J.A. Konrath yesterday posted a story of what is going on in publishing right now. I think it’s a pretty good summary of the situation.

Brandon Sanderson has said that one of the two main ideas for the first Mistborn novel was to create a fantasy version of a heist story like Ocean’s Eleven or Sneakers. I probably wasn’t the only one to make the connection before reading that that was his intent, so it did come across. I think the idea of a fantasy caper story is interesting, but as much as I liked Mistborn, it didn’t really satisfy me as a heist story. Maybe that’s because other elements took over more after the first part of the book.

Honestly, though, while I like heist films, I find most of them unsatisfying. I’m not really sure why. Is the archetypal heist story inherently deficient in some way? These stories are compelling, but usually leave me with the sense that something is missing, that they didn’t live up to their potential.

The thing about pure heist movies like Ocean’s Eleven is that they often have to resort to hokey non-chronological storytelling to hide information and build tension, because the actual story is fairly rudimentary. A team gets together, forms a plan, executes the plan, and escapes. There are always a few things that go wrong, and Wikipedia tells me that the thieves surviving at the end is a fairly recent trend; traditionally they would all turn on each other or get caught and everyone would die. But still, the whole telling is like the performance of a magic trick: misdirection, misdirection. You can’t know how it really works until the end, due to the Unspoken Plan Guarantee:

When the characters come up with a plan to save the day, its chances of success are inversely proportional to how much the audience knows about it beforehand.

Maybe that’s the reason they feel so empty to me: you spend the entire film confused, only to find out at the end that the story wasn’t interesting to begin with: “here is a puzzle. Now here is the solution to the puzzle.” There are other issues, as well. The ensemble cast usually means less screen time for each character, and thus less time to grow attached (and less character development). And the focus is usually on grabbing some pile of cash, which I don’t find very interesting.

Like I said, I enjoy heist stories. I like Sneakers, less so Ocean’s Eleven and The Italian Job. And the heist story structure definitely leaves tons of room for brilliance (see: Inception, one of my favorite movies). So what is the draw?

They’re expertise power fantasies. We love to watch a competent character do what they do best, and we love to see a plan in action and find out whether it succeeds. When the shit hits the fan, we love to see our protagonists demonstrate the improvisational genius that led them to survive long enough to become experts in this dangerous business.

I think the confusing storytelling detracts from this. When you don’t know why anyone is doing what they’re doing, and you know nothing of the plan, you can’t even tell when things aren’t going as expected. The cleverness of the hero anticipating the double-cross is lost, though I think to some extent the “hero planned for this exact thing to go wrong in this exact way” twist is a bit of a cop out anyway.

It seems like writing a fantasy heist story would be a fun challenge. I might try to tackle it someday. In the meantime I think The Lies of Locke Lamora is supposed to be one of these, and it’s been on my to-read list forever, so maybe I should just pick it up.

In the Guardian piece I linked yesterday Clay Shirky was quoted saying, “Institutions will try to preserve the problem for which they are the solution.” Anecdotal evidence and intuition agree with this observation, but what does it really mean?

These decisions are made by people; we commonly think of organizations as individuals, but they are the dragons in Chinese dragon dances. Why would people, especially those associated with an institution which ostensibly intends to solve a problem, choose to prolong it? Let’s just talk about the conscious decisions here. One reason might be that they are trying to preserve their jobs. In that case, supposing we set up the world so that no one was allowed to lack the most basic human needs (so that fear would not compel anyone to do work they did not sincerely wish to do), would this still occur? I think it might.

I think there is a deeper issue of identification. The decision-maker identifies with the organization, mentally conflating it and his role with his definition of self: “I am the CEO of ExecuBureauCorp.”¹ In the same way that an insult can elicit a similar emotional response to a physical threat, the demise of the institution would be taken as serious personal blow. And this identification is stronger than the one the person has with those adversely affected by the problem.

Perhaps in a world where basic human needs were assured and decision makers didn’t define themselves by their roles, this wouldn’t happen. But in this world, is an institution always a bad solution to a problem?

