Liberal angst is for muppets
I’ve said this lots of times before, and Marvin just sent me an e-mail to tell me I’ll say it again, but fuck the Penny Arcade dudes. I don’t even mean the bizarre and largely incomprehensible rant he goes into toward the end about how we can be the "curators" of "distributed culture." I’m mostly complaining about that part where he declares that nobody should charge for Puzzle Pirates because it’s a "java based puzzle game." Do you see that part?
I dunno. I guess puzzle games are easier to make than other games (I have found this to be true to a certain extent), and I guess there’s something about Java that makes it easier to use than other programming languages (I have found this to be true to what could be charitably described as "no fucking extent whatsoever"). I suppose what we’re supposed to believe is that puzzle games are so easy to make — even MMO puzzle games — and Java is so easy to use that it’s basically no work at all and so it’s immoral to ask for compensation in return. See, I’m old-fashioned and kind of a shithead, so I’m of the opinion that, if you make a game, it’s worth whatever people will pay you for it. Apparently the enlightened view is that games should be free to a certain point; since Tycho doesn’t bother to tell us how to determine which games should be free and which games are justified in charging money, I guess we’re supposed to ask him.
Has anybody else noticed this attitude coming off of a lot of modern leftists? Don’t bother answering that, I know you have. I guess the idea is that everything has a "correct price" that people just should charge, and that this price is known to leftists through some magical a priori means whether or not they have any idea what was involved in the creation of the product or provision of the service.
Incidentally, Penny Arcade’s own vanity game is only $20 from Steam. In case you’d like to wash down your liberal angst with a bit of hypocrisy.
