Gaming Under the Influence
[Podcast]
E.64

Xbox isn't wrong for charging more
they are wrong for having nothing to charge for

Drinking this week: Mash Up the Jam (Collective Arts), The Darkest One Stout (The George)

Playing this week: Resident Evil VIII Maiden Demo, Disco elysium, Deadly Premonition, Final Fantasy X

Xbox's planned, then abandoned, price hike for online membership has irritated the internet, but not for the right reasons. No one will ever enjoy a price increase. But the real problem on the part of Microsoft is the consistent lack of worthwhile things on offer in exchange for any quantity of our money, having cannibalized their core brands and refused to invest in ambitious or noteworthy new IPs. Join us at GreenDragonCVR for a discussion of what a healthy relationship of video games and business might look like. Also featuring the fantastic Resident Evil VIII Maiden demo (Resident Evil makes an interesting counterexample to MS franchises: still made by the same people making a very different sort of game, while Halo is made by different people making the same!)

ARGUMENT: We have [with the Xbox brand] an instance of "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.