I think for problems that can be solved (even if only in theory), organizations which set the solution as their sole or primary purpose are probably not a good idea. Maybe this is why communism never lived up to the manifesto; the implementation required an organization charged with solving the issue of inequality. But are institutions in general always bad? I don’t think so.

Humans have achieved great things by collaboration, and will continue to do so. If the mission of an organization is positive and not predicated on the existence of a specific problem, it can be extremely useful. A hazy mission is suspect, and at times realignment may be necessary, but institutions can have a positive effect.

A few weeks ago I put up the comment I’d made on Joe Konrath’s blog about the self-preservation motive of the Authors Guild, and then later a link to Barry Eisler’s post expanding on that. In my original comment I asked the question:

After all, what use does a self-published author have for the Authors Guild, anyway?

It was intended to be rhetorical, and the implied answer was “none,”  but since then I have been wondering what a serious answer to this question would look like. I don’t know if the Authors Guild has a mission statement (I couldn’t find one), but these are the services they provide, according to their site:

Members of the Authors Guild receive free book contract reviews from experienced legal staff, discounted health insurance rates in some states, low-cost website services including website-building, e-mail, and domain name registration, access to our free Back in Print service, our quarterly print Bulletin, and invitations to panels and programs throughout the year.

In addition, they provide advocacy in the form of legal action to defend the rights of authors collectively.

Almost all of this seems to be of dubious value, especially to the self-published author.

There are some things I think an author-focused organization could offer a self-published writer, though:

• Legal action to defend the rights of authors collectively (something may come up that would warrant this), and to help authors individually combat copyright violations.
• Marketing help (advice, a forum to facilitate cross-promotion and “blurbs,” maybe even actual marketing services for members’ books).
• Reviews of providers of author services (cover designers, editors, etc.).
• Advocacy for (and perhaps even creation and maintenance of) a universal ebook format.

An organization which could provide those things (and more?) for an author would actually be worth joining in the twenty-first century.

Barry Eisler has an article in The Guardian today continuing to point out the problems with the arguments supporting legacy publishers against the Justice Department’s suit. It’s good, but what prompted this post was the great links in the article to some things I hadn’t come across before.

In particular I think George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” is worth reading. There’s some great stuff in there that points out ways you can improve your prose.

I’ve added a gallery of drawings I did on Draw Something that I thought were worth sharing. Take a look if you like.

A lot of people are blogging lately about the civil antitrust suit the US Department of Justice filed against Apple and 5 of the Big 6 publishers. Some authors are saying some pretty ridiculous things to paint Amazon as the bad guy and the Big 6 as the underdogs, and of course the publishers themselves want you to see them this way. I found it kind of disappointing today that John Scalzi recommended people read that drivel by Charlie Stross, especially since Scalzi’s earlier points on the matter were so rational. I found this section of Stross’ diatribe both humorous and galling (emphasis mine):

I’m not going to comment on the Agency model which has drawn down the current US Department of Justice enquiry into Apple and the big six publishers. Let’s just frame it as a desperate attempt by the publishers to get away from the wholesale model, which was allowing the monopsony incumbent (Amazon) to extort ridiculous discounts from their suppliers. If anything, the agency model simply means selling books the same way they were sold 30 years ago…

Funny way to not comment, but at least he’s nice enough to directly state that he is attempting to spin things. There are so many things wrong with just this quote, and the original post has plenty more. The wholesale model had Amazon paying for ebooks at fixed prices, which were in many cases higher than what they were charging the customer, and in virtually all cases higher than what the publishers make per unit on the agency model. Amazon was not the only ebook store (monopsony incumbent), and the agency model is nothing like the way books were sold thirty years ago (the wholesale model).

I just read the actual document for the suit and found it fascinating. When these things were happening I was talking about it and posting on forums about it, so I was incredibly surprised to find that I hadn’t actually blogged about it here. This document filled in a lot of blanks from that time, and reads almost like a story rather than a legal document. I can see this turning into a book or movie along the lines of The Social Network.

