Chapters: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
Not quite at the end of the free trial period I decided the World of Warcraft was probably not singing to my better angels: the household entertainment budget seemed like something that was due for a stoic reevaluation rather than an impulsive expansion and in just over a week I had rediscovered in myself a caution-worthy inclination towards shoveling solitary hours into the Grind - that low level, light-skill playing towards the gradual but inexorable accumulation of treasure, levels, virtual skills (as opposed to the real kind whose acquisition is far from automatic regardless of the time you sink).
Much has been made of the dangers of immersion in these new virtual realms, and I tend to think it is pretty much all invented hysteria. Escape is always going to be an attraction in an epistemologically ambiguous and frequently egregiously unpleasant physical universe and there are always going to be people who ride escape to genuine ruin - whether the medium is sherry, bridge, novels or glue. Obsession over new media is just something to sell papers with, another bit of grist for the feuilletons. Nevertheless, I let my subscription lapse. I would hope perhaps that someday I will sort out my personal issues of money, time, and personal balance to the extent of allowing me to really enjoy the possibilities of one of these new social environments.
I left my dwarf in an Inn with the beast he’d just tamed (new “skill”) at his feet - I spent a few coins to buy him a drink, even. It is all a goof, narrative wrapped in technological moonshine, but we’d spent a good few hours together nonetheless. In some sense I think of him as being there still.
That wraps it up for Nine Nights in Azeroth, and I think for the 2011 edition of Phree as in Phreakshow unless something AMAZING happens. What’s next? No idea.
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Nine Nights in Azeroth, Chapter 4: Country Mouse, City Mouse
Chapters: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
Right from the get go I had this social interaction problem in World of Warcraft. It gave me a strong Playground vibe: everyone is ignoring me and that’s cool, but at any minute someone bigger and meaner than me might wander by and pants me. A lot of this came out of not taking the time to learn how to properly socially navigate the world. I didn’t know any action commands not related to combat or quest negotiation, or even how to start a conversation with another player. WoW was the first multiplayer online game I’d played. The exemplar of this weird hangup was a moment when I saw some dude tussling with a bear and noticed I had a bead on the beast with my rifle-type weapon, so assisted him with a shot. He noticed where the help had come from and executed a neat little bow and made some innocuous comment like “nice, thanks.” I had no idea what to do with this so I ran off.
So I’m running around basically grinding (which was 90% of what I did in my brief sojourn through Azeroth) and suddenly a name I do not recognize is “whispering” to me and my immediate reaction is oh what now?! Am I about to be subjected to teasing? Invited to participate in some collective action in which I’ll embarrass myself through ineptitude? Subjected to the pitch for some scam? It wasn’t until the person whispering was inviting me to connect on Skype and I recognized their handle there that I realized I was in fact talking to the same friend who had introduced me to the game in the first place - they were just inhabiting an avatar I hadn’t encountered yet - and deduced that the “whispering” thing just meant they were communicating privately.
So we got connected on Skype and my friend invited me to run around with him a while and see the sights. I’m still ridiculously susceptible to these technological “holy Brave New World, Batman!” moments and interacting with someone across town in a virtual world while simultaneously talking to them via a phoneless, internet mediated, free communication protocol was reasonably mind-blowing.
At this point I was more or less the character I’d started as, this drab dwarf in dull leather clothes: I’d acquired a few indifferent pieces of marginally better gear. So my friend shows up as some sort of wizard, resplendent in all this sparkling attire and dire-looking magical stave, attended by arcane familiars, occasionally shooting off sparks or bursts of flame... it was all very Country Mouse, City Mouse. Immediately he is showing me all this amazing stuff I was not ready to get to yet at my lowly level, transgressing at least some of those invisible walls I’d noticed at the outset.
And so I finally figured out the real hook of this kind of game: ironically (and already clichéd) it was all about the social. At its heart World of Warcraft’s actual game is not all that damn much more sophisticated than Paper Mario; certainly it doesn’t bring a lot more innovation to gameplay. The radical expansion occurs with the introduction of other people in real time. This is one of the 21st century truths of technology, I think: friends are the killer app. My nine nights in Azeroth certainly gave me a lot to think about in terms of the philosophy of gaming, as evidenced by the fact that I’m wrapping up a series of essays about it after almost 3 years, but my favorite memory of it is that night, being a rube, getting shown the bright lights by my friend from the city.
Right from the get go I had this social interaction problem in World of Warcraft. It gave me a strong Playground vibe: everyone is ignoring me and that’s cool, but at any minute someone bigger and meaner than me might wander by and pants me. A lot of this came out of not taking the time to learn how to properly socially navigate the world. I didn’t know any action commands not related to combat or quest negotiation, or even how to start a conversation with another player. WoW was the first multiplayer online game I’d played. The exemplar of this weird hangup was a moment when I saw some dude tussling with a bear and noticed I had a bead on the beast with my rifle-type weapon, so assisted him with a shot. He noticed where the help had come from and executed a neat little bow and made some innocuous comment like “nice, thanks.” I had no idea what to do with this so I ran off.
So I’m running around basically grinding (which was 90% of what I did in my brief sojourn through Azeroth) and suddenly a name I do not recognize is “whispering” to me and my immediate reaction is oh what now?! Am I about to be subjected to teasing? Invited to participate in some collective action in which I’ll embarrass myself through ineptitude? Subjected to the pitch for some scam? It wasn’t until the person whispering was inviting me to connect on Skype and I recognized their handle there that I realized I was in fact talking to the same friend who had introduced me to the game in the first place - they were just inhabiting an avatar I hadn’t encountered yet - and deduced that the “whispering” thing just meant they were communicating privately.
So we got connected on Skype and my friend invited me to run around with him a while and see the sights. I’m still ridiculously susceptible to these technological “holy Brave New World, Batman!” moments and interacting with someone across town in a virtual world while simultaneously talking to them via a phoneless, internet mediated, free communication protocol was reasonably mind-blowing.
At this point I was more or less the character I’d started as, this drab dwarf in dull leather clothes: I’d acquired a few indifferent pieces of marginally better gear. So my friend shows up as some sort of wizard, resplendent in all this sparkling attire and dire-looking magical stave, attended by arcane familiars, occasionally shooting off sparks or bursts of flame... it was all very Country Mouse, City Mouse. Immediately he is showing me all this amazing stuff I was not ready to get to yet at my lowly level, transgressing at least some of those invisible walls I’d noticed at the outset.
And so I finally figured out the real hook of this kind of game: ironically (and already clichéd) it was all about the social. At its heart World of Warcraft’s actual game is not all that damn much more sophisticated than Paper Mario; certainly it doesn’t bring a lot more innovation to gameplay. The radical expansion occurs with the introduction of other people in real time. This is one of the 21st century truths of technology, I think: friends are the killer app. My nine nights in Azeroth certainly gave me a lot to think about in terms of the philosophy of gaming, as evidenced by the fact that I’m wrapping up a series of essays about it after almost 3 years, but my favorite memory of it is that night, being a rube, getting shown the bright lights by my friend from the city.
Monday, December 12, 2011
Welcoming the latest addition to our bandwagon
SECOND UPDATE: $1,006,996.17
This is the Paypal balance shown on a screen cap Louis C.K. posted in his latest update. I don't mean to be a suck up but I'm fairly impressed by how he is handling this. Making people feel good about having spent their money might also just be the smartest game there is in this wild west of pure digital distribution.
UPDATE: Louis C.K. posted a lengthy and interesting follow-up discussing the economics and results of his experiment. It's a good inside look at taking the reins of a creative project with a significant budget. I won't give away the ending but I can say I saw a lot of online commentary suggesting that this probably didn't represent much of an investment or much of a risk for him, which is clearly untrue.
You know: no snark, in fact. It's true, people like Louis C.K. do tend to be a little "look at this amazing idea I invented" when they embrace the paradigm of self-publishing in the digital realm. But you know, so what. It's still significant, and very positive, for an A list performer whose star is distinctly rising to go this direction, and to do it right - offering his latest performance recording as a high quality, unencumbered file, a straight download in a versatile format, for a modest price.
