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This is long winded and a tangent from my daily life, so... yeah you've been warned.
I just watched Adam Sessler's (from the ill fated Tech Tv of my pre-drinking days) response to the flame war regarding his Killzone 2 review. (available: here and pretty damn funny to see a tv host with the freedom to tell people to "shove a cock in your mouth.") Let me brief you as I'm fairly sure only META has any idea what I'm talking about. Killzone 2 is a game that just came out for the ps3. It's apparently good. It's earning good reviews from the sources I trust.
Sessler's review has created a flamefest rekindling some "xbox 360 vs playstation 3" internet flamewar.
What the fuck.
This generation - that I think I'm still a part of - has the desire to go out and defend a consumer product vehemently on a multitude of shared conversation spaces across the internet. Let me restate that. There are lots of kids. Who go online. Who then post messages to forums at a hundred a minute. Defending a consumer product. As if it's their own kin.
This issue speaks to me fundamentally. Our generation (it's becoming harder and harder to lump myself in with my perceived idiocy of my peers - a hauntingly hypocritical statement) has been lam-blasted with commercials, product placement and the most materialistic culture in known history since conception. McDonalds has had toys in it's food for as long as I can remember. Saturday morning cartoons are about collecting shit and competing with (beating's more accurate) your friends over all else - due to a larger collection. It's these fundamental aspects of our culture that has given the message board dwellers the entitlement to name call and defend an entertainment system with such bravado.
Of course, it's not any one company/person's fault that individuals act this way about an entertainment system. It's everybody's. We all buy into consumer culture and feel some of this - that's how it has become a value in the younger generation. (I've heard sociologists refer to it as 'generation entitlement' - not much sums up my view more elegantly.) We're all guilty of replacing social interaction with some easier convenience, slowly weakening our ties to our community and neighbors. We are more "social and connected" than ever before, but in reality, not many of us will ever talk to a stranger in their daily life unless they physically bump into them (I do. Fuck does it startle people. ESPECIALLY students! ha!) We exist solely in cellular 'tribes' of people, larger cliques that occasionally interact and exchange members with one another, but pretty much stay within our well defined walls. We'll sit around at home talking to other friends on the internet instead of existing in our local community.
This brings me back around to the 360 vs ps3. One group of people who "invested" in the xbox and one group of people who purchased a ps3. A very obvious, core value to each of these groups is that they do not OWN the other console. There is an instant, implied loyalty there. After a person makes a 300$ investment, they now are entitled & even expected to defend their investment in the eyes of their peers. (peers in this case are 'gamers as a whole' not the individual groups of xbox/playstation.) They have created the shared group identity solely in opposition to the other group. It's not "I play games on the xbox!" that comes across in any game forum. It's "Playstation 3 is SHIT for x, y, and z reasons now fugoff" or "you're bias against SONY because you're getting PAID by MICRO$OFT!" Instead of a greater community that any new game or system is accepted and judged on it's merits, we have games that are instantly filtered through a "oh it's a PC game instead of a console game" lens. (it took me quite some time to actually judge the xbox fairly as an entertainment system - years in the 'PC trenches' caused a deep biases.) That a glimmer of my perception on why people are so dumb about something as simple as a review of a game.
So, Adam Sessler, it's not your fault. It's just you reported (fairly) on something that's a pulsing, inflamed and raw nerve amongst our generation. That's why the pires were constructed and burnas applied.
My solution? Light a cigar, kick your feet up and antagonize playfully - only through self realization will this culture refocus its alignment towards something besides materialistic shit. Read Fight Club. Eat a good steak. BREATHE.
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*edit: I should have titled this "SUCK ON SOCIOLOGY!"