April L. Hamilton posted a nice rebuttal of some of the silly arguments people are making to defend Apple and the Big 6. Some people would have you believe that breaking up the agency model would hand Amazon a monopoly, which is not true (this should be obvious).  All it would do is break up the agency model, at least for a while. As Scalzi pointed out, none of these companies are actually on your side, though their interests may be aligned with yours at times.

As far as whether or not this was illegal collusion, for me, after reading the document, the facts boil down to a few pretty simple points:

• The adoption of the agency model was not intended to be a competitive move; competition (in a commoditized market) drives prices down. This was intended to drive prices up, which is seen in the fact that that is exactly what happened.
• If a single publisher had adopted the agency model and raised prices, they would have quickly lost market share since competitors’ ebooks would still be set at more attractive prices. The shift couldn’t have happened without collusion; no lone CEO would have been willing to sign without knowing in advance that his competitors wouldn’t punish him for it.
• This type of conspiracy among competitors to raise prices is illegal.

When the publishers spin things to say they were trying to promote a healthy market, they’re talking about the paper book market, not the ebook market. It was meant to stifle the growth of the ebook market in order to hang on as long as they could to the dead tree business where their advantages lie. Remember that publishers make less money per ebook under the agency model in order to charge you more. They’re trying to fight disruption.

The word right now is that three of the five accused publishers are working on settling, and the other two (plus Apple) are still fighting the suit. I found a really nice explanation on dearauthor.com which is largely free of spin for one side or the other (which makes sense since it was written by a reader) and includes reasonable predictions about what might happen with ebook prices in the near future as a result of this. I’m not sure where the author got the details about what happens next, but if true I find it interesting. I hope when this is all over I will finally be able to buy books at the reasonable prices which were available before this all went down.

I came across this great video today of John Cleese giving a lecture about creativity. Watch:

I just read an article on Kotaku explaining how the science in Assassin’s Creed is slightly less far-fetched than I had thought. If that sounds interesting, you should check it out. I thought it was pretty cool.

On Wednesday the New York Times Magazine published a really interesting article that talks a little about gamification and a lot about specifically the type of games, often found on Facebook and mobile devices, that capitalize on the snippets of “free” time everyone has between doing other things. It’s definitely worth a read; go check it out.

The author of the piece believes that this is more likely to lead to a dystopian future of rampant corporate manipulation of consumers for profit than a golden age, similar to what I suggested in an earlier post. I agree that that is a far more likely outcome than what is imagined in Reality is Broken.

Also in the article, the creator of Drop7 talks about these games as personal experiments in addiction, allowing us to find out more about how our brains work in that regard. That may be how they work for him, and he obviously finds that to be beneficial, but I don’t think that’s how most people see them.

There was an article in Wired in October last year about the importance of boredom. It turns out that mind wandering is basically our default mode of thought, and that being aware of it when it happens (so that we can notice those interesting thoughts that pop up and jot them down) is a strong predictor of creative ability. These small games threaten to steal away the time we’d use for that normal, healthy function, which in turn would be expected to hamper creativity.

This agrees with my personal experience and that of the author of the New York Times Magazine article. I suspect it agrees with the experience of most people who embark on creative endeavors, whether as a hobby or a profession. When my free time is filled (with Twitter, Facebook, games, RSS feeds, etc.), sitting down to write is the last thing I feel like doing. When I resist the inclination to reach for my phone during every slow moment, I often discover I the beginnings of new ideas spontaneously throughout the day.

Of course there must be a balance; all creativity is a synthesis of the ideas we’ve taken in, rearranged into new configurations. With no exposure to the ideas of others, that fuel would quickly dry up. But I think the threat of these small games to creativity (among other things) is something people should be aware of.

A few weeks ago I was looking at Wikipedia’s list of cognitive biases (one of the more interesting things to read about on Wikipedia. Another is the list of common misconceptions). Yesterday I was thinking about rap. Specifically, the rhyming reminded me of the rhyme-as-reason effect I’d read about, and gave rise to a humorous theory.