There's nothing really to complain about: you can moan about Paypal but you know, seriously: Paypal won. They have just simply won at internet. Yes they occasionally unleash their hounds on cringing bundles of fuzzy kittens and bunny rabbits for no particular reason. You want to complain about Paypal, at this point your only recourse would be to start a service that actually competes. I suppose you could point a finger at the price point as well, five bucks is cheap but it isn't necessarily stellar for an hour of entertainment. But this starts to get into quibbling that puts me in mind of this Penny Arcade cartoon about Braid: or as it was succinctly put nearby: "You’re mad about five dollars? What? Shove your five dollars up your stupid ass."
I thought C.K.'s statement asking people not to torrent it was pretty reasonable, all things considered. I've always said that J.R.R. Tolkien's comments in the first authorized Ballantine paperback edition of his trilogy was a good model for this sort of thing, and bears repeating:
It seems to me a grave discourtesy, to say no more, to issue my book without even a polite note informing me of the project... However that may be, this paperback edition and no other has been published with my consent and co-operation. Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will purchase it, and no other. And if the many kind readers who have encouraged me with their letters will add to their courtesy by referring friends or enquirers to Ballantine Books, I shall be very grateful.
I think if content industries in general and individual creators in particular had focused on this message from the beginning, this message of courtesy, of gratitude, and of enlisting one's partisans in the service of recommending others to the "authorized edition" of whatever work, there's little question it would have done much more good at little cost compared to the Keystone Kops slapstick of their ongoing attempts to stuff the digital genie back in the bottle via legal sword rattling, and useless DRM. Louis C.K.'s appeal certainly falls more to the former end of the spectrum.
I will say it would be nice, though, to see more creators engage this question in a more nuanced way, because it's actually a damn interesting grey area that really lights up the difference in most people's mind between the law and ethics and where both - but particularly ethics - are very slippery indeed. I'd like to hear someone owning up and engaging the fact that they are copyright cheats, because EVERYBODY is a copyright cheat. Everybody makes mix CDs, rips CDs they check out from the library and decide they really like, and watches or listens to what basically amount to bootlegs on YouTube and the like. Don't tell me there's any comedian out there between the ages of 35 and 55 who never wore out a bootleg cassette of some friend's comedy album when they were a teenager. It would be nice to see someone with significant skin in the game take on the question of advocating the ethical right of the creator to realize the benefit of an exclusive right to copy their own production without merely invoking the simplistic analogy of theft. It would be nice to see someone wrestle with the unquestionable benefits of things like the proliferation of old, often out of print intellectual property finding its way online by the agency of fan curators. I don't expect to hear it from Louis C.K. but it would be nice to hear it from someone.
This is the Paypal balance shown on a screen cap Louis C.K. posted in his latest update. I don't mean to be a suck up but I'm fairly impressed by how he is handling this. Making people feel good about having spent their money might also just be the smartest game there is in this wild west of pure digital distribution.
UPDATE: Louis C.K. posted a lengthy and interesting follow-up discussing the economics and results of his experiment. It's a good inside look at taking the reins of a creative project with a significant budget. I won't give away the ending but I can say I saw a lot of online commentary suggesting that this probably didn't represent much of an investment or much of a risk for him, which is clearly untrue.
You know: no snark, in fact. It's true, people like Louis C.K. do tend to be a little "look at this amazing idea I invented" when they embrace the paradigm of self-publishing in the digital realm. But you know, so what. It's still significant, and very positive, for an A list performer whose star is distinctly rising to go this direction, and to do it right - offering his latest performance recording as a high quality, unencumbered file, a straight download in a versatile format, for a modest price.
There's nothing really to complain about: you can moan about Paypal but you know, seriously: Paypal won. They have just simply won at internet. Yes they occasionally unleash their hounds on cringing bundles of fuzzy kittens and bunny rabbits for no particular reason. You want to complain about Paypal, at this point your only recourse would be to start a service that actually competes. I suppose you could point a finger at the price point as well, five bucks is cheap but it isn't necessarily stellar for an hour of entertainment. But this starts to get into quibbling that puts me in mind of this Penny Arcade cartoon about Braid: or as it was succinctly put nearby: "You’re mad about five dollars? What? Shove your five dollars up your stupid ass."
I thought C.K.'s statement asking people not to torrent it was pretty reasonable, all things considered. I've always said that J.R.R. Tolkien's comments in the first authorized Ballantine paperback edition of his trilogy was a good model for this sort of thing, and bears repeating:
It seems to me a grave discourtesy, to say no more, to issue my book without even a polite note informing me of the project... However that may be, this paperback edition and no other has been published with my consent and co-operation. Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will purchase it, and no other. And if the many kind readers who have encouraged me with their letters will add to their courtesy by referring friends or enquirers to Ballantine Books, I shall be very grateful.
I think if content industries in general and individual creators in particular had focused on this message from the beginning, this message of courtesy, of gratitude, and of enlisting one's partisans in the service of recommending others to the "authorized edition" of whatever work, there's little question it would have done much more good at little cost compared to the Keystone Kops slapstick of their ongoing attempts to stuff the digital genie back in the bottle via legal sword rattling, and useless DRM. Louis C.K.'s appeal certainly falls more to the former end of the spectrum.
I will say it would be nice, though, to see more creators engage this question in a more nuanced way, because it's actually a damn interesting grey area that really lights up the difference in most people's mind between the law and ethics and where both - but particularly ethics - are very slippery indeed. I'd like to hear someone owning up and engaging the fact that they are copyright cheats, because EVERYBODY is a copyright cheat. Everybody makes mix CDs, rips CDs they check out from the library and decide they really like, and watches or listens to what basically amount to bootlegs on YouTube and the like. Don't tell me there's any comedian out there between the ages of 35 and 55 who never wore out a bootleg cassette of some friend's comedy album when they were a teenager. It would be nice to see someone with significant skin in the game take on the question of advocating the ethical right of the creator to realize the benefit of an exclusive right to copy their own production without merely invoking the simplistic analogy of theft. It would be nice to see someone wrestle with the unquestionable benefits of things like the proliferation of old, often out of print intellectual property finding its way online by the agency of fan curators. I don't expect to hear it from Louis C.K. but it would be nice to hear it from someone.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Will Netflix's furious backpedaling arrest its share price tailspin?
And the answer is - as a non-stockholder, I don't really care. Now you probably recall my most recent Phreakshow post, in which I:
1) Reiterated my opinion that recent Netflix price increases were reasonable and expected and that people complaining about them were being "whiney", but
2) Complained about getting business communications in the form of "personal" communications from corporation executives
3) Complained about fake corporate apologies that don't actually fix anything
4) Called out the proposed division of Netflix into the Qwikster DVD service and the Netflix streaming service for adding complexity and organizational effort to the customer experience with no attendant consumer benefit
5) Offered thinly veiled insinuations that the Netflix business decisions were being driven by CEO Reed Hastings having a mid-life crisis over having made his fortune basically running a glorified direct-mail business, and finally
6) Pointed out that the real problem was Netflix's poor on-demand selection.
So, it's no secret that NFLX share prices have been diligently headed for the toilet since hitting an all-time July high near $300, and in particular have been in a scary plunge since mid-September, when they fell off the $200 cliff and proceeded to languish in the low $100s since. Given the nearly universal derision the Qwikster announcement got I was none too surprised (but certainly gratified) to get a notice in my inbox this morning letting me know that Netflix had decided to call the whole thing off.
Hey, wait a minute, let's take a glance over the notable qualities of this email...
1) It's a straightforward business announcement from "The Netflix Team"
2) It eschews explicit apology and affirms the necessity of recent price increases, but acknowledges customers didn't want the businesses to be split
3) Reverses the business split decision ("no change... no Qwikster") and finally
4) Announces a raft of additions to the streaming library and asserts a commitment to continually improving the streaming service.
