Electronic goods markets: end-to-end wins?

Hypothesis: As industries of cultural production adapt to digital distribution, content publishers in each industry will follow, with minor variations, the four-phase pattern set by the music industry:

1. Denial: Publishers pretend that digital distribution does not exist, attempting to salvage business models based on distribution of physical media. In some cases, publishers use the legal system to try to make this fantasy a reality. Regardless of the legal outcomes, this proves unsustainable in the long run. During this phase, publishers may make halfhearted forays into digital publishing, which invariably fail because they are deeply and deliberately user-hostile.
2. Faustian Bargain: A technology company designs a system which disguises computers' fundamentally general nature with a fig leaf of DRM. The disguise allows this company to strike a deal with major content publishing cartels to distribute content. Because a technology company has taken control of the technology, the system finally works in a way that doesn't make customers want to tear their hair out. The DRM system fails to prevent widespread copyright infringement, but it provides a hook for the technology company to build a vertically integrated stack which is somewhat inconvenient for customers to exit.
3. Clash of the Titans: Publishers realize that they are in a weakening bargaining position with respect to the technology company, which has acquired considerable monopsony power due to its control of the platform. Publishers butt heads with the technology company over prices and other contractual terms. This, too, proves unsustainable.
4. End-to-End Wins: Publishers realize that architectures which embed control in the distribution mechanism put more power in the hands of middlemen than endpoints. Conversely, end-to-end architectures, wherein the endpoints negotiate the transaction and any number of interchangeable mechanisms carry data between them on a best-effort basis, place power in the hands of endpoints rather than middlemen. Publishers furthermore realize that publishers and customers are the endpoints; that in the long run both are best served when the customer can purchase a bundle of data which is not bound (even weakly) to the sales channel, the software stack, or the physical device, all of which are intermediaries between the content and the customer. Publishers finally offer their content in a portable format via multiple sales channels.

This is just a hypothesis. I'm not sure I believe it. However, as evidence that expecting the final stage is not laughably utopian, I offer Sony and Warner's deals with eMusic and the introduction of MP3s on iTunes as evidence that stage 4 is already happening for music.

Detailed application of the above model to current hoopla in the e-book market left as an exercise to the reader. However, I will note that one reason I bought a Kindle is that I thought book publishers were so ornery, retrograde, and technophobic that they'd never progress to stage 4 unless they had an obnoxious would-be monopsonist (viz., Amazon) to frighten them through stage 3.

(A counterpoint to the above argument would be to observe that certain goods, like streaming video and computer games, appear to be evolving in the direction of fairly strong architectures of control. Neither Netflix streaming nor Steam give you much freedom w.r.t. your "purchase". It's unclear whether this means their respective markets haven't progressed far enough yet, or there's something fundamentally different about these media.)

J. Blow: Games as Instruments for Observing Our Universe

You might be dissuaded from listening to this talk by Jonathan Blow because it's distributed as a PowerPoint presentation and a couple of MP3s, or else because it's nominally about the much-maligned artifacts of human civilization commonly called "video games".

You would be making a mistake.

Jonathan Blow is a minor genius, and this talk is worthy of attention from anyone interested in science or art or really any creative activity. I have previously mocked video game apologists for viewing games as a failed (or at least not-quite-successful-yet) aspirant to "interactive cinema" — the teleological destiny of gaming, by this aesthetic, being the creation of an action movie in which You! Are! The! Hero! — and Blow is perhaps the most articulate proponent of the opposite view.

E. W. Dijkstra famously said that "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." He was suggesting that there are properties of the universe — viz, certain mathematical truths — that can only be inspected by studying algorithms, which humans can only do through the construction of computing devices. Per Dijkstra, the devices are not the point, or at least not the only point.

In practice, most of computer science amounts to cleverly engineering around messes that humans have created; but sometimes you do glimpse something which appears to be a property of the broader universe. This is a point that is mostly unappreciated by non-computer-scientists, who assume that the essence of computer science is fiddling around with gadgets.

