I am super looking forward to game designer Jonathan Blow’s upcoming game The Witness. Playing his surprise hit platform puzzler Braid gave me enormous respect for him as a designer and innovator in the medium. Reading that he is essentially gambling all the money gained by Braid’s success on bringing his vision for The Witness to life just increases that respect.
But to be clear, what excites me about The Witness is the prospect of learning its game play, working the puzzles and seeing how they interact towards the game’s climactic elements. What I’m not looking forward to is the game’s writing, by which I mean anything in it that you read or is read by an actor. Because experience tells me it just won’t be that good.
Here is a random sampling of the writing from somewhere around midway in Braid.
But to be fully couched within the comfort of a friend is a mode of existence with severe implications. To please you perfectly, she must understand you perfectly. Thus you cannot defy her expectations or escape her reach. Her benevolence has circumscribed you, and your life's achievements will not reach beyond the map she has drawn.
All I can get out of that is a contrived and badly overwritten comment about how expectations in a relationship can limit you, but what it means doesn’t much matter anyway. It’s sole relation to the game’s plot (such as it is) is it communicates the idea that Tim’s relationship with The Princess has Issues. At the point in the game this text occurs, reiterating this idea is completely superfluous. Indeed, everything you need to know about it for the sake of playing is communicated in the first line of formal text in the game:
Tim is off on a search to rescue the Princess. She has been snatched by a horrible and evil monster. This happened because Tim made a mistake.
This is a decent bit of writing, it is brief and direct and it plays with your sense of the usual dynamic of the barest of bones videogame plot (the bad guy took your girlfriend and you have to fight your way through to rescue her) with that little twist (and it was your fault it happened).
Two things make Braid great. The first is the wonderfully engrossing game play of solving spacial/temporal puzzles with its combination of traditional platformer skills and time-manipulation mechanics. It is absolutely this, rather than moving through the “story,” that keeps you playing Braid. And that’s fine: nobody plays a classic Mario for the story (spoiler alert: the Princess is in another castle, until she’s not).
But Braid rises above this tradition not solely through its innovative gameplay. It adds the icing of a genuinely satisfying game-narrative arc, by which I mean the whole experience of play from its fantastic, beautiful atmospheric opening scene, through the very effective temporal dynamic of the final levels, culminating in the superbly effective final boss. That last involves a narrative touch that I could easily sum up in a few simple sentences, but no need for spoiler warnings here. All I need to communicate is that this touch is surprising, simple, easy to understand, and it wraps up the game in perfect sync with its play dynamics and minimalist, referential narrative.
And then there is the text. Not to belabor it but the basic reality of the text is that it is just not great. Obfuscated, overwritten, generally delivering a tone of contrived artiness. Above all these deficiencies though is that it simply adds nothing of real substance to the narrative. Braid would play exactly the same with almost all the text removed. One pithy sentence on par with the opening line per level would manage the same effect.
When you add the fact that everything not-great about the text is present in spades in the game's dénouement level, I have to say that the writing actually detracts from the game. It sucks energy out of the great climax and renders the small, quiet puzzles of the post-ending’s interstitial world (which are conceptually a great element in and of themselves) less satisfying. The only proper reaction to these final textual elements (that isn’t motivated by frankly slavish, uncritical devotion to the game as a whole) is to go “What?” and “Huh?”
I feel like I have to stress before I go on that the writing in Braid isn’t terrible. It is merely not great (okay, probably even not good) which is a shame because the game is great. It is great game design, great art, great music... and mediocre writing.
Bad writing in videogames is practically canonical, setting you up the bomb and so forth. Bad writing in independent, experimental, innovative games is a pet peeve though because damn it, the designers of these games ought to know better.
Braid has a great game narrative because Jonathan Blow is a great game designer. Braid has great art because Jonathan Blow knew he was not a great artists so he went out and hired an artist. Braid has great music because Jonathan Blow knew he was not a great musician so he went out and searched for great music by musicians. Why doesn’t Jonathan Blow know he is not a great writer?
Why do video game designers not know that they are not writers? Do they think that game design and writing are the same thing? They don’t narrate their own product when it’s time to record the audio for the game, they hire a professional voice actor. Which is good because you have to be a professional to even marginally pull off something like this:
Just to review that text...
I’ve begun my voyage in a paper boat without a bottom; I will fly to the moon in it. I’ve been folded along a crease in time, a weakness in the sheet of life. Now, you’ve settled on the opposite side of the paper to me; I can see your traces in the ink that soaks through the fibre, the pulped vegetation. When we become waterlogged, and the cage disintegrates, we will intermingle. When this paper aeroplane leaves the cliff edge, and carves parallel vapour trails in the dark, we will come together.
This is gobbledygook, a mishmash of metaphors couched in ostentatious prose (wait is the paper a boat, or a cage, or you’re the paper and you’ve folded, and it’s an airplane? Sorry an aeroplane? And about this... fibre? The pulped vegetation? We’re talking about, like, paper again, right?). I’m sorry, and I’m not saying I could do better, but that is just what it is. The game looks beautiful. The music sounds beautiful. But the sum total of the narrative scope I get out of the paragraph (aside from feeling like I’m in for another beatin’ from the Art Stick) is that The Princess is in Another Castle.
And I'm going to go out on a limb and say the reason for this is that it was written by Dan Pinchbeck and Dan Pinchbeck is a digital artist and a game designer. Dan Pinchbeck is Dan "not to be mistaken with the writer Daniel Pinchbeck" Pinchbeck, the not writer. thechineseroom game team doesn't have any writers. It has artists. It has a composer. Nobody has the title writer. Is it that they don't believe they need one? Or that they think they already have one, but that it isn't an important enough role to put it in an actual title?
Please. Game designers. You can be so good at what you do. It is exciting. It is a new medium. It is art. But text is text, it’s not game design and it is a different kind of story than the one you tell with games. There are so many great writers out there scrapping in a terrible market. Hire writers. Hire writers and explain to them what the game means to you and the story you are trying to tell and let them play the games and figure out how to properly tell that necessary allotment of text that you read or hear as you play the game. Let them do their job, let them amplify and perfect your vision the same way artists and composers and voice actors do.
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Saturday, March 10, 2012
i me a river, adventures in electronic bookulation
Since I’ve been going on about eBook reader gadgets for a while it will come as little surprise that I finally pulled the trigger on acquiring one. I ended up going a little weird on the specific gadget, however, for reasons I’ll cover later. First off though I’ll note that this is not really a device review, because I have next to no hands-on experience with any other reader, without which my take on how the thing works lacks the context to mean much. Call it impressions.
So I purchased an iriver Story HD:
Which at this point I fear you could probably safely call an “also ran” in the reader race. The reason I feel like you can say this is, interestingly, also a big reason I chose this particular device: Target, where the Story made its exclusive retail debut, has by all appearances given up on the device and put the remainder of its stock on sale for 50 dollars. My local branch of the hipper-than-Walmart department giant had plenty on hand but given that they were at last look still on Amazon for $95 and people were trying to move them on eBay between $70 and $130 I wouldn’t be surprised if what’s left dries up fairly quickly in the rush to take advantage of the price discontinuity, but who knows.
If you want to know what’s wrong with the thing, you know, look up a review. In a nutshell its design sense is a dowdy, its buttons-only interface is bare bones clunky for anything other than straightforward cover to cover reading, and its ergonomics are sub-par. What it offered on launch by way of compensation was a higher resolution display and built-in integration with Google Books. Showing up as it did in the midst of the majors adopting touch interface en masse, 3G connectivity and the undeniable fact that Google just does not have the profile as a media provider that an Amazon does (perhaps unfairly, as I’ll get into later) its chances were probably not great when it showed up at pretty much the same price as a the roughly equivalent Kindle or Nook. For 50 bucks, though, I thought it was worth the experiment.
I liked it as soon as I got it out of the box, but soon surmised that a lot of this was over reasons that aren't, maybe, very sensible... but are a lot like me. What I realized (on the heels of this essay) was that for once my late adopter ways had left me disappointed: I had left the electronic book go until well after the whole market was fully domesticated, and consequently not as magical and exciting. I suspect part of my hidden motivation in going off the path in this first selection was to get (or at least simulate) an experience slightly more out of the mainstream. As such its design issues are almost a plus to me - its terminally unsexy melamine-brown hospital tray back shell, it’s goofy little coffee-toned plastic chicle keypad contrasted with its up-level display and nerd-cool Google connection. I took undue pleasure in trawling the internet, over several days, for more winsome editions of free public domain literature, defying the lords of Amazon and their Whispernet as I loaded it all up on a gigabyte SD card I had sitting around, plugged into a little USB reader dongle that I also had sitting around. Bought a couple odd ball à la carte downloads for this library as well - including that Rucker short story collection I mentioned the other day (such a steal, now available in a straight .epub direct from the source). Finally to fingernail open the little door in the back of the reader to slot it, boot and just like that, a respectable library of 200+, and I got my magical moment with technology new to me, however swiftly it might be getting overshadowed in the march of the tablet paradigm.
