Here's another guy who pays close attention to what I say, but who never seems to manage to understand anything (emphasis is mine):
Seriously. I've been thinking about this lately. Videogames are ridiculous and juvenile. While I haven't done it much lately, those of you who know me are aware of my tendency to clamor for games to be more, and yet I perpetually find myself drawn to games as they are. Is it because I am some sort of man-child? What is the appeal? Timesinks and artificial achievements?
http://forums.selectbutton.net/viewtopic.php?t=14774
The same can actually be said about most people who post in that forum. They all read Insomnia, and you can often find threads there discussing issues I dealt with in my articles, but they always take care not to link back here. Sometimes someone will link me, and then the admin or the moderators will either delete the link, or on occasion even the whole thread!
In any case, it never ceases to amuse me to see these little monkeys scratch their monkey-heads in frustration and mystification. No one on that website knows anything about videogames, and yet their discussions never end. They never learn anything, but they never get bored either.
Take this thread I just linked, for example. It would just take me a couple of sentences to solve their problem, and yet it would be a waste of effort, because no one would understand anything. So here's the answer:
Yes the reason you still play games is because you are a man-child. Everyone who plays games after a certain age is by definition a man-child. However, this is not their fault. In fact it is no one's fault -- there's no one to blame. That just seems to be the way things eventually turn out in advanced civilizations.
So basically that's it. If someone were to post the above 4-5 lines in that thread, that would be the end of the thread. There'd be nothing more to say, except for people asking for clarification. But the clarifications would never end, so you'd be forced to tell them to read a dozen books about philosophy, which of course there's no way they would ever read, so what would probably end up happening is that they'd start calling you names and eventually ban you because they can't understand what the fuck you are talking about.
That's basically what makes every single serious thread in that forum (and EVERY internet forum) a lost cause -- the fact that the people participating in it lack the basic knowledge necessary to tackle it.
All of which brings us back to Baudrillard:
it's better to have nothing to say if one seeks to communicate
In which case -- long live communication!