Damn it Netflix, my day rate for business strategy consultation to publicly traded companies is $2500 and that is cheap, Greenspan charges six figures and look where his advice has gotten us. I've got to stop giving this gold away for free.
I suppose the other interpretation is that I have no credentials whatsoever to analyze business so I just rehash the mind-numbingly obvious but seriously, how likely is that?
And Reed... Sorry about the mid-life crisis crack.
1) Reiterated my opinion that recent Netflix price increases were reasonable and expected and that people complaining about them were being "whiney", but
2) Complained about getting business communications in the form of "personal" communications from corporation executives
3) Complained about fake corporate apologies that don't actually fix anything
4) Called out the proposed division of Netflix into the Qwikster DVD service and the Netflix streaming service for adding complexity and organizational effort to the customer experience with no attendant consumer benefit
5) Offered thinly veiled insinuations that the Netflix business decisions were being driven by CEO Reed Hastings having a mid-life crisis over having made his fortune basically running a glorified direct-mail business, and finally
6) Pointed out that the real problem was Netflix's poor on-demand selection.
So, it's no secret that NFLX share prices have been diligently headed for the toilet since hitting an all-time July high near $300, and in particular have been in a scary plunge since mid-September, when they fell off the $200 cliff and proceeded to languish in the low $100s since. Given the nearly universal derision the Qwikster announcement got I was none too surprised (but certainly gratified) to get a notice in my inbox this morning letting me know that Netflix had decided to call the whole thing off.
Hey, wait a minute, let's take a glance over the notable qualities of this email...
1) It's a straightforward business announcement from "The Netflix Team"
2) It eschews explicit apology and affirms the necessity of recent price increases, but acknowledges customers didn't want the businesses to be split
3) Reverses the business split decision ("no change... no Qwikster") and finally
4) Announces a raft of additions to the streaming library and asserts a commitment to continually improving the streaming service.
Damn it Netflix, my day rate for business strategy consultation to publicly traded companies is $2500 and that is cheap, Greenspan charges six figures and look where his advice has gotten us. I've got to stop giving this gold away for free.
I suppose the other interpretation is that I have no credentials whatsoever to analyze business so I just rehash the mind-numbingly obvious but seriously, how likely is that?
And Reed... Sorry about the mid-life crisis crack.
Monday, September 19, 2011
Parsing Netflix's Bizarre Non-Apology Business Announcement
I'm on record saying that I felt like people were being whiney when the started complaining about the separate and jack price maneuver Netflix pulled a while back. I'd been happy with the service, which at the end of the day provided easy access to a DVD library I'd never have been able to tap otherwise, at a reasonable price. They even dropped the price on me once. I got streaming for a long while for free, and seriously - when you're given something new to try out for free, who doesn't understand that this is an introductory offer?
Now I'm trying to figure out the next move, a mass email from CEO Reed Hastings (connected to a slightly longer blog post that invites all and sundry to Facebook back at it which, yeah, go fuck the devil in hell Reed Hastings) which is a sterling classic of that beloved genre "the corporation is sincerely sorry it inadvertently (and through no fault of its own) hurt your feelings while doing what honestly is just the best for everyone involved".
I was going to gloss over this but man I've got to take just a moment and note what's wrong with this sort of bullshit. First off, when you start a communication out with something like "I messed up. I owe everyone an explanation", the mind-space I am instantly transported to is a family meeting called by the liberal and enlightened and yet still somehow traditionally patriarchal Dad in one of the more serious episodes of an 80s-90s era sit com. An "Eight is Enough," "Family Ties," "Cosby Show" kind of touchy feely moment is imminent. I am an adult, a customer, a professional in my own right, okay? You want to communicate with me about the business we conduct by mutual consent, be a fucking professional.
Second, you did not hurt my feelings because you are not a person. I understand that Reed Hastings is a person but he is not a person I have any personal relationship with. Businesses do not hurt my feelings. I engage in commerce with them and the outcome is satisfaction, indifference, or me being pissed off. When you piss me off you can make one of two choices, you can apologize for screwing up and correct your error or you can say well, this is the way it is and if you don't like it you know where the door is. Communications like this one profess to be doing the former while actually delivering the latter. Do you think I'm stupid? Yeah that is actually a rhetorical question.
The only nut of any substance in this letter is that they are concretely dividing the businesses into the DVD mailing business, which they are renaming Qwikster, and the Streaming business, which is staying Netflix. I have to honestly consider the possibility that they chose a deliberately terrible name as a method of obfuscating discussion about what the real underlying business strategy at work is. One is left otherwise with the conclusion that nobody on the branding team bothered to notice, for example, the existing Qwikster account on Twitter, for example, or thought about the various phonetic associations with the name, such as the erstwhile identity of some transient facet of the Amway empire, or the mascot of a distinctly low-rent-tending powdered milk flavoring product...
All of which could distract a person from asking, what exactly is the benefit of this to me again? Because it seems like the only practical impact on me is going to be having to deal with twice as many websites and twice as many bills. The added video game upgrade might actually be something I want but I'd have to wait and see what the cost will be. The way my entertainment dollar is stretched right now, chances are it will be too high.
The explanation that the businesses are being separated because it is too difficult to keep them integrated seems pretty suspect, in fact. It's a straight loser for the customer, added complexity with no added functionality (that couldn't have been added to the service as it stands), and honestly, how much harder could it have been to separate the businesses internally while maintaining one name, one point for billing, and one point of entry on the internet (and for that matter, transacting the tiny bit of information relevant between the businesses, i.e. past viewing and rating information)?
A believable explanation (and I am very far from original in this suggestion) is that the DVD business is boring, and stagnant: it has gained more or less maximum market share, its price margins are mired in the physical realities of packaging and mailing - it is basically running a direct mail business, the kind of place that sends you that Valu-Pak of coupons that you throw into recycling without even opening it, which is, like, a very uncool business for a hep only barely fifty movin' and shakin' entrepreneur type to be in charge of. They are prepping it to sell, in a nutshell, to someone who will maybe maintain it in some semblance of its current form, or maybe steadily convert it into the ugly mail-order cousin of Redbox, where you can get your new releases mailed to you 2-3 weeks after the fact, and that weird little indie documentary you wanted? Yeah since the last copy of that broke in transit that is on backorder. ETA? Can't really say, no way to tell. Not the service you signed up for? No, it's not is it, it's QWIKSTER!
Of course the irony of all this is that I'm entirely ready to go all-streaming, I've got a fat ethernet pipe AND a robust wifi network in my damn basement, both connected to the teevee by various appliances. The fact that data disks are being driven around town and hand carried from the street to my home is literally offensive to my intellect. None of which (and none of the above corporate blather) addresses the tiny problem that Netflix's streaming selection is still just terrible.
Who knows, in other words, the enterprise is obviously in the grips of corporate aspiration which bears little resemblance to what customers want. I'm waiting to see how much of a pain in the ass dual account maintenance is, and what the details on that video game add-on are, and of course what goes down with the DVD-by-mail side. I'm rapidly going to lose my patience with Netflix streaming if they do not start beefing up their selection pronto. And I'm wondering if there's a very sincere email from Jeff Bezos in my future, letting me know that Amazon will be spinning off its physical item delivery business, for, you know, really everyone's good... maybe into an exciting new business we'll call, hmm, "Dumpster"?
Now I'm trying to figure out the next move, a mass email from CEO Reed Hastings (connected to a slightly longer blog post that invites all and sundry to Facebook back at it which, yeah, go fuck the devil in hell Reed Hastings) which is a sterling classic of that beloved genre "the corporation is sincerely sorry it inadvertently (and through no fault of its own) hurt your feelings while doing what honestly is just the best for everyone involved".