African American Vernacular English (Wikipedia tells me that’s probably the right thing to call it) has been around a long time, and has of course evolved over time. Rap has also been around a long time, but much of modern rap (of at least the last fifteen years or so) seems to have a symbiotic relationship with AAVE. Given this, it would seem likely that rap, with its necessity of rhyme, might slant the evolution of AAVE toward the adoption of more rhyming words. And taken to its extreme conclusion, that would lead one to expect AAVE to eventually become a dialect in which virtually every possible phrase rhymes. Which, considering the rhyme-as-reason effect, would mean anything spoken in AAVE would sound more true.

I should have mentioned this sooner, but on Friday Barry Eisler put up a nice post on his blog about the motivations of the Authors Guild. It explains the point more thoroughly than the original comment I made on the topic.

I mentioned in an earlier post how the developer of Draw Something was purchased by Zynga, but I wanted to talk a little about my experience with the game. I did order a stylus, by the way; it should arrive this week sometime.

In grade school I was pretty decent at drawing. I was lazy, I guess, and wanted/expected to be good at things without much effort, since that had worked for me so far, for the most part. Toward the end of elementary school there began to appear in my classes people who I felt were at least as good as or better than me at drawing. I enjoyed art, though I was rarely able to achieve quality that satisfied me. There were a few other things I was fairly good at: writing, though in school I hated it; singing, though I don’t think I’m naturally gifted in that area (I just learned what I needed to be passable); and working with computers (programming, once I finally tried it in high school classes).

In junior high art classes, I know I was given leeway other students weren’t allowed. Because I was so obsessive about details in my work, it took me longer to complete projects, but I was allowed as much time as I needed (even while the rest of the class was working on the next project) without my grade being affected. When it was time to figure out my schedule for high school, my art teacher wanted me to continue to take art, put together a portfolio which would get me into an art school, and make that my career. It was an option. But there was a hitch: I couldn’t do that and take choir. She was right that singing wouldn’t ever be a career option for me. But at the time I wasn’t thinking too much about jobs. I was thinking about girls.

It’s true, and to those of you who were in school with me it’s probably funny. I was depressed a lot then, and the thought of asking a girl out filled me with an almost completely debilitating degree of anxiety (honestly, it probably still would). The reason I chose choir over art was because I wanted a girlfriend; I wanted to get into the mixed choir and meet girls. The punchline is that I never had a single girlfriend in high school.

Anyway, even after squandering my high school years without developing my artistic skill at all, when I showed my work (mostly from junior high) to someone from the Kansas City Art Institute, I was told that I was definitely talented enough to get into an art school if I put together a portfolio. But at that point I had taken computer science classes, and I knew I had a similar talent in that field. The difference was that while in art classes I’d always taken longer than everyone else to finish projects, in computer science I was often finished with the next project before the rest of the class started it, and I was the one everyone else asked for help. That ended up deciding what I chose to go to college for (not to mention the potential for employment afterwards). And from college on, my artistic ability languished.

When I have occasionally attempted to draw something since then I have usually been disappointed. I know that I could improve with practice; I now realize that talent isn’t enough to make it in any field. So, to finally return to the topic, that’s what I like about Draw Something. Despite its often frustrating limitations, I like it because it gives me a reason to doodle, which means I get practice at drawing without even trying.

My drawings on Draw Something are often decent for Draw Something (drawing with my finger, limited color selection, limited brush types, etc.), but outside of the context of the game and its limitations they aren’t very good at all. I don’t always put much effort into my drawings for the game. Sometimes almost every picture is junk. But when the whim strikes me to try to actually put in some more effort, it’s there, and even the simple act of making a crappy doodle has a positive effect. I can tell that in the time I’ve been playing it I’ve improved, and I’m happy about that. I have a hunch that the next time I actually want to draw something outside of the game, I won’t be nearly as disappointed as I have been in the past.

There’s been a lot going on lately. I’m writing a novel, which I started a few months (a year?) ago and then let sit. I’ve been continuing to write it intermittently, and I am at a point where I really feel a need to finish it, hopefully this year. It’s been slow going. There are always other things that demand my attention, but this is important to me and I don’t want to let it slide anymore. Honestly I’m only around twenty pages in at this point, but still.

