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Valve, Writers and Success

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Long-time readers know I’ve been harping on this subject for at least six years, but it deserves the harp. One of the more successful and forward-looking game developers over the past decade has been a company called Valve. It’s more recognizable titles include Half-life, Half-life 2 and Portal.

As I noted as recently as September, Valve has had a professional writer on staff throughout its admirable run. My own opinion, as a writer, is that these two things — writer-on-staff and success — are actually related. The interactive industry being what it is, however, this tends to be a minority opinion, and the rationale is always the same: there’s no money for a staff writer. To which I reply: maybe if you had a writer on staff, you’d make more money.

In any case, today Gamasutra put up an interview with Mark Laidlaw (the aforementioned writer) and Eric Wolpaw (a second writer hired by Valve — apparently because the first hire turned out so well). It’s worth a read if you’re trying to break out of the game-design box you’re in. Because good writers know how to do that.

— Mark Barrett

Art, Entertainment, Ethics and Exploitation

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I read an article yesterday (via JurieOnGames) about the supposed difference between game development in China and the West. I’ll deal with the nationalism of the speaker who was featured momentarily, but the article itself did a good job of framing the issues anyone confronts when merging art and commerce. This is particularly true in light of attempts to monetize free content, which is being explored in both the interactive (online gaming) and non-interactive (publishing) markets.

As I noted previously, attempts to emphasize money above all else are ultimately pointless. If you’re in business to make money, yes, you should focus on making money. But saying that money comes before everything else is a literal lie if you are in the entertainment business, because everyone knows it’s a horrendously bad way to make money. Mining zinc is better. Building houses is better, even in today’s market. Making cereal is better.

The article in question focuses on “Zhan Ye, president of GameVision,” who was “speaking at the Virtual Goods Summit in San Francisco on Friday.” In the article, Ye states that a new breed of Chinese developers is building games from the ground up that are focused as much (or more) on monetization as they are on art, entertainment or fun. He paints all Western development (including Western-trained Chinese developers) as failed precisely because monetization is not the primary focus during every step of the production process.

It’s tempting to dismiss Ye’s comments as either uninformed or nationalistic hype. But Ye is genuinely talking about a paradigm shift from creating and selling entertainment on the merits to actively exploiting customers.  [ Read more ]

The Over-Saturated E-Reader Market

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Okay, I’m calling this. I don’t know what’s happening with the e-reader market, but I’m 100% sure there are too many participants. Has this ever happened before with emerging tech? Were there fifty different MP3 players before Apple begat the iPod?

Today’s entrant is none other than Creative, known to long-time PC aficionados for their sound technology, and more recently sundry miscellaneous gadgets. Their impending e-reader is called the Mediabook, and unlike the kindle it:

will harness “videos, pictures, text, and services in one device that supports a media-rich experience.”

Which means it won’t be a dedicated e-reader, but some sort of hyrbrid iPhone-ish-netbook-like hand-held computer gizmo. But isn’t this really inevitable? Just as all SUV’s invariably morph into egg-shaped station wagons when gas mileage becomes an issue, all task-specific devices like the Kindle are going to keep drifting back to the hand-held computer model where all-in-one functionality is critical.

The biggest concern I have is that all of these developers are going to blow it. They’re going to go feature crazy and forget that the race to develop a digital book on par with an actual book has not been won — not even close. If that happens, gadget sales go up, e-book sales go flat or down, and everybody forgets (again) that text is still a big deal in the entertainment business. And education business. And newspaper business.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy who runs the local service station is putting together his own e-reader, to be given away with every full tank. And I hear the Girl Scouts are going to be selling one along with their cookies. Can Nintendo be far behind? What about PlaySkool? And where is Boeing on this? If you can build a 7X7, can’t you build an e-reader?

— Mark Barrett

It Isn’t the Recession*

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Lying is a part of doing business. When things are good, you leverage trust as long as it makes you money. When things are not good there’s no lie you won’t tell in order to survive.

