The FFVII Letters between Kirk Hamilton and I are continuing over at Paste Magazine. Right now, we're talking about camp and immersion, and how there's so much silly stuff going on in FFVII -- weird minigames, timing challenges, and parade marching. In modern games we'd complain this kind of thing "breaks immersion," but we don't seem to be bothered by it in FFVII. We wonder why?
It's been a lot of fun for us to be reflecting on simpler times in an era of being inundated by next-gen this and social that. The social media climate in particular, where there's an app for everything and you're supposed to share it with everyone, is a bit overwhelming. Sometimes it even looks silly.
When I wrote 'How I Became A Social Media Millionaire in One Week' at Thought Catalog last Fall, it was a satire of this business culture that trades investment dollars on ideas and in trends, not products or actual market savvy. This hilarious fake 'pitch deck' I found yesterday (via Ian Bogost, naturally) also makes note of the silly sameness inherent in the social media biz (get your fake social media company name here).
And this SUPREMELY HILARIOUS YouTube vid I saw yesterday (also via Ian) satirizes the app developer market really brilliantly: Check out the Brother IntelliFax 2800 App Store. They want developers to be fapping all the time.
All of these apps and all of this sharing. Facebook! Twitter! Ever feel like it's ruining the meaning of the word 'friend?' I certainly do, especially when I realize I have all these virtual strangers 'friended' on Facebook. I wanna delete some of them. You do too, right? THEN I HAVE WRITTEN YOU AN ARTICLE: It's entitled "The Top 5 People You Should Unfriend From Facebook,"and hopefully it will help you out.
I do have some people who are actual friends. Someone on Twitter dug up this old 'podcast' -- I think it's from 2009? that Gillen and I did while becoming progressively more drunk on my kitchen floor at my old apartment in Bed-Stuy. Recommend listening at your own risk as we ramble, at times borderline-offensively, on abstraction and immersion -- but mostly about hentai games and Japanese fetishes. When I get to the part about how maids aren't hot in real life because of an extremely non-PC and wince-inducing reason (which I later clarify, but still!), you can hear Gillen 'helpfully' refilling my glass again. Good times. Embarrassing, but mostly good.
3 comments:
This is why I have probably less than 100 Facebook friends. I actually know most of them.
Heh, I have 44 friends and dropping on my Facebook. I just have to get my lazy ass around to unfriending an ex or two, and then that's it. In general, unless you're a public figure, I pity people who have to have 300 or more friends. I mean, don't you have anything better to do?
Social networking has removed a lot of the face-to-face social interaction that is what made our species a communication powerhouse, and it's even gone to the extent of allowing us to alienate people even more (like the Twitter addicts who have to post something every ten seconds or they'll just DIE).
But it works for some people.
Now Leigh, what you were discussing about selling ideas instead of products, that's what think tanks already do, right? But it is a good analogy on Western Economics - credit vs. capital (the idea of money vs. the product of it) - when you think about it.
Is there an RSS feed anywhere for the FFVII series? I'm enjoying reading it, but I tend to be bad about checking for updates.
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