Of course how I’m actually spending 95% of my time with the thing is reading Neal Stephenson’s Reamde that I bought from Google for the same $14.99 the Kindle or Nook edition would run me.
The primary risk of all this is that I’m steadily locking myself into an .epub file preference which is currently incompatible with Kindle. All I can say about that is, you know, get with it, Amazon. Everybody supports .epub except you. EVERYBODY.
A few negatives and a positive to wrap this up. I am not so convinced of the general superiority of the Apple Design Revolution but but really the ergonomics on this thing are a little off. Turning a page involves your thumb going either to the middle of the lower fifth or the bottom right corner, both of which just aren’t quite right. Of course it still beats wrestling with one of Stephenson’s 3.5 lb. doorstops, not to mention the vastly superior ergonomics compared to holding a conventional 200 volume library in one hand.
Still. Given that signing into your Google account can be a frequent necessity of trying to use it as anything other than read-only storage, given further that a solid 20% of the front architecture is given to the keypad, it’s hard to excuse said keypad’s lack of a numeric row and a few judicious symbol keys (. and @ and @gmail.com) - these offered instead as clumsily mapped alpha keypad alternatives visible only on a display-based “symbol” menu. Repeatedly entering my relatively strong password rapidly became infuriating.
That “repeatedly” brings in the second negative, though there is a distinct possibility that this one, or at least a large part of it, was on me. You access Google Books through your google account and actual content of these books live in Google’s cloud until you download them. If you pick stuff up via your computer they won’t show up on the reader at all until you refresh your library. Yesterday all my library refresh processes started to hang. The device didn’t crash - I could pull out of the hung update with the home button - but otherwise it would not resolve: left to itself, the reader would ultimately go into its sleep mode from which it would wake back at the home screen, library unrefreshed. I probably entered my gmail address and password 7 times fooling around trying to resolve this and experienced moments of hearty hatred for the thing in the process.
As I say this might be on me: I’d been fooling around under the hood in ways not obviously verboten but possibly (in retrospect) unjudicious: in the process of reading the box out of desperation with the glitch I discovered that it doesn’t actually support Mac OS (fucking seriously, iriver?). So the fact that I’d previously plugged it in via its mini-USB connection and been manually fooling around with files inside the drive menus that came up on my iMac might well have been what glitched it.
If not it could end up being an actually deal-breaking problem. I ended up taking it through the set-up wizard again, which wiped my settings, bookmarks, and everything in my download library, (though the latter didn’t matter because there wasn't all that much of it, and it is all in Google’s cloud). So early into owning the thing it didn’t matter much, everything was refreshed and downloaded within half an hour. If it were to become a regular occurrence however it would basically render the device unusable. Time will tell.
The only other bad thing to say is purely speculative: I’ve read enough reports about screen fragility to be concerned about it, though its clearly a far from universal occurrence. I’m crossing my fingers on that one.
An unexpected plus side is that I was basically unaware of Google Play. Early impression is that it is a promising and welcome addition to the digital media retail field. They have a lot of free stuff to boot and they’re running some interesting promotions (like the 25 cent “play of the day,” sufficiently enticing to get me to check in frequently, as is of course their intent). It’s interesting enough that it could even tempt me to stay in the iriver ecology. It remains to be seen of course if what looks like a basic commercial failure with the Story will push iriver out of the reader market entirely, or if they will rally with offerings that leverage the positives and exploit the Google relationship (bringing in Android and Chrome functionality seem like things that ought to happen). I hope they do because the Story has potential.
So I purchased an iriver Story HD:
Which at this point I fear you could probably safely call an “also ran” in the reader race. The reason I feel like you can say this is, interestingly, also a big reason I chose this particular device: Target, where the Story made its exclusive retail debut, has by all appearances given up on the device and put the remainder of its stock on sale for 50 dollars. My local branch of the hipper-than-Walmart department giant had plenty on hand but given that they were at last look still on Amazon for $95 and people were trying to move them on eBay between $70 and $130 I wouldn’t be surprised if what’s left dries up fairly quickly in the rush to take advantage of the price discontinuity, but who knows.
If you want to know what’s wrong with the thing, you know, look up a review. In a nutshell its design sense is a dowdy, its buttons-only interface is bare bones clunky for anything other than straightforward cover to cover reading, and its ergonomics are sub-par. What it offered on launch by way of compensation was a higher resolution display and built-in integration with Google Books. Showing up as it did in the midst of the majors adopting touch interface en masse, 3G connectivity and the undeniable fact that Google just does not have the profile as a media provider that an Amazon does (perhaps unfairly, as I’ll get into later) its chances were probably not great when it showed up at pretty much the same price as a the roughly equivalent Kindle or Nook. For 50 bucks, though, I thought it was worth the experiment.
I liked it as soon as I got it out of the box, but soon surmised that a lot of this was over reasons that aren't, maybe, very sensible... but are a lot like me. What I realized (on the heels of this essay) was that for once my late adopter ways had left me disappointed: I had left the electronic book go until well after the whole market was fully domesticated, and consequently not as magical and exciting. I suspect part of my hidden motivation in going off the path in this first selection was to get (or at least simulate) an experience slightly more out of the mainstream. As such its design issues are almost a plus to me - its terminally unsexy melamine-brown hospital tray back shell, it’s goofy little coffee-toned plastic chicle keypad contrasted with its up-level display and nerd-cool Google connection. I took undue pleasure in trawling the internet, over several days, for more winsome editions of free public domain literature, defying the lords of Amazon and their Whispernet as I loaded it all up on a gigabyte SD card I had sitting around, plugged into a little USB reader dongle that I also had sitting around. Bought a couple odd ball à la carte downloads for this library as well - including that Rucker short story collection I mentioned the other day (such a steal, now available in a straight .epub direct from the source). Finally to fingernail open the little door in the back of the reader to slot it, boot and just like that, a respectable library of 200+, and I got my magical moment with technology new to me, however swiftly it might be getting overshadowed in the march of the tablet paradigm.
Of course how I’m actually spending 95% of my time with the thing is reading Neal Stephenson’s Reamde that I bought from Google for the same $14.99 the Kindle or Nook edition would run me.
The primary risk of all this is that I’m steadily locking myself into an .epub file preference which is currently incompatible with Kindle. All I can say about that is, you know, get with it, Amazon. Everybody supports .epub except you. EVERYBODY.
A few negatives and a positive to wrap this up. I am not so convinced of the general superiority of the Apple Design Revolution but but really the ergonomics on this thing are a little off. Turning a page involves your thumb going either to the middle of the lower fifth or the bottom right corner, both of which just aren’t quite right. Of course it still beats wrestling with one of Stephenson’s 3.5 lb. doorstops, not to mention the vastly superior ergonomics compared to holding a conventional 200 volume library in one hand.
Still. Given that signing into your Google account can be a frequent necessity of trying to use it as anything other than read-only storage, given further that a solid 20% of the front architecture is given to the keypad, it’s hard to excuse said keypad’s lack of a numeric row and a few judicious symbol keys (. and @ and @gmail.com) - these offered instead as clumsily mapped alpha keypad alternatives visible only on a display-based “symbol” menu. Repeatedly entering my relatively strong password rapidly became infuriating.
That “repeatedly” brings in the second negative, though there is a distinct possibility that this one, or at least a large part of it, was on me. You access Google Books through your google account and actual content of these books live in Google’s cloud until you download them. If you pick stuff up via your computer they won’t show up on the reader at all until you refresh your library. Yesterday all my library refresh processes started to hang. The device didn’t crash - I could pull out of the hung update with the home button - but otherwise it would not resolve: left to itself, the reader would ultimately go into its sleep mode from which it would wake back at the home screen, library unrefreshed. I probably entered my gmail address and password 7 times fooling around trying to resolve this and experienced moments of hearty hatred for the thing in the process.
As I say this might be on me: I’d been fooling around under the hood in ways not obviously verboten but possibly (in retrospect) unjudicious: in the process of reading the box out of desperation with the glitch I discovered that it doesn’t actually support Mac OS (fucking seriously, iriver?). So the fact that I’d previously plugged it in via its mini-USB connection and been manually fooling around with files inside the drive menus that came up on my iMac might well have been what glitched it.
If not it could end up being an actually deal-breaking problem. I ended up taking it through the set-up wizard again, which wiped my settings, bookmarks, and everything in my download library, (though the latter didn’t matter because there wasn't all that much of it, and it is all in Google’s cloud). So early into owning the thing it didn’t matter much, everything was refreshed and downloaded within half an hour. If it were to become a regular occurrence however it would basically render the device unusable. Time will tell.