The problem with the publishing industry is that I can’t tell whether the people in charge are lying or simply oblivious. Here’s a quote from an AP/WaPo article at the end of last year:

The economy has crashed on a supposedly recession-proof industry: book publishing. There is consolidation at Random House Inc., as well as layoffs at Simon & Schuster and at Thomas Nelson Publishers.

And here’s a quote from the Boston Globe a week ago:

“Historically, the conventional wisdom was the publishing industry was recession-proof, and if the adage was ever true it doesn’t remain the case,’’ said Gary Gentel, president of the trade and reference division at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a sponsor (along with the Globe) of the Boston Book Festival. “That said, this is the perfect time for a festival. What a great escape.’’

It’s hard for me to believe that people actually think constriction in the book business is being caused by (or primarily by) the recession. If the adage that publishing is recession-proof was ever true, it would make sense to look for other causes of trouble even if you were in the middle of a recession. There’s also the rather obvious point that the music business has been pulverized by the effects of the internet for the better part of a decade, and that the decline of newspapers has accelerated because of the internet, making it at least plausible that what’s happening in publishing has something to do with the internet.

Which would mean that these publishing voices, like all vested voices in a darkening market, are simply lying into the wind, hoping that enthusiasm, confidence, and bravado will shore up an eroded foundation. And if that’s all this is, I’m fine with it, in the same way that I was fine watching high-flying kamikaze pilots on Wall St. and in government smile as they blew up the foundation of our economy.

For the record, however, what’s hurting publishing is not the recession. It’s the internet.

* Apparently the recession is over, so we can all stop worrying and love the bomb.

— Mark Barrett

Suspension of Disbelief Revisited

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Earlier today the following quote appeared on Twitter (via Guy Charles and others), regarding Jane Friedman’s keynote interview at PBV:

Friedman on enhanced ebooks: “Vook is read and watch… I’m not interested in disrupting the reading experience; it’s sacrosanct.”

By coincidence, I ran across the following quote at almost the same moment while doing research for the previous post:

There are plenty of people who cringe at the cultural toll, who believe that the loss of books means losing the tactile, absorbing relationship with text we’ve enjoyed for centuries. MIT technology guru Nicholas Negroponte would like to remind them that people resisted indoor plumbing, too.

“They complained that if women didn’t do the laundry beside the river and at the fountain they would be alone, but other things started to serve those social purposes,’’ said Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop Per Child program, a festival panelist, and Deborah Porter’s significant other. “The reading experience is becoming more social. There are various ways of interacting on e-readers or computers, where people blog and use Twitter, and where the sharp line between the writer and the reader is going away.’’

I understand both of these perspectives, but relative to the functional merits of books they are both wrong, and both wrong for the same reason.  [ Read more ]

The Bigger Picture

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CNET’s interview of Eric Garland, CEO of Big Champagne, has attracted understandable interest over the past few days. Garland talks turkey and sense about how the internet will inevitably impact the movie business, just as it has the music and publishing industries:

What will happen is the studios will exhaust every available remedy and there will be a series of evolutions, meaning they will exhaust one remedy and a new one will present itself. These things will be pursued in tandem. They will pursue technological intervention on the Internet. This goes to the study at NYU that basically says this has had no effect. Ultimately, because they are spending a lot of money and not getting results, they’ll become disillusioned with these vendors. They’ll clean house. But something else will present itself.

I think he’s right about where we are, and I think he’s right about where we’re going in the future, but I think he and almost everyone else stop short of where we’re ultimately headed. And I’m not saying that as a criticism: Garland properly frames his comments in the context of survivability, not ultimate truth. The goal is getting your industry through the transition, after which things will of course continue to evolve.

