On The Gaming Company
Just started a new temp assignment for a video game company this week. On Day One, I was plagued with guilt and disgust that I was selling out my value system for $15 an hour. I was joining the evil entertainment industry, sitting around in a converted SOMA warehouse under exposed brick and halogen track lighting discussing how to sell products that depict women as sex kitten perfectobots; glamourize violence and destruction; and promote the idea that conflict can be neatly resolved (or simply getting what you want can be achieved) by inflicting excessive physical force, pain or death upon your opponents. My company encourages customers to spend money on material items (video games) to entertain themselves, with no thought to the greater implications of this consumerism. For example, what happens to all the packaging and toys and posters and raw materials that go into making and promoting the video game? One word: landfill. Couldn't the millions and billions of dollars circulating in this industry and throughout our economy be better used to improve the greater social good instead? EEE-VILE, is what I say.
Entertainment has it's place in my life and in our culture, and I don't believe that it's completely devoid of value. Plenty of movies, TV, radio and websites present challenging ideas, promote debate or just inspire us to reflect upon our own humanity. You could hold me down and flog me for days, and I'd eventually admit that even sporting events provide a common ground for people who would otherwise have no way to connect with each other. But video games seem to embody all the worst evils in my book of evil evildoings of evil, with no apparent benefit to anyone but the consumer, who gets hours or days or years of cheap, addictive thrills, much to the horror of his bored and lonely girlfriend.
On Day Two, I was instructed to play one of the video games. I haven't touched a video game since sixth grade, when I used the family Apple IIc to move little bitmappy characters around a black and green screen. After playing a test version of a video game our company is developing, I have to admit that I can see how video games encourage problem solving. I was like, "What do these buttons on the right do? And why are there two joysticks on one controller?" You're no slouch if you can figure out that you press the square to pull out your lightsaber and the circle to activate the Force and that if you take control of other characters you have additional powers that help you move onto the next level.
On Day Three I discovered that I spend six hours a day answering emails, and two hours a day sitting in meetings fighting sleep while a woman on the phone performs voiceovers for ten different drafts of a TV trailer. I work in one of those companies where everyone spends most of their day sending and receiving emails. One of those places where if you leave your desk for five minutes, you'll have 15 new emails waiting when you get back. Where you are a small cog in a machine that uses 500 cogs who cc the other 499 cogs everytime they have a question. Where half the emails are titled Re: RE: Fwd: Re: [No Subject] and contain hundreds of lines beginning with > > > >.
Entertainment has it's place in my life and in our culture, and I don't believe that it's completely devoid of value. Plenty of movies, TV, radio and websites present challenging ideas, promote debate or just inspire us to reflect upon our own humanity. You could hold me down and flog me for days, and I'd eventually admit that even sporting events provide a common ground for people who would otherwise have no way to connect with each other. But video games seem to embody all the worst evils in my book of evil evildoings of evil, with no apparent benefit to anyone but the consumer, who gets hours or days or years of cheap, addictive thrills, much to the horror of his bored and lonely girlfriend.
On Day Two, I was instructed to play one of the video games. I haven't touched a video game since sixth grade, when I used the family Apple IIc to move little bitmappy characters around a black and green screen. After playing a test version of a video game our company is developing, I have to admit that I can see how video games encourage problem solving. I was like, "What do these buttons on the right do? And why are there two joysticks on one controller?" You're no slouch if you can figure out that you press the square to pull out your lightsaber and the circle to activate the Force and that if you take control of other characters you have additional powers that help you move onto the next level.
On Day Three I discovered that I spend six hours a day answering emails, and two hours a day sitting in meetings fighting sleep while a woman on the phone performs voiceovers for ten different drafts of a TV trailer. I work in one of those companies where everyone spends most of their day sending and receiving emails. One of those places where if you leave your desk for five minutes, you'll have 15 new emails waiting when you get back. Where you are a small cog in a machine that uses 500 cogs who cc the other 499 cogs everytime they have a question. Where half the emails are titled Re: RE: Fwd: Re: [No Subject] and contain hundreds of lines beginning with > > > >.
posted by Justina at 11:52 PM
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