I was going to gloss over this but man I've got to take just a moment and note what's wrong with this sort of bullshit. First off, when you start a communication out with something like "I messed up. I owe everyone an explanation", the mind-space I am instantly transported to is a family meeting called by the liberal and enlightened and yet still somehow traditionally patriarchal Dad in one of the more serious episodes of an 80s-90s era sit com. An "Eight is Enough," "Family Ties," "Cosby Show" kind of touchy feely moment is imminent. I am an adult, a customer, a professional in my own right, okay? You want to communicate with me about the business we conduct by mutual consent, be a fucking professional.
Second, you did not hurt my feelings because you are not a person. I understand that Reed Hastings is a person but he is not a person I have any personal relationship with. Businesses do not hurt my feelings. I engage in commerce with them and the outcome is satisfaction, indifference, or me being pissed off. When you piss me off you can make one of two choices, you can apologize for screwing up and correct your error or you can say well, this is the way it is and if you don't like it you know where the door is. Communications like this one profess to be doing the former while actually delivering the latter. Do you think I'm stupid? Yeah that is actually a rhetorical question.
The only nut of any substance in this letter is that they are concretely dividing the businesses into the DVD mailing business, which they are renaming Qwikster, and the Streaming business, which is staying Netflix. I have to honestly consider the possibility that they chose a deliberately terrible name as a method of obfuscating discussion about what the real underlying business strategy at work is. One is left otherwise with the conclusion that nobody on the branding team bothered to notice, for example, the existing Qwikster account on Twitter, for example, or thought about the various phonetic associations with the name, such as the erstwhile identity of some transient facet of the Amway empire, or the mascot of a distinctly low-rent-tending powdered milk flavoring product...
All of which could distract a person from asking, what exactly is the benefit of this to me again? Because it seems like the only practical impact on me is going to be having to deal with twice as many websites and twice as many bills. The added video game upgrade might actually be something I want but I'd have to wait and see what the cost will be. The way my entertainment dollar is stretched right now, chances are it will be too high.
The explanation that the businesses are being separated because it is too difficult to keep them integrated seems pretty suspect, in fact. It's a straight loser for the customer, added complexity with no added functionality (that couldn't have been added to the service as it stands), and honestly, how much harder could it have been to separate the businesses internally while maintaining one name, one point for billing, and one point of entry on the internet (and for that matter, transacting the tiny bit of information relevant between the businesses, i.e. past viewing and rating information)?
A believable explanation (and I am very far from original in this suggestion) is that the DVD business is boring, and stagnant: it has gained more or less maximum market share, its price margins are mired in the physical realities of packaging and mailing - it is basically running a direct mail business, the kind of place that sends you that Valu-Pak of coupons that you throw into recycling without even opening it, which is, like, a very uncool business for a hep only barely fifty movin' and shakin' entrepreneur type to be in charge of. They are prepping it to sell, in a nutshell, to someone who will maybe maintain it in some semblance of its current form, or maybe steadily convert it into the ugly mail-order cousin of Redbox, where you can get your new releases mailed to you 2-3 weeks after the fact, and that weird little indie documentary you wanted? Yeah since the last copy of that broke in transit that is on backorder. ETA? Can't really say, no way to tell. Not the service you signed up for? No, it's not is it, it's QWIKSTER!
Of course the irony of all this is that I'm entirely ready to go all-streaming, I've got a fat ethernet pipe AND a robust wifi network in my damn basement, both connected to the teevee by various appliances. The fact that data disks are being driven around town and hand carried from the street to my home is literally offensive to my intellect. None of which (and none of the above corporate blather) addresses the tiny problem that Netflix's streaming selection is still just terrible.
Who knows, in other words, the enterprise is obviously in the grips of corporate aspiration which bears little resemblance to what customers want. I'm waiting to see how much of a pain in the ass dual account maintenance is, and what the details on that video game add-on are, and of course what goes down with the DVD-by-mail side. I'm rapidly going to lose my patience with Netflix streaming if they do not start beefing up their selection pronto. And I'm wondering if there's a very sincere email from Jeff Bezos in my future, letting me know that Amazon will be spinning off its physical item delivery business, for, you know, really everyone's good... maybe into an exciting new business we'll call, hmm, "Dumpster"?
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Speaking of Media Empires
If I could wave the magic wand I would be able to make a modest income (say that of a middle manager at a reasonably successful non-profit) engaging in my endless tinkering with text and sound and image (the last of these has received very short shrift in my digital presentation but it
meant a fair bit to me once).
In fact I suspect that if I really threw myself into it I could succeed in this ambition, at least with writing, even in the treacherous mutant-infested cesspool that is 21st century freelancing. I strongly suspect that I would effectively end up working 60 hours a week and 80 percent of that would be hustling. I hate hustling. I'm bad at it and it makes me feel sad. Which is why I'm leaning strongly towards just getting a job: it's more straightforward, more lucrative, and it doesn't burden the "art" with any responsibility of financial sustenance. A better person (or a better artist) might find some method of avoiding these compromises. I in fact think I feel okay about how it is all trending.
But if I had my druthers... if I had my magic wand... if I had an oil tycoon instead of a country minister for a father and a fat trust fund... Maybe I'd try to get the Media Empire rolling - it's hard to resist in the face of how utterly dumb so much of this in-between stage current media distribution paradigm is set up. My own little despotic News Corp., which would subsidize these idiosyncratic scrawlings and all the rest.
So it has been interesting (by way of revealing that these personal musings have all been virtually unrelated preamble), if intermittently envy-inspiring, to watch the development of the New Media Empire that is Penny Arcade (who don't need any linkies from the likes of me) happening in real time. It's one of these things that just absolutely shouldn't have worked. There's no need to retread the story, or to point out the qualities that are making the thing a legitimate empire which now has enough of a moat dug in its top tier events and merch that it's not likely to be easily toppled by, say, waning popularity of the core strip (not to say this is happening or going to anytime soon).
Over the last several years the maturity of the thing as a business has been evident in a perceptibly increasing drive to diversify the media product base. There's a video section now, a couple of games that did well enough (though apparently not well enough to finish the proposed trilogy). The strip hosts the occasional experimental continuities, some of which are spinning off products of their own.
Finally I have arrived at my point, which is you should check out The Trenches (starting out at the beginning there, for reasons I'll shortly elucidate). I've been on the fence about it. It's a weird strip, relatively devoid of jokes and gags, defined by continuity and off to a very slow start (the opposite of Penny Arcade in other words). It's on something like the tenth strip and I just this day figured it out and was surprised to find myself somewhat actually invested in the story. What it is, in fact, is a three-panel comic narrative serial, which is something of an odd beast, the kind of thing that thrived in the golden age of newspapers.
And now, because of the incredibly slow start and the absolutely terrible job they're doing at presenting it (the thing has been around for a solid month now and the "New Reader" link still directs to a perplexing content-free placeholder page as opposed to, say, some indication of what the hell you're reading, directions to start at the beginning if you need to, directions to a "catch up" page with links and precis of the comics or something so I can get caught up when I forget the thing exists for a couple weeks as opposed to the endless clicking around with these wretched things - << < > >> - oh and how about a feed link since the "what's new" ticker thing at the top of the redesigned PA page says there is "new Trenches" 100% of the time and consequently is right twice a week but contains no useful information by virtue of being wrong the other 5 days, and don't even get me started about the old-link-puking broken PA feed) - not to mention the terrible job they're doing at promoting it (the what's new ticker, again, by virtue of saying the same stuff pretty much all the time, has become invisible to me and I presume anyone else who visits the main PA site regularly), it is never mentioned on the PA weblog, which has got to be one of the more abused, under-utilized bully-pulpits in the internet, co-creator Scott Kurtz doesn't even have a LINK to the damn thing on his PvP site, no not even a teensy-weensy one under the "Other Stuff I Do" heading in the lower left-hand corner of his website (P.S. Mr. Kurtz the PvP page also lacks a link their to your "TV" show you did a large and frankly undeservedly successful Kickstarter for which is also posted at the biggest gaming webcomic site on the internet as you might recall, what, are you afraid of diluting your brand? ARRGH), by virtue of all this, I'm worried the damn thing is going to tank and get scrapped now that I'm just getting interested.
