The "truncated field" of which you speak seems to be more a limitation of the medium. Obviously one cannot introduce tastes and smells into a medium which lacks either sensory modality, but one modify the graphics, sounds, models, maps, and programmed behaviour of video games so as to be completely unrecognisable from it's original form, and not just visually but in terms of gamplay and genre also. I think that offers so many more degrees of freedom compared to your McD's example. Learning the required skillsets to do some serious modding takes more time than learning to cook, but the requisite software is easily pirated even if one doesn't have a pot to piss in.
Mixed feelings. In my opinion, I think it's more of a case of "in spite of" than "due to", or, more accurately, than it's an unintended consequence. As for allowing players to interact imaginatively (modding, etc.), I still think it seems like a truncated field within which to imagine, that represents a certain necessity. To look for a comparison elsewhere, I'd go to fast food, where new menu items are routinely the creations of bored employees fucking around when making their lunches. Is there creativity? Absolutely! Does working at McDicks foster creativity? Seems like a stretch. That said, I think your example speaks while to your own capacities, and the capacities of people generally (I hope) to be resilient in the face of capital's wholesale (retail?) attempts to reduce them to slavishly uninventive garbage disposal units.
What do you make of my points regarding what players can bring to games in terms of imagination?
To be fair, Tropico does rule, as does Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries. Less than sold on the Microsoft interpretations.
http://www.revleft.com/vb/notes-towa...744/index.html
Erm, where is the thread?
Hey - sorry for not replying to your last message. Anyway, I kinda kicked off a thread on the subject. I'm sure it will probably just piss you off, and make you dismiss me as a pomo obscurantist, but . . . well, there you go. <3
"Religion ... is not delivered by the divine as a "bad" or "repressive apparatus." Correct, it's not delivered by the divine at all, because that doesn't exist. It is a human phenomenon. "Capital-S "Science", of course, being a totalizing discourse that is not particularly different, is subject to the same constraints, which picking up any popular science magazine and subjecting it to even a few minutes' analysis should reveal" Pop-sci mags report on science (with varying degrees of accuracy), they don't participate in it as a way of gaining data about the universe. Which constraints would you be talking about? As for your last sentence (damn character limit!) I'm not sure what you mean here. Are you referring to science as an approach to gathering data and constructing theories, or as a body of knowledge?
While perhaps you have a more detailed analysis tucked away somewhere, I feel like your take on religion as it comes up in many threads is pretty crass and ironically unmaterialist. Religion reflects the balance of class forces in a given society; it is not delivered by the divine as a "bad" or "repressive apparatus. Capital-S "Science", of course, being a totalizing discourse that is not particularly different, is subject to the same constraints, which picking up any popular science magazine and subjecting it to even a few minutes' analysis should reveal. Of course, Science, you will no doubt agree, is not essentially an obfuscating construction of bourgeois hegemony, but is "essentially" devoid of class or social character if it is abstracted from its material practice.
