2010 August | Periscope Depth

From the Blog

Aug

oh, if only I could stay awhile; but what am I afraid of?

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Penny Arcade followed up their contentious post on buying used video games last week with another post on Friday:

People who buy used games are not pirates, by definition. Used games (used everything, really) are and will continue to be a legal and protected form of commerce. Other industries have done what they can to co-opt, destroy, or harvest those markets, but their existence is settled law. What I have said is that the end result of that purchase from a developer perspective must be indistinguishable. Isn’t it? That is the question I couldn’t answer. I still can’t answer it. And because I couldn’t, I had to change the way I invested my leisure dollar.

People want to talk about used cars, or libraries, or any other thing really, but I’m not talking about the universe in general – I’m talking about the tiny part of it I have any control over. That bit up there is the part I can’t resolve: the moral dimension contained within the purchase. Yes, I’m giving somebody money when I buy used. Is that sufficient? What is the end result, and what systems am I sustaining by doing so?

Also, I got some good comments on my LiveJournal (which mirrors every post here, but gets more comments). The most interesting one was from Dan S., longtime friend of the blog:

What Holkins is taking for granted that his audience knows, and he shouldn’t, is this: GameStop controls 98% of the used games market. So when we say “used games”, what we should be saying is “GameStop”. Also, we’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars here.

The problem is GameStop will encourage gamers to return new, hot games quickly, and then push the used copies onto people trying to buy the game new. So not only does the developer not see a profit, they’re not seeing a profit on the order of, depending on the game, tens of millions.

This also allows GameStop to artificially inflate the price of used copies for an insanely long time: part of the reason I don’t bother with GameStop is that I can go to Best Buy and get the game new for either the same price or at least ten bucks less than their used price.

This is an important point.

If I buy a copy of HALO Reach at Best Buy for $60, play it for a while, then get tired of it, I can sell it to GameStop. They’ll pay me about $15 for it. They will then turn around and sell it for at least $40. If someone buys it and does the same thing, GameStop can keep collecting $40 for the same disc every time it crosses their counter. And since most people trade in their games for store credit, rather than legal tender, GameStop makes money on every aspect of the transaction.

So, yes: I can see why game developers wouldn’t like that.

How to stop it? Aside from legal obstructions (which wouldn’t work) or some sort of shaming campaign (which has been great at convincing America that our President is a Muslim, but little else), publishers could lower the MSRP. GameStop can only make the profits they do because of the margins involved. If I’m choosing between a brand new copy of a game at $60 and a used copy at $40 – which has a 90% chance of being playable – I might take the gamble on the $40 copy. GameStop’s margin on the game is $25 ($40 retail, minus the $15 credit they gave the person who traded it in), all other things being equal.

But if a brand new game retailed at $40, what’s GameStop going to do? Lower the “used” price to $30? That would lower their margin to $15, which cuts their revenue by 40%. They could also lower their trade-in value from $15 to $5, but then you’d get fewer trade-ins, which would also cut revenue.

Of course, it’s easy for me to say that huge corporations that already spend millions of dollars in developing new games should experiment by slashing prices. That decision’s always scary. But GameStop’s behavior is exactly the sort of rent-seeking that comes from massive margins. So long as there’s room for middlemen to whittle away at the price, you’ll find middlemen whittling.

Plus, maybe it’s not that much of a gamble. As several other commenters pointed out last week (Joel being the first), consumers are willing to pay $60 with the knowledge that they can sell a game used. So they’re already discounting the price of the game in their heads. If you want to be really cynical about it: you’ve already lost that $15 to GameStop anyway. Why not cut it out of the retail price to spite the bastards?

Of course, as my good friend Jason pointed out, the future of profitable video game development lies in mobile and social, not in the console. Angry Birds took a team of ten developers less than a year to make. It retails at $0.99 ($4.99 on the iPad). It’s now the #1 app on iTunes, with revenue in excess of $4.5 million, and has been optioned into a movie. That’s not the billions in revenue that World of Warcraft clears every year, but it’s not the hundred million dollar bath that investors took on APB, either. Which would you rather take a chance on – that Activision will still be around in five years, or that your Mafia Wars / Farmville knock-off will make you enough money to pay your rent?