The preceding paragraph was a sentence approximately half of which was parenthetical asides which raises questions about my credentials in critiquing readability but then again I don't exactly have a payroll over here. Seriously, Penny Arcade, do you not have anyone doing user experience over there? Because if you do they need an assistant or something.
meant a fair bit to me once).
In fact I suspect that if I really threw myself into it I could succeed in this ambition, at least with writing, even in the treacherous mutant-infested cesspool that is 21st century freelancing. I strongly suspect that I would effectively end up working 60 hours a week and 80 percent of that would be hustling. I hate hustling. I'm bad at it and it makes me feel sad. Which is why I'm leaning strongly towards just getting a job: it's more straightforward, more lucrative, and it doesn't burden the "art" with any responsibility of financial sustenance. A better person (or a better artist) might find some method of avoiding these compromises. I in fact think I feel okay about how it is all trending.
But if I had my druthers... if I had my magic wand... if I had an oil tycoon instead of a country minister for a father and a fat trust fund... Maybe I'd try to get the Media Empire rolling - it's hard to resist in the face of how utterly dumb so much of this in-between stage current media distribution paradigm is set up. My own little despotic News Corp., which would subsidize these idiosyncratic scrawlings and all the rest.
So it has been interesting (by way of revealing that these personal musings have all been virtually unrelated preamble), if intermittently envy-inspiring, to watch the development of the New Media Empire that is Penny Arcade (who don't need any linkies from the likes of me) happening in real time. It's one of these things that just absolutely shouldn't have worked. There's no need to retread the story, or to point out the qualities that are making the thing a legitimate empire which now has enough of a moat dug in its top tier events and merch that it's not likely to be easily toppled by, say, waning popularity of the core strip (not to say this is happening or going to anytime soon).
Over the last several years the maturity of the thing as a business has been evident in a perceptibly increasing drive to diversify the media product base. There's a video section now, a couple of games that did well enough (though apparently not well enough to finish the proposed trilogy). The strip hosts the occasional experimental continuities, some of which are spinning off products of their own.
Finally I have arrived at my point, which is you should check out The Trenches (starting out at the beginning there, for reasons I'll shortly elucidate). I've been on the fence about it. It's a weird strip, relatively devoid of jokes and gags, defined by continuity and off to a very slow start (the opposite of Penny Arcade in other words). It's on something like the tenth strip and I just this day figured it out and was surprised to find myself somewhat actually invested in the story. What it is, in fact, is a three-panel comic narrative serial, which is something of an odd beast, the kind of thing that thrived in the golden age of newspapers.
And now, because of the incredibly slow start and the absolutely terrible job they're doing at presenting it (the thing has been around for a solid month now and the "New Reader" link still directs to a perplexing content-free placeholder page as opposed to, say, some indication of what the hell you're reading, directions to start at the beginning if you need to, directions to a "catch up" page with links and precis of the comics or something so I can get caught up when I forget the thing exists for a couple weeks as opposed to the endless clicking around with these wretched things - << < > >> - oh and how about a feed link since the "what's new" ticker thing at the top of the redesigned PA page says there is "new Trenches" 100% of the time and consequently is right twice a week but contains no useful information by virtue of being wrong the other 5 days, and don't even get me started about the old-link-puking broken PA feed) - not to mention the terrible job they're doing at promoting it (the what's new ticker, again, by virtue of saying the same stuff pretty much all the time, has become invisible to me and I presume anyone else who visits the main PA site regularly), it is never mentioned on the PA weblog, which has got to be one of the more abused, under-utilized bully-pulpits in the internet, co-creator Scott Kurtz doesn't even have a LINK to the damn thing on his PvP site, no not even a teensy-weensy one under the "Other Stuff I Do" heading in the lower left-hand corner of his website (P.S. Mr. Kurtz the PvP page also lacks a link their to your "TV" show you did a large and frankly undeservedly successful Kickstarter for which is also posted at the biggest gaming webcomic site on the internet as you might recall, what, are you afraid of diluting your brand? ARRGH), by virtue of all this, I'm worried the damn thing is going to tank and get scrapped now that I'm just getting interested.
The preceding paragraph was a sentence approximately half of which was parenthetical asides which raises questions about my credentials in critiquing readability but then again I don't exactly have a payroll over here. Seriously, Penny Arcade, do you not have anyone doing user experience over there? Because if you do they need an assistant or something.
Thursday, September 08, 2011
eBooks and the moat of legacy media
I have a moderate collection of books. Too many, it seems, as I find myself adding another shelving unit to the fray and going through yet another cull of the detritus trying to get down to a collection that will actually fit on the shelves. Most of the obvious chaff was ejected in several prior purges and now it's getting down to battling with my ingrained proclivities... the mid-twentieth-century how to manuals that call to me from the shelves of friends of public library bookstores, that I almost never open, the works of great literature I generally fervently avoid but apparently feel add some sort of intellectual weight to my stacks, and most of all the indifferent mass-market paperback bindings of so-called "classic" works of speculative fiction, mostly science fiction. Which is what got me thinking about Dune.
I have no idea how this 1984 Berkley Books edition of what is frequently cited as the bestselling work of science fiction of all time ended up in my possession, aside from the fact that I'm confident I didn't buy it new, and have certainly owned it less than half of its 27 year sojourn on this earth. It's in good enough shape for reading: the binding is intact though well creased on the spine. The only marks of prior ownership it bears are the words effluvia and sussuration (sic) scrawled in small but untidy lowercase ballpoint printing inside the back cover, legacy of some reader presumably out to increase their word power. The pages are uniformly yellow but not brittle. Aside from the random vocab jotting this precis would probably account for an uncomfortable number of the books in my collection, hence the necessity of vigilant culling: when a collection like this won't fit on the shelves and starts to develop "symmetrical book stacking" behaviors you aren't a collector, you're merely a hoarder.
I've read this particular copy at least once. I read Dune at least once before that, probably my dad's copy when I was a teenager. I may have read it once before, maybe the one I own, but I doubt I've read it more than three times or I would remember it better. I barely remember it at all, other than the broad sketch of the plot. Coming across my dingy paperback inspired no desire to reread it at all. What it mainly got me thinking about were the economics.
This edition, the 31st printing, sold new for $3.95. What I actually paid for mine I don't know, as it bears no mark of its used price, but I'd be surprised if it was more than two dollars. Inflation calculators tells me $3.95 is around eight dollars in today's money. I recently picked up a new copy of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's seminal The Mote in God's Eye, cover price $7.99, so I guess reprints of classic sci-fi books are following standard inflationary models pretty well.
Conventionally printed books, that is. Out of curiosity I clicked around Amazon and found that the Kindle edition of the 40th Anniversary edition of Dune was available for immediate download for... $14.99.
This is the only legal eBook edition of Dune cursory searching produced and I can't help but think it an indication that the economics of eBooks are still a little bit, well, fucked. This is a book that is so thoroughly already done being written (let us not speak of the endless sequels) that its author has been dead for a good quarter of a century. It is being sold in a form that requires no physical production and no transportation and it costs almost twice as much as a bog standard new paperback, and that is if you are utterly unwilling to shop around at all. To say nothing of the $139 I'd have to shell out to be able to read it in the first place. I'm willing to allow that the economics of publishing are no doubt complicated and that the market has produced this as a "fair" price. But the undeniable conclusion it leads me to is that eBooks are still very much a commodity intended for individuals with substantial disposable income.
