http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/20/arts/20game.html
If you don’t follow the next-gen consoles, you might think he has a point.
Don’t be fooled. This guy makes Thomas “I-Married-a-Millionaire” Friedman look like Antonio Gramsci.
His rant basically boils down to, the PS3 doesn’t have an online service like XboxLive, and its web browsing is a little slow. Therefore, the PS3 sucks. (Never mind that Sony is just beginning to roll out its online service, that XboxLive requires a $50 annual subscription whereas the PS3 is free, or that the PS3 has all sorts of terrific multimedia applications, etc.)
His only source? A quotation from Joystiq, a perfectly ordinary gamer fan blog with no discernible commitment to objectivity or research. Pure NY Times!
In fact, the article contains no research, no history, no facts, no perspective, nothing but lots of Sony-bashing and some Wall Street snarling at Sony for putting too much horsepower into the PS3. You see, Sony’s mission isn’t to produce the finest consoles in the world – no, it should be peddling second-rate products, screwing its workers and shelling out dividends to the idle rich. You know, like GM.
Six-year-olds write better critical essays than this.
This is the culmination of an interesting recent trend in the game culture – a xenophobic, white, male American backlash against East Asian game producers, a.k.a. neo-con rage. I’ve seen this on game forums galore – deep anxieties over the collapsing Empire, the collapsing real estate bubble, and the collapsing US middle class are being displaced onto Sony’s console. Interestingly, there’s no positive referent to this rage, no “Buy American” message, just a free-floating nastiness and penchant for violence, combined with contempt for intellectuals or dissidents.
-- DRR