Similarly, the word "game" applies, in the broadest sense, to any system of rules with which one or more agents interact. Blow's basic point is that the generative systems of rules that we call games can be profound devices for exploring truth, just like the generative systems of rules we call algorithms. But that's a pretty inadequate summary of the talk. You should really listen to the talk itself.

(The Q&A is longer and somewhat more inside-baseball w.r.t. the Game Industry as it actually exists today, and therefore less interesting overall, although there are some good bits there too.)

Video game apologists: Looking for art in all the wrong places

Alright, I can't take it anymore. For the umpteenth time, a video game fanboy has tried to substantiate the claim that video games are art by pointing to Final Fantasy and a bunch of in-game cinematics. Gaaah. Somebody is wrong, and I must speak.

Video games can be art, but not for the reasons these guys think.

First of all, Roger Ebert was so transparently wrong to begin with that it's almost ridiculous that gamers got defensive about it. Ebert's claim was, in short, that games cannot be high art because they require the participation of the player. By this standard, architecture, sculpture, and installation art are not high art, since full appreciation of those works requires the audience to navigate a space established by the work's form. But that's ludicrous. Any definition of art that excludes these forms is silly on its face.

I mean, come on. Are you telling me Roger Ebert knows more about "art" than the MOMA and the Guggenheim Foundation? There's just nothing to prove here. Don't even bother trotting out your favorite games; it's wholly unnecessary. This claim can be disproved a priori.

On the other hand, as the foregoing analogy illustrates, the other art form that video games most resemble is not cinema; it is architecture. A large contingent of video game apologists, eager to prove that their favorite form deserves the cultural capital endowed by the label "Art", have latched onto the cinematic properties of video games. This is probably because, in our day and age, cinema possesses a cross-product of high-culture respectability, low-culture accessibility, and economic influence that no other art form comes close to matching.

But likening video games to cinema is a fundamental error. Video games may borrow the aesthetic language of cinema, in the same way that architecture can borrow painterly or sculptural gestures, but the nature of a game is that it is an abstract state space through which the player moves. Indeed, video games, like computer code in general, can be viewed as simply the abstract version of architecture.

And so it's not surprising that, although games have come a long way, the games that currently try hardest to be "cinematic" almost always end up being unsuccessful as art. My definition of successful art is this: an artifact that provokes a powerful and seamless aesthetic reaction in the viewer. A good art work seduces us into believing wholly in the world that it proposes, whether that world consists of the abstract geometries of a Mondrian painting or the intricately braided themes of a Beethoven symphony. "Cinematic" games like Final Fantasy, Mass Effect, etc. foolishly attempt to create a game world by mimicking the conventions of mainstream narrative feature film. And they fail — because mainstream narrative feature film centers on interactions among people, and today's computers are incapable of producing even vaguely convincing simulacra of human beings.

Walk up to a character in a typical "cinematic" computer game and say hello. Then say goodbye, turn around in a circle, and say hello again. Chances are, the conversation will go exactly the same way. You can do this a dozen, a hundred, a thousand times, and not once will the character notice that you're acting a little strange. And let's not even get into the painful stiltedness of dialogue trees.

Now, traditional narrative art forms like fiction, theater, cinema, and comics are all unrealistic in numerous ways. But this doesn't matter; our brains are wired to forgive many infidelities in representation, so long as human interactions follow a logic that is recognizably human. Or, at least, as in David Mamet plays, that they follow a course that's deliberately crafted for aesthetic effect. By contrast, conversations in computer games are not deliberately crafted to be stilted, artificial, limited, and repetitive; they just are, because of technical limitations, and an attentive audience can never escape this realization.

Thus, most so-called "cinematic" video games can be highly effective entertainment, but they can at best be middling art.

So when do games succeed at being art?