I haven't pulled the trigger on acquiring one of these electronic bookulators yet, which would probably not come as a surprise to anyone who knows me: I am a notorious late adopter of new technologies. The prices are getting into the range where it is rapidly becoming an inevitability, but things like this are still sufficient to give me pause. What would seem to be the substantial economic benefits of not actually printing words on sheets of paper, cutting them, binding them, boxing and shipping them, don't appear to be making it into the economics of conventionally published, mass-produced popular fiction with much reliability. In the end this may not really impact my eventual purchase of a digital reader much: I'm far more drawn by the allure of the deep font of the public domain available for free through agencies like Project Gutenberg. But I also do not think I will stop dipping into the massive moat of printing's long legacy - all those billions of cheap, crummy paperbacks, aging very slowly on shelves, old enough to vote, to drink, in some cases old enough to be having a solid mid-life crisis in some Minnesota basement (my almost flawless copy of Critique of Pure Reason was printed in 1966). And I don't think I will be replacing my copy of Dune with digital ephemera any time soon.
I have no idea how this 1984 Berkley Books edition of what is frequently cited as the bestselling work of science fiction of all time ended up in my possession, aside from the fact that I'm confident I didn't buy it new, and have certainly owned it less than half of its 27 year sojourn on this earth. It's in good enough shape for reading: the binding is intact though well creased on the spine. The only marks of prior ownership it bears are the words effluvia and sussuration (sic) scrawled in small but untidy lowercase ballpoint printing inside the back cover, legacy of some reader presumably out to increase their word power. The pages are uniformly yellow but not brittle. Aside from the random vocab jotting this precis would probably account for an uncomfortable number of the books in my collection, hence the necessity of vigilant culling: when a collection like this won't fit on the shelves and starts to develop "symmetrical book stacking" behaviors you aren't a collector, you're merely a hoarder.
I've read this particular copy at least once. I read Dune at least once before that, probably my dad's copy when I was a teenager. I may have read it once before, maybe the one I own, but I doubt I've read it more than three times or I would remember it better. I barely remember it at all, other than the broad sketch of the plot. Coming across my dingy paperback inspired no desire to reread it at all. What it mainly got me thinking about were the economics.
This edition, the 31st printing, sold new for $3.95. What I actually paid for mine I don't know, as it bears no mark of its used price, but I'd be surprised if it was more than two dollars. Inflation calculators tells me $3.95 is around eight dollars in today's money. I recently picked up a new copy of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's seminal The Mote in God's Eye, cover price $7.99, so I guess reprints of classic sci-fi books are following standard inflationary models pretty well.
Conventionally printed books, that is. Out of curiosity I clicked around Amazon and found that the Kindle edition of the 40th Anniversary edition of Dune was available for immediate download for... $14.99.
This is the only legal eBook edition of Dune cursory searching produced and I can't help but think it an indication that the economics of eBooks are still a little bit, well, fucked. This is a book that is so thoroughly already done being written (let us not speak of the endless sequels) that its author has been dead for a good quarter of a century. It is being sold in a form that requires no physical production and no transportation and it costs almost twice as much as a bog standard new paperback, and that is if you are utterly unwilling to shop around at all. To say nothing of the $139 I'd have to shell out to be able to read it in the first place. I'm willing to allow that the economics of publishing are no doubt complicated and that the market has produced this as a "fair" price. But the undeniable conclusion it leads me to is that eBooks are still very much a commodity intended for individuals with substantial disposable income.
I haven't pulled the trigger on acquiring one of these electronic bookulators yet, which would probably not come as a surprise to anyone who knows me: I am a notorious late adopter of new technologies. The prices are getting into the range where it is rapidly becoming an inevitability, but things like this are still sufficient to give me pause. What would seem to be the substantial economic benefits of not actually printing words on sheets of paper, cutting them, binding them, boxing and shipping them, don't appear to be making it into the economics of conventionally published, mass-produced popular fiction with much reliability. In the end this may not really impact my eventual purchase of a digital reader much: I'm far more drawn by the allure of the deep font of the public domain available for free through agencies like Project Gutenberg. But I also do not think I will stop dipping into the massive moat of printing's long legacy - all those billions of cheap, crummy paperbacks, aging very slowly on shelves, old enough to vote, to drink, in some cases old enough to be having a solid mid-life crisis in some Minnesota basement (my almost flawless copy of Critique of Pure Reason was printed in 1966). And I don't think I will be replacing my copy of Dune with digital ephemera any time soon.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
kick in the pants
"It is necessary for me... To apply myself industriously to whatever business I take in hand, and not divert my mind from my business by any foolish project of growing suddenly rich"
Benjamin Franklin
I am as susceptible to the allure of the idea of "sudden" riches as the next person, and perhaps it is innate (or at least as good as innate in a world where by the designs of the already rich we are inundated almost perpetually by stark totemic spectacles scientifically designed to provoke desires that can only be answered by the application of lucre), and thus the reliability of such contrivances as the lottery. The other day the little man noticed the scratch ticket machine in the grocery store and there was nothing for it, after I explained the basic premise of gambling to him, but to have one to investigate at home. It was melancholy to witness the hope shining in his relatively guileless eyes as we scratched our ways fruitlessly through the stupid multiple games they put on the big cards to scratch some monkey-itch desire to believe that one ticket represents more than one chance of very unfavorable odds. I explained again and again that there was virtually no chance of winning but it didn't matter: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, you know. How long did it take reality to genuinely beat the idea that narrative logic had any relevance to the actual working of events in your life out of me?
Thank god we got nothing, I suppose, a couple hundred dollars, say, is a depressing and meaningless pittance to me in the era of child, mortgage, ten-year-old car and real doctor bills on a regular basis. The lesson it would have taught him would have been incalculably damaging. So I guess it was worth the 20 bucks.
Now the internet presents this fresh allure, in theory everyone in the world could see your scheme and buy you your own personal off-label lottery, right? Indeed there seems to be some sort of invisible-hand type force that dictates projects of the lamest nature must appear -and succeed- on a regular basis. And a million imitators that fail unseen. Full many a gem of purest ray serene indeed.
So I was impressed by the numbers Kickstarter published to celebrate their birthday a few weeks ago. 43% is a very respectable success rate for projects overall and the fact that 85% of the money pledged is collected is even more impressive (and suggests that projects tend to fail definitively and early). My understanding is that Kickstarter juries the projects to some degree which makes it a bit less impressive, of course it is impossible to know how much true dross they reject out front.
All of which has merely been in service of giving me a chance to vent a pet peeve about the Kickstarter universe: stop offering lame-ass rewards!
1. Undying gratitude, and/or my name on a list. For any amount of money, no matter how shitty. These are not rewards. Thanks and acknowledgement are the expected minimum follow up to successful begging. If nothing else, buttons and stickers can be produced by anyone for a pittance, and quickly enough that it is not even necessary to invest a penny in advance.
2. Cooking me dinner, baking me cookies, cleaning my kitchen or anything else that has nothing to do with whatever personal competency you're trying to sell in the real project. Especially for 500 dollars or whatever. I'm not interested in your being in my home, doing things I can do myself for nothing or next to it.
3. Flying to my city to have dinner with me or whatever the hell, especially for 10,000 dollars. The overhead is actually terrible compared to the pledge size (you can get over 90% on giving away buttons for $5 pledges without even shopping around; try and do any serious travel and entertaining for less than a thousand), you're blowing days of your time that nobody who is trying to make a go of living on the virtue of creative projects can spare, and you're suggesting that your presence is worth ten grand.
You're not a celebrity, and if you were I wouldn't fund your damn Kickstarter because seriously, don't you have enough advantages already? If your project produces no product that anyone would want to pay for, maybe you don't actually have any good rationalization for asking other people to pay for its existence.
Franklin's prescription for reliable wealth, looking to the source of the quote above, was the application of "industry and patience." Speaking of which I best get back to work.
Benjamin Franklin
I am as susceptible to the allure of the idea of "sudden" riches as the next person, and perhaps it is innate (or at least as good as innate in a world where by the designs of the already rich we are inundated almost perpetually by stark totemic spectacles scientifically designed to provoke desires that can only be answered by the application of lucre), and thus the reliability of such contrivances as the lottery. The other day the little man noticed the scratch ticket machine in the grocery store and there was nothing for it, after I explained the basic premise of gambling to him, but to have one to investigate at home. It was melancholy to witness the hope shining in his relatively guileless eyes as we scratched our ways fruitlessly through the stupid multiple games they put on the big cards to scratch some monkey-itch desire to believe that one ticket represents more than one chance of very unfavorable odds. I explained again and again that there was virtually no chance of winning but it didn't matter: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, you know. How long did it take reality to genuinely beat the idea that narrative logic had any relevance to the actual working of events in your life out of me?
