Mark – Page 59

Scott vs. Scribd

September 22, 2009 By Mark 7 Comments

There’s a fair bit of notice being given today to a lawsuit in which a writer (Elaine Scott) is suing an online publisher (Scribd) for copyright infringement. The trend in the comments I’ve seen is to go after the writer on a number of fronts, but I’m not going to join the chorus.

If there is any single point of focus needed in the current back-and-forth about publishing it’s that an author’s copyright is law. Not old law, not antiquated law, not mushy law, not if-we-can’t-find-the-author-it’s-no-longer-law law, but law. As in it’s the law and no one else — no third party of any kind — is allowed to take away, restrict, modify or in any way lay claim to an author’s copyright without the author’s approval.

If we’re not willing to say that unambiguously, collectively and individually, then we’re not serious about writing as a profession. Because copyright law is the only thing that allows us to produce a product that can be sold. We don’t have mines full of physical ore to sell. We don’t have stands of timber we can cut down. We don’t have items that can be warehoused and protected under guard. We have intellectual property which only has value to us if the law says we have a right to control it. [ Read more ]

The Oz Project

September 22, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

I first learned of the Oz Project a decade ago, during conversations with some of the original members of the Carnegie-Mellon team. If you’re interested in believable agents and interactive drama you can find a comprehensive overview of the subject here, written by Michael Mateas.

— Mark Barrett

Why I’m Opting Out

September 21, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

Over the past month I’ve discovered a number of reasons why I prefer to try to go it alone as a writer, and I’m confident I’ll be talking about them in the near future. Reading the following quote, however, made me realize that some of the reasons are more moral and ethical than they are practical:

While the distant past may not be germane, we do have to go back to the middle years of the twentieth century. At that time, publishing was certainly a business, as it is today, but it was a business that had accepted a low rate of return on investment, in exchange for the thrill (and it is a thrill) of being part of the cultural life of the country, and indeed, the world. But in the 1980s and 1990s, bigger publishers began gobbling up smaller publishers, and then multinational corporations swallowed up the bigger publishers. Suddenly these houses needed to service the debt involved in buyouts, on top of the relatively modest six-to-eight percent return on investment that Bennett Cerf and Alfred Knopf had once been happy to receive.

I think that’s right. I also think it explains why I feel the way I do about the publishing industry — like they’ve been making suckers out of me and everyone else. [ Read more ]

We’re All Publishers Now

September 21, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

More than once during my life I’ve been involved in trying to solve a problem that never previously existed. In grappling with such issues I’ve managed to make a small contribution to the cause, which was both interesting to me as a process and satisfying as an end.

In turning my mind to the evolving (devolving?) world of publishing, I anticipated a similar opportunity, but as I noted indirectly in this post there really isn’t a lot that one person can do to affect the course of future events. [ Read more ]

Jason Epstein 2009 ROC Keynote

September 21, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

If you don’t know who Jason Epstein is, don’t worry. As someone who’s playing catch-up on a whole host of publishing-related issues I didn’t recognize the name, but after reading his 2009 ROC keynote I probably won’t forget it in the near future. Here’s a sample:

The radically decentralized digital marketplace has already rendered traditional publishing infrastructure — warehouses, inventory, shipping, returns and so on redundant. Like American automobile manufacturers traditional publishers will persist in their traditional mode as long as they can, but they cannot indefinitely defend their institutions against disruptive technologies any more than the monks in their scriptoria could withstand the urgency of movable type.

Because we live in a socially-distracted and self-obsessed America, it’s already been forgotten that the entirety of the United States automobile industry crashed to earth and crumpled on impact like a crippled dirigible only a few short months ago. Though there were no flames, the collective balance sheet of one of America’s (and the world’s) mightiest industries bled so much red ink that it died on the operating table, only to be resurrected by the rather neat trick of selling off organs in order to keep the skin intact. That skin is now being paraded in a wave of commercials expressing deep interest in green technology, electric vehicles, and any other buzzword that might attract buyers and investors.

The publishing business will probably not fall as hard, but it will fall. Every half-step into the inevitable future that a given publishing CEO decides to take will rationalize the omission of the next ten necessary steps. But that’s what happens when you tie yourself to shareholder value instead of trite ideas like quality or customer service.

If you want to know what the future will look like, read Jason Epstein’s full speech. If you want to know where the opportunities are, read Jason Epstein’s full speech. It’s all in there, it’s going to happen, and I didn’t disagree with a word of it.

— Mark Barrett

Interactive Lather

September 19, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Yesterday a story that’s been running for seventy-two years finally came to a close:

Friday marked the final flicker of CBS’ “Guiding Light,” as that venerable daytime drama logged its farewell hour after 72 years on the air.

