Living in A Pretentious World
Here’s 10 signs we’re living in a pretentious world (and if I were pretentious, I’d point out that it’s also the same 10 signs of the apocalypse as well).
- Oscar snubs the Lego Movie.
- We thought Famous for being Famous peaked with Paris Hilton, but then we were blessed with Kim Kardashian.
- We have more Indie Showcases each year than we have successful Indie Games.
- One of the most successful talk-shows on TV has less than 10 minutes of talk per hour. Now, although talk-show-talk is usually pretentious in and of itself; the surrounding segments, designed to help Ellen DeGeneres supplant Oprah Winfrey as the Mother Teresa of afternoon television, take the pretentiousness to all new heights.
- The anti-vaccine movement is a thing. Yes, a parent’s right to be pretentious trumps all common sense. Yes, my GED trumps your MED (and peer-based scientific research).
- Facebook, Reddit, Imgur, Twitch, Vine, Twitter – because I’m pithier than you are at 140 characters or 6-second videos.
- More people seem to be discussing “Games as art” instead of “What makes a game fun?”.
- Net neutrality gets everyone concerned but Apple’s iStore monopoly gets a free pass. Don’t the indie mobile devs see the problem there? Is this because game devs don’t like to discuss “Games as commerce”?
- Sons of Anarchy: Motorcycles meet Macbeth. (or is it Hogs meet Hamlet?) And don’t get me started on Jax’s white sneakers. A show I enjoyed, yet was so pretentious at times, it got me asking the question – “Can a show ‘jump the shark’ more than once?”
- Simon Cowell, Ralph Lauren, Teresa Giudice (not to be confused with Mother Teresa); Three sides of a pretentious triangle – discuss amongst yourselves.
I recently read about a guy trying to create 100 games in 5 years, and now that he’s at the half-way point, he’s talking about it. I haven’t checked into him enough to know if he’s pretentious or not, but he seems to be one of the new artistic darlings of the indie circuit. I do know that once you start talking about something, instead of just continuing to do that something, that you run the risk of being pretentious.
I talk about creating the Clutter franchise for the casual PC Download space quite a bit but unlike most other devs, I share my actual numbers. Not to magnify or impress but to show an alternative to the “not getting seen in mobile” strategy that everyone else seems to be following. At times when I complain about mobile and the lack of shared information there, I feel like I’m the little boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes” that no one wants to listen to, even though he speaks the truth (as he sees (or doesn’t see) it).
Since I’m willing to share my actual numbers, I don’t think I’m being pretentious. A pain in the A maybe, but not pretentious…however…
…If I truly believed that anyone will read this last sentence, then yes, I’m a little pretentious too. (Is it time for the apocalypse yet?)