Thank god we got nothing, I suppose, a couple hundred dollars, say, is a depressing and meaningless pittance to me in the era of child, mortgage, ten-year-old car and real doctor bills on a regular basis. The lesson it would have taught him would have been incalculably damaging. So I guess it was worth the 20 bucks.
Now the internet presents this fresh allure, in theory everyone in the world could see your scheme and buy you your own personal off-label lottery, right? Indeed there seems to be some sort of invisible-hand type force that dictates projects of the lamest nature must appear -and succeed- on a regular basis. And a million imitators that fail unseen. Full many a gem of purest ray serene indeed.
So I was impressed by the numbers Kickstarter published to celebrate their birthday a few weeks ago. 43% is a very respectable success rate for projects overall and the fact that 85% of the money pledged is collected is even more impressive (and suggests that projects tend to fail definitively and early). My understanding is that Kickstarter juries the projects to some degree which makes it a bit less impressive, of course it is impossible to know how much true dross they reject out front.
All of which has merely been in service of giving me a chance to vent a pet peeve about the Kickstarter universe: stop offering lame-ass rewards!
1. Undying gratitude, and/or my name on a list. For any amount of money, no matter how shitty. These are not rewards. Thanks and acknowledgement are the expected minimum follow up to successful begging. If nothing else, buttons and stickers can be produced by anyone for a pittance, and quickly enough that it is not even necessary to invest a penny in advance.
2. Cooking me dinner, baking me cookies, cleaning my kitchen or anything else that has nothing to do with whatever personal competency you're trying to sell in the real project. Especially for 500 dollars or whatever. I'm not interested in your being in my home, doing things I can do myself for nothing or next to it.
3. Flying to my city to have dinner with me or whatever the hell, especially for 10,000 dollars. The overhead is actually terrible compared to the pledge size (you can get over 90% on giving away buttons for $5 pledges without even shopping around; try and do any serious travel and entertaining for less than a thousand), you're blowing days of your time that nobody who is trying to make a go of living on the virtue of creative projects can spare, and you're suggesting that your presence is worth ten grand.
You're not a celebrity, and if you were I wouldn't fund your damn Kickstarter because seriously, don't you have enough advantages already? If your project produces no product that anyone would want to pay for, maybe you don't actually have any good rationalization for asking other people to pay for its existence.
Franklin's prescription for reliable wealth, looking to the source of the quote above, was the application of "industry and patience." Speaking of which I best get back to work.
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Nine Nights in Azeroth, Chapter 3: Hell Is Something Something
Chapters: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
Early in my brief hunting career in Azeroth I had one of those “World of Tomorrow” moments, which is to say a thing happened that reminded me of something I’d read in a science fiction book. I was loitering around in an inn, doing I recall not what, when some other player characters came blowing through, in apparent rapid pursuit of some gripping mission... and passed right through me.
If these avatars were real people in a real street, Hiro wouldn’t be able to reach the entrance. It’s way too crowded. But the computer system that operates the Street has better things to do than to monitor every one of the millions of people there, trying to prevent them from running into each other. It doesn’t bother trying to solve this incredibly difficult problem. On the Street, avatars just walk right through each other.
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
It took me a while to figure it out (although not the, uh, year and a quarter since I wrote the last installment in this now truly laughably attenuated series of articles about playing a videogame for a week like two years ago) but I eventually realized that what had really struck me at that moment wasn’t a fairly mundane usability hack that a speculative writer happened to foresee a couple decades prior. What that moment had done was to finally impress on my mind that those were other real people and they were really there. We could see each other. We could interact, form a relationship of some description.
It’s a little philosophy 101 to suggest that human “reality” is at least in part the result of the consensus among all our disparate and sometimes contradictory points of view (floating in their diverse stews of personal internal metaphysics). Philosophical, perhaps, but pragmatic as well: things like money don’t make any sense at all without consensus, but there’s little argument that money is a primary factor in things that are not just shaping human society but quite actively changing massive physical realities on a planetary scale. (And perhaps it is quite understandable that Neal Stephenson went on to write 4 massive books in which the puzzle of money and currency are dominant plot elements, and is said to be currently writing a thriller involving money laundering through the baroque practice of gold farming in the online gaming world).
Perhaps the lesson is that the technological barrier that had to be overcome for virtual reality to really become something akin to what it was in the story books had very little to do with input/output peripherals - image resolution, binocular vision, sensor-studded gloves and the like - and a whole lot to do with the communications technology that allowed geographically separated people to share the same experience in as close to real time as made any difference. A premise that the aficionados of text-based MUDs of not all that yore might have nodded long before most people were aware there was such a thing as being “online.”
(9 Nights in Azeroth, a series of 5 short essays on playing World of Warcraft for a little over a week 2 years ago, WILL be completed before the world ends in 2012. If the world ends before that all bets are off, who could have seen that coming?)
Early in my brief hunting career in Azeroth I had one of those “World of Tomorrow” moments, which is to say a thing happened that reminded me of something I’d read in a science fiction book. I was loitering around in an inn, doing I recall not what, when some other player characters came blowing through, in apparent rapid pursuit of some gripping mission... and passed right through me.
If these avatars were real people in a real street, Hiro wouldn’t be able to reach the entrance. It’s way too crowded. But the computer system that operates the Street has better things to do than to monitor every one of the millions of people there, trying to prevent them from running into each other. It doesn’t bother trying to solve this incredibly difficult problem. On the Street, avatars just walk right through each other.
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
It took me a while to figure it out (although not the, uh, year and a quarter since I wrote the last installment in this now truly laughably attenuated series of articles about playing a videogame for a week like two years ago) but I eventually realized that what had really struck me at that moment wasn’t a fairly mundane usability hack that a speculative writer happened to foresee a couple decades prior. What that moment had done was to finally impress on my mind that those were other real people and they were really there. We could see each other. We could interact, form a relationship of some description.
It’s a little philosophy 101 to suggest that human “reality” is at least in part the result of the consensus among all our disparate and sometimes contradictory points of view (floating in their diverse stews of personal internal metaphysics). Philosophical, perhaps, but pragmatic as well: things like money don’t make any sense at all without consensus, but there’s little argument that money is a primary factor in things that are not just shaping human society but quite actively changing massive physical realities on a planetary scale. (And perhaps it is quite understandable that Neal Stephenson went on to write 4 massive books in which the puzzle of money and currency are dominant plot elements, and is said to be currently writing a thriller involving money laundering through the baroque practice of gold farming in the online gaming world).
Perhaps the lesson is that the technological barrier that had to be overcome for virtual reality to really become something akin to what it was in the story books had very little to do with input/output peripherals - image resolution, binocular vision, sensor-studded gloves and the like - and a whole lot to do with the communications technology that allowed geographically separated people to share the same experience in as close to real time as made any difference. A premise that the aficionados of text-based MUDs of not all that yore might have nodded long before most people were aware there was such a thing as being “online.”
(9 Nights in Azeroth, a series of 5 short essays on playing World of Warcraft for a little over a week 2 years ago, WILL be completed before the world ends in 2012. If the world ends before that all bets are off, who could have seen that coming?)
Saturday, February 12, 2011
eMusic the Third
So I've written about eMusic twice before (1, 2) and I suspect this will be the last time. My current annual subscription comes up in March and my strong inclination at the moment is that I won't renew it, ending a four year experiment.
From a straight financial perspective I think that eMusic is probably technically still a reasonably good deal - provided you feel like you would actually want to spend whatever the statutory requirement of your contract dictates in their store anyway, doing so month in month out is likely going to give you more music for your dollar than spending the same at Amazon, iTunes and the like.