The future will not be kind to business models that require real estate. The future will be creative, like Schumpeter said, but it’ll have to be destructive first.

Aug

good things come to boys who wait

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Our manager returned from her honeymoon in Shanghai (which should be a Jackie Chan flick, if it isn’t already) with a bag full of local candy for us. She made us all pick something at random first, then dumped the rest of the bag on the table for us to share.

My first pick: a package of cookie sticks with a tiny pocket of strawberry creme to dip them in. The package described them as “biscuit,” and though I typically shy away from European language for its own sake, I feel that’d be most appropriate here. They weren’t as dry or salty as crackers, but they weren’t as sweet as Americans would be used to for cookies. I think that’s the price we pay for being serfs to the corn industry: a surfeit of sweetness. America tried the cookies and dip route and it never quite caught on, though you can still find them on some supermarket shelves. I liked the taste, but found the strawberry creme a bit much after a while and couldn’t finish the package.

My next pick: milk taffy! It came in little wrapped morsels, like the salt water taffy you might buy on the Atlantic City boardwalk. But this had a lighter consistency and was easier to chew. Inside the paper wrapper, the taffy came encased in a little wax shell. It flaked off as you picked it up. I worked on peeling mine but it came off in minuscule shreds. “I don’t think you need to take it off,” one of my coworkers said. “You just eat it.” Figuring the Chinese would never make something I couldn’t safely put in my mouth, I popped the whole thing in.

white-rabbit-taffy

For my third pick, I selected a small cake wrapped in plastic that looked like a teatime snack. It was white and crumbly, shaped like a symmetrical flower. I took about half of it in one bite. Then I stared at it.

“It …” I said.

“What is it?” my manager asked.

“It tastes like a piece of chalk with a sponge in the middle.”

Imagine a powdered Hostess donut, but caked in flour instead of sugar. The center had a red, porous consistency, like coral, and tasted organic. I know that “organic” isn’t a bad word, but it should have nothing to do with candy. Imagine reaching into a bag of M&Ms and swallowing a handful of stale peas instead. That’s the level of disconnect I suffered.

This thing tasted wretched – it might have been soap – but that wasn’t what made my face go slack. What stunned me was the idea that this would be considered candy. That anyone would enjoy this taste. What was this meant to accompany: sour milk? Pixie sticks? Pulped mushrooms? There was nothing sweet, salty or savory about it. It didn’t have the hardy taste of a fibrous plant or the tartness of nature. I could only attribute it to malice. Forget razor blades in Halloween candy or arsenic in the school milk: this was what children had to fear.

I stumbled to the sink, poured myself a cup of water and rinsed my mouth out. Still the taste lingered. I ate a few more of the biscuits-and-creme to staunch the chalky aftertaste, then dropped some change in the vending machines for a ginger ale and Reese’s. Good, honest HFCS – the stuff I was raised on, like every good American – steadied my troubled stomach.

Aug

a little goodwill goes a mighty long way

Posted by Perich at 10:04 am

Yesterday, Jerry Holkins (a/k/a Tycho of the popular video game webcomic Penny Arcade) said some stuff about used games:

In a literal way, when you purchase a game used, you are not a customer of [game developer THQ]. If I am purchasing games in order to reward their creators, and to ensure that more of these ingenious contraptions are produced, I honestly can’t figure out how buying a used game was any better than piracy. From the the perspective of a developer, they are almost certainly synonymous.

[...]

It’s exceedingly rare that I purchase a game from Gamestop these days. I got tired of being harangued for trying to buy products there, or being told that they didn’t have a product when they did, or going across the street to Best Buy or Target or Fred Meyer and finding fifty copies of the game I was trying to buy heaped up like some heathen altar to commerce. There’s more, besides. At some point in the last few years, I became incredibly uncomfortable with the used games market.

[...]

I traded in games for a long time, there’s probably comics somewhere in the archive about it – you can imagine how quickly my cohort and I consume these things. It was sort of like Free Money, and we should have understood from the outset that no such thing exists. You meet one person who creates games for a living, just one, and it becomes very difficult to maintain this virtuous fiction.