Part of what got me back into it was reading the novel of a friend from high school and providing him with editorial criticism. Writing out all I had to say about it made me realize that I do know a decent amount about writing a good story, which I’d been doubting due to lack of evidence. At the end of the process I felt confident that given enough time and effort, I am capable of crafting a story I would consider worth reading. This was a big boost for my motivation, and pushed me to return to the story I had started.

I’ve been avoiding reading new novels, skimming RSS feeds more selectively, and holding off on diving into any involved games lately in order to create some mental space in which to carry out my own creative work. But I still get to feeling like every word I type is inadequate, and my admiration for the good writing I see is growing as my certainty that I can achieve such quality shrinks. I wouldn’t deem the twentyish pages I have so far fit for human consumption, but I am fighting to continue to the end and finish laying the foundation for the story before going back to perfect it.

I know other writers go through the same stuff; presumably first draft material for many feels this way. And I know I just need to continue to write. Fortunately, right now, I feel compelled to do just that.

I just finished reading Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. I’ve mentioned it here before, but I finally got around to buying and reading it, and there’s so much more here that needs to be told than I knew.

Read this book. Factory animal farming is one of the most significant issues facing the world today, and touches on many of the others. This does impact your life. If you aren’t making educated decisions about what you eat, you are part of the problem. Changing what you choose to eat is all it takes to make a difference, which should make it one of the easiest things in the world to take a stand about.

You may need to educate yourself initially, but beyond that, it’s simply a choice made for every meal. You were going to eat that meal anyway, and this doesn’t make it more difficult or time consuming. If you think it’s too difficult to make that choice for every meal, please read this book. And if you still think that after reading it, well, every meal where you do choose to eat differently makes a difference, even if you don’t choose that way for all of your meals.

I live in Texas. Many of my friends seem to think eating meat is cool and manly, and apparently never give any serious thought to the topic. Bacon is a meme these days, and vegetarianism is a joke. “If God didn’t want us to eat animals, He wouldn’t have made them out of meat.” “I wouldn’t eat animals except they’re so damned tasty.” Fast food chain shenanigans are made out to be objects of reverence. Ha, ha.

But the jokes sweep under the rug the very real decision being made there. Because meat tastes good, we allow ourselves to ignore the process that puts it on the plate, and the real costs associated with it. We use this blissful ignorance to flee from the question of whether that taste is worth the price.

Read the book. Then decide.

So Draw Something is cool. I want a stylus for my iPhone now.

Zynga bought OMGPop (the makers of Draw Something) this week (only 6 weeks after the game was released), for $180 million plus $30 million in retention payments to keep the small developer’s 40 employees. In cash, not shares.

I thought that was interesting.

If you don’t already know about it, my wife is starting a company called Geekdom Adventures. It might coincide with your interests. Check it out.

More news sites are realizing today what the Scrolls trademark going to Zenimax means for Mojang. Of course, they still haven’t really said anything about how little sense the whole thing makes. I think Zenimax Media gets better treatment than Tim Langdell by gaming news sites just because it actually makes games people enjoy.

Given how dismissive Notch was about the whole issue from the beginning, I shouldn’t really be surprised Mojang let it end this way, with no regard for the broader implications of this result. Since it was a settlement, it may not go into the record as legal precedent to be used if a trademark suit goes to trial in the future, but it does set a general precedent.

Notch offered on Twitter early on to resolve the dispute with a Quake III deathmatch. No, I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am disappointed.

Scott Turow, President of the Authors Guild, posted an open letter to its members regarding the US Department of Justice’s impending anti-trust lawsuit against five of the Big 6 book publishers, plus Apple. The contents of the letter are laughable, and there have been responses already posted by Joe Konrath, Barry Eisler, Suzanne White, David Gaughran, and probably others I haven’t read.

I’d like to point out, though, that from the point of view of the Authors Guild, trying to survive, this stance is understandable. It still doesn’t really make a lot of sense, but it’s understandable. Here’s the quote I posted on Joe Konrath’s blog about it:

I haven’t read any of these comments, so maybe someone has already brought this up, but it seems to me that the motivations of the Authors Guild become more clear if you think about their role.

