Everybody sells out sometimes

So last week I got a tattoo, which, in itself, isn't too unusual. Lots of people get tattoos in college. The difference, though, is that this tattoo will probably end up in a video game at some point in the future.\nThat's because I joined a small but ever-growing legion of people willing to sell off small portions of their body in the name of advertising.\nLast Thursday, I got a rather modest tattoo on my right shoulder blade of the Electronic Arts logo. EA, the world's largest video game publisher, is responsible for such hit titles as "The Sims," "Need for Speed" and the Madden football series.\nSince then, I've gotten a lot of crap from my friends about selling out and becoming a "corporate whore," and it's pretty hard to deny those charges. But I'm still going to try to explain myself as best I can.\nI love video games. I've been a huge gamer since I could hold a controller, and I plan on playing until my hands are too achy with arthritis to even mash buttons. \nSo when Brent Coyle, the EA campus rep, offered me a chance at immortality by appearing in a future EA game introduction, I accepted. From my point of view, that of a hard-core gamer, I'd be stupid to turn it down.\nThe stigma here just seems to be that the tattoo is the logo of a major corporation, like that somehow makes me soulless for making my body a billboard. \nWhen people think of corporations, they almost automatically stereotype them as evil and greedy -- and there are a lot of companies out there involved in some shady dealings, such as Enron and Halliburton. Huge corporations are a shining beacon of all that a capitalist economy can accomplish. Being successful does not automatically make one evil or a "little Eichmann," as University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill recently put it.\nThe fact is that companies make tons of money by putting out great products consistently. If they don't, they fail. The one exception is MTV. There must be a pact with Satan involved to keep that drivel on the air.\nHeck, if it weren't for another corporation, pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Company, giving me an academic scholarship, odds are I wouldn't even be in college right now. So not everything corporations do is bad -- they just have a ton of money to throw around.\nStill, I'll admit there's quite a difference between accepting a scholarship from big business and getting a tattoo from them.\nThere aren't many people out there with a company logo tattooed on their bodies; quite a few people have tattoos of characters such as Superman, Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse.\nAll those characters represent corporations just as much as the logo I now have on my back, and I don't see anyone calling those people sell-outs.\nBesides, whether most people want to admit it or not, they "sell out" on a daily basis. Whenever someone gets up in the morning to pour a bowl of Kellogg's cereal, puts on those Abercrombie & Fitch clothes with the store's name written all over them and walks to class listening to the latest "American Idol" CD, they're "selling out" to corporations.\nBut I'm not judging. We all do it because they keep putting out stuff we enjoy. It's impossible to avoid.\nIf there's a company out there that puts out stuff you really enjoy and has a cool logo, I would even recommend getting a tattoo of it if you can work out a deal with them to make a profit.\nIt doesn't hurt that much, and the only difference is that you wear it under your shirt instead of on it.