Still, I think the lines of convergence are pretty clear, even if they still resolve over the horizon. Everything people think they know about the internet is predicated on a set of relatively arbitrary decisions. Net neutrality is one instance, anonymity is another. Flip a couple of simple switches and suddenly the internet doesn’t look like the wild west or a commune, it looks like Big Brother or a corporate bureaucracy.  [ Read more ]

Dell As Predator

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Every once in a while I do a survey of the PC landscape to see what’s selling and what’s changed. In the heyday of the personal computer tech advances were routinely amazing. Today, computers are lifeless commodities, differentiated more by colors on laptop lids than by anything inside. And that’s fine: there was really only one performance requirement for computers, and that was that they be able to do what we want them to do without having to wait for anything to spool up or refresh or crunch. Now we’re there.

As with all else these days, this commoditization has put tremendous price pressure on manufacturers. While Apple still commands a premium because of its snob appeal, everything else is being squeezed to the nth degree. (I configured a couple of PC’s last night, and on one I had the option of upgrading my hard drive by 500GB for $39.) Margins are shrinking to nano levels, meaning corporate profits must be driven elsewhere. Which brings me to Dell.  [ Read more ]

Theme, Literature and Money

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Nathan Bransford put up a post today titled Themes Schmemes. Here’s the gist of it:

I think the drive to write Literature/art sometimes leads some very talented writers, especially young ones, to write books that as an agent I can’t sell because there’s too much attention paid to the themes and the subtext and the meaning and other English-class-type concerns, rather than the narrative and the plot and the craft and other sausage-making-type concerns.

In talking about theme over the course of this past week, I tried to stay focused on the difference between theme as a useful literary technique and theme as a toxic analytical tool. I tried to stay away from the relative merit of theme as a technique or personal literary objective because I consider that an artistic choice. Saying that theme is bad when used by a particular author to create a given story would be like saying that reference photographs are bad for any artist’s painting. It’s not for me to decide.

Bransford’s post, however, changes the axis of analysis. Instead of the utility or merit of theme, he is focused — rightly, for an agent — on sales. And from that point of view I have no doubt that he’s right: theme and other literary tools are often completely unnecessary when crafting marketable fiction. The problem, of course, is that this is a slippery slope, and once you shove off you can’t stop the slide without exposing yourself to your own market-driven arguments.

I’m confident Bransford believes there’s a minimal level of storytelling skill necessary to write a bestseller. Still, if you found a trendy, charismatic writer who could riff on pornographic sex, gruesome, sadistic violence and pop-culture references, and you hyped the resulting title with a cutting-edge social-media marketing tour, you might end up with a bestseller on your hands. At which point that writer’s agent would point out that Bransford’s concerns about plotting and character and story are totally overrated, and the only thing that matters is whether you really can increase sales by taking a bus load of orphans hostage and refusing to free them until every American buys five copies of Risotto: A Love Story.

Which is why I tend not to make market-driven arguments about craft-driven processes. If what sells is what matters, then nothing else matters.

— Mark Barrett

Start Me Up!

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We all know there’s a cottage industry in making fun of Sarah Palin. Whatever your political bent, her appearance(s) on Saturday Night Live cemented that fact. Now that she’s written (cough) a book that’s due out shortly, people are trying to get more yuks out of the woman.

We also know that the whole self-publishing movement is saddled with a lot of baggage. If it isn’t the vanity-publishing industry ripping off customers, it’s the pervasive idea that self-publishing of any stripe is an admission of failure. Failure to succeed in publishing, failure to write good (sic!), failure to have been born into the right social circles, etc. I’ve even read snarky comments about use of the term independent author, although I can’t figure out how it’s anything but accurate.

Tonight, however, all that changed. Because of this:

Start-up publisher OR Books has announced plans to publish….

Start-up publisher…?

OMG!!! [Cue gender-neutral thrill-squeal.]

If perception is reality, then marketing speak is the plutonium that fuels cultural mushroom clouds. One day you’re a lowly self-publisher fighting industry scorn, the next you’re a start-up publisher driving technology and innovation to capture market share!

(See also micro-publishing for another marketing-friendly co-opting term.)

— Mark Barrett