Ouch! Harsh words. And I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Jerry’s partner on the webcomic, Mike Krahulik (a/k/a Gabe) wrote the following about eight hours later:

My Twitter and my email are both exploding today. People on both sides of the used game debate are crazy passionate about this. If Penny Arcade was a talk radio show this would be a perfect time to “go to the phones”. Since we can’t do that I’d like to do the next best thing.

If you are a developer or a gamer or both I’d like to hear your thoughts. Shoot me a mail and let me know how you feel about this but try and do it in a paragraph or so if you can.

So I took him up on it, sending Gabe an abridged version of the following:

Selling used games doesn’t cheapen the developers’ product. If I buy a copy of Dragon Age: Origins for $60 when it’s first released, play it for a few months, then give up in frustration (as I have done), I have a couple options. I can let it sit on my shelf and gather dust, benefiting no one. Or I can trade it in at GameStop for store credit, where someone else can buy it for $40. I haven’t magically created a second copy where the developer only intended there to be one. I’ve put it out of my hands and into someone else’s. In fact, by putting it into the hands of someone who’ll play it, I’ve done the developer a favor.

Of course, Bioware – the developers of DA:O – don’t get that $40 from the resale. GameStop does. That can rankle some developers. But there’s no alternate scenario in which the developer gets that $40. The alternate scenarios are:

The game sits on my shelf (to no one’s benefit);
I give the game to a friend (I get some goodwill; the friend gets the game);
I sell the game myself, on eBay or Amazon, to a friend or stranger (I get some cash; someone else gets the game);
I turn the shiny plastic disc into decorative jewelry or a mural (to no one’s benefit).

People get tired of the games they buy. They want to make room on their shelves for new games. Trading in a game disc for cash or credit doesn’t water down the developer’s intellectual property, since I stop having it the moment someone else does. And it doesn’t take bread out of the developer’s mouth.

I know that Holkins isn’t proposing a buying cycle where buying a video game is a sacred trust – where the purchase of EA or THQ’s latest offering means you become custodian of a product that you must guard for all time, bequeathing as a rich legacy unto one’s issue. But there’s no other logical conclusion to his complaint. If the idea of people reselling games bothers him so much, what would he prefer? Some ridiculous new law? Some bizarre standard of behavior which applies to video games but not to bicycles, cars, leather jackets, books, houses, DVDs, cameras, lamps, unlocked phones, bed frames, coffee tables, curtain rods, vases or collectible plates?

One thing that might keep the discussion from getting too rancorous is separating the idea of buying used games in general (which is harmless) to the practices of Gamestop (which are sketchy and questionable). Shopping there becomes less fun every time I go in, as the staff aggressively hypes their magazine, their frequent buyer programs, game protection, pre-orders and every other possible way to extract money from me without adding much value.

But I don’t think selling a game, or buying a used game, takes money out of a developer’s pocket. I don’t know as many developers as Jerry and Mike do, but I know a couple. And I don’t think they mind.

Aug

tonight wyclef, akon, weezy on the bill

Posted by Perich at 9:15 am

I wrote my longest Overthinking It post in years – perhaps ever – giving a deep read of Wyclef Jean’s three-year-old pop hit, “Sweetest Girl (Dollar Bill).”

Wyclef makes use of a triple-antanaclasis here with three different meanings of the word “bill.” The first, the most common one throughout the song, is a bill as in currency — the “dollar dollar bill, y’all.” The second is a bill as in an invoice for services, like a water bill — “if they got to pay the bill.” The third is the bill as in the marquee of performers — “Tonight Wyclef, Akon, Weezy on the bill.”

What’s the effect of this identity rhyme? It ties into the theme that we’ll explore later in the chorus — that the presence of cash in the world is inescapable. Every aspect of your life touches on a bill. Wyclef, Akon and Lil’ Wayne are on the bill tonight (the marquee). Why? So they can make the bills (dollars) to pay the bills (invoices). It’s almost as if this single syllable rules everything around them.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-check it.

