its a fine cowboy simulator. i’m fine with story-focused games. played kentucky route zero recently and it has literally NO gameplay at all, still a worthwhile game. i think that’s what it boils down to, if you think of games as art meant to evoke atmospheric and emotional experiences.
about crunching in the videogame industry, yeah. we should probably be undertaking such huge projects in an open-source collaborative kind of way but i don’t think society is ready for that just yet.
the oligarchy as it currently stands precedes the capitalist state as we know it today. some of them even come from the very same families, like they are fucking kings (they are)
and yes, despite capitalism having changed over time, its basic power structures have remained the same for the last century or more.
and that’s nothing, if you consider feudalism lasted even longer while also changing but keeping more or less the same types of power structures. don’t quote me on feudalism though.
yes that’s precisely what i implied, because they control it in the first place. companies like amazon are more powerful than nation states, and they exercise that power.
if they make a big mistake or want labour law adjusted, they can get the state to coddle them, because they privately control, say, the entire food supply (ie the means of production) without which the state is meaningless.
this has been the capitalist state’s modus operandi for more than 100-200 years. and the oligarch’s power precede it, they shaped it that way back then.
aaron schwartz was literally just a dude, not remotely comparable to oligarchs.