I can't lay out comprehensive criteria, but I can give a few examples. It seems to me that the following games actually succeed at creating experiences that are both seamless and aesthetically powerful, although in different ways:

• Geometry Wars Retro Evolved. Yes, you heard me: Geometry Wars (UPDATE 2008-10-26: note that this video does not use the in-game soundtrack). It's the ecstatic love child of Stan Brakhage and a techno music video, in video game form.
• Shadow of the Colossus. This is the rare example of a game that achieves seamlessness despite being relatively cinematic in presentation. Pay attention, and you'll see how this game succeeds where other games fail: you're practically the only living human being in the whole game. Almost everything else that moves is either an automaton or an animal. The experience is nearly wordless. The aesthetic texture (the visuals, the sound) is breathtaking, but also exceptionally stark. If Shadow of the Colossus were a film, it would be an art film; no mainstream Hollywood studio would greenlight it. And within the dream logic of its lonely world, everything fits together. I could write a great deal more about this game and how it speaks to me, but that's a subject for another day.
• Echochrome. An abstract exploration of spatial perception and motion with immaculate visuals and music. Would not be out of place installed in the MOMA.
• flOw. If you like Mark Rothko paintings but not flOw, then I claim that you are a hypocrite.
• Katamari Damacy. This game is not exactly my bag, but both as a work of absurdist aesthetics and as a cunningly crafted explorable state space, I cannot deny its success.

Now, to the above list, I can add a very long list of games that succeed wildly at being entertaining, and have some merit as art, but don't fully succeed at the latter. For example, BioShock, Okami, and the Half-Life 2 episodes achieve higher quality, both as entertainment and as art, than 99% of television shows or movies; but you can see the man behind the curtain a little too often for them to be wholly successful art works.

Lumines is the video game equivalent of pop music, and roughly as artistic.

And then there are games like Civilization, which manage to be tours de force of complex state space design, but aesthetically barely rise above the level of a board game. If Civilization IV were a work of physical architecture, it would be the New York subway system.

And so on, and so forth. Basically, many video games succeed as entertainment; some of those manage to be less-than-great art; and a very small number manage to achieve a unity of presentation and gameplay construction as to be really good art. And given how far the circle of "art" has widened in the past century and a half, only the most blinkered kind of fool would claim otherwise.

But please, please, stop trying to convince people that games are like the grown-up little brother of cinema (or, even more nonsensically, of literature). They're not. I mean, really.

---

p.s. I have deliberately elided all mention of multiplayer games, which deserve a whole other analysis. To what extent can collective experiences be art? The Fluxus movement's answer: plenty. Presumably computer-mediated participatory group activities can in theory be art as well. My major uncertainty is that I don't think I've ever played a multiplayer game that I'd describe as a "seamless aesthetic experience". One thing's for sure: listening to a thirteen-year-old bitching into his headset mic does not qualify.

---

* People familiar with the world of academic game criticism may recognize the distinction I draw as one of "narratological" versus "ludological" game appreciation, with the position I take being roughly ludological. I don't entirely buy into this distinction, mostly because I find "narratological" to be a terrible misnomer. The visual or aural properties of a game are sensory; they are not necessarily narrative.

My experience with Passage

My feedreader this morning leads me via Terra Nova to Passage, an arty indie game whose (warning: spoilers) creator's statement shows a thoughtfulness and purpose that's rare in game design.

So, I downloaded the Linux tarball, unpacked and built it (and its shared library dependencies; some sudo apt-get install required), and started it up. Whereupon I was greeted by, er, something other than the life I was promised:

In short, there was no maze to the south, and there was no path by which I could avoid acquiring a wife. Instead of a tradeoff between exploration and treasure, or between a life of lonely freedom versus married bliss/grief, I was given a single, unbroken line of treasure. Evidently Passage's message for me was that I would inevitably live a long, repetitive life where female companionship and riches would be lavished upon me without my ever having to make hard choices or challenge myself. In short, I would be an investment banker.

Epic fail, as the kids say. Some trivial bug — maybe the random number generator, maybe the maze generation algorithm — squashed this game's designs on greatness (ADDENDUM 2008-02-24 10:45 p.m.: ...on my platform, of course).

I suppose, however, that even the buggy game has a message, and one that could even be appropriate depending on the audience. Truthfully, all things considered, my life has been pretty easy. It seems all too plausible that I could just continue muddling through as I have been and end up in the silent water.

