From the super-smart Anne Galloway, two links of interest.
“World’s poor to get own search engine.”
Great. So now the world can shunt the poor into slums online as well as offline. Instead of diddling with the symptoms, folks, why not have a go at the causes? Does the assertion that “people in poor countries are short of money but have time on their hands, whereas people in the West are cash-rich but time-poor” strike anyone else as problematic?
A nice joke, that’s been kinda done before (check out the site for Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet; the book itself offers some interesting insights, and some less-interesting obfuscations), but most engaging to me for what the review says about the author’s/audience’s view of the world. Would most folks characterize the following quotations as indicative of mainstream American ideology? (It’s an honest question, and given my previous post, I acknowledge that my selective quotation is a form of fisking, although I’d protest that my intent isn’t to demolish whatever I may see as reviewer Greg Kasavin’s “argument” in the joke review, but to ask other folks who might read this for their sense of the prevalence of the ideology behind Kasavin’s descriptions. Not trying to be nasty, Greg; I thought the faux-review was kinda fun in spots.)
“The only problem is you’re relegated to playing as a human character, though the game does randomly choose one of several different races for you (which have little bearing on gameplay and mostly just affect appearances and your standing with certain factions).” I assume that Real Life is a global game; do most people today believe race to “have little bearing”? Actually, that’s a weird question; I think the American experience of race and racism is probably rather unique in the world — I don’t think anybody’s obsessed with race in quite the same ways Americans are, and I think there’s something to be said for the scholars in African-American studies who date American history from 1619.
“There are a few known exploits for making money, but generally the game’s financial system is well balanced, complex, and rewarding for those who put forth proportionally more effort.” I mean, I’d ask whether U.S. workers put forth 27 times as much average effort as Angolan workers, but that immediately demands the economic-patriotism response: “Well, that’s why America’s so great, because capitalism is so fair.” Perhaps a better response would be to ask, rhetorically, whether Jack Welch puts forth umpty-billion times as much effort as Darla the Wal-Mart greeter, but I sense that the response would be that Jack Welch did try really hard but maybe he’s kind of an exception, too. At the same time, Greg’s taking a pretty nuanced position, and points out that “it’s certainly true that players of good parentage have an inherent and arguably unfair advantage.”
Regarding appearances in Real Life, Greg writes that “Some are incredibly striking and beautiful, while others appear hideously ugly–it’s great that you can more or less decide for yourself on which side of the spectrum you wish to be.” Maybe it’s just evidence of my cranky disposition that I don’t much go for the “pretty-as-you-feel” argument, or maybe it’s knowing that my mug won’t ever make it as a model, and that a lot of other folks’ won’t, either. And the experience of Lucy Grealy seems to me the saddest answer to that argument.
Have I fisked? I hope not. But I think it’s worth asking: who else might claim Greg’s ideology? Is this mainstream America, or is this the GameSpot audience? Despite the results of Pew’s recent study, I’m not convinced that gamers are a terribly diverse group (I’ve taken issue with some of Pew’s stuff before, and besides which they surveyed college students, who aren’t all that representative of broader society, and finally, maybe “roughly” the same numbers of men and women play video games — I couldn’t find the actual hard numbers, but I didn’t look very hard — but that’s about as culturally informative as saying the same numbers of men and women see movies. Who’s the target audience for Bloodrayne?)
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