The only other bad thing to say is purely speculative: I’ve read enough reports about screen fragility to be concerned about it, though its clearly a far from universal occurrence. I’m crossing my fingers on that one.
An unexpected plus side is that I was basically unaware of Google Play. Early impression is that it is a promising and welcome addition to the digital media retail field. They have a lot of free stuff to boot and they’re running some interesting promotions (like the 25 cent “play of the day,” sufficiently enticing to get me to check in frequently, as is of course their intent). It’s interesting enough that it could even tempt me to stay in the iriver ecology. It remains to be seen of course if what looks like a basic commercial failure with the Story will push iriver out of the reader market entirely, or if they will rally with offerings that leverage the positives and exploit the Google relationship (bringing in Android and Chrome functionality seem like things that ought to happen). I hope they do because the Story has potential.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Trancing the Real Gnarl
If you ARE one of those people who already owns one of them newfangled electric bookulators and you like cyberpunk, cypherphunk, steampunk, hell, beanpunk? I don't know. Druggy lit up postmodern fin de siècle-era style science fiction type writing, then you best be informed that Rudy Rucker has started his own imprint, Transreal Press, and he is kicking it off by selling a super compendium of his short stories - roughly five book's worth of collected short stories for less than five dollars, which is basically a no-brainer's no-brainer (Little Kidder reference getit?) if you like that kind of thing. Yaaar.
Thursday, February 09, 2012
Making book in 2012
A rumination on five books, 4 real and one imaginary
It's an issue I'd expected or at least hoped was going to temper with age, because it gives me a lot of grief and it's boringly typical mid-life crisis material (that my age has now finally caught up with). This question of vocation. I used to blame it on my father, his capital-C Calling. As I drift (there's no other word for what I've been doing lately) further past that bright dividing line where what he does became what he did, I begin to think that while I might have gotten this bug, this need to be defined by a profession, from him, it was probably at a much more fundamental level than merely nurture. Something in the cells, the genes, the architecture of my brain. Something in the way I'm wired.
That expression, the way I'm wired, is one I picked up from William Gibson, from Neuromancer, a construction that wormed its way deep enough inside my head that I use it unconsciously, non-referentially, like it was something I came up with myself, or something of the common coinage. Which is irritating, because I generally find it embarrassing by proxy when people use fictional devices as if they were normal components of language, like people who say "shiny" as if it were normal slang for "good".
Somehow I totally missed cyberpunk when it happened, I was reading 50s-70s era science fiction classics from the hardcover stacks of Montevideo's (Minnesota, not Uruguay, natch) local library and fat, terrible fantasy paperbacks from the recent acquisitions rack of the same, and then I got put onto literature, and sometime mid- to early post-college I got back onto contemporary science fiction, having pretty much missed the 80's.
I was never a "fan" proper and this was still pretty much pre-internet for me so I'd managed to never even hear of Neuromancer when I noticed its incongruous presence on the bookshelf of my wife-to-be (she's not a science fiction reader, at all, and I still don't really know why she ended up buying it sometime in the very early 90's). I was actually not that taken with it on first pass, I read it too quickly which made its narrative style come across as fractured and murky. But it got some hook in me and I went back, and again. It ended up being for a while one of those things I could seemingly go back to at will, just for sheer entertainment, though as with most such things I finally had read it one too many times and went back one last time to find that it just wasn't really something I could read anymore. It had become part of the furniture of my brain; running my eyes over the words again was just redundant. I've yet to find anything in literature outside of certain poetry that is proof against this effect, likewise in movies, though it's common enough for me to find music that my mind finds seemingly evergreen.
After I'd read Neuromancer the second or third time I bought everything else Gibson had out in paperback, which in 1996 was a disappointingly short list. Still, I loved it all. Further output came at a relatively slow pace, but consistently satisfied, and so new Gibson joined a very short list of things I buy automatically in hardcover upon publication, just to get it sooner.
I ran into inner resistance to this policy with the recent release of his collected nonfiction essays, Distrust That Particular Flavor. I'd already read most of it, I figured, authorized republication or not, online, during a period when I was stalking him around the internet a bit. And liked it fine but not to the extent of feeling like I had to have it on the shelf. Frugality has had a premium lately, maybe you heard about the economy. Maybe I would wait for it in paperback, or check it out from the library, or maybe just skip it. Then a few days ago I ran across it in a bookstore and something rare occurred: I was seduced by the actual object itself. Just a nice, pretty little hardcover book. A thing that could easily last centuries (I have a 1764 book of German sermons my dad gave me when I got married, which is probably worth, the experts tell me, less than I paid for the new Gibson hardcover - centuries is hardly hyperbole for a well-bound book provided it stays in decent environments). I bought it and I'm glad I did, because I'm getting a kick out of the essays (a different beast than reading the fiction though I'm not totally clear on how), and because it got me thinking about the object of the book again, the construction of the thing, which is interesting.
Books remain a lovely technology, I don't believe they'll ever go away. A nice hardcover is, like a well-produced LP, an affordable little luxury, a piece of utilitarian (if slightly anachronistic) industrial art. Better than an LP, as no equipment is required to enjoy: it will retain its self-contained functionality as long as it retains its physical integrity.
It made me think about a particular relationship I have with books, similar to one I have with a number of things which share the one unique property that I have, at least once, made them from scratch, by hand. A little class I took, at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. I made a pair of little blank books, the real deal, sewn signatures and carefully assembled boards. It is really the only way you know completely what a thing is, I think, by making it. I dug up one of them (I don't remember what happened to the other one) that I'd given to my wife, it is a charming little thing. It, too, could last centuries, strangely enough.
I took that class under the influence of of another one of my restless sojourns in search of calling. One of those things they tell you to do: take a class.
I've been thinking about making books again, lately, specifically the construction of the book that is pure electronic ephemera. Thinking I perhaps will figure out how these electronic books are put together.
I've been finding myself wondering lately how much play there is in that, the degree to which an eBook can be well (or poorly) assembled. I've related my disappointment in the "free" content in the public domain. I've been digging into this business further now that I downloaded Amazon's free Kindle reader for the Mac. It's the little things: a lot, probably most of it, is basically just a monolithic hunk of linear text. No table of contents, little or no framing art, and what there is bland and cursory and low-fi, anything weird (like Ben Franklin's checklist charts he used to print up to work on ironing out his personal deficits) coming through mangled by formatting conventions (or the lack thereof). And I feel like a dick, complaining about it, because mostly volunteers have extracted this stuff from the highly imperfect output of optical character recognition, and cleaned it up and gotten it into a format that you can't say isn't readable.
But there is at least a somewhat premium product that is possible. I recently forayed into a first experiment at actually purchasing an electronic book, another step on the all-but-inevitable path of buying another gadget. Our friend Mr. Gibson makes another appearance in the narrative: I read in an interview recently that he'd published a short story in a Canadian anthology - a thing he just doesn't do, I've often wished he would write a little short fiction somewhere in the long gaps between the novels. I wanted the story. I wasn't at all sure I wanted to pay $17.21 for the anthology. The anthology is a bit weird, the only apparent binding thread of it being that the authors are all Canadians, I think, and its tagline (Astounding Tales of Tomorrow!) is such a clanging cliché that it you have to assume that it is intentionally so, but why? To what object? What does it mean? The title and cover art are similarly opaque. Maybe after they talked William Gibson into crossing the line into short fiction territory again they decided they didn't have to come up with any other arguments to convince the prospective reader to sign up.
I decided to make an experiment of the compromise of spending a penny less than ten bucks by buying the Kindle edition. The transaction, I have to say, was satisfyingly space age. A handful of clicks and it is there, instantaneously or as near as makes no odds. As with other forms of digital delivery I'm starting to appreciate the fact that the price is the price, there is no shipping and handling surprise at the end of the transaction (please don't start fucking this up with meaningless gotcha fees, oh ye deliverers of digital content).
And so I have my hands (so to speak) on a "premium" eBook, a proper digital edition. It is okay. It has a cover image of decent size and resolution, a table of contents with proper links. I liked the story, it was pretty far off Gibson's beaten path (its closest kinship perhaps with 1981's The Gernsback Continuum"). Ten bucks a steep price at that but maybe I'll like the rest of it if I read it (sitting and reading fiction at the computer just doesn't work very well for me - although the Kindle program makes it work a bit better - despite all the time I spend absorbing text from the internet). I imagine the file is not something I can pull apart and tinker under the hood without breaking some laws but as a showpiece I can at least get some ideas of how it is supposed to work, and how it could work better.
Perhaps, something like affluent book collectors of yore, I will end up ganking "unbound folios" of straight-up text from Gutenberg's files and binding them in my own shop, give them a proper cover and functional contents, pretty them up a bit so they look nice on the virtual shelf.
