In waiting too long to write this post, some of the details may have faded a little bit for me, but I’ll do my best to run through some of the things I found most interesting about journalist Walter Pincus’s talk in RAJ last week.

What surprised me the most about the basic premise of his argument was this, and I hope I didn’t misinterpret it.  In giving a talk about how an industry under pressure like newspapers will survive, I thought it would sort of be like “here’s what newspapers need to do/change in order to survive”.  Instead, and I have no grounds to agree or disagree with this, it seemed like he was saying “if newspapers go on as they have been, with a few minor changes (most of them harkening back to the ‘good ol days’), the nature of the industry and its economics will allow them to survive without that much effort”.  This seemed to be founded on his belief, a bit out of touch in my opinion, that this whole ‘internet journalism’ thing is just a ‘fad’, and people only really buy into it because it’s ‘jazzy’ (his word, not mine).  And a lot of his argument hinged on the fact that people haven’t really found a good model for making money in online advertising yet.  But we are exceptionally good at figuring out how to make money out of just about anything, so I would guess that will come soon, don’t you think?

Mark did a good job summing up his ideas about newspapers ‘slimming down’, and I agree with him in that respect, so I won’t say too much about it.  But one of my favorite things about Pincus’ argument was a more general point he made, sort of about ‘slimming down’ in another respect.  He mentioned both the newspaper business and related it to the auto industry, but I think his point about businesses needing to return to a more sustainable business model, with lower expectations (maybe?) applies to many of our industries, especially in publishing — newspapers, record labels, film and tv studios, etc.  As in, they need to face the fact that they might not find a way to make the bucketloads of money they did in their heyday, and this seems to me to tie quite neatly back into some of the stuff Lessig talked about with the record industry refusing to find a compromised middle ground when it comes to digital music.  I couldn’t agree more with this, but I wonder if this shift in mentality is possible for the greed-fueled gears of capitalism.  It seems like this will have a large role in our country’s economic fate.

This post, and the forthcoming one about the Pincus lecture, are both concerning stuff that I should’ve posted last week, but with the ridiculous amounts of work I’ve had, I’m just now catching up with them.  That being said…

I’m glad we got a glimpse into WoW — there’s a lot that I didn’t know about it before, just on the very basic level of what spends most of one’s time doing in it, and I feel like Ian gave us a pretty good idea of what your average WoW devotee actually does in the game most of the time.

There were a lot of things that I liked about it — I’m impressed that they can make the graphics look that nice for such a huge world with so many people in it; it’s pretty much the anti-Second Life in that respect, probably because it’s all controlled by one entity, and people are paying that entity for access to that world, and with that price comes the expectation that things will run smoothly.  So the world is rich and pretty and complex, and the whole accumulation of abilities thing seems like that could get pretty addicting, but like Ian said, most people only ever use, say, four of their abilities.  All the “fighting against the game itself” stuff he told us was interesting too, in a sort of meta- way.  And though we didn’t get to see a raid, the idea behind it, with all the intensely planned strategy, sounded kinda cool.  In that respect, it almost seems more like a board game to me than a video game — of course, it’s much more visually stimulating than a board game, and you’re playing it on the internet with thousands of other people, but the fighting and such relies more on strategy than the usual finger-mashing dexterity that success in most video games demands.

But in the end, I felt no desire to ever try the game out.  I think the dullness of combat, like I just mentioned has something to do with that — fighting = clicking rapidly and repetitively on something.  Plus, the ‘grinding’ and all the other drudgery that you have to go through just to keep improving sounds pretty unbearable.  And lastly, I mentioned this in class, but it really bothers me that one of the, if not the driving force in the game is that masculine, typical-internet desire to brag, sling insults, fuck with people, and basically piss them off in any way you can think of, just because there’s no real life consequences — “internet assholism”, I think I called it.  It’s that sort of thing that really drives me away from, say, Halo online and that kind of thing.  And it seems like WoW contains the epitome (if not the birthplace) of that attitude.  So I’ll pass on WoW for now.