>On Jun 19, 2010, at 3:06 AM, dredmond at efn.org wrote:
>
>>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.
>
>Wait a minute - we've got people working for play money and you think
>there's something *good* about it?
>
>Doug
Isn't it the same thing as me once babysitting in exchange for someone's foodstamps? the money was extra money to me. she, always 'creative' about her finances, had foodstamps to spare since she'd gotten 'paid' in foodstamps for some babysitting she'd done for someone.
i mean, it's just the same as getting paid cash money. these folks were going to spend it on gaming anyway.
i'm not saying it's right, good, true, or beautiful. but i don't see a whole lot of difference between that and, say, as a freelancer, creating someone's website in exchange for an advertisement placed on that web site. Dude could have paid me cash money and i could have turned around and paid him cash money for the ad placement. *shrug* Freelancers do this all the time. They provide services in exchange for the publicity they get from an appearance for instance.
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)