We call ourselves players– as opposed to “gamers,” a herd of junkies doing rather well squandering their time.

We see no connection between truly exhilarating flow and the cunning and calculation of the profiteers.

We consider the psychological Euro-American MMO-reward drama weighed down with needy apparitions and childhood greed– an absurdity.

To the synthetic frontier with its showy geography and to the mythification of Tolkien lore the players say thanks for the rapid territory transitions and the quests. Good … but disorderly, not based on precise study of locality and immersion. A cut above the psychological raid drama, but still lacking in foundation. A cliché. A copy of a replicant.

“Seeing these technoloiges and practices over and over in our popular culture, and particularly in cinema, we witness a scorn for the boundaries between the public and the private, between the interior and the exterior. And in doing so popular culture has created the sense that surveillance is normal–the aesthetic accompaniment to the end of privacy. Films that feature surveillance as a vehicle for spectacle, suspense, and violence demonstrate how we are no longer affected or unsettled by the video gaze or bodily intrusion. They have become ordinary images.”
-John Turner

Since the birth of cinema, film and cultural critics have noted the emergence of the spectacle as a challenge to traditional rituals of art – especially concerning the medium’s capacity to “distract” the masses. In 1936 Walter Benjamin famously warned of the loss of artwork’s so called “aura” in the age of technological reproducibility