Aug

I’ll pretend my ship’s not sinking

Posted by Perich at 7:30 am

Oh, dear. Someone take Eli Manning’s last known photograph:

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning said he will play Saturday against the Baltimore Ravens.

Manning will practice Monday afternoon but will wear a baseball cap instead of a helmet. The quarterback is not to be touched in the non-tackling practice. He expects to be able to put on a helmet for Wednesday’s practice.

Manning had 12 stitches removed from his forehead on Friday and sat out Saturday’s preseason loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers.

“It feels fine, the stitches are out,” Manning said while wearing a Giants baseball cap prior to practice. “I’m not wearing a helmet today for practice, will be in a hat, but it feels fine and is not hurting. It’s exposed, as long as I don’t get hit in the head, it will be all right.”

“As long as I don’t get hit in the head.” Wow.

Granted, the New York Football Giants are a better team than the Deadskins, so I’m not expecting the same 23-3 mudfest that we saw last weekend. Perhaps Elisha will only be sacked once, as opposed to McNabb’s two visits to the ground on Saturday that left him limping onto the bench after the first half. Manning only got sacked thirty times last season, which makes the Giants’ pocket protection more porous than the 3-13 Tampa Bay Buckaroos but sturdier than the Stillers (sorry, IOZ). In 2009, Ben Wafflespurgisnacht got jacked up fifty times – an average of 3.125 sacks per game. Actually, that should be 3.33 sacks per game, since Big Ben sat out the Baltimore game in Week 12; something about his head hurting.

But I digress! This isn’t about Pittsburgh. This is about the Giants, playing the Ravens in Baltimore. Perhaps things won’t be as bad for the lesser of two Mannings as they were for Donovan McNabb. After all, Terrell Suggs was going up against rookie offensive linemen last Saturday – no match for a ferocious Pro Bowler. Fortunately, the Giants are … what’s that? They’re on their second and third-string guards? Oh. Oh, dear.

Well, there’s always Jim Sorgi.

Aug

baby won’t you try to find me

Posted by Perich at 11:55 am

click for full screencap

I suppose it’s not strictly an SEO fail. Technically, Jetblue.com is in position #1 on Google for “jetblue all you can jet.” But you’d think they’d have a better page in the top slot. Sorry.

That search was performed on Wednesday August 18th, the day the sale was announced. I performed another search this morning and found the same results.

SEO: not for the weak.

Aug

a piece of me will always be inside of you

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Question regarding the new Jennifer Aniston / Jason Bateman comedy The Switch:

Kassie [Aniston], on her own but eager to have a baby, has personally selected her donor, a square-jawed surfer-blond dude named Roland (Patrick Wilson). To toast her impending pregnancy, she throws a party in which Roland is asked to leave his crucial sample in the bathroom. He does — but Wally [Bateman], in a drunken haze, pours it down the drain and leaves his own sample instead.

Cut to seven years later, when Kassie is living in Colorado with her 6-year-old son, Sebastian (Thomas Robinson), who unbeknownst to everyone, is really Wally’s son. Even Wally doesn’t know it; he has no memory of that fateful night, or of the switch that he drunkenly, passive-aggressively instigated.

Is what Bateman’s character does:

Worse than rape;
Just as bad as rape; or
Actually rape

I’m torn between 1 and 2, but you could make a case for 3.

# # #

The gym near my office has a whiteboard at the entrance. The staff regularly updates it with health tips. For the past few weeks they’ve had a paragraph of text which reads (paraphrasing):

Desk jobs are bad! Sitting all day puts an unnatural strain on your back, core, knees and hip flexors. Talk to a personal trainer today for ways to recover.

About two weeks ago, someone erased the word “desk.”

Someone replaced the word “desk” last week, using a different colored marker. I don’t know if that was done for emphasis or just because no one could find the original color.

As of this past Wednesday, someone had erased it again. The Cold War continues.

# # #

Use as needed.

Aug

a woman is a woman and a man ain’t nothing but a male

Posted by Perich at 9:03 am

I tell myself I don’t like swing dancing. “I don’t like swing dancing,” I told myself, Sylvia and several other people on Tuesday. This was at the Yelp Elite event in Charles Square near Harvard.

