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[PATV] Tuesday, August 30, 2011 - Extra Credits Season 2, Ep. 6: Ludus Florentis
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
This week, we try our best to describe a big upcoming change in the world of video games, as well as what's causing it.
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Translation:
Ludus Florentis (Latin) - The Flowering of Games
That idea of decentralization in the video game business made me think about what happened to the movie business when it was 40 to 45 years: It was also decentralized. Either the major movie studios owned the theaters or independent theaters were forced to block-book a studio's shoddy movies with the ones in high demand. These big Hollywood studios had all the power.
Of course, a big difference is that the government stepped in and forced the studios to play more fairly (and filmmaking classes producing the Lucases and Spielbergs didn't take off until the 1970s), and by then, movies were already seen as universally socially okay, but it happened during then nonetheless. I can only hope that once video gaming reaches 100 years old that it doesn't become recentralized like movies have become.
Every mass medium that comes out goes through a series of social reactions, and they seem to happen in roughly similar amounts of time and in the same order, centralization and subsequent decentralization by an increasingly large counter movement being one of the middle steps. We've seen it as early as the rise of the Greek parody when the tragedies were getting stale and repetitive to recently as in the 90s when FOX (as mixed as people are about it today) broke the CBS-NBC-ABC stranglehold that had been ruling television since--of course--roughly 40 to 45 years.