Withstanding inaccuracy of my title, I would like to quote the author
half of the long-time, satirical, objectionable humor iconic video
game (etc) review webcomic penny-arcade verbatim. The comic for this
day (23/05/01) [1] depicts the aging authors, rather than their
characters. The comic is titled All's Well. The comic theme is the
writer's signature objectionable joke which had been played down in
later years.
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
I was thinking about Waypoint going down, and Launcher; these weren't
sources of news I actively used, but the Internet I come from allowed for
things I didn't personally utilize to flourish. It did this by braiding
media with a traditional funding source for media, which is advertising.
I'm not saying that advertising is the best or whatever, but it does
enable people to pay their rent, which I ultimately believe is a social
good. What isn't a social good is when the lion's share of every
advertising dollar on both sides of the equation goes not to publishers or
creators but to the middleman.
It's something I think about a lot, because I live precisely at the nexus
of that tension. I think about the fraudulent pivot to video. I do return
to the idea of Nostalgia, which I recently discussed in this sacred space.
Before the scheme became fully operational, I knew a lot of people paying
rent with nothing but an audience. Ryan North even made a parallel
advertising model altogether. That was reality. Now, you don't get to have
a business of any scale if you don't fuck these algorithms. The carving of
the Internet into megacorp fiefdoms I think is just sort of intrinsically
bad, but there are those who don't agree, either because they're stupid or
they work there.
I often complain about this sort of thing on Twitter, an arena which has
become increasingly psychotic and annoying, and whose denizens spend a
nontrivial amount of time simply watching the service rot. But the fandom
content space is utterly overrun with a few endlessly repeatable forms,
whose calculated, mercenary virality beggars belief. I saw more than one
venue last week run stories about the ninth episode of The Mandalorian, in
one case even calling it a Bonus Episode. Where can you find it? Why isn't
it up on Disney Plus? The answer, which these blackguards get around to
after stuffing every crevice of the page with pornography for search
engines, is that there is no ninth episode because the season is over.
So, that's what we get instead of Waypoint or the other shit you like. In
precisely the way that the map is not the territory, this Internet is not
the content. It's a series of monopoly fattened cartels who have simply
agreed to own it together. Their business determines what can and cannot
exist.
(CW)TB out.
#+END_QUOTE
The author seems unable to reconcile how a younger generation that the
author strongly identifies with are unable to duplicate the author's
own success (conclusion of the comic about the objectionable humor:
"it's a crutch. One we need! Badly. Because we're not very good at
this. And some day, somebody's gonna find out."
I've written about this author's suspiciously outernet tics
before. They were an early web success, satirizing the cynicism and
other evils of video game industry while personifying bland
omniconsumerism.
I feel suspiciously like my piece was being served on beastie when I
permanently lost access to it, but my vibe is that I said before what
I'll say now; feeding at the troughs of these hereditarily incumbent
brands should not even vaguely register as a course of action. solene
makes games
gopher://dataswamp.org/1/~solene and I feel like Blake
Shaw from the Mastodon might make some kind of splash in guile scheme.
There is a particular thing to do to further this. We need a high
level framework on top of jns's Eternal Game engine [2] specifically
for rapidly apeing proprietary games, in that way that every
commercial tom, dick and harry was able to identically ape the custom
WC3 map, defense of the ancients. Outside of software patents, having
a mechanically similar program isn't against normal laws- what's
protected from freedom are proprietary brands and marks.
A natural follow-on to that, which I obviously don`t condone would be
to then anonymously satirise popular games, introducing desirable
gameplay but enhanced with Brahean humor.
[1]
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2023/05/01/all-s-well
[2]
https://linkerror.com/Eternal/
[useful]
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_to_video