It’s not that I don’t like dancing. I love dancing. Ask anyone who’s seen me at a wedding, or in a club, or driving in the car when my jam comes on. I just don’t like dancing with rules. I feel the same way about line dancing, Irish step and polka. Fuck you for telling me when I get to stomp. I’ll stomp when I damn well want to.

But I can’t hear a tune and not dance, so I ended up in the center of the floor against all sense and reason. “I keep dropping the beat,” I said, stumbling back into the one, two, rock-step rhythm. “I can’t hear a 4/4 song and dance in 3/4 time.”

“You’re thinking about it too much,” Sylvia said.

“That’s what I do,” I said.

But the free booze and support of my friends helped. I turned a corner with Yelp this year. Now I can show up at an event and point to half a dozen people I can count as friends. Plus, Yelp events are always a good source of cocktails and flaky, cheesy hors d’oeuvres. Everything a growing boy needs.

Aug

it’s such a feeling that, my love, I can’t hide

Posted by Perich at 10:08 am

Can we talk about how great Mad Men has been this season so far?

I have this secret daydream that Matthew Weiner sat down a year ago, looked at the various issues of Vanity Fair and Esquire and Maxim that proclaimed Don Draper the idol of a generation of unanchored males, and said, “Obviously you weren’t paying attention.” The first third of this season has been devoted to dismantling the myth of Don Draper, super-stud with his finger on the pulse of the now. Consider:

He strikes out with every woman he makes a move on. The sole exception is his secretary, who knows that rebuffing his advances might cost her a job (and suspects that catering to them might earn her a promotion) and consents to sleep with him while he’s blackout drunk. But everyone else – the actress, the perky nurse from across the hall, the consumer psychologist, the twenty-year-old Berkley student – all shoot him down.
Not only that, but it’s clear that Don isn’t looking to claw his way out of his hole. The actress with whom he goes on a date is gorgeous, smart, funny and clearly into him. She explicitly tells Don that (1) she won’t sleep with him that evening and (2) he should call her later so they can go on another date. But the idea of seeing a woman twice in one decade makes Don nervous, so he calls a prostitute to slap him around.
Don’s progressed from “casual drinker” to “habitual drunk.” Notice how he pours Lane’s expensive Scotch into a flask, letting the excess dribble onto the rug. Notice how many times he shows up to a meeting with bags under his eyes (the end of Ep.3, right before Allison quits in Ep.4). Notice how he snaps at his secretary when his bottle’s empty.
And for a man who’s supposed to be shaping the popular consciousness, he doesn’t care as much about moving the Zeitgeist any more. He rattles off a list of Christmas gifts for his secretary to buy for his daughter Sally, and adds “a couple of Beatles LPs” as an afterthought. Which do you think will have a bigger impact on Sally’s childhood – a generic pink dress or A Hard Day’s Night?
Not only is the mystique fading, but everyone seems to notice. Peggy no longer worships Don as a creative genius. Roger and Bert grow tired of Don’s petulant privacy, particularly after he botches an interview in Ep.1. Joan regards Don with impatience, foisting a battleaxe of a secretary on him after Allison leaves in tears. And the new consumer psychologist, Faye, regards Don as “a type.”

Get this straight, American males – Don Draper is not your model for life. And I say this as someone who dressed as him for Halloween.

Other developments?

Peggy and Pete have started to take more of the spotlight, particularly in the last episode. This season should mark Don becoming less relevant and Peggy and Pete moreso. They’re the face of the “youth culture” that’s going to become more important as the Sixties roll on. And, as Ep.04 made explicit, they’re going in opposite directions. Pete aligns himself with old money (the Vick’s cough syrup cartel) and power, while Peggy follows after impulsive hipster culture. Don, Peggy and Pete are going to be the dramatic tripod around which the later seasons develop.

And then there’s poor Joan. The timing’s ironic: the world just discovered how gorgeous Christina Hendricks is at the moment when her fictional character’s good looks became less relevant. The camera still forces us to regard her as a good body in a tight dress. There’s a shot in Ep.02 where she talks to Roger in his office. Roger sits down on the corner of his desk; the camera follows to keep him framed. The result is to cut off Joan’s head, leaving her bust and hips perfectly framed while Roger keeps talking about this red dress she wore once. There’s the male gaze, and then there’s the gaze at the male gaze.

