Critiques – Page 2 – My Game Reviews

Google Search and the Paywall: A consequence of near monopolistic power

Google is a company that has been controlling the search market in its grip for well over 20 years at this point. While the company offers many convenient services, it has also become a monopoly. Some people would disagree with that but the company is one and also is also dominating in mobile phones with the android operating system. There is a need for the internet to untangle from this monopolistic system that Google has made. Just for the interests of keeping the internet interesting and useful for many types of people, that is important. However, one of the main reasons why I am focusing on this issue is because of paywalls on news sites.

Paywalls used to be rarer in the past. Only really the WSJ (Wall Street Journal) had them in a significant way. However, as time has gone on and the internet went from a place for bragging rights to a necessity for someone to be able to have a journalism career, paywalls have been going up across cyberspace. The building of walls across the internet feels like an admission of failure of the internet’s ability to reduce the cost of producing news. I have seen it in real-time here; this is not a change that one sees through generations but it happened after 2008 and we have seen more and more paywalls.

Google’s inability to categorize paywalls is huge issue. Their unwillingness to categorize websites to make it more useful to the public shows their institutional inertia. The company makes billions upon billions of dollars on advertising, yet it is unable to even pay attention to its search engine that made it popular in the 2000s.

Why is Google so unwilling to change?

It’s because they are comfortable in taking ad revenue from sites. Changing that revenue stream would make them take a hit and they can only tolerate having more and more revenue streaming into it.

If Google was to take its search engine seriously, it would take a hit to its reputation. It would have to respond to all the calls about it having a monopoly on the internet and manipulating people’s minds. They would have to make the legacy outlets which seek to maintain their power have to play by the rules rather just allowing them to regurgitate what the ruling parties want to see.

Paywalled sites do need to not show up in the search results. Many of these sites are business sites that often hide their arcane language away from public view. The internet should be divided up into small kingdoms where you have to pay entry fees to get into the castle.

Google’s unwillingness to categorize such things show that monopolies that hold onto power for so long have a way of shaping the whole culture around them. The internet, once free and vibrant, is becoming yet another shopping mall where everything has a price.

Having free access to information on the internet isn’t a right but essential aspect to cyberspace.

Civilization 7 Review: The Worst Game in the Series.

Civilization 7 is the worst game in the series. There are some who want to say that it has new ideas and not recycled ideas. I am guessing these are casual gamers or people who are easily swayed by marketing because this is basically SimCity Societies from 2007 in a Civ Game.

The issue is that the players who played the older games before Civ V have been seeing the changes and that it is becoming very much like Angry Birds and other forgotten mobile games, just a brand to put on mediocre gameplay and hide it with marketing.

The UI is terrible and when compared to Civ 1, it shows the generational changes and the malaise we are currently in this culture.

The Civ switching was a concern of mine earlier on and I see that Fraxis was lazy and put in a bunch of leaders who are not leaders but Great People.

The game does not have England in the game but hides behind a DLC and puts in a person, Ada Lovelace, who was not a political leader, phlisophical, or spiritual leader in any sense. The leader of England should be a King or Prime Minister. I would recommend King Charles II of the Restoration Era.

The Shawnee were put in the game for politics and yet Confucius can rule them. Do not use the CIV has never been about history. It has a tech tree which contains many of the most important technologies in human history. This is not a very good argument to using here.

The crisis system is lazy and does not provide context for what is happening. Having every Civ move into the same age is silly and makes the game too easy. There needs to be consequences to not being able to catch up in tech or economics. Having a reset does not make the game challenging. The Civ Switching doesn’t even stop the snowballing that they say they wanted to not have.

It is clear that the game has increasingly become attached to politics in America more and not just a game about history.

The map generation is terrible and worse than 20 year old games.

The positive reviews are people who generally enjoy simpler, easier games. While Microsoft is no saint of a company, they have made AOE 4 into a game that appeals to casuals and power users. They even encourage people to improve their tactics while also being a great platform for teaching history about multiple cultures, without being myopic about it.

