Dear gogfellows!

The project "The Sins of the Industry" is finally content lock and will be publicly released in just a few days! It is just some last minute corrections and it's out.

Some of you may remember this project by a couple of announcements I have made here during the past three years (it has been a very long process), but for most of you who wont, this project consists on a compendium of all the wrongdoings of the industry of video games during the 2006-2012 period and an overarching analysis from a Marxist point of view that uses all that evidence to theorize why the medium of video games is as it is. It deals comprehensively and gives perspective to topics such as sexism, creative stagnation, DRM, gamification, press ethics, intellectual property and many others and it tries to tie them together within a unified theoretical body to explain video games (and culture by extension) in capitalism.

I'm announcing it here a bit earlier since I have already used these forums for feedback before and because it is always useful to have some honest opinions before a public release.

IMPORTANT: Also, the friend of mine who was doing the cover is very busy right now and I am stuck with a title font I don't like. There is an editable .psd in the folder, if someone could help me, it will be very appreciated. I would like a font similar to this one, but all capital letter. I'm open to suggestions, though.

You can find the full work here:

Full Work

The Sins of the Industry
Introduction
[url=https://www.dropbox.com/sh/6s8mipgwryv9j45/AAAz0kplS4QTz4lBi1cO-bw-a/Chapter 1.html]Chapter 1: Violence Resolves Everything[/url]
[url=https://www.dropbox.com/sh/6s8mipgwryv9j45/AACWFpxPLYER0m4LEdYrcl6ra/Chapter 2.html]Chapter 2: Boys Club[/url]
[url=https://www.dropbox.com/sh/6s8mipgwryv9j45/AAC3mShyooI99KWQI_MXpkTWa/Chapter 3.html]Chapter 3: The Played Player[/url]
[url=https://www.dropbox.com/sh/6s8mipgwryv9j45/AABOoQmd7_szwDNIdaPcCIk4a/Chapter 4.html]Chapter 4: Playing Wallets[/url]
[url=https://www.dropbox.com/sh/6s8mipgwryv9j45/AADQ-oFwpdv5OTZpr53cVbM5a/Chapter 5.html]Chapter 5: “It's a Business, duh!”[/url]
[url=https://www.dropbox.com/sh/6s8mipgwryv9j45/AAAbW0vkrB5HeYee1VSH_o2La/Chapter 6.html]Chapter 6: Creativity Crisis[/url]
[url=https://www.dropbox.com/sh/6s8mipgwryv9j45/AADGgZZ0CahhGnpkdGPZO8o8a/Chapter 7.html]Chapter 7: Loudspeakers[/url]
[url=https://www.dropbox.com/sh/6s8mipgwryv9j45/AAC9qLkfJskGpyN-CvN6D7hoa/2013%2C a review.html]2013, a Small Review[/url]
[url=https://www.dropbox.com/sh/6s8mipgwryv9j45/AAD0oqnLKwYFNeXMU5qzorNea/On Capitalism.html]On Capitalism[/url]
[url=https://www.dropbox.com/sh/6s8mipgwryv9j45/AABFbBQSFnH8FyZwJxi7DgZ6a/Final Conclusions.html]Final Conclusions[/url]
Glossary

For anything you want to tell me, you can post it here or send me an email to sinsoftheindustry@gmail.com.

I hope you find it interesting. Thanks for your time in any case.

EDIT: And, if you can tip me any typographical or syntactic error or any broken link you find, it would be very helpful. Thanks!

Wow, I just had a quick look at this and some pages are huge.

I have loaded it all up as a PDF on my tablet (550 pages) and I will take a read of it with time. The only thing I wish to say right now is just I commend you on the time you have put aside to this project. I know I have seen you pop up here before mentioning bits about this, I just never imagined how big it would be.

I'd love to read the whole thing, but the formatting (or lack thereof) makes it really uncomfortable to read in a browser. Have you considered making an EPUB version?

Just took a quick look at the first chapter. One thing that instantly irked me was that you don't seem to distinguish adventure games and action adventures. Traditionally adventure games have very little to no combat (and if it's present it's often non-interactive or very abstract) and truth is that action adventures like Darksiders are action games first and the "adventure" part only means that they have some of the features common to actual adventure games such as riddles and/or social interaction. Especially the sentence "As most adventure games, combat is just unavoidable" (sic) stood out negatively in this context. I think it's extremely important to refer to games such as Darksiders and Tomb Raider explicitly as action adventures.

Thanks for the praise, it actually feels very good to read words like that after all the hard work.

One recommendation. Although it should not change much till the final version, I am going to be correcting text (and, apparently, fixing quite a few broken links) during this week. You may want to pick the last version whenever you give it a read. I was going to merge everything into a .pdf at the end. Had not thought of .epub, but yes, I'll do that too. When you say "adventure", are you referring to "graphic adventures"? I talk about them in section Some Positive Examples. By "adventure" I refer mostly to games like Elder Scrolls series and similar games, where there is a focus on exploration and, yet, you are forced to fight to progress.

