This is a great article. Some choice bits: > What happened? One standard answer is that advertisers overpaid for ad placement in the past, and now the Gray La

This is a great article. Some choice bits: > What happened? One standard answer is that advertisers overpaid for ad placement in the past, and now the Gray Lady, confronted with precise readership metrics, is finally getting paid the pittance she always deserved. This seems implausible: could perpetually rationalizing, efficiency-maximizing capitalism really have misjudged the efficacy of print advertising for more than a century? > Today we Google ourselves to see what the world knows about us; tomorrow we’ll just watch the ads. The outlines of this can already be discerned in Gmail’s sometimes tactless data mining of your emails: write a friend that your cat has died and you learn, cruelly, of discounts on litter. > And it’s often proposed that the dignity of games therefore lies in their future utility: play Doom now so you can pilot a Predator drone later, or learn to reduce your workforce with a click of a mouse. But the most potent allure of games surely lies in their fantasized, not their realistic, relationship to work. Here, control is angstless, effortless, and enormous: you can watch rioters take to the streets of your Roman city for two minutes of gametime, send out the police, cut taxes, shelter the rich, and watch your city blossom with gentrified villas some five minutes later. There is no game, at least not yet, in which you accomplish the mission only to learn you’ve been torturing an innocent man, or get passed over for promotion. Neither is your guitar heroism cut short by an overdose of heroin or rooted in coping with your abusive father. Here is a very un-labor-force-like experience of meaningful activity.