We've had comparisons to the Greek article and plenty from a gamer's point of view, but with a former national newspaper editor arrested in the UK yesterday and the Leveson Inquiry on, that seems too shallow. At BoLS eeore said of the BBC look: "It is a hatchet job, it's just more subtle"; I disagree, but I'd say that level of thinking is far more useful.
There's a lot to ponder, but I'll keep it simple. The first thing that stands out for me is the interviewee's claim that: "people fall back into [40K] as as an adult when they realise 'I don't care any more'." But that isn't a reason for return as much as an openness about having done so. So what could those reasons be then? In a recent commment I wrote:
Remember, 40K could now be so deeply a part of the way each of us experiences the world, and the emotional bond so strong after years of reading, modelling, painting and gaming with friends, that few of us can make a clean break.
Hold that thought. The next most outstanding element for me is the response from GW CEO Mark Wells to the claim of price exploitation: "It's just not in our nature," he says.
This from the CEO of a public limited company whose executives, so the journalist tells us, "say they don't do media interviewees". Why not? The two statements feel more like the jumping off point for some fuller investigative journalism than the closure of a thing.
What's the connection? Watching the lawyers at the Leveson Inquiry do what I'd call a rather poor job of questioning Paul Dacre, another UK newspaper editor, I couldn't help but wonder: how do we scrutinise a media that shapes language and mental landscape if we have to use that language itself, appealing to an audience shaped the same way?
How do we keep powerful institutions in check when they form the media which informs us, when we work within them nine to five and spend our free time with their products?
How do we keep powerful institutions in check when they form the media which informs us, when we work within them nine to five and spend our free time with their products?
How far can we freely grow into new spaces if pruned any given way at an early age?
Are we trapped today in an imaginative and perceptual loop? Are we doomed to return to the old because we can't make a new, and because we can't articulate why we might?
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