Still and yet I dream of a better electronic book, a notion of a thing that doesn't exist yet. Somehow purer like the simplicity of a nice binding yet more diverse and functional with all the promise of hypertext, of markup languages and style sheets, like the internet itself. The imaginary thing I thought I was noodling out around the borders of, way back in the 90's with the abortive Kingdom Come Institute (I note that despite my efforts substantial chunks of It's Rome, Baby are succumbing to link rot, truly the center cannot hold).
Perhaps somewhere I generally find a little fraught to engage much I am still pining to make a book in that other sense, the dream of being not just a writer (now that the internet has made that functional verb so meaninglessly accessible to us all) but (dare I say it) a novelist. And I wonder again if the fooling around with various ephemeral electronic wrappers for text is anything but a way to avoid coming to terms with even thinking about the real work of writing a functional book that someone might actually bother to read.
I think about Gibson, again - writing about the earliest stages of his writing, phrases like "try to learn to write fiction" and "trying to figure out how to try," it shows up again in that new short story, "starting to try to write fiction." I think this? Still? I'm forty, for fucks sake. I've only got so much time left to devote to any serious trying, trying to try, trying to learn. I think about a musician I asked for advice about figuring out what the hell you're supposed to do in this life, who could only say "find out how to find out".
I think about a philosophy professor, gone now, almost 20 years ago, in a class improbably called "The Philosophy of the Literature of Existentialism," a professor who I now know was perceptibly (though none knew it then, I don't know if he did or not) grappling with the earliest stages of Alzheimer's, trying to get at something by saying "when I write my next book" and then breaking to, with surprising emotion, "oh, who am I kidding, I'll never write another book! If any of you have any creative aspirations at all you must leave academia at once! It destroys creativity!" Nervous laughter. I doubt he was playing for laughs. 6 years dead. Nobody left academia. Of course I was studying Science and assumed I was immune to these sorts of dangers.
It's an issue I'd expected or at least hoped was going to temper with age, because it gives me a lot of grief and it's boringly typical mid-life crisis material (that my age has now finally caught up with). This question of vocation. I used to blame it on my father, his capital-C Calling. As I drift (there's no other word for what I've been doing lately) further past that bright dividing line where what he does became what he did, I begin to think that while I might have gotten this bug, this need to be defined by a profession, from him, it was probably at a much more fundamental level than merely nurture. Something in the cells, the genes, the architecture of my brain. Something in the way I'm wired.
That expression, the way I'm wired, is one I picked up from William Gibson, from Neuromancer, a construction that wormed its way deep enough inside my head that I use it unconsciously, non-referentially, like it was something I came up with myself, or something of the common coinage. Which is irritating, because I generally find it embarrassing by proxy when people use fictional devices as if they were normal components of language, like people who say "shiny" as if it were normal slang for "good".
Somehow I totally missed cyberpunk when it happened, I was reading 50s-70s era science fiction classics from the hardcover stacks of Montevideo's (Minnesota, not Uruguay, natch) local library and fat, terrible fantasy paperbacks from the recent acquisitions rack of the same, and then I got put onto literature, and sometime mid- to early post-college I got back onto contemporary science fiction, having pretty much missed the 80's.
I was never a "fan" proper and this was still pretty much pre-internet for me so I'd managed to never even hear of Neuromancer when I noticed its incongruous presence on the bookshelf of my wife-to-be (she's not a science fiction reader, at all, and I still don't really know why she ended up buying it sometime in the very early 90's). I was actually not that taken with it on first pass, I read it too quickly which made its narrative style come across as fractured and murky. But it got some hook in me and I went back, and again. It ended up being for a while one of those things I could seemingly go back to at will, just for sheer entertainment, though as with most such things I finally had read it one too many times and went back one last time to find that it just wasn't really something I could read anymore. It had become part of the furniture of my brain; running my eyes over the words again was just redundant. I've yet to find anything in literature outside of certain poetry that is proof against this effect, likewise in movies, though it's common enough for me to find music that my mind finds seemingly evergreen.
After I'd read Neuromancer the second or third time I bought everything else Gibson had out in paperback, which in 1996 was a disappointingly short list. Still, I loved it all. Further output came at a relatively slow pace, but consistently satisfied, and so new Gibson joined a very short list of things I buy automatically in hardcover upon publication, just to get it sooner.
I ran into inner resistance to this policy with the recent release of his collected nonfiction essays, Distrust That Particular Flavor. I'd already read most of it, I figured, authorized republication or not, online, during a period when I was stalking him around the internet a bit. And liked it fine but not to the extent of feeling like I had to have it on the shelf. Frugality has had a premium lately, maybe you heard about the economy. Maybe I would wait for it in paperback, or check it out from the library, or maybe just skip it. Then a few days ago I ran across it in a bookstore and something rare occurred: I was seduced by the actual object itself. Just a nice, pretty little hardcover book. A thing that could easily last centuries (I have a 1764 book of German sermons my dad gave me when I got married, which is probably worth, the experts tell me, less than I paid for the new Gibson hardcover - centuries is hardly hyperbole for a well-bound book provided it stays in decent environments). I bought it and I'm glad I did, because I'm getting a kick out of the essays (a different beast than reading the fiction though I'm not totally clear on how), and because it got me thinking about the object of the book again, the construction of the thing, which is interesting.
Books remain a lovely technology, I don't believe they'll ever go away. A nice hardcover is, like a well-produced LP, an affordable little luxury, a piece of utilitarian (if slightly anachronistic) industrial art. Better than an LP, as no equipment is required to enjoy: it will retain its self-contained functionality as long as it retains its physical integrity.
It made me think about a particular relationship I have with books, similar to one I have with a number of things which share the one unique property that I have, at least once, made them from scratch, by hand. A little class I took, at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. I made a pair of little blank books, the real deal, sewn signatures and carefully assembled boards. It is really the only way you know completely what a thing is, I think, by making it. I dug up one of them (I don't remember what happened to the other one) that I'd given to my wife, it is a charming little thing. It, too, could last centuries, strangely enough.
I took that class under the influence of of another one of my restless sojourns in search of calling. One of those things they tell you to do: take a class.
I've been thinking about making books again, lately, specifically the construction of the book that is pure electronic ephemera. Thinking I perhaps will figure out how these electronic books are put together.
I've been finding myself wondering lately how much play there is in that, the degree to which an eBook can be well (or poorly) assembled. I've related my disappointment in the "free" content in the public domain. I've been digging into this business further now that I downloaded Amazon's free Kindle reader for the Mac. It's the little things: a lot, probably most of it, is basically just a monolithic hunk of linear text. No table of contents, little or no framing art, and what there is bland and cursory and low-fi, anything weird (like Ben Franklin's checklist charts he used to print up to work on ironing out his personal deficits) coming through mangled by formatting conventions (or the lack thereof). And I feel like a dick, complaining about it, because mostly volunteers have extracted this stuff from the highly imperfect output of optical character recognition, and cleaned it up and gotten it into a format that you can't say isn't readable.
But there is at least a somewhat premium product that is possible. I recently forayed into a first experiment at actually purchasing an electronic book, another step on the all-but-inevitable path of buying another gadget. Our friend Mr. Gibson makes another appearance in the narrative: I read in an interview recently that he'd published a short story in a Canadian anthology - a thing he just doesn't do, I've often wished he would write a little short fiction somewhere in the long gaps between the novels. I wanted the story. I wasn't at all sure I wanted to pay $17.21 for the anthology. The anthology is a bit weird, the only apparent binding thread of it being that the authors are all Canadians, I think, and its tagline (Astounding Tales of Tomorrow!) is such a clanging cliché that it you have to assume that it is intentionally so, but why? To what object? What does it mean? The title and cover art are similarly opaque. Maybe after they talked William Gibson into crossing the line into short fiction territory again they decided they didn't have to come up with any other arguments to convince the prospective reader to sign up.
I decided to make an experiment of the compromise of spending a penny less than ten bucks by buying the Kindle edition. The transaction, I have to say, was satisfyingly space age. A handful of clicks and it is there, instantaneously or as near as makes no odds. As with other forms of digital delivery I'm starting to appreciate the fact that the price is the price, there is no shipping and handling surprise at the end of the transaction (please don't start fucking this up with meaningless gotcha fees, oh ye deliverers of digital content).
And so I have my hands (so to speak) on a "premium" eBook, a proper digital edition. It is okay. It has a cover image of decent size and resolution, a table of contents with proper links. I liked the story, it was pretty far off Gibson's beaten path (its closest kinship perhaps with 1981's The Gernsback Continuum"). Ten bucks a steep price at that but maybe I'll like the rest of it if I read it (sitting and reading fiction at the computer just doesn't work very well for me - although the Kindle program makes it work a bit better - despite all the time I spend absorbing text from the internet). I imagine the file is not something I can pull apart and tinker under the hood without breaking some laws but as a showpiece I can at least get some ideas of how it is supposed to work, and how it could work better.