As the article points out, there’s a lot more competition for eyeballs than there used to be, and there are fewer and fewer consumers at home during the day. Of such societal shifts are final curtains made.

It also seems to me, however, that the essence of the soap opera remains deeply-rooted in our culture, even as the pre-packaged network television versions have been dropping like flies over the past decade. For what is the online gathering place — whether bulletin board, chatroom or social networking site — but a live-action, real-time soap opera?

The king of the hill these days isn’t General Hospital, it’s Facebook — a 24/7 rolling soap opera filled with bad blind dates, drunken escapades, desperate pleas for help, fake desperate pleas for help, loneliness, sexual intrigue, comedy and enough vanity to stock every dressing room the length of Broadway. Instead of SAG actors playing roles, the users are the cast, mixing truth with fiction as they build and morph their online personas into the feel-good characters they most want to be.

The entire production cycle is down to mere seconds. The production cost is the price of broadband. The actors, writers and directors are you. The show never goes off the air. And each user’s dialogue is immediately embraced by other live human beings, who in turn play out their parts against a backdrop of pop-culture myopia.

How could any fictional soap opera hope to compete with that?

— Mark Barrett

Scalability Bites Back

September 19, 2009 By Mark 3 Comments

One of the first comments posted on this site when it launched a month ago mentioned a book called The Black Swan. So I went to the library and checked out a copy, and I have to say that it’s an interesting read written by an interesting person who’s not shy about letting you know how interesting he is.

I agree with the basic premise: that there’s too much attention paid to meaningless detail, when the really important stuff is usually not indicated by measurable shifts in meaningless detail. Rather, it’s indicated by a one-off event that pretty much everyone seems not to have anticipated at all. (My own take on the heavy use of the bell curve — which the author rightly despises in so many instances — is that the bell curve is a useful indicator of markets and demographics. Since most of our lives and the meaning in and of our lives revolves around money, the bell curve is a useful device for both measuring how much we have and whose reserves we can most easily target.) [ Read more ]

License to Lie

September 18, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

I don’t know when I first heard the terms narrative nonfiction and creative nonfiction, but it wasn’t too long ago. Five years at most. I do, however, remember what my reaction was.

You’re kidding.

The joke was on me, however, because it turns out that people really aren’t kidding about these — what to call them? — terms? Genres? Amazing new art forms?

Call me old fashioned, but I don’t really see why these newfangled words are necessary from a functional point of view. (If this is really just about marketing the same old books to a new crop of easily-led readers, that’s something entirely different. It’s still not okay, but it’s entirely different.)

As hard as I try, I can’t really see the difference between what used to be called nonfiction and what is now being dressed up as narrative nonfiction or creative nonfiction. Unless of course these new terms (that’s what I’m going to call them) are really an excuse for allowing nonfiction writers to cross the line into fiction writing. [ Read more ]

Writing Blogs and M&M’s

September 17, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

27 Writing blogs vying to make a Top 10 list. To my mind, the list itself is the treasure.

Here’s a favorite found nugget:

Stay away from the peanut M&M’s. You may think they’re harmless, but a handful turns into ten and you’re going to consume just enough calories between September and February to make you hate yourself in March. Remember, you’re spending lots of hours sitting on your ass. Your brain doesn’t burn calories at the same rate as your body. Eat accordingly.

Don’t I know this. You start with the little packet. You move up to the Tear & Share packet — but you don’t share. Then you see the medium-sized bag is on sale at the local market. Then you notice the large bag is also on sale for the same price. Then you’re pushing a wheelbarrow full of lose, custom-printed peanut M&M’s down the purgatory hallway of your dreams, slipping and sliding on the candies that fall out of the barrow until you finally lose your balance and plummet into a swirling cauldron of half-melted pills, only to wake up screaming with the caked-on taste of peanut-flavored chocolate foaming the inside of your mouth like spray-on insulation.

Which is when you finally admit you have a problem and switch to plain.

[Warning: if you are prone to seizures, narcolepsy or zoning out, don’t click here.]

— Mark Barrett

You Get What You (Don’t) Pay For

September 17, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

In the publishing business writers get paid to write. In Hollywood, writers get paid to write. In the copywriting business, writers get paid. In the theater, playwrights get paid.

In the interactive industry, however, it’s been a very slow process getting the people who make games to see writers as an inherent part of the industry. In fact, ten years ago one of the docs I just added to this site — Storytellers: A Hiring Guide for the Interactive Industry — originally had this title: “Storytellers: Part of the team?”

Well, the good news is that writers are now much more a part of the development process than they were even five years ago. In fact, that’s one of the things that’s changed for the better in the interactive industry: writers are now being thought of as part of the team. [ Read more ]