Feb. 5, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
05:02
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Um, you, right there, yeah. | |
| Well, me? | |
| I'm honored. | |
| Alright, so... | |
| Oh, you actually meant one of the San Francisco hipsters who appear to be forming parts of your apparently literal echo chamber. | |
| Sorry, sorry, I'll sit down. | |
| This is a bit of a controversial question. | |
| I don't know if you want to talk about it, right? | |
| Oh I don't think it is a controversial question. | |
| I don't think there was any doubt as to what the extra credits position on this subject was going to be. | |
| Yeah. | |
| It's an open floor, man! | |
| So, I'm asking because I respect your opinion, I want to hear your opinion on this. | |
| My question is, from your perspective, what has been either the positive or the negative effects of the so-called gamers? | |
| Of course, of course. | |
| It's a value-picking game church! | |
| So-called, what does that even mean? | |
| That's just the hashtag being used. | |
| But I tell you what, I can actually answer this for James, and I'm really not trying to usurp Daniel Floyd's position as the mouth of Portneau. | |
| Let's take a brief look at the history of extra credits. | |
| Our main focus today are these, and why you don't see more of these playing these. | |
| So, I found a friend who is one of these. | |
| Uh-huh. | |
| Old Grey Peel of a token I was bitten to show thee. | |
| Oh, I'm the worst game critic ever. | |
| Whether I'm doing interviews, criticism, anything, no pretense of being unbiased. | |
| Yeah, I have an agenda. | |
| Sorry. | |
| I want to keep the donate short because I actually don't think it's worth a great deal of time. | |
| That was written as if I'd gone kind of, and then I just made up a story about it that said what I wanted to say about the event. | |
| I want to keep the donate short because I actually don't think it's worth a great deal of time. | |
| Digital Publisher Thought Catalog, they gave me an advance to do my first book, Breathing Machine, which is a memoir of growing up alongside the early internet and computers and stuff. | |
| Basically, as soon as I took their money though, they started letting their quality bar plummet and publishing transphobic hate speech, which was really a bad situation for me to be in. | |
| So somebody leaks my book onto the internet. | |
| So now instead of giving money to Thought Catalog, there's horrible pirates stealing it. | |
| Oops. | |
| I want to keep the donate short because I actually don't think it's worth a great deal of time. | |
| I have a vision of a mature, independent conversation about video games. | |
| And a sort of servile cowardice we have to address. | |
| And of course, I'm far from the only person doing progressive writing these days, which is awesome. | |
| I'm part of a community as well. | |
| I'm part of a, I feel I'm part of a movement. | |
| I want to keep the donate short because I actually don't think it's worth a great deal of time. | |
| deliberately alienated the traditional audience is there any in this route with authority to treat with me of course all this investment is awesome It makes these things meaningful to us. | |
| It's why these games are great, but it does also have a downside. | |
| It means that some part of us doesn't often want to accept when we're at fault. | |
| It's all made by people who either want something or want to deflect from some of the stuff that they are doing. | |
| I mean, I don't, I think it's worth their time. | |
| I think it's done damage to a community. | |
| I think it's done damage to reputation and light of recent events. | |
| I think it's time to revisit an old topic. | |
| Standing up for our medium. | |
| Now, video games are no stranger to controversy by any means. | |
| Like most new media, games have experienced their share of growing pains. | |
| We've had them all. | |
| Video games cause violent behavior, video games encourage crime, video games cause addiction, video games socially cripple children, video games cause obesity. | |
| This game's a porn simulator. | |
| That game's a murder simulator. | |
| Games cause this or that school shooting. | |
| And now I'm hearing about these game restricted rig people and also terror. | |
| So it's just done a ton of damage to us in terms of image. | |
| It's fractured our community, right? | |
| Now, I'm going to quote James word for word here, because this is good stuff. | |
| This will take real courage from within our industry. | |
| It will take the bravery to face critique and the fortitude to weather outcry. | |
| It will ask that we expose ourselves to short-term financial risk and that we don't back down from early losses, firm in the knowledge that we are doing right. | |
| We will have to be steadfast under the scrutiny of the world and resolute when we are asked to justify ourselves in the court of public opinion. | |
| It will ask that, for the moment, we give up ease. | |
| But if we can do this, we can do good, real good with our medium. | |
| If we do this, we can expand the industry and bring whole new genres within the purview of games. | |
| If we do this, we can turn a greater profit while providing more meaningful experiences and reach audiences hitherto unthinkable. | |
| If we do this, we can perhaps elevate some small portion of our labor to an art. | |
| But if we do this, we will no longer be able to pretend as if what we do doesn't matter. | |
| If we do this, we can never go back to the way it was before. | |
| Damn, James. | |
| Nice. | |
| Honestly, I really don't know what everyone was expecting from extra credits. | |
| They've always been circle-jerking, pseudo-intellectual, nepotistic, hipster hacks. |
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