Perhaps, something like affluent book collectors of yore, I will end up ganking "unbound folios" of straight-up text from Gutenberg's files and binding them in my own shop, give them a proper cover and functional contents, pretty them up a bit so they look nice on the virtual shelf.
Still and yet I dream of a better electronic book, a notion of a thing that doesn't exist yet. Somehow purer like the simplicity of a nice binding yet more diverse and functional with all the promise of hypertext, of markup languages and style sheets, like the internet itself. The imaginary thing I thought I was noodling out around the borders of, way back in the 90's with the abortive Kingdom Come Institute (I note that despite my efforts substantial chunks of It's Rome, Baby are succumbing to link rot, truly the center cannot hold).
Perhaps somewhere I generally find a little fraught to engage much I am still pining to make a book in that other sense, the dream of being not just a writer (now that the internet has made that functional verb so meaninglessly accessible to us all) but (dare I say it) a novelist. And I wonder again if the fooling around with various ephemeral electronic wrappers for text is anything but a way to avoid coming to terms with even thinking about the real work of writing a functional book that someone might actually bother to read.
I think about Gibson, again - writing about the earliest stages of his writing, phrases like "try to learn to write fiction" and "trying to figure out how to try," it shows up again in that new short story, "starting to try to write fiction." I think this? Still? I'm forty, for fucks sake. I've only got so much time left to devote to any serious trying, trying to try, trying to learn. I think about a musician I asked for advice about figuring out what the hell you're supposed to do in this life, who could only say "find out how to find out".
I think about a philosophy professor, gone now, almost 20 years ago, in a class improbably called "The Philosophy of the Literature of Existentialism," a professor who I now know was perceptibly (though none knew it then, I don't know if he did or not) grappling with the earliest stages of Alzheimer's, trying to get at something by saying "when I write my next book" and then breaking to, with surprising emotion, "oh, who am I kidding, I'll never write another book! If any of you have any creative aspirations at all you must leave academia at once! It destroys creativity!" Nervous laughter. I doubt he was playing for laughs. 6 years dead. Nobody left academia. Of course I was studying Science and assumed I was immune to these sorts of dangers.
Friday, January 13, 2012
Free as in lunch (though not as in effort): the other side of eBook econmics
So I was complaining not that long ago about eBook pricing, in which you could end up paying twice as much for Amazon to shoot you what probably represents $0.000001 worth of data for them as you would pay to have someone in California mail you a like-new used copy of a book whose author died something like 25 years ago.
There is though another side to the economics of the eBook that I only slightly hinted at in that essay, the issue of (very roughly speaking) everything through 1922, which is to say, the U.S. public domain. Which is a lot, a lot of books.
Many of which are available absolutely free of charge! This is actually pretty amazingly incredible, of course. This entrances me in a way that the prospect of reading Neal Stephenson's latest three and a half pounder without suffering back strain doesn't touch, despite this latter promise being (given my actual historical reading habits) a far more practical argument for my acquiring one of these devices. To hell with Dune, who can complain about free?! Ah, watch me.
The fantasy that dances before my sparkling eyes is of hooking my freshly unwrapped Kindle (I'm sick of carrying water for Amazon but I'm pretty resigned to this being the fact of the eventual matter) and zapping an everloving bolus of data from my computer into it - et voilà - a vertiginous library of classical literature at my fingertips, intellectual fodder for a lifetime, quick and handy access to all those smarty-pants references the erudite continually sneak into their prose.
To be honest, while I do actually read this kind of thing from time to time, what really gets me is the whole library in your pocket thing. It'll doubtless be a matter of zero wonder to the kid, who is learning to read in the basically unexamined assumption that if you want to know anything, Daddy will go to the computer (he will not turn it on, it is always on) and the information will be found readily at hand. But to me - someone who quite literally came of age alongside the personal computer (and Lo, JMH didst attempt to program an adventure game in BASIC on a TRS 80, and verily didst he fail mightily) it is The Future, the stuff of fiction. My great library of human wisdom, in the palm of my hand. Glorious.
The reality of course collides with my fantasy forthwith. Even as my conviction to get on the eReader bandwagon grows, my initial forays into the world of free text rapidly demonstrate I can expect to be regularly tossed between the twin horns of Lack of Curation and Unreliability of Source.
Overabundance. Checking out the statistics page (which has 6 "likes" on Facebook, what does it all mean?!) I learn that first off, I also literally came of age alongside Project Gutenberg - being how the first text was uploaded just the month before I was, er, downloaded... But more relevantly that as of July 2011 some 36,701 books had been uploaded. Surely one to two miles of conventional bookshelf. Too much! As usual the best curating offered on the spot is popularity... handy if I want to know that A Christmas Carol, The Kama Sutra and the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes summarize the rough mindset of the Vox Populi (oh man have I got a fanfic mashup for you... Sherlock Holmes' Kama Sutra Christmas, anyone?).
I thought I was onto something of a start when I stumbled on the Harvard Classics - doubtless a shibboleth of an intellectual mindset, virtually untroubled by any shadow of what we now call multiculturalism, that belongs firmly in the 19th century. Even so! A manageable collection, officially vetted by an Extremely Erudite Gentleman.
Immediately I started running into issues. My dreams of finding this thing neatly packaged as a single one-click zip file vanished in a trice. But that wasn't the start of the end of it. Mainly I discovered (not unsurprisingly) that a free, downloadable file of an electronic book was a bit of a black box. Part of the problem of course is that I don't have a hardware eReader - yet - so I'm trying to simulate the experience with a free desktop reader... which I just discovered got eaten by Amazon at some point in the recent past which explains some stuff... Suffice to say it ain't easy. Some test files wouldn't open. A lot appeared to be just a straight whack of text - not so much as a table of contents. This is non-ideal. The first one I manage to get open at all pops up on my reader with the title Classic_Harvard Classics, and call me shallow if you like but its frontpiece image is this:
That's full size, mind you. Displeasing. But truly, readability is the big pig in this poke. No contents, no chapters, formatting (or more specifically lack thereof) that's hard on the eyes. Clearly the big pile of free text is not going to be so sweet to parse. Maybe my reading technology is to blame (it is surely at least part to blame) but seeing what I see there I find it hard to believe the state of the art will do much better with the source material. Readable in the technical sense of the word, but not nearly up to my standard for what I'd call a book.
Clearly somebody should be doing something about this.
My wild impulses has me quickly thinking about launching the Kickstarter project, you know, I think I could happily spend several years of my life turning these text dumps which represent the (noble, valuable, decent and correct, mind you) output of Project Gutenberg into something you would actually want on your virtual bookshelf. My forays into business tend to suggest I do not have a firm finger on the pulse of the consumer, though, and experience tells me that obvious things that do not end up getting done by friendly volunteers tend to prove more difficult than they seem on face value. Leave that one on the back burner. My virtual, infinite, increasingly cluttered back burner, shouldn't there be an app for that?
Indeed a certain amount of this is ongoing by the looks of things. My researches continue and I suppose my free virtual bookshelf will slowly accrete as I start to save the odd pennies towards the eventual, inevitable (it has started to feel, finally, of late) purchase. But I realize I've distinguished in my mind another gradient of freedom on the as beer/as freedom axis... The well of public domain content is increasingly both those things, but acquiring and consuming it is nothing like free from effort, yet. And my pocket library is still mainly a dream.
There is though another side to the economics of the eBook that I only slightly hinted at in that essay, the issue of (very roughly speaking) everything through 1922, which is to say, the U.S. public domain. Which is a lot, a lot of books.
Many of which are available absolutely free of charge! This is actually pretty amazingly incredible, of course. This entrances me in a way that the prospect of reading Neal Stephenson's latest three and a half pounder without suffering back strain doesn't touch, despite this latter promise being (given my actual historical reading habits) a far more practical argument for my acquiring one of these devices. To hell with Dune, who can complain about free?! Ah, watch me.
The fantasy that dances before my sparkling eyes is of hooking my freshly unwrapped Kindle (I'm sick of carrying water for Amazon but I'm pretty resigned to this being the fact of the eventual matter) and zapping an everloving bolus of data from my computer into it - et voilà - a vertiginous library of classical literature at my fingertips, intellectual fodder for a lifetime, quick and handy access to all those smarty-pants references the erudite continually sneak into their prose.
To be honest, while I do actually read this kind of thing from time to time, what really gets me is the whole library in your pocket thing. It'll doubtless be a matter of zero wonder to the kid, who is learning to read in the basically unexamined assumption that if you want to know anything, Daddy will go to the computer (he will not turn it on, it is always on) and the information will be found readily at hand. But to me - someone who quite literally came of age alongside the personal computer (and Lo, JMH didst attempt to program an adventure game in BASIC on a TRS 80, and verily didst he fail mightily) it is The Future, the stuff of fiction. My great library of human wisdom, in the palm of my hand. Glorious.