Hillary Clinton betrays the First Amendment and wastes the government's time with video game sales bill

Tonight, Politech brings me news that Sen. Hillary Clinton is, with Sen. Lieberman's help, introducing the "Family Entertainment Protection Act", which will impose fines on retailers that sell "M-rated" video games to minors.

Stuff like this is a perfect example of why I will never feel excited about Sen. Clinton as a politician. This bill's wrong for all sorts of reasons. First, and most obviously, it infringes on people's First Amendment rights, or at least skirts perilously close (because it subjects video games to legal restrictions that don't exist for any other expressive medium, and are therefore not content-neutral). Second, the problems it addresses can be also solved by technological measures, like parental control interfaces on game consoles, which the industry's already implementing. Third, the law will waste the resources of Federal law enforcement agencies, which have plenty of real crimes like fraud and terrorism to deal with. Fourth, even if enforced, the law will probably do little to reduce the incidence of children playing violent video games.¹ Fifth, it's ridiculous to have a Federal law about this when local community standards about acceptable game use may vary widely. Sixth, it's ridiculous to suppose that sixteen-year-olds and eight-year-olds need to be "protected" in the same way.

Finally, even if none of the above were true, the bill would still be a waste of time and energy. There are about ten thousand more important issues that Clinton could be acting upon, and it's a sign of her extraordinarily misplaced priorities that she's choosing to insert herself into the news cycle with this one.

But none of this matters to Sen. Clinton. Sen. Clinton thinks she can buy off "values" voters by offering up this bill, and so the bill gets offered. The Lieberman co-sponsorship is telling, because I think it reveals the proper way to think about Clinton: she's basically a slightly more mediagenic version of Holy Joe. Whenever the going gets tough --- and even when times aren't tough, but she just wants some attention --- Clinton will instinctively tack rightward on culture issues and national security issues², because she fundamentally believes that's how Democrats win elections. If Clinton has failed, thus far, to equivocate on Intelligent Design, it's only because she doesn't think it's a big enough vote-earner.³

And the kicker's that this particular element of the ploy, at least, probably won't even work. Are suburban parents really going to vote for Clinton because she came out against violent video games? If so, then I weep for our nation.

---

1. When I was a kid, I didn't have the cash to buy video games on my own. My parents bought them for me. Even if I got a game through other means, like borrowing from a friend, it was never a big secret what my siblings and I were playing: the cases were lying around on the floor, and the gameplay was right up there on the television screen, for anyone in the den to see. The problem (to the extent that any problem exists) is not that stores are selling mature games to little kids. The problem's that parents aren't paying attention to the games that they buy for their kids, and that they permit to be played on the family television. Legal penalties for selling to kids are just a non sequitur.

2. Speaking of national security, let us also contemplate the irony of Clinton's bill in light of her consistent support for, you know, actually real violence on a massive scale, in the form of the Iraq war.

3. Incidentally, McCain has already made the opposite calculation w.r.t. Intelligent Design. Why this man gets credit for having greater integrity than, say, Rick Santorum is a freaking mystery to me. I hypothesize it has something to do with the fact that Santorum's obviously a bigot, which is an unforgivable media sin, whereas McCain's merely incredibly bad on civil liberties, women's rights, and labor rights, which all fly right under the radar for well-fed pundits. Don't get me wrong --- as long as the Republicans remain a band of plutocrats, theocrats, and criminals, McCain's a useful guy to have around in the Senate. But I've got no particular affection for him, and I certainly don't want him to be President.

How Commoners can beat the Mafia (most of the time)

For those who have never played the party game Mafia, here are the rules:

1. An arbiter is selected at random from the players. Call the other players "townspeople".
2. The arbiter uses some random, secret procedure to designate some small fraction (say, 1/4) of the townspeople as Mafia, and the rest as Commoners. One way that works is to take one slip of paper for each player, write down "Mafia" or "Commoner" on each slip, and have players draw from a hat.
3. All the players to close their eyes. Then, at the arbiter's signal, only the Mafiosi open their eyes and look around, so they know the identities of all the other Mafia.
4. The play proceeds in rounds. Each round goes as follows:
   1. First, all the players discuss who might be Mafia, and then vote to execute one person as a Mafioso.
   2. The person who gets the most votes is executed. If there is a tie, the arbiter should flip a coin. The dead player leaves the game, at which point the arbiter informs the town whether that person was a Commoner or a Mafioso.
   3. Dead players tell no tales. Once dead, a player may not communicate with living players for the remainder of the game.
5. Play proceeds until either the entire Mafia is dead, or all the Commoners are dead. The living team wins.

