It's No Contest Boys Will Be Men, and They'll Still Choose Video Games By Patrick Welsh
>T.C. Williams senior L.J. Harbin has played his share of video games, >especially the ones involving cars, like Gran Turismo. He agrees that the >games take time away both from studies and from the development of >physical abilities. "There are more and more couch potatoes -- guys who >are 30 to 40 years old and organize tournaments. Some work just to pay for >their addiction," L.J. says. "I know two guys who are Halo fanatics and >both chose the game over their girlfriends. They would rather be sitting >on their butts pushing buttons than doing something with their >girlfriends."
May I suggest that the allure of the video games arises from the game play's psychophysical resemblance to what today largely passes as "work" (and unemployment)? Those who prefer "sitting on their butts pushing buttons" to doing something experiential will be better trained to endure sitting on their butts pushing buttons at work day in and day out, year after tiresome year. And, of course, when they're out of work, they can *keep out of trouble* by sitting around on their butts pushing buttons. The hyperreal subsumption of labour under capital in the (re)production process. Roll on, Columbia, roll on.
"The unskilled worker is the one most deeply degraded by the drill of the machines. His work has been sealed off from experience; practice counts for nothing there. (footnote: The shorter the training period of an industrial worker is, the longer that of a military man becomes. It may be part of society's preparation for total war that training is shifting from the practice of production to the practice of destruction.) What the fun fair achieves with its dodgem cars and other similar amusements is nothing but a taste of the drill to which the unskilled labourer is subjected in the factory -- a sample which at times was for him the entire menu; for the art of being a clown, in which the little man could acquire training in places like the fun fair, flourished concomitantly with unemployment." Walter Benjamin, "Some Motifs in Baudelaire", _Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism_, p.133.
"If it develops a one-sided specialty into a perfection, at the expense of the whole of a man's working capacity, it also begins to make a specialty of the absence of all development."
Sandwichman
