> [Sometimes you just don't know what to say.]
>
> Workers Spurn Cash for Virtual Coin to Fund Online-Game Habits
> 2010-06-18 04:01:00.11 GMT
Nothing terribly new. People used to go to the fairgrounds and win giant stuffed rabbits, now the rabbits are digital -- but they're as real as anything else human beings have constructed. Thing is, you still have to pay real money to get into the carnival.
What the article doesn't mention -- this is Bloomberg, after all, the place where, as a friend of mine once put it, America's silicon oligarchs do their thinking -- is that videogame culture is astonishingly resistant to commodification. It's something structural, deep in the military-industrial/silicon-imperial DNA of gaming. Game communities are not product placement ads, they are some of the most fascinating, multicultural, transnational, and democratic communities around. Their power over the aesthetic forces and relations of production keeps increasing, and this scares the hell out of Big Media.
-- DRR