In practice, the Mafia wins as soon as they're a majority, because then they can always outvote the Commoners and execute them all.

What makes this game fun is the social interaction and politicking that goes on when you're deciding whom to execute. The Mafiosi are all trying to influence the voting so that a Commoner gets executed on each round. Meanwhile, the Commoners are trying to detect excessive certainty or bloodlust (which probably indicates a Mafioso --- after all, only Mafia know for certain whom they want executed), so the Mafia can't appear too eager or obvious. It's also a game of teamwork --- a lone clever Commoner can't beat the Mafia unless (s)he can also convince the other suspicious townspeople to trust him/her. A cleverly played game of Mafia will ultimately be won by the Mafia, if they're better actors, or by the Commoners, if they're better at "reading" people. With the right group, this can be lots of fun.

Now I'm going to tell you how to take all the fun out of Mafia. Propose the following strategy to your fellow townspeople:

1. During the first round of discussion, use some mechanism to produce a random ordering of players. One way that works is for everyone to roll a pair of dice, and sort people from highest to lowest roll, rolling again to break ties. Note: if you use this method, you must decide on the exact method for sorting, including whether you're going from low-to-high or high-to-low, before you actually roll the dice.
2. Agree that everyone will vote to eliminate the players in order. Anyone who dissents from this plan must be a Mafioso, and becomes the next target of execution instead of the scheduled player.

Why does this work? Notice the victory conditions: the Commoners win when 100% of the Mafia dies; the Mafia wins when when they outnumber the Commoners. Given that the Commoners have a large majority, most random orderings of the townspeople will list 100% of the Mafia before any point where the remaining Mafia outnumber the remaining Commoners.

Proving this claim formally requires some fairly intense math. I looked at it for a few minutes with one of my friends (who was also a computer scientist). We decided it was hard, and just handwaved our way through it.

(If you're curious, here's the handwaving: on average, over all random sortings, you expect the proportion of Mafia and Commoners in the remaining population to remain roughly constant as the population decreases; so the Mafia will usually not attain a majority. Then, once you get down to a small number of remaining players --- say, N, where 1/N is the fraction of Mafiosi in the original population --- then you expect that, on average, there will be 1 Mafioso left out of those N players. The chance that this Mafioso will be the last one standing is 1/N. Since N > 2, the last Mafioso probably doesn't survive.)

So, on average, over a large number of games, this is a winning strategy for the Commoners. Only Mafiosi would dissent from it; but the really cool thing is that they can't do anything about it, because if they dissent then they reveal that they belong to the Mafia. Even if all of them dissent together, they're outnumbered, so the Commoners will just execute them all. And even if the Mafia win --- as they sometimes will --- the win doesn't give them much satisfaction, since it wasn't through the exercise of wit and deception but just a random roll of the dice.

When you play the game by this strategy --- and I have done it once --- the game goes pretty fast. Everyone votes unanimously to execute the next player on the list. There's no discussion, no politicking, no doubt, and the game becomes a rather grimly fatalistic exercise until the arbiter calls the end. On the other hand, as the person who devised this strategy, I enjoyed watching it play out.

The Commoners won, by the way. Ironically, I was on the Mafia team that time.

---

UPDATE 9:30 p.m.: I got curious, so I wrote a Python script to simulate many games of Mafia in aggregate. Basically, the handwaving analysis above is a decent approximation of the actual results for typical party-sized populations (6-30 people) and small fractions of Mafia. At a population of 25% Mafia, the Mafia wins about 25% of the time. As the number of Mafia increases, however, the results begin to diverge from this analysis, due to the asymmetry in winning conditions: the Mafia win at a rate that exceeds their fraction of the population. At about 39% Mafia, the game becomes 50/50 Commoners v. Mafia.

