DrDreams

They don't just reflect it, they reflect it, distort it and magnify it.

Video games produce versions of the violence in society which are unrealistic, in which everyone can get up off the floor after being shot by being reloaded and start again.

Video games produces thousands of times as many violent events as in real life.

The amount of resources (money and time devoted) in creating and playing video games rivals the amount of time and energy people spend practicing at making real life into a safe experience. Much more than a distraction, they are the centerpiece, a devotion to delusional destruction.

I can tell you now that I've been out of grad school for around a year or so:

Many companies are not product-focused. The goal of producing a good product using sensible techniques is only a small part of what happens. Companies are mainly social relations, specifically fiefdoms. At the top of the social hierarchy is an organization which can produce a "good enough" product to earn an income to keep the company afloat, while supporting the back-stabbing that goes on at the high levels.

Competing viciously for those dollars are hundreds of individuals. Their work is optimal when they bring the company, the commons, or the social fabric nearest to the brink of destruction. These people really don't care about sharing. If a company is not doing well, it doesn't make sense to them to utilize new techniques (such as sharing software) to make it better. They would rather loot the company and move on.

This is especially true of companies which have reached maturation separately, then been artificially bonded, such as the two newspapers you mention. From the outside, they may appear as two large pools of positively-charged molecules and you're wondering why the negatively-charged (connotations not implied here) molecules of software don't simply attract and stick. The reason is that the companies are not uniform entities... They're deeply complex structures with all kinds of spikes, moats, alarms, etc. to keep foreign entities, such as uncertainty and loss of control - away.

It doesn't matter if that friendly visitor coming to their door is a good Samaritan who wants to give out free cookies and teach them how to make cookies more efficiently or more deliciously. They already have reliable ways to make enough money and any newcomer is only going to disrupt how that flows. To make more money, they prefer social means, not technical ones. Why mess with - or even consider - software and other work when you can hire, fire and deceive people through antisocial practices of marketing, human resources, the stock market, etc.? Software is too wild - anyone (even teenagers for crissake) can write it and it's too powerful. So don't stake the business on software, stake it on social relations.

If your goal is to make a better product, find a better system of social relations. If you want to make your technological solution work, appeal to the antisocial tendencies in the hierarchy.