"this project consists on a compendium of all the wrongdoings of the industry of video games during the 2006-2012 period and an overarching analysis from a Marxist point of view that uses all that evidence to theorize why the medium of video games is as it is. It deals comprehensively and gives perspective to topics such as sexism, creative stagnation, DRM, gamification, press ethics, intellectual property and many others and it tries to tie them together within a unified theoretical body to explain video games (and culture by extension) in capitalism. "

Wow, that sounds very interesting, I have never read a marxist aproach to videogames. I have read some debates about intellectual property or other similar topics but never in the world of videogames. I don't have time right now but after finishing exams I will take a look at it.

I've started leafing through your Sexism chapter and I'm really impressed. Thanks for your hard work, and thanks for posting this. I'm afraid I'm not going to get around to reading this until I finish at least Service Games and one other book that I've been pressured to read, but this has definitely gone to the top of my backlog.

Some general comments though:

a) Are you intending this to become, in the end, a more academic/scholarly work, or a more general analytical piece? I'm tempted to make the comparison to Brendan Keogh's "Killing is Harmless: A Critical Reading of Spec Ops: The Line", or Anna Anthropy's Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, though the former is more of a discussion piece, while the latter is more expository.

b) The biggest flaw with your work right off the bat (IMO), is that I'd really love embedded/in-line pictures, be they screenshots, or diagrams, or anything of the sort. I understand that in the form it's in right now, it's more of a collection of extended forum/blog posts and less like an actual book/ebook, but it all comes across to me as a huge wall of text, and that's big obstacle to flow and readability (IMO). If you're intending to polish this up into a full ebook release (and I really hope you do), I think you really need to put in some visual elements and aides into your work, especially where you discuss specific facts and figures.

In any case, keep up the awesome work. I'm really looking forward to the PDF/ePub version, as a folder full of .html files is a little unwieldy right now for me. Right away I looked at your piece and saw that this is something I would love to spend money on, if it were included in the next StoryBundle Video Game Bundle (or if you'd put up for sale yourself).

Well, no one uses "adventure games" to refer to the Elder Scrolls games. Adventure games are point-and-click and the like. Where did you come across "adventure" used the way you use it?

Seconded. Elder Scrolls are RPG or at worst Action RPG games.

These definitions that we're using, Michael, are industry standard. Adventure games are typically like Tex Murphy or Space Quest (or Zork if you want text adventure).
Action adventure titles involve puzzle solving and item fetching on top of action-y combat and or platforming.
RPGs typically involve some type of character customization and skill development.
Action RPGs are similar, but usually with shallower customization and faster-paced combat.

At least, this is generally how most people see them.

The big drawback of PDFs is that they are divided into pages, which makes them difficult to read on, say, a phone (which is where I do most of my reading these days). An EPUB file is much easier to deal with, on any device.

Ill be very honest that I'm interested with a huge but, that imo Marxist interpretations of economical phenomena are mainly discredited so maybe you can offer a bit of an intro why you wanted to use that lens?

Also why a title with religious overtone if the interpretation is Marxist? :p

Thirded. If you want people to take what you write seriously, you can't just invent your own genre definitions. You have to use the ones that are in general use.

Genre-wise, an adventure game is not just any game that contains some sort of adventure. If that was the case, most RPGs and quite a few FPSs, RTSs and platformers would be adventure games.

Good stuff. I hope this project of yours will lead to success and happiness for you.

First of all, thanks a lot for your words. It is very rewarding to read people praising something you do, especially after long years of work.

It will become something a bit odd, I guess. I believe it has a near-academic level in terms of analytical rigor, but it also has a bit of an amateurish approach both to academic texts and to Marxist analysis. Just a little, though. As for the intention, it has changed during the years and it is not easy to track. It was basically to develop some points of view I had about the medium that I was not seeing well-represented in the public discussion and it has become an integral theory to explain how culture is produced in capitalism. The book also serves as a database of all the wrongdoings of the industry of video games during the 2006-2012 period.

I have been told many times that it is difficult to read and it is true, but there is little I can do to solve it. I really want to close it soon. There may be a future version with all the information in the links stored locally (web links tend to break at a frightening pace) and there could also be a version with some screenshots here and there now that you mention it, but I'm exhausted at this point. However, notice that this book can be modified and forked by anybody. Maybe someone could improve it in the future. Never heard of a modded book before, but, hey!, never heard of a book with a soundtrack before either;)

Also, notice that it is very modular, similar to Wikipedia in structure. One thing I recommend in the introduction is to read it in whatever order sections peek your attention, precisely because I'm conscious it's a massive brick to read.

And no, no commercial release. I will throw a torrent into the web, announce it to the game press and let the Internet do the rest.

Yes, you are right. I am used to call "adventure" any game with certain focus on exploration, but I see it is not common at all. I'll have to see how can I fix it, maybe using Western RPG or RPG instead will solve the problem in most cases.