But. The shifts made in the most recent transition have appreciably cut into the savings for the customer shopping at eMusic. They have also transparently paved the way for chipping at the bargain factor of eMusic purchases in an incremental and confusing way. In a nutshell the new order at eMusic simply requires me to think too much about whether and how I buy music - and for that deal, you don't get to demand that I pay in advance.
Good things first, they expanded the catalog again, they've got most everything now, this has been the sugar they've been pushing with the medicine of costlier music all along. There are some new customer service areas, look at this bargain on headphones and buy your concert ticket here and download the free track of the day you will never listen to again. I've perused it all a couple of times and it made basically no impact on me. But I didn't actually hate it or anything.
Downsides: a substantial cost increase. It's hard to say exactly how substantial, which is part of the problem. The credit system of pricing has been eliminated: everything is priced on a cash basis now. With this shift has come variable track pricing (very generally, the standard price is .49 per track, but popular tracks often price out at .79). Album prices are frequently completely disconnected from the per-track price and they're all over the map.
Against this I'm getting a $5 monthly bonus for some reason - maybe because I'm an annual subscriber? Maybe as some sort of retention bonus? Various other small retention bonuses, rewards for reviewing tracks have cropped up. You begin to see the problem? I would get into some serious tracking and math to figure out just what sort of deal I'm getting. And I've got a feeling this is just exactly the point. The version of eMusic I started out with was straightforward: tracks cost me 24-25 cents. Every change since - album only pricing, 12 credit albums (pretty much, exceptions may apply etc.), the shift to cash basis and variable track pricing - has made it all but impossible to figure out what I'm actually paying for music.
And this doesn't work out so great for eMusic because it makes me give the various deals, bonuses, and such forth a pass and just look at most obvious comparisons, which is that I went roughly from 24 to 36 to 49 cents or more a track, all in the course of less than 2 years.
The prices have crawled into the range of the other download stores now. I feel like I have to shop around whenever I buy an album. Beastie Boys License to Ill, $7.27 on eMusic, $7.99 on Amazon. Sting's Nothing Like the Sun $5.88 at eMusic, $9.49 at Amazon. Talking Heads Remain in Light $4.52 on sale at eMusic, 7.92 at Amazon.
Kanye West My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, $8.99 at eMusic, $4.99 at Amazon.
Barely a deal, a couple of decent deals (but unlikely to dip below a 40% discount it seems), a terrible deal.
Further, eMusic has finally broken the ground to basically change the deal with their customers without further notice. Bump more tracks up to 79 cents. Eliminate full album deals, change the price to the added up track price. Add more track prices between the high and low end. Add a higher high end. I don't want to have to pay this much attention.
What this stands alongside are the things that have always been a straightforward downside to the eMusic deal: the subscription requirement and the failure to roll over unused credit at the end of the month. Maybe it is purely psychological but the conversion to cash pricing has greatly reduced my tolerance for these conditions. My attitude has gone from viewing it as a subscription fee guaranteeing me access to a minimum monthly volume of music, to seeing it as a mandatory spending minimum I am required to pay in advance.
Where this leads me to is not entirely eMusic's fault but on the other hand I find it hard to believe my situation is particularly unique. It's 2011 and the American economy has been in the tank for basically ten years. Like everyone else in the heavily squeezed, rapidly vanishing middle class, I've got a weather eye constantly on the future and there is nothing non-essential that's not potentially on the chopping block. My iTunes catalog* has almost 25 straight days of audio in it, over 9,000** tracks. It's all legal: the combined CD collections of two adults plus ten years on the digital marketplace. I can't make much sense in this state of maintaining a mandatory monthly music budget. eMusic will definitely still make sense for many. I don't think it makes sense for me any longer.
*iTunes as my music management software, not the store, I'm sure less than 1% of my collection actually came from the iTunes store.
**Actually true and unintentional, still, LOL.
From a straight financial perspective I think that eMusic is probably technically still a reasonably good deal - provided you feel like you would actually want to spend whatever the statutory requirement of your contract dictates in their store anyway, doing so month in month out is likely going to give you more music for your dollar than spending the same at Amazon, iTunes and the like.
But. The shifts made in the most recent transition have appreciably cut into the savings for the customer shopping at eMusic. They have also transparently paved the way for chipping at the bargain factor of eMusic purchases in an incremental and confusing way. In a nutshell the new order at eMusic simply requires me to think too much about whether and how I buy music - and for that deal, you don't get to demand that I pay in advance.
Good things first, they expanded the catalog again, they've got most everything now, this has been the sugar they've been pushing with the medicine of costlier music all along. There are some new customer service areas, look at this bargain on headphones and buy your concert ticket here and download the free track of the day you will never listen to again. I've perused it all a couple of times and it made basically no impact on me. But I didn't actually hate it or anything.
Downsides: a substantial cost increase. It's hard to say exactly how substantial, which is part of the problem. The credit system of pricing has been eliminated: everything is priced on a cash basis now. With this shift has come variable track pricing (very generally, the standard price is .49 per track, but popular tracks often price out at .79). Album prices are frequently completely disconnected from the per-track price and they're all over the map.
Against this I'm getting a $5 monthly bonus for some reason - maybe because I'm an annual subscriber? Maybe as some sort of retention bonus? Various other small retention bonuses, rewards for reviewing tracks have cropped up. You begin to see the problem? I would get into some serious tracking and math to figure out just what sort of deal I'm getting. And I've got a feeling this is just exactly the point. The version of eMusic I started out with was straightforward: tracks cost me 24-25 cents. Every change since - album only pricing, 12 credit albums (pretty much, exceptions may apply etc.), the shift to cash basis and variable track pricing - has made it all but impossible to figure out what I'm actually paying for music.
And this doesn't work out so great for eMusic because it makes me give the various deals, bonuses, and such forth a pass and just look at most obvious comparisons, which is that I went roughly from 24 to 36 to 49 cents or more a track, all in the course of less than 2 years.
The prices have crawled into the range of the other download stores now. I feel like I have to shop around whenever I buy an album. Beastie Boys License to Ill, $7.27 on eMusic, $7.99 on Amazon. Sting's Nothing Like the Sun $5.88 at eMusic, $9.49 at Amazon. Talking Heads Remain in Light $4.52 on sale at eMusic, 7.92 at Amazon.
Kanye West My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, $8.99 at eMusic, $4.99 at Amazon.
Barely a deal, a couple of decent deals (but unlikely to dip below a 40% discount it seems), a terrible deal.
Further, eMusic has finally broken the ground to basically change the deal with their customers without further notice. Bump more tracks up to 79 cents. Eliminate full album deals, change the price to the added up track price. Add more track prices between the high and low end. Add a higher high end. I don't want to have to pay this much attention.
What this stands alongside are the things that have always been a straightforward downside to the eMusic deal: the subscription requirement and the failure to roll over unused credit at the end of the month. Maybe it is purely psychological but the conversion to cash pricing has greatly reduced my tolerance for these conditions. My attitude has gone from viewing it as a subscription fee guaranteeing me access to a minimum monthly volume of music, to seeing it as a mandatory spending minimum I am required to pay in advance.
Where this leads me to is not entirely eMusic's fault but on the other hand I find it hard to believe my situation is particularly unique. It's 2011 and the American economy has been in the tank for basically ten years. Like everyone else in the heavily squeezed, rapidly vanishing middle class, I've got a weather eye constantly on the future and there is nothing non-essential that's not potentially on the chopping block. My iTunes catalog* has almost 25 straight days of audio in it, over 9,000** tracks. It's all legal: the combined CD collections of two adults plus ten years on the digital marketplace. I can't make much sense in this state of maintaining a mandatory monthly music budget. eMusic will definitely still make sense for many. I don't think it makes sense for me any longer.
*iTunes as my music management software, not the store, I'm sure less than 1% of my collection actually came from the iTunes store.
**Actually true and unintentional, still, LOL.
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