The reality of course collides with my fantasy forthwith. Even as my conviction to get on the eReader bandwagon grows, my initial forays into the world of free text rapidly demonstrate I can expect to be regularly tossed between the twin horns of Lack of Curation and Unreliability of Source.
Overabundance. Checking out the statistics page (which has 6 "likes" on Facebook, what does it all mean?!) I learn that first off, I also literally came of age alongside Project Gutenberg - being how the first text was uploaded just the month before I was, er, downloaded... But more relevantly that as of July 2011 some 36,701 books had been uploaded. Surely one to two miles of conventional bookshelf. Too much! As usual the best curating offered on the spot is popularity... handy if I want to know that A Christmas Carol, The Kama Sutra and the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes summarize the rough mindset of the Vox Populi (oh man have I got a fanfic mashup for you... Sherlock Holmes' Kama Sutra Christmas, anyone?).
I thought I was onto something of a start when I stumbled on the Harvard Classics - doubtless a shibboleth of an intellectual mindset, virtually untroubled by any shadow of what we now call multiculturalism, that belongs firmly in the 19th century. Even so! A manageable collection, officially vetted by an Extremely Erudite Gentleman.
Immediately I started running into issues. My dreams of finding this thing neatly packaged as a single one-click zip file vanished in a trice. But that wasn't the start of the end of it. Mainly I discovered (not unsurprisingly) that a free, downloadable file of an electronic book was a bit of a black box. Part of the problem of course is that I don't have a hardware eReader - yet - so I'm trying to simulate the experience with a free desktop reader... which I just discovered got eaten by Amazon at some point in the recent past which explains some stuff... Suffice to say it ain't easy. Some test files wouldn't open. A lot appeared to be just a straight whack of text - not so much as a table of contents. This is non-ideal. The first one I manage to get open at all pops up on my reader with the title Classic_Harvard Classics, and call me shallow if you like but its frontpiece image is this:
That's full size, mind you. Displeasing. But truly, readability is the big pig in this poke. No contents, no chapters, formatting (or more specifically lack thereof) that's hard on the eyes. Clearly the big pile of free text is not going to be so sweet to parse. Maybe my reading technology is to blame (it is surely at least part to blame) but seeing what I see there I find it hard to believe the state of the art will do much better with the source material. Readable in the technical sense of the word, but not nearly up to my standard for what I'd call a book.
Clearly somebody should be doing something about this.
My wild impulses has me quickly thinking about launching the Kickstarter project, you know, I think I could happily spend several years of my life turning these text dumps which represent the (noble, valuable, decent and correct, mind you) output of Project Gutenberg into something you would actually want on your virtual bookshelf. My forays into business tend to suggest I do not have a firm finger on the pulse of the consumer, though, and experience tells me that obvious things that do not end up getting done by friendly volunteers tend to prove more difficult than they seem on face value. Leave that one on the back burner. My virtual, infinite, increasingly cluttered back burner, shouldn't there be an app for that?
Indeed a certain amount of this is ongoing by the looks of things. My researches continue and I suppose my free virtual bookshelf will slowly accrete as I start to save the odd pennies towards the eventual, inevitable (it has started to feel, finally, of late) purchase. But I realize I've distinguished in my mind another gradient of freedom on the as beer/as freedom axis... The well of public domain content is increasingly both those things, but acquiring and consuming it is nothing like free from effort, yet. And my pocket library is still mainly a dream.
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Nine Nights in Azeroth, Chapter 5: The Call of the World
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.
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.
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.
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Hells yeah it is a store
I have actually been thinking on raising my mesozoic snout up out of the swamp mud and gacking out some new content hereabouts but in the meantime there's commerce. In the event you haven't been monitoring the changes in my sidebars with breathless regard I have rebooted my Media Empire Shop for your consumptive pleasure.
Thursday, May 06, 2010
On the Humble Indie Bundle, and the virtues of humility in general
...Excuse me? You thought there was some sort of digital culture blog around here? Boy, it doesn't look to me like there's been anything going on around here for a while, but, okay, what the hell, I'll see what I can dig up.
The Humble Indie Bundle is a snazzy little packet of five independent video games. As a purchase, it's distinguished by a number of features that you can read about here rather than watching the pseudo-rap video on the website, because sorry, guys, but that is very terrible. Anyway, it is cross-platform (PC, Mac and Linux), the games are DRM free, you are allowed to set your own price for the bundle, and a portion of the proceeds are donated to Penny Arcade's Child's Play charity and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. How big of a portion? You can customize how much of your payment goes to either of the charities and how much goes to the developers. Sort of. You divvy up the split with an imprecise kind of slider bar widget so if you like round figures this can be sort of frustrating.
Now this is all fine and pleasant and I certainly recommend it if you have any inclination to play the games in question. But what it got me thinking about is how in this new digital commerce paradigm business the independent game developers are really standing out in terms of stomping on the notion, which is still generally being desperately clung to by the media conglomerates and publishing industries, that mature works - particular copyrighted packets of data - can successfully hang on to their legacy price points. A year, two out of the gate prices start to drop - 30, 50, 75 percent - or games show up in these sorts of rock-bottom promotions for a limited time.
Putting aside all old media conceptions it seems like it would make perfect sense- these products have paid their way, I'm assuming. They have covered their development costs and produced their hoped-for chunk of profit and whatever they generate from this point out is basically gravy. Promotion manages itself via the always hyperactive video game infosphere and, with the basic architecture of file transfer in place and bandwidth presumably on-tap and cheap (transacting bits being the business model of these developers), I'd hope the overhead on such a promotion would trend toward rock bottom. I mean I hope: as of this writing they have brought in almost $400,000, though on the other hand their suggested (to their credit quietly suggested with a very light touch) donation is around 30 bucks and by their reporting their average so far is around 8 bucks. I'm not actually sure their reporting that is such a great idea but there you go, transparency is a harsh mistress.
But as I say, it is a common sense that the media industry at large has been resisting like crazy, particularly throughout the last decade, and it bears scrutiny as to why independent game developers in particular are so far ahead on this concept - this concept that in most cases a piece of media is a thing that ages, and not like a fine wine but like a loaf of bread, and past its fresh-by date you only get to charge half price.
This is the humility I allude to in my title: to recognize that an infinitely reproducible piece of work is a commodity with a shelf life, it does not eternally retain full value, it is not some sort of sacrosanct chunk of metaphysics. I don't know the answer but several pieces occur to me. Independent game developers, quite distinct from old media producers, were I think completely ready, indeed evangelized, converted and committed, to abandon physical media in favor of digital transfer. Of course, it is pure useless overhead. Much less so than mediated music or books, I think people basically grasp that with software you are paying for rights to the data, not for some object. This makes people initially less resistant to a substantial cost for an ephemeral download, but that initial price may have less stability over time, unattached to the notion that "object X costs about $Y". Software invites the analysis, what is this functionality of this data to me now, much more than those occult entities, the Album or the Novel.
Perhaps less immediately transferable to other media, of course software is practically prone to a much harsher reality of obsolescence than most media. A book is a book, more or less, but after a certain point not only is a piece of software not up to the current standards, it won't even play on the current equipment (or at best, will play only with additional software). Beyond the nostalgia market (which seems mostly hardware/media driven, with little visible paying market for digital ephemera) old video games have basically no monetary value.
So here's a puzzle: compared to their retail value, video games are disproportionately resource-intensive to create as compared to, say, cutting an album or writing a novel. The product is subject to a much more aggressive value deterioration over time. Yet we're told that video games are eating the market share of these other media for lunch. Dear everybody trying to sell data besides the people making video games: you're doing something wrong.
The Humble Indie Bundle is a snazzy little packet of five independent video games. As a purchase, it's distinguished by a number of features that you can read about here rather than watching the pseudo-rap video on the website, because sorry, guys, but that is very terrible. Anyway, it is cross-platform (PC, Mac and Linux), the games are DRM free, you are allowed to set your own price for the bundle, and a portion of the proceeds are donated to Penny Arcade's Child's Play charity and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. How big of a portion? You can customize how much of your payment goes to either of the charities and how much goes to the developers. Sort of. You divvy up the split with an imprecise kind of slider bar widget so if you like round figures this can be sort of frustrating.
Now this is all fine and pleasant and I certainly recommend it if you have any inclination to play the games in question. But what it got me thinking about is how in this new digital commerce paradigm business the independent game developers are really standing out in terms of stomping on the notion, which is still generally being desperately clung to by the media conglomerates and publishing industries, that mature works - particular copyrighted packets of data - can successfully hang on to their legacy price points. A year, two out of the gate prices start to drop - 30, 50, 75 percent - or games show up in these sorts of rock-bottom promotions for a limited time.
