidai era and you can’t very well visualize me sitting on a tatami mat with a calligraphy brush, gracefully slashing the Chinese character for “death” on rice paper, waiting for the proper samisen riff to strike so as to reveal it to you with much dramatic aplomb.

So I must explain.

Death. Like all words it’s magical, because it hides behind its letters a horrendous truth. You and I, and everyone reading this will be dead one day. Since this is a statement that we’ve all heard before and will continue to hear till the end of our lives, ignoring it for the most part, let me reiterate it with more force: you will cease to exist, everything you’ve ever thought, dreamed, or done will not matter one iota after your death, because you will no longer have the means to comprehend anything. It’s worse than perpetual darkness, and more sinister for the fact that it’s unavoidable. For all it’s worth you’re life and eventual death will have about as much meaning as a random Russian peasant massacred by a passing Mongol army in the 11th century.

There’s only one thing that can make the idea of death tolerable: trust and faith. If you find something or someone that you can trust completely, ideally something that you can idealize and have true, blinding faith in, well, then, you’re the beautiful dreamer, comrade, living the greatest lie of all.

A Russian war song goes:

“I believe in you
My dear girlfriend,
I’m calm in this fatal battle
Knowing that you’ll meet me with love whatever the outcome.”

Trust and faith is the stuff that love is made, the most glorious, warm, comforting, and worthwhile feeling in the world. When a person doesn’t feel like he’s marching alone through this “island of ignorance on a black sea of infinity,” if I may quote his eminence Howard Philips Lovecraft, then the world doesn’t look like the vile, evil, moribund prison that it actually is. Love will make you blind, but, goddamn, it’s the type of blindness that I’d like to feel again.

The problem comes with loving and worshipping things that don’t deserve to be worshipped, in this case multi-billion dollar corporations. No, my friends, while we all may pray to our crocodile gods, and swallow a large helping of mental snake oil to force ourselves through our days, having a corporation release products for you to purchase, products that you may as well truly enjoy, is not love. It’s a corporation abusing your immortal souls to line its pockets. It’s the true face of evil in this world, and we have brought it on.

For centuries, governments have been trying to steal your souls from you. In 17th century France a decree was passed making duels illegal. The government already owned your lives now it also wanted to own your deaths. Two men protested and fought a duel in front of Richelieu’s residence. Both were arrested and executed.

So we moved on through the centuries. Centuries that saw every single mass movement discredited and vilified, with only one possible alternative left: consumerism of the vilest sort. I recently spent some time looking through pictures of “gaming tattoo” communities on the net and I was astounded to what lengths people have gone to identify themselves with a corporation. People have literally branded themselves with Nintendo tribal markings. And this is the apex of individualism! This is Fukuyama’s End of History?!

I pray that I have enough sex before the inevitable nuclear winter sets in
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Szczepaniak · . Joined: 19 Feb 2005 Posts: 770

I agree with much of what you've just said, but came to a different conclusion. Life is indeed vile, evil, and a moribund prison, but surely that is why we should all look upon our inevitable deaths with some degree of happiness? Dare I say it, tremendous joy?

As Plato said, death is either a dreamless sleep, which to me sounds quite wonderful and far removed from your infinite sea of blackness, OR, it is one hell of an adventure. Excuse the pun. In which case, if it's only twice as exciting as some of my real life adventures (which I have had far too few of), we should be in for quite a ride.

I regard death as the ultimate equaliser, like an old friend who is slowly over time trying to balance the world by making everyone the same.

dhex · Posted: Tue Jan 31, 2006 9:23 am Post subject:

death needs time to kill what it grows in.

also: fukayama is a tard.

Mister Toups · Posted: Tue Jan 31, 2006 1:08 pm Post subject:

seryogin · Posted: Tue Jan 31, 2006 1:21 pm Post subject:

As usual, Szczepaniak chimes in with an unexpected opinion that just blows me away.

And, well, choice is an illusion. Choice=temperament+social conditions. We are fundamentally not free.

As for everything else, I never mentioned that I like Schopenhauer.
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dhex · Posted: Tue Jan 31, 2006 2:03 pm Post subject:

we are so much more free than any of us would like to believe.

