Comm203: gaming

While I understand the desire to have the best of the best as far as employees go, especially in such a competitive environment like the gaming industry, oftentimes the way these corporations go about letting people go is downright dispicable. Honestly, it sounds like something that might happen in an episode of Arrested Development, firing a whole team at an amusement park. And the gaming industry isn't the only place where sketchy hirings and firings occur. I have a friend who spent months drawing up pages worth of art for a comic book only to be denied payment for her work after the book was published. Artists are being swindled every day and it's an incredible shame that it happens not just on the small scale, but on the big scale too.

I really want to know the reasoning behind the firings. Were they simply not profiting anymore? Could they not afford to pay their employees? Certainly, no matter the case, there are better, more efficient, less dickish ways to go about firing so many people at once. I also feel like, if it is not about quality and instead about financial issues, there should be some sort of contract in place that keeps artists and other programmers on the job for a set amount of time. I feel like a lot of this inhumane firing stems from big corporations' inability to understand that these are real people trying to make a living.

No matter what, there need to be some drastic changes made before the environment changes in the game producing community.

Comm203: Argo

It is certainly an interesting concept to think about - whether the government should be involved in movie production and if so, how. In the Wired magazine article, the government used a fake Science fiction flick to assist in a real life situation. Of course, the government has had a hand in the entertainment business for quite a long time before this, with propaganda films and even before that with the newspaper industry and yellow journalism. Nowadays you see ads on TV that depict the Marines as hardcore servicemen being courageous in times of despair, which may be true but it's still one shot of a much bigger picture that isn't shown on TV.

The governments in other countries play a huge role in what is allowed on screen and what isn't and I'm grateful that, for the most part, American cinema can do and say whatever it wants. There is a certain stigma that comes with government censorship that says it has to censor certain things because its people are too stupid to understand that whatever is being censored is bad. I think the rating system that the U.S. has is a great way to keep the camera rolling while still laying out some guidelines for people. While some rules are more stupid than others, the rating system allows people to judge if they want to see a movie based on a standardized set of policies.