Putting aside all old media conceptions it seems like it would make perfect sense- these products have paid their way, I'm assuming. They have covered their development costs and produced their hoped-for chunk of profit and whatever they generate from this point out is basically gravy. Promotion manages itself via the always hyperactive video game infosphere and, with the basic architecture of file transfer in place and bandwidth presumably on-tap and cheap (transacting bits being the business model of these developers), I'd hope the overhead on such a promotion would trend toward rock bottom. I mean I hope: as of this writing they have brought in almost $400,000, though on the other hand their suggested (to their credit quietly suggested with a very light touch) donation is around 30 bucks and by their reporting their average so far is around 8 bucks. I'm not actually sure their reporting that is such a great idea but there you go, transparency is a harsh mistress.
But as I say, it is a common sense that the media industry at large has been resisting like crazy, particularly throughout the last decade, and it bears scrutiny as to why independent game developers in particular are so far ahead on this concept - this concept that in most cases a piece of media is a thing that ages, and not like a fine wine but like a loaf of bread, and past its fresh-by date you only get to charge half price.
This is the humility I allude to in my title: to recognize that an infinitely reproducible piece of work is a commodity with a shelf life, it does not eternally retain full value, it is not some sort of sacrosanct chunk of metaphysics. I don't know the answer but several pieces occur to me. Independent game developers, quite distinct from old media producers, were I think completely ready, indeed evangelized, converted and committed, to abandon physical media in favor of digital transfer. Of course, it is pure useless overhead. Much less so than mediated music or books, I think people basically grasp that with software you are paying for rights to the data, not for some object. This makes people initially less resistant to a substantial cost for an ephemeral download, but that initial price may have less stability over time, unattached to the notion that "object X costs about $Y". Software invites the analysis, what is this functionality of this data to me now, much more than those occult entities, the Album or the Novel.
Perhaps less immediately transferable to other media, of course software is practically prone to a much harsher reality of obsolescence than most media. A book is a book, more or less, but after a certain point not only is a piece of software not up to the current standards, it won't even play on the current equipment (or at best, will play only with additional software). Beyond the nostalgia market (which seems mostly hardware/media driven, with little visible paying market for digital ephemera) old video games have basically no monetary value.
So here's a puzzle: compared to their retail value, video games are disproportionately resource-intensive to create as compared to, say, cutting an album or writing a novel. The product is subject to a much more aggressive value deterioration over time. Yet we're told that video games are eating the market share of these other media for lunch. Dear everybody trying to sell data besides the people making video games: you're doing something wrong.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Sorry, but a positive net worth is in another castle...
I get down sometimes about poor financial decisions of my past. Like so many Americans, I have a solid chunk of unsecured credit debt, the cumulative legacy of every impatient purchases over two decades, an extra little financial burden that hangs over me wherever I may go.
From the basement files of the Department of How Much Worse Could it Get comes the tale of one James Burt, a hapless 24-year-old from Queensland Australia, to make me feel better about my life choices. Mr. Burt got his hands on an early release of Nintendo’s New Super Mario Brothers for Wii and decided it would be a very bright stunt to put it on a file-sharing network.
This probably seemed like a great idea until Nintendo’s anti-piracy ninjas pulled a blue turtle shell out of their bag of tricks and hunted poor James Burt down. The final disposition of this youthful indiscretion recently made the rounds of the embarrassingly rich fields of the video game news circuit: Nintendo arrived at an out-of-court settlement with Mr. Burt to pay their legal bill of $100,000... and $1.5 million AU damages for Nintendo’s lost sales. “We would like to play” indeed.
My mind is filled with questions by these kinds of stories. Like, what the hell is Nintendo threatening you with that you “settle” for a million and a half in red ink against your lifetime net worth? Did they they finagle some secret copyright arrangement with the Australian government where if you fail to settle they can have you torn apart by wild dogs? Why not $1.5 billion? Is it any more likely that a mid-twenties Australian gamer is going to be able to pay that off? Is it just meant to be cautionary news, is this individual headed directly to bankruptcy, making the specifics irrelevant? Can you bankrupt your way out of that kind of agreement? Did Nintendo present this kid with a payment plan? Does James Burt’s punishment include a lifetime banning from the Mii network?
There are all sorts of directions to go with this about copyright violation and reasonable consequences, but I have to admit I’ve become utterly bored with that whole conversation. Bogus as the system is, I’ve run out of compassion for the illicit file-sharing set as well. These people are not exactly Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Do something interesting with all this unbridled new media power, okay, or don’t come whining to me when you get stepped on for trying to abscond with the giant’s golden-egg-laying hen. Unfortunately this leaves me without a pithy moral. Except, perhaps: Don’t Fuck with Mario.
From the basement files of the Department of How Much Worse Could it Get comes the tale of one James Burt, a hapless 24-year-old from Queensland Australia, to make me feel better about my life choices. Mr. Burt got his hands on an early release of Nintendo’s New Super Mario Brothers for Wii and decided it would be a very bright stunt to put it on a file-sharing network.
This probably seemed like a great idea until Nintendo’s anti-piracy ninjas pulled a blue turtle shell out of their bag of tricks and hunted poor James Burt down. The final disposition of this youthful indiscretion recently made the rounds of the embarrassingly rich fields of the video game news circuit: Nintendo arrived at an out-of-court settlement with Mr. Burt to pay their legal bill of $100,000... and $1.5 million AU damages for Nintendo’s lost sales. “We would like to play” indeed.
My mind is filled with questions by these kinds of stories. Like, what the hell is Nintendo threatening you with that you “settle” for a million and a half in red ink against your lifetime net worth? Did they they finagle some secret copyright arrangement with the Australian government where if you fail to settle they can have you torn apart by wild dogs? Why not $1.5 billion? Is it any more likely that a mid-twenties Australian gamer is going to be able to pay that off? Is it just meant to be cautionary news, is this individual headed directly to bankruptcy, making the specifics irrelevant? Can you bankrupt your way out of that kind of agreement? Did Nintendo present this kid with a payment plan? Does James Burt’s punishment include a lifetime banning from the Mii network?
There are all sorts of directions to go with this about copyright violation and reasonable consequences, but I have to admit I’ve become utterly bored with that whole conversation. Bogus as the system is, I’ve run out of compassion for the illicit file-sharing set as well. These people are not exactly Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Do something interesting with all this unbridled new media power, okay, or don’t come whining to me when you get stepped on for trying to abscond with the giant’s golden-egg-laying hen. Unfortunately this leaves me without a pithy moral. Except, perhaps: Don’t Fuck with Mario.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Micropayments: a bad idea that will not die
I received a notification today that Tipjoy, my second foray as an early adopter of a micropayments strategy, was going under (and that if I didn’t redeem my pathetic little barely used account balance it would vanish, probably to displace a tiny portion of some beleaguered founder’s credit card balance. So I went and transferred my $4.80 right back into PayPal, because, you know, like that’s my problem). I’m far from oblivious to the irony that the whole ineffectual experiment was transacted via what is essentially a functional (if fee heavy and intermittently evil) small transaction provider.
I signed up for Tipjoy somewhat reluctantly, at the motivation of a friend, because I had been through definitive micropayment disappointment as a beta seller and buyer for the now several-years-dead Bitpass. I set up a musicians account on their Mperia store experiment. I bought anything I could remotely justify “owning” (as much as you own data). I bought micropayment cheerleader Scott McCloud’s pay per view webcomic experiment The Right Number and I’m still waiting for him to finish the story. I paid serial project-abandoner Patrick Farley for his Pokemon-Revelations mashup Apocamon - I don’t ever expect to see the end of that one. I bought music of dubious quality (though there were a couple of rough gems in the slag).
Bitpass left a particularly bad taste in my mouth because prior to closing up shop they quietly instituted account-hoovering fees - account inactivity fees, low balance fees - and I had to go raise hell to get them to give me back the money they had taken, which wasn’t much, less than twenty dollars, but which I felt obligated to demand on general principles. So at least Tipjoy got something right.
And now I see there are another couple going concerns out there, Kachingle and flattr (and I suppose there are more obscure contenders). My faith in these enterprises can be assessed by the fact that I won’t even go to the trouble of adding hyperlinks to their sites. You know how to use Google. I will note that Flattr comes from the mind of one of the founders of the Pirate Bay, which is so damn funny it deserves a post all its own, aside from the fact that it doesn’t really matter and will be defunct in just a few short years.
Let’s get into the history of micropayments as it stretches back to the mid 1990s. I’ll break down the evolution of these various strategies to collect small amounts of money from a large base of users and distribute them to content providers, and explain how these most recent start-ups have taken the lessons of the failures of their predecessors, and tapped into the robust and contentious discussions that have circled the internet, featuring heady concepts like the mental accounting barrier, and how their strategies differ from what has gone before.