Civilization 7 is the worst in the series. Civilization V was a strange experiment on launch but they did not railroad the player into 3 mini games.

M3GAN-A seminal Cyberprep Movie or Neo-Cyberpunk Movie

I have only watched clips of M3GAN but the plot is quite familar to me. It is the story of a robot going aganist its servitude and becoming self-aware and how conflict begins here. However, M3GAN has something unique which is it is the encapsulation of a style or sensiblity. It is known as Cyberprep. While there is a clothing style known as Cyberprep, I am talking about a subgenre of Cyberpunk here. To some, Cyberprep is Captialism’s attempt to subvert the Cyberpunk genre, which seeks to create a digital space that is more about cooperatives and the sharing of information for the furthering of human knowledge instead of refining consumerism in global capitalism in our culture. Cyberprep is some sense is the sanitization of cyberpunk and acknowledgment of regression in styles.

Some people in the more left-wing circles have been trying to make M3GAN into a icon of identity politics, the truth is simplier. M3GAN is a movie about transition of styles in America.

Previously, such movies had distinct style which harkened back to two styles I will describe here. While there are offshoots and every movie is different, there are two types in my opinion.

1. Cyberpunk Classic(Japan)

This is the Cyberpunk which everyone knows. It is the one with the Neon lights and the Japanese characters. This is what people think of when they think about Cyberpunk. In the 1980s, it was at its height in media. It is generally an extension of the rebel culture of the 1960s. It is about embracing one’s individuality online. It had an eye on the up-and-coming growing Japan. The Asian country, already with rich tradition of automata in its ancient times during the Heian and Tokugawa eras, was becoming a focal point of what people though the future was going to be. Japanese society, which conformity but also innovation, allowed for a consistency in style. Rural Japan and Urban Japan had their differences, but they tended to be on the same wavelength culturally. In America, the gap is larger between the city and country. While the radio would start the process of closing such gaps, it remains wider than in places such as in Japan.

2. 1990s Internet Chic

This is a refinement of Cyberpunk and the sensibility is more corporate. The internet in its beginning was a computer system known as Aparnet. It was more for scientific purposes and the military, a result of the need to share knowledge during the Cold War. The internet would then go into a transition phase into becoming more commercial as time went on.

By the beginning of the World Wide Web, Hypertext Markup Language(HTML) had become standard and was remaking the nature of internet networks.

With the rise of websites, the internet merged with Cyberpunk but it was no longer about the clunky hardware. While CRT computers were reigning on the throne, the nature of connectivity was no longer about putting on bulky VR headsets. It was now something was contained within a cyberspace. This cyberspace was not navigated with hardware but was hitching a ride on copper wires that were venerable veterans in telecommunications.

M3GAN represents an updating of the 2nd style here.

Generally speaking, M3GAN and its themes are focused on the upper middle-class experience. While some people may say that the robot is not realistic, I think that it makes a lot of sense here. M3GAN is a product of a brilliant if awkward mind. Gemma is genius but held back by the Capitalist system. M3GAN is a representative of Cyberprep.

M3GAN clothing is a throwback to the 1980s Corporate woman, who would often wear clothes in that style. Indeed, such a robot has a fashion sense which is more sophisticated than most Americans now. I would even say that she is reminiscent of a small girl in the body of an upper middle-class woman in 1940s America.

M3GAN is representative of a capitalist system which is starting to fortify in its enclaves. There is no interest in helping the average person even understand what they are getting into. Cyberprep is the Cyberpunk without the edge. The elite of today in places such as Seattle is not interested in guiding mankind towards greatness; it is more about their own people.

M3GAN is really about the palace battles in the corporate halls. To the people farming shimp on the Bayou, M3GAN seems like something out of a Middle Eastern Fantasy story with flying carpets.

M3GAN is true Cyberprep cinema