Notes on the MS Brand from GUI64

We have [with the Xbox brand ] an instance of total "market immanentization", Cyberpunk style. Where, not only does the business entity reduce the game-thing to a "trade format commodity"... the knower-player HIMSELF conceives of it in those terms, reducing the game to a "product", indexed in terms of "value", related to himself as "consumer". Whereas (like we have prescribed in the past) the game should NOT be market-immanent; it should be an external element the "market" instrumentally (or at least symbiotically, for mutual benefit) serves.

A corporation is an inanimate machine for the generation of profit. Since run by men, its tendency to immanentize difference can be resisted, to maintain such a (merely) "material" overlap of the objects of "market" and "art". Both pursue their formal objects in the same local area to mutual benefit. But if market-immanence is taken as the formal object of art, the thing enshrined in the artist’s concept and work, the work will contain nothing but market-relative or reducible [skin-deep] elements. Everything else is discarded ("single player games aren't popular"). The result will be an alien's parodical attempt to represent a game.