Hah, yeah, right. Hey, maybe I’m wrong, and everyone will be Flattr’d and Kachingling this time next year and you can all come back and laugh and throw mocking quarters at the ubiquitous buttons I have been sheepishly compelled to add to all my projects. No. I know these people think they have figured out the core problems with micropayments, or “crowdfunding” or whatever they want to call it. They think they will change the game because they have eliminated paywalls and made everything voluntary and instituted the customer-selected price point and made it so easy to pay. Like all the foundered ships before them they have focused on the quality of the individual transaction of a consumer at a content site. These are deck chair on Titanic solutions, lipstick on pig solutions. Let’s take a look at the sow underneath. Here’s how it breaks down.
Number one problem: the content is not worth paying for. That’s the meanest way to put it but there it is. Bloggers, podcasters, webcomic artists, sub-indie label musicians set the price already at zero. There’s too much of it. Nobody is really asking to pay for it. The majority of people who think they should get paid for it can just put a donation button on their site. The tiny percentage of people who want to pay for the pleasure have already applied the button. Sites with sufficiently high value content and high volume traffic to make it worth the effort to formally “monetize” already do so with the methods that work, advertising and merchandising.
The transaction systems all break down on two points, neither of which are what ever get addressed by the fixes for a simple reason: they aren’t fixable by any small third-party intermediary. First, you have to sign up. Every day my resistance to sign-ups gets higher. Sign ups are something I have to maintain, I have to keep track of logins and passwords and update them if my email changes. They are potential weaknesses in the eternal battle to hold a line on my privacy and security. My online history is littered with pointless sign-ups I never used and which served no purpose, and every time I’m solicited to set up another one I ask, with increasing self-interest, what am I getting out of doing this? In this case I then go and take a look at their (always poorly framed, disorganized) content rosters. Which returns us to problem number one.
Second, if I do sign up, I have to maintain some sort of account. I have to transact real money into this thing so that I have something to spend (or pay off something I owe). Should I trust you to hold on to my credit card information? Is what you have to offer compelling enough to get me to sign up for a repeating transaction on some kind of subscription basis? Right now the enterprises that have earned this position are Apple (via iTunes and Apps), eMusic and Amazon. For random one-off small transactions PayPal already exists. Take a look at problem number one and guess what your chances are.
Next problem: the support transaction itself invites me to do something I have become incredibly proficient at avoiding. I have to notice a thing to click and then click it. If you’ve gotten all clever and made it some sort of optional pay-what-you-like scheme then I have to make a decision on top of that. At some point along the line I have to have signed up. On the internet I am ignoring this sort of thing all the live long day. Advertisement clicks, donation button clicks, partners and affiliate clicks, take a survey clicks. I find the content on the page and pay attention to that.
What it all adds up to is work and money for something I’m used to getting for free. Which brings us to the last but not least point: a significant percentage of your best potential customers and clients have been burned by the assholes who have gone before you. I honestly can’t think what anyone would have to show me get me to sign up for their scheme, as a buyer or seller, after Bitpass. We went through a bunch of rigamarole to no benefit to ourselves or anyone. Nobody got squat out of their relationship with Bitpass that they couldn’t have exceeded in a tenth the time with a good old begging session. And Bitpass is hardly the start of it. There are probably people out there who still remember getting burned by Flooz. And Beenz. You say you’re different but when I look at your little charts or watch your videos you look exactly the same to me. The differences in the character of the core transaction are cosmetic. I have no faith in my participation doing your clients any good or adding any substance to my experience as a consumer. You are a solution that doesn’t work for a problem that doesn’t actually need to be solved.
I signed up for Tipjoy somewhat reluctantly, at the motivation of a friend, because I had been through definitive micropayment disappointment as a beta seller and buyer for the now several-years-dead Bitpass. I set up a musicians account on their Mperia store experiment. I bought anything I could remotely justify “owning” (as much as you own data). I bought micropayment cheerleader Scott McCloud’s pay per view webcomic experiment The Right Number and I’m still waiting for him to finish the story. I paid serial project-abandoner Patrick Farley for his Pokemon-Revelations mashup Apocamon - I don’t ever expect to see the end of that one. I bought music of dubious quality (though there were a couple of rough gems in the slag).
Bitpass left a particularly bad taste in my mouth because prior to closing up shop they quietly instituted account-hoovering fees - account inactivity fees, low balance fees - and I had to go raise hell to get them to give me back the money they had taken, which wasn’t much, less than twenty dollars, but which I felt obligated to demand on general principles. So at least Tipjoy got something right.
And now I see there are another couple going concerns out there, Kachingle and flattr (and I suppose there are more obscure contenders). My faith in these enterprises can be assessed by the fact that I won’t even go to the trouble of adding hyperlinks to their sites. You know how to use Google. I will note that Flattr comes from the mind of one of the founders of the Pirate Bay, which is so damn funny it deserves a post all its own, aside from the fact that it doesn’t really matter and will be defunct in just a few short years.
Let’s get into the history of micropayments as it stretches back to the mid 1990s. I’ll break down the evolution of these various strategies to collect small amounts of money from a large base of users and distribute them to content providers, and explain how these most recent start-ups have taken the lessons of the failures of their predecessors, and tapped into the robust and contentious discussions that have circled the internet, featuring heady concepts like the mental accounting barrier, and how their strategies differ from what has gone before.
Hah, yeah, right. Hey, maybe I’m wrong, and everyone will be Flattr’d and Kachingling this time next year and you can all come back and laugh and throw mocking quarters at the ubiquitous buttons I have been sheepishly compelled to add to all my projects. No. I know these people think they have figured out the core problems with micropayments, or “crowdfunding” or whatever they want to call it. They think they will change the game because they have eliminated paywalls and made everything voluntary and instituted the customer-selected price point and made it so easy to pay. Like all the foundered ships before them they have focused on the quality of the individual transaction of a consumer at a content site. These are deck chair on Titanic solutions, lipstick on pig solutions. Let’s take a look at the sow underneath. Here’s how it breaks down.
Number one problem: the content is not worth paying for. That’s the meanest way to put it but there it is. Bloggers, podcasters, webcomic artists, sub-indie label musicians set the price already at zero. There’s too much of it. Nobody is really asking to pay for it. The majority of people who think they should get paid for it can just put a donation button on their site. The tiny percentage of people who want to pay for the pleasure have already applied the button. Sites with sufficiently high value content and high volume traffic to make it worth the effort to formally “monetize” already do so with the methods that work, advertising and merchandising.
The transaction systems all break down on two points, neither of which are what ever get addressed by the fixes for a simple reason: they aren’t fixable by any small third-party intermediary. First, you have to sign up. Every day my resistance to sign-ups gets higher. Sign ups are something I have to maintain, I have to keep track of logins and passwords and update them if my email changes. They are potential weaknesses in the eternal battle to hold a line on my privacy and security. My online history is littered with pointless sign-ups I never used and which served no purpose, and every time I’m solicited to set up another one I ask, with increasing self-interest, what am I getting out of doing this? In this case I then go and take a look at their (always poorly framed, disorganized) content rosters. Which returns us to problem number one.
Second, if I do sign up, I have to maintain some sort of account. I have to transact real money into this thing so that I have something to spend (or pay off something I owe). Should I trust you to hold on to my credit card information? Is what you have to offer compelling enough to get me to sign up for a repeating transaction on some kind of subscription basis? Right now the enterprises that have earned this position are Apple (via iTunes and Apps), eMusic and Amazon. For random one-off small transactions PayPal already exists. Take a look at problem number one and guess what your chances are.
Next problem: the support transaction itself invites me to do something I have become incredibly proficient at avoiding. I have to notice a thing to click and then click it. If you’ve gotten all clever and made it some sort of optional pay-what-you-like scheme then I have to make a decision on top of that. At some point along the line I have to have signed up. On the internet I am ignoring this sort of thing all the live long day. Advertisement clicks, donation button clicks, partners and affiliate clicks, take a survey clicks. I find the content on the page and pay attention to that.
What it all adds up to is work and money for something I’m used to getting for free. Which brings us to the last but not least point: a significant percentage of your best potential customers and clients have been burned by the assholes who have gone before you. I honestly can’t think what anyone would have to show me get me to sign up for their scheme, as a buyer or seller, after Bitpass. We went through a bunch of rigamarole to no benefit to ourselves or anyone. Nobody got squat out of their relationship with Bitpass that they couldn’t have exceeded in a tenth the time with a good old begging session. And Bitpass is hardly the start of it. There are probably people out there who still remember getting burned by Flooz. And Beenz. You say you’re different but when I look at your little charts or watch your videos you look exactly the same to me. The differences in the character of the core transaction are cosmetic. I have no faith in my participation doing your clients any good or adding any substance to my experience as a consumer. You are a solution that doesn’t work for a problem that doesn’t actually need to be solved.
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