The Light Bulb Conspiracy is a great documentary about planned obsolescence. It starts with a printer programmed to fail (at the end of the movie Marcus downloads a homemade Russian driver which mysteriously repairs it). It deals with many more subjects and products, including titular lightbulbs (one of them is working for over 100 years already), ipads with irreplaceable batteries lasting 3 years, macs and other PC waste dumped in Africa as "used computers", degrowth, Bernard London, Phoebus, wooing consumers with short-lived products instead of forcing them (reminds me of STEAM).
Unfortunately, only fragments of it are on youtube (except for Polish version, in full).
A fascinating comment, and now I want to watch the documentary! Could you clarify:
"wooing consumers with short-lived products instead of forcing them (reminds me of STEAM)"
There might be a typo or I might just be not reading it right, but I can't seem to parse this, probably due to confusion about who/what "them" refers to and what action is being "forced". I want to understand it though because the comparison to Steam could be an interesting one! (Assuming that is Valve's Steam - another slight confusion, I'm not used to seeing it written in all caps so perhaps you're referring to something else.)
The documentary states that planned obsolescence was invented in the US, in wake of the stock market crash of 1920's. Some economists wanted to find a solution for the depression. Initially one of the economists came up with the idea that planned obsolescence should be controlled by the government. Check out Bernard's London paper on the right of this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
The idea was that products would later be gathered and destroyed by a commission or something. A similar approach was used by Phoebus Cartel, which fined factories which made light bulbs lasting over 1000 years. According to the documentary, it still exists after multiple name changes.
I don't remember the exact details, but the documentary then proceeds to show many commercials and famous designers who promoted new goods with short life span. Instead of the government making people give up their stuff and destroy it once time is up, the focus was on "low quality" and advertising.
It's dubbed, but you can hear many interviewed people talk in english. I'm a native polish speaker. Treat it as a teaser :-). Points of interest:
- nylon stockings at 27:10
- at 16:10, an interview with a woman who met Bernard London. A few minutes later the section with commercials starts. "Planned obsolescence. A desire by the consumer to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary..."
The documentary doesn't mention STEAM, but I think it's similar. STEAM is DRM in sheep's clothing. It comes bundled with so many extras (I can live without) such as friends lists, IM, automatic patching. These days, people are asking developers to publish on STEAM. They are seduced.
As for games in general and planned obsolescence - after watching this documentary I think I know why so many games these days are linear, story-based and short.
