# four arguments for the elimination of garming > i got game ey's got game > we got game they got game ey got game > it might feel good > it might sound a little somethin' > but flock teh game if it ain't sayin nuttin' > ~ they got game by public enemy a playabe scenario via ur-ludonaut theodore miles based around jerry mander's four arguments for the elimination of television. in no particular order argument one: games games everywhere nor any space to think to paraphrase the good dr. thompson - "video garming is what the whole hip world is doing now that big (garming) business has won the war" consider video garming as a normalized and seemingly universal (and therefore strictly culturally-enforced) hobby the ideology of modern video garming lies not in suggesting some b.s near-future sci fi dystopia where everyone is forced to play video games might or could not ever occur - but rather in constantly stating that this very reality isn't already and never could already be an dystopian video game circus run via / played by fully automated human parodies inside a dumb electronic simulation that is the situation today is already one of the following aggressive cultural injunction disguised as an innocent question: "who *wouldn't* want to become part of our friendly global video garming community?" argument two: games *as* time / waste regarding the tautoillogical argument that video games are a waste of time rather consider the possibility that any reality that permits allows and actively encourages video games is already one based entirely on nothing but hollow excess and waste; video games do not waste time but might be expressions of the excessive waste that is time to play video games is perhaps to crap out (eliminate) time; perhaps all that happens when we play is that more wasteful time gets generated - time spent garming argument three: games as violent symbolic split regarding the false argument that video games make you violent rather consider the possibility that violence is already present in the very concept of video games - the brutalization of the pursuit of sensation as ballard says - which is also a real violence against people and ir environment maybe garming essentially represents and enforces a terrible symbolic split or dualistic disjunction; that is even to engage with the notion of "video games" is to separate oneself away from the truth of the greasy lie that video games somehow bring us all together - when in fact they simply bring us all under the same corporate umbrella perhaps to treat games as ontology (as a seeming way of knowing the world) is already to lost in ir steamy cloud of bad ideas posting as inevitable progress four: a scenario in which "video games are art" isn't enough even if video games are art - so what? a friend of writer david shields argued that "literature never saved anyone's life" - perhaps ir's right but perhaps the problem is that video games permit allow and encourage people's lives to remain exactly the same; stuck at an infantile level - that of play itself even by being art perhaps games can't grow up because they're always made and played by people who are themselves kidults willingly caught in a disturbing digital peter pan playground of inherently limited video imagination consider the single truest a-calypso of video garming now a deliberately exciting sunset overdrive to nowhere > objectively garmz are built with metals mined by slaves in countries marked by endless civil war. those metals are refined by exploited labourers working in unsafe conditions and encased in plastics that poison ecosystems and contribute to an over-reliance on fossil fuels. they are developed by armadas of overworked temps conditioned to lay-offs after every project. games foster addiction until they are discarded to repeat the cycle of waste and spending. garmz are marketed as masculine power fantasies to an increasingly hostile homogeneous group of insecure men and when criticized the monied few that truly benefit from the industry retreat into dismissive irreverence. objectively speaking garmz are evil. the only reason they are worth spending any time on is that they might bring joy and encourage thought and neither of those virtues necessitate the evils that currently define ir culture. none of that is necessary. gamers aren't necessary > ~ mark filipowich // republic of bob