The Digital Cash Cow and Those Who Would Milk It to Death

Never let it be said that video game publishers are bad at finding the "Withdrawal" button on a cash machine. Large game companies, second only to the people who brought us the Sweet Valley High books, are truly superb at churning out sequels to successful titles well past the point at which there are any interesting stories left to tell in the franchise. Far be it from me to tell them not to sell a product that people will still pay money for. Hooray capitalism and all that. It's just that sometimes it feels like the beautiful new growth on the forest floor is getting smothered by all the big recycled trees -- like this year's bestselling entries, Pine 2010, Birch: Redux, and Oak 8: The Oakening.

Sam and Grookey were Arguing On The Internet recently about this very issue.

Actual Man's Work for Actual Men

(Thanks to Sam and Grookey for their contributions to this post.)

When I was a boy, neither I nor anyone I knew ever said, "When I grow up, I want to be the kind of man who excels at killing spiders." Some of us may have enjoyed killing or otherwise utilizing spiders for our own youthful purposes, but our fantasies of grown-up freedom and manhood were probably not built around dead arachnids. Secret agents, pirates, and superheroes do not kill spiders -- they are killers of men. They have adventures; they buckle swashes; they conduct daring night-time missions. That's what most of us wanted. We wanted an adult life filled with missions.

Then we grew up, and we looked around and realized that we weren't buckling any swashes. There was a distinct lack of espionage. For most of us -- those of us who are not professional daredevils -- we spend exactly zero minutes of our week jumping cars over other cars, or over any objects at all. Where did our missions go?