AperioContra said:
I agree, it is kind of dubious. And when it comes to much art nowerdays we are no longer restricted sell to ensure that it gets enjoyed. For example, my form, the written art, can be distributed through blogs or online publishing. Even in music the vastly unrecognized Myspace bands have a different alternative than the record companies.
However, this offers little comfort to me when I turn on my radio and I hear Ke$ha or Shine Down twice as much as I ever want to hear it (more than Zero). Or when I walk through a bookstore and find Anne Rice's rape of literature that she crapped out this year. Even though I know that I can get far better bands than Jackle or far better Fanfics than anything Anne Rice can make on the internet (man this is a post for ripping on Anne Rice, isn't it?), it provides little comfort when I see that the mainstream art, the art that determines the direction that all other art will follow suit, is becoming bland and stale.
And nowhere is this more prevalent than video games. Unlike the other arts I've mentioned, making a high fidelity video game for the Consoles or PCs requires a lot of money that a starving artist simply does not have access to. So what do we get for it? Games that take no risk, losing all of their artistic integrity to bring us this year's First Person Shooter 9/11 revenge simulators.
Sometimes it's about the money you get to live, rather getting money to improve your art, or just insuring more people will enjoy your art, which is what most artists want. We do artists or ourselves no favors by aprehending the large companies (no matter how big of dicks they are). We aren't going to force them to stop being dicks, we just force them to take no risk at sacrifice to the art they present.
Actually we do both artists and the people enjoying their art a favor by sticking it to the companies as much as possible.
In fact, im even going to go as far as to say that I hope that the videogame industry DOES take severe damage from piracy and that it collapses altogether.
*pause for listening to the sound of almost every user on the escapist's jaw drop to the floor*
However!.. This does NOT mean I hope that videogames should go away. And some of you might argue that hoping that the videogame industry should collapse is the same thing as hoping that videogames go away. And to that assesment I would like to add a resounding:
WRRRRRRRRRROOONG!
And I'll tell you why. First we have to start looking at it from the old "supply and demand" perspective. Clearly there's a demand for videogames. I mean people even acquire pirated copies in order to play, so the demand is pretty huge. The supply however is somewhat meagre in comparison, and it's not because "those poor videogame developers" are doing poorly or that piracy is really reducing their profits, but the fact that they enjoy a sweet position of being in control of the supply of quality videogames and the soulless corporate automatons working for these companies aren't keen to relinquish that position willingly.
But back to my main point: there is a demand for videogames. And this demand won't simply go away because the videogame industry collapses. It's like saying that people will lose interest in hearing music if the record labels all went bankrupt.
And we do know for a fact that there are creative people who like to create for the sake of creating, and if the "big business" corporations of the videogame-industry die out, it's these people that will supply the world with videogames.
And now you might say: "But making quality videogames costs HUGE SUMS of MONEY! Private people who don't have huge financial resources like the big companies will NEVER be able to produce anything of the same quality!"
And to that I'll answer: WRONG! (again)
In a world where huge corporate videogame productions have become redundant and an unsustainable businessmodel for a huge corporation to survive on, the interest in private videogame developing will increase. And there'll be a market ready to assist that interest, namely the market that develops tools in forms of both software and hardware for making videogames. You know, motion capture equipment, sound recording equipment, 3D-animation software, scripting software etc. etc.
Someone would realize that since it's no longer profitable for big corporations to have the monopoly over making videogames but that people want to make videogames of their own, then there would be a market for these tools needed to make videogames, which in turn become increasingly easy to use (after all, the current software and hardware is far from "user-friendly" and most of the time you require an education in using it, and since user-friendlyness sells well and have a large base of customers it will be a capitalist interest to develop such equipment that is progressively more and more user-friendly).
Eventually it'll reach a state where making your own videogames is about as difficult and "hard" to get into as blogging. And if you think about it, wouldn't that be a great artistic atmosphere? Where pretty much anyone can have artistic expression through the medium of videogames with minimal know-how of operating the necessary software and hardware required? Where (for example) a school project in artclass involving a staff of gradestudents could actually result in a videogame of rivalling quality of some of the most famous videogame titles today?
And what's better is that you'd probably never have to pay for videogames again, because piracy insures that it isn't a viable businessmodel trying to "lease" software the way they try to do today. So the videogames being produced would be produced by true artists who spend their time willingly and not because they're out to make a quick buck of their art.
And to you eventual naysayers decrying this scenario as some sort of wishful thinking: do remember that there was a time when only major corporations had access to technologies like the Wacom Tablet, and digital image editing with such tools and software like the latest version of photoshop was pretty much IMPOSSIBLE for a single private person to afford or even know how to use without taking some pretty advanced computer classes.
Today pretty much anyone can buy an afordable Wacom Tablet and with it produce digital drawings that only a few years ago was only within the realms of possibility for major corporate entities.
Also remember how we were once dependant on record companies to manufacture and distribute sound recordings on casettes, compact discs and the like. Whereas now, pretty much all storebought computers come with at least a DVD-burner as standard, and unrecorded discs barely cost anything at all.
The market will always somehow catch up with both our technological progression and our behaviour. These corporations of today who protest and try to stop piracy only do so because they are cranky about the fact that people are beginning to wise up that their current businessmodels are becoming outdated and that the companies themselves are beginning to become redundant.
And the fact of the matter is that in a truly capitalistic economy, no corporation that doesn't fill a purpose that people are willing to pay it for deserve to exist or prosper. Remember, it's the corporations that are supposed to be ours (the consumers') servants and not the other way around.
That said, the shareholders of big corporations try to make it the other way around. They do whatever they can to maintain and gain as much power as possible, even going so far as to try to influence politicians and world leaders to dance to their piping tune. Suing a lone individual for filesharing demanding that he or she pays several thousand dollars and effectively ruining their life with debts that they might never be able to pay off is just one of many such powermongering tactics. They want to take away the power from consumers and keep it for themselves. That's all there is to it. There's no "struggle" for being able to keep doing something as "innocent" as creating videogames. It's all about power and nothing else.
So we can either be their mindless slaves who support the corporations, picking on internet pirates and buy into their shit about videogames as an artform will "die" if piracy doesn't cease. Or we can call their bluff and let their powermongering corporate empires crash and burn and then see for ourselves that videogaming just won't "go away" just because corporations affiliated with videogame development does.