THE USER IS YOU!

i feel kinda bad i went on that goofball bender previously. the gold standard is quite hilarious.
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seryogin · Posted: Tue Jan 31, 2006 2:07 pm Post subject:

dessgeega · Posted: Tue Jan 31, 2006 2:24 pm Post subject:

dhex · Posted: Tue Jan 31, 2006 2:57 pm Post subject:

Szczepaniak · . Joined: 19 Feb 2005 Posts: 770

seryogin · Posted: Tue Jan 31, 2006 6:01 pm Post subject:

sawtooth · . Joined: 02 Nov 2005 Posts: 419

dhex · Posted: Tue Jan 31, 2006 10:47 pm Post subject:

it only seems silly to us because we've been using greenbacks our whole lives.
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sawtooth · . Joined: 02 Nov 2005 Posts: 419

not necessarily greenbacks. the whole economy thing just makes my mind spin. Maybe I'm ignorant!

Like, I'm reading about wheat futures for an english seminar (an article in defense of grain speculation, called "Futures in the Grain Market") right now. it's aggravating. The ability of people to futz around with numbers on paper and come up with a lear jet and a winter home in the bahamas is just ridiculous. I'm good at math and everything, it's just that the modern economy is just so apparently senseless I'd have to be senseless myself in order to make sense of it.

dhex · Posted: Wed Feb 01, 2006 8:48 am Post subject:

why are futures senseless?

that's an interesting topic for an english class. are you studying rhetoric or something?
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Swimmy · . Joined: 16 Sep 2005 Posts: 990 Location: Fairfax, VA

dhex · Posted: Wed Feb 01, 2006 11:02 am Post subject:

well, certain things do have an inherent value. like a roof over your head when it's raining outside. many things are subjective in their valuation, but not all.
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Dracko · . Joined: 10 Oct 2005 Posts: 2613

I wouldn't say that just because a roof over one's head happens to be a concern for individuals world-wide makes it inherently valuable. If it, then what value ascribe to it?
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

dhex · Posted: Wed Feb 01, 2006 11:52 am Post subject:

not dying from exposure = inherently valuable.
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sawtooth · . Joined: 02 Nov 2005 Posts: 419

dhex · Posted: Wed Feb 01, 2006 1:08 pm Post subject:

the quantity of money is indeed part of its stability, or lack thereof, actually.

speculation - which can broadly include almost any kind of short term action for profit rather than use/long term holding - adds an awful lot to a market. mostly by losing lots of liquidity.

Dracko · . Joined: 10 Oct 2005 Posts: 2613

Swimmy · . Joined: 16 Sep 2005 Posts: 990 Location: Fairfax, VA

dhex · Posted: Wed Feb 01, 2006 3:40 pm Post subject:

ahh, you're talking about value (price) rather than value (valuation).

gotcha.

i've been meeting a quite a few solipsists lately and i think it's starting to fry my brain.
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Lackey · . Joined: 11 Jul 2005 Posts: 1107 Location: Canada

Do you go to special clubs or something?
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

Swimmy · . Joined: 16 Sep 2005 Posts: 990 Location: Fairfax, VA

dessgeega · Posted: Wed Feb 01, 2006 5:01 pm Post subject:

dhex · Posted: Wed Feb 01, 2006 9:51 pm Post subject:

i don't know if they do or not. it's rather disturbing. really. it's like, peter's my rock and on this rock i shall build my church, and if my church fell on your foot it would hurt quite terribly and cause much consternation.

it's not like they're a gang or something - though a ripped t-shirt reading "me, myself and i" would be a good start.
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dessgeega · Posted: Wed Feb 01, 2006 11:01 pm Post subject:

dark steve · . Joined: 17 Jun 2005 Posts: 1110

If they were organized, how would they handle delegation?

dhex · Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2006 9:15 am Post subject:

i imagine a gang of solipsists being like a low rent therevada sermon on the sanghra. minus the poetics, of course.

the easiest cure for solipsism (being punched in the face) is hard to administer remotely.
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Dracko · . Joined: 10 Oct 2005 Posts: 2613

They'd just see that as a part of their envy, doubt or confrontational brand of thinking manifesting itself in their perceptual reality.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

dessgeega · Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2006 5:31 pm Post subject:

the best way to disprove solipsists is to kill them and then continue to exist.

not that i advocate this.
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sawtooth · . Joined: 02 Nov 2005 Posts: 419

but what if... they aren't real? The solipsist you would have killed would have merely been a manifestation of your thoughts on the subject; by killing him and continuing to exist you only prove their point!?!?!?!

the whole deal is so ridiculously circular.

Dracko · . Joined: 10 Oct 2005 Posts: 2613

Which is why it works oh so well.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

dhex · Posted: Sun Feb 05, 2006 1:21 am Post subject:

i stole the face punching from the buddhists

really!
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