It's rather interesting to note that as a society we have advanced enough to the point that we can donate the resources to support roughly 3 average size families for a year to a "pop culture critic" to study video games.
No condemnations or moral objections, just merely stating an interesting observation.
In another light, society, using pricing as a communication signal, has determined that its value is worth 100 million USD more than its cost. I'm not sure whether that's less or more depressing.
> The film has earned $64,372,300 in North America, as of July 9, 2012, and $236,650,220 in other countries, as of June 28, 2012, for a worldwide total of $301,022,520.
"It's rather interesting to note that as a society we have advanced enough to the point that we can donate the resources to support roughly 2 average size families[1] for a year to a "game designer" to make a tabletop game about Lego robots."
Honestly, your scare quotes and italics kind of hurt your claim of "no condemnations or moral objections" and make your post come off as kind of judgmental.
[1] just guessing that $40k might be enough to support an "average sized" family depending on the part of the country
I was afraid those editorial annotations would get me in trouble with my neutral stance...
"Pop culture critic" is in quotes, as that is how the author describes herself in the kickstarter video. I italicized "video games" to emphasize the triviality of what is being studied, not to trivialize the actual study (Though you could argue that's still what I'm doing).
Art colors how we see the world and ourselves. The video game industry is bigger than the motion picture industry. I don't see how it's at all trivial.
Social surplus. To put this in perspective, I believe there's a stat that the total number of man hours spent creating wikipedia is equivalent to a fraction of the time the US spends watching prime time television on an average weekday evening. (I think it's from a Clay Shirky essay.)
Why would you think that? We're talking about what Anita wanted money for. She wasn't asking for people to fund " the entire field of racial studies and gender/queer/men's gaze theory". She was asking for money to keep making the same videos she's already been making. And which you can view for yourself to see that calling them "rehashing tvtropes" is actually being pretty generous.
It's rather interesting to note that as a society we have advanced enough to the point that we can donate the resources to support roughly 3 average size families for a year to a "pop culture critic" to study video games.
No condemnations or moral objections, just merely stating an interesting observation.