The source for the script follows. It's a pretty direct interpretation; I haven't tried to do any of the obvious optimizations for simulating games.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import random

TRIALS         = 100000
MAFIA_FRACTION = 0.39
MIN_POP        = 6
MAX_POP        = 30
HIT_VARIANT    = 0

COMMONER = 0
MAFIA    = 1

maf_wins = 0
com_wins = 0

def init_town():
    popsize = random.randint(MIN_POP,MAX_POP)
    town = [COMMONER for j in range(0,popsize)]
    maf_count = int(MAFIA_FRACTION * popsize)
    for j in range(maf_count):
        while 1:
            idx = random.randint(0,popsize-1)
            if town[idx] != MAFIA: break
        town[idx] = MAFIA
    return town

def hit_commoner(town):
    if COMMONER not in town:
        return town
    else:
        com = town.index(COMMONER)
        return town[:com] + town[com+1:]

for i in range(TRIALS):
    town = init_town()
    while len(town) > 0:
        town = town[1:]
        if HIT_VARIANT: town = hit_commoner(town)
        maf_left = town.count(MAFIA)
        pop_left = len(town)
        if maf_left > (pop_left/2):
            maf_wins += 1
            break
        elif maf_left == 0:
            com_wins += 1
            break

print "Commoner wins  : " + str(com_wins)
print "Mafia wins     : " + str(maf_wins)
print ("Mafia fraction : " +
       str(float(maf_wins)/float(maf_wins+com_wins)))

UPDATE 1 Sept: In comments, Andrew and AJ reminded me of a variation of the rules, wherein the Mafia get to secretly "hit" one Commoner in each round, after execution. I've fixed the script so that the HIT_VARIANT flag controls whether to play with this variation. The results are surprising --- see comments for details...

Video games, ugly buildings, and whores...

...all get respectable if they last long enough (apologies to N. Cross). The Times is paying attention to video game music, although, predictably, they focus on the recent big-budget productions (which, after all, provide the news "hook") and overlook older, smaller gems that made the medium's limitations into virtues. My musician friends would no doubt gag at the following litany, but I'll list a few of the game soundtracks that rang my personal chimes...

First, there's the shockingly diverse music from Star Control 2 (a game which I loved when I was a teenager, and which some cognoscenti class among the greatest games of all time). This bizarre alien-planet bachelor pad music spans and explodes nearly every genre of techno, from ambient to house to breakbeats to weird-ass shit that doesn't even have a name.

Then there was the (much smaller) Privateer soundtrack (alternate links: [1], [2]), whose best pieces were essentially dime-store ambient knockoffs of the soundtrack Vangelis composed for Blade Runner. Call me crazy, stupid, and deaf, but I think there's something genuinely evocative about these minimalist pieces, something that speaks of loneliness and vast distances.

Finally, there's Grim Fandango (unofficial site), which had, among other things, some terrific jazz numbers. Grim Fandango was also a superb game in so many other ways --- the distinctively surreal visual style, the memorable characters, the well-crafted story and dialogue --- that it's one of the few games I've ever played that I'd cite as an example of the storytelling art, on a par with a film or a novel. It's essentially a comic picaresque --- a genre whose "lightness" may lead people to underestimate the work's brilliance --- but it's a superb example of the genre. And, if I recall correctly, at least one other historical medium first discovered its voice in the picaresque.

While I'm at it, I suppose I should also point to OverClocked ReMix, whose existence indicates that at least some electronic musicians were even more taken with computer and video game music than I was.

Anyway, I've basically quit playing video and computer games --- my life's too crowded these days --- and, objectively speaking, I have to admit that if I'd spent those hours of my youth doing something more productive, my life would have been qualitatively better. But, really, that's hardly less true of most people's childhoods. As a kid, you spend too much time watching teevee, or reading junky genre fiction, or playing video games, or (these days) on instant messenger or blogs. The best you can hope for is that you find some accidental beauty along the way.