Joan has begun to realize (by Ep.03) that she climbed the wrong ladder. Her husband (in addition to being a rapist) is not a suave, talented surgeon destined for wealth. He’s petulant, manipulative and selfish. But she married him. So what’s her next step? Joan may have made a series of mistakes, but she’s not a weak character. She’s not one to sit idly by and let fate push her into a corner. So the only question is when she’ll push back.

And what’s next for 1965? Martin Luther King’s march on Montgomery, increased troop presence in Vietnam, the Beatles at Shea Stadium and Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, the Second Vatican Council and the New York World’s Fair. So things might stay busy.

Aug

baby did a bad bad thing

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Saturday night, I shot perhaps the worst game of pool I’ve shot in over a decade.

I’ve never been good at pool. There’s no great mystery behind it: I never had much opportunity to play growing up and have never invested the money in learning. I developed enough skill to knock balls in the direction they’re supposed to go, to break without embarrassing myself and to distinguish stripes from solids. Which is good enough for social play. And I need to stress that I still had fun this past Saturday.

But, man, my game sucked. I scraped the cue ball on three consecutive shots like Moe going upside Curly’s head. Every ball I hit went at least one radian off from its intended direction. In three rounds of play I sunk two balls total. To quote Achewood, if my game had touched some eggs, the mother bird would have killed them.

So: I’m no good at pool. You can count on me to forget at least two of the essential rules of poker in any given evening. I’m good enough at fighting, though I don’t test it by getting in a lot of scraps. I have a good beard – not the ragged beard of most Internet professionals, but an honest beard of style. And my haircut’s been okay this year.

This got me thinking about the Classic Hallmarks of American Manhood.

I know, I know, gender roles, etc. I don’t feel any worse about myself for not being able to shoot a competitive game of pool. The hours I would need to have spent practicing billiards, I spent doing things like Not Smoking, Not Getting Teenagers Pregnant, Not Getting Arrested and other life skills that are hard to acquire at a pool hall. Not Putting Some Guy’s Cousin Up On Your Couch for his First Few Days Out of Prison. Not Wrecking Your Charger. Skills like that; real resume boosters.

This is more of an intellectual exercise than anything. But before I can measure myself against this arbitrary checklist, I need to devise it.

Why do we think that shooting a good game of pool is a Classic Hallmark of American Manhood? It certainly requires skill, but so does gourmet cooking. There’s the element of gambling, and particularly hustling, which goes a long way as well. But I suspect pool looks cool because of its pop culture history. When you think “pool hall,” your thoughts will probably drift toward dim rooms with wood slats, smoke curling near the ceiling and bright lamps haloing green tables. Taciturn men leaning on cues like sages out of myth and young guys with crew cuts and faded jeans. Jazz music and pitchers of beer. You know, some place cool. Not an actual pool hall.

Look at this cool mother right here.

So this Classic Hallmark of American Manhood comes to us from pop culture. Surprise, surprise.

Every now and then, some men’s magazine or website will publish a link-baiting list of the essential skills every man should have. The editors rarely give a methodology behind this list. It’s usually cobbled together from a survey of Manly Men, furtive memories of shortcomings that these skills could have avoided, and copy-pasting from last year’s list. Screw that. Our list is going to have reason behind it!

Since we’re admitting that the notion of American Manhood comes to us from pop culture anyway, let’s dip straight from the trough. Help me assemble a list of Classic Hallmarks of American Manhood by asking yourself this question: if I’m shooting an action movie, and I want to establish our male protagonist as a bad-ass without any dialogue, what could I depict him doing?

Some easy answers leap to mind:

Shooting pool
Playing poker
Firing a gun
Beating some thugs up
Staring down a bad guy
Lighting a match with his thumbnail
Drinking a shot
Opening a beer on a counter-top
Tossing his hat onto a coat rack

And so forth.

Obviously, that’s an incomplete list. So I open it up to you! What are the Classic Hallmarks of American Manhood? How else can we feel incompetent today?