The Authors Guild ostensibly exists to defend the interests of authors. Against what? The interests of paper publishing industry. In this sense the Authors Guild is just another middleman, whose services are no longer needed in the absence of an oppressive status quo.

Really, if the Authors Guild advocates for authors, and then Amazon comes along and provides authors better terms than the Authors Guild has ever been able to do, you can see how Amazon would be framed as a competitor and an enemy. After all, what use does a self-published author have for the Authors Guild, anyway? If every author goes in that direction, where will that leave the organization? Where will they get their dues?

The Authors Guild is attempting to survive and stay relevant in a world that doesn’t need it (in its current form, at any rate; I imagine an association of authors could still be beneficial in a marketplace dominated by self-publishing).

Am I the only one who doesn’t think this settlement is good news? GamaSutra has a short article today pointing out the problem with this agreement, but in my opinion the problem is more fundamental than that: Zenimax never had any right to the Scrolls trademark.

Zenimax were obviously engaging in a bit of trademark trolling akin to the antics of Tim Langdell, and the fact that Mojang caved to such ridiculous claims strikes me as a step backward. It only lends legitimacy to the unscrupulous exploitation of trademark laws for corporate gain, completely undermining the intended purpose of the system. The whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and I’m surprised I haven’t seen this opinion expressed on any gaming news sites I follow, some of which routinely mix in opinions with news.

People are saying both parties “win” or “come out on top” with this settlement, and that simply isn’t true. Mojang got screwed, apparently willingly, and all small companies and individuals hoping to make use of the trademark system to protect them will pay for it as well. Good luck to the indie developer who eventually tries to make a game called Elder.

If you hadn’t heard, Double Fine Productions is going to be making a new point-and-click adventure game with Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert headlining the team, funded entirely through a Kickstarter project which went live last night. It’s big news today: this is the fastest-funded Kickstarter project ever, and already the one with the most backers less than 24 hours since it went up. It even prompted the U.K. Interactive Entertainment trade group to start work on a report to persuade lawmakers in the U.K. to make adjustments to legally support this type of funding mechanism for game developers.

While this is definitely cool, and U.K. laws around such things probably do need revision (I don’t know anything about that), I don’t think anyone should start to think this is anywhere close to “the new normal.” There are a few factors contributing to the right-place-right-time nature of this event, which won’t be easily duplicated:

• This Kickstarter project launched right in the middle of news-attention on Schafer and Double Fine already. On Tuesday Rock, Paper, Shotgun tweeted their article reporting that Tim Schafer wanted to do Psychonauts 2 but hadn’t been able to get a publisher to bite. Schafer was quoted as saying to Digital Spy in an interview, “I’d have to convince someone to just give me a few million dollars. That’s all.” Markus Persson, aka notch, creator of MineCraft, responded to the tweet: “How many millions exactly?” followed by “Let’s make Psychonauts 2 happen.” and confirmation that he was serious. This was widely reported on gaming news sites, and Schafer and Persson began talking about it via email. (Aside: based on the obvious amount of effort that went into putting together this Kickstarter launch, there is no way it was done in response to these events. The timing is just a happy coincidence.)
• New point-and-click adventure games have been largely missing from gaming for years. Not only is there very little competition, but some fans of the genre may be so starved for it that they’re willing to spend a lot to make this happen. After this, though, that won’t be the case so much anymore.
• Double Fine is an established development studio that has proven it is able to produce quality games. I doubt many Kickstarter aspirants already have such an established, rabid fan-base.

As such, I don’t think everyone should rush to put their own projects on Kickstarter just because of this. It seems likely, though, that there will be somewhat of a rush to do just that, and possible that many will be disappointed with the results. We may see other smallish but still established companies trying it out, and for some it may turn out to be superior to what they were doing for funding before. Just don’t necessarily expect that to be you.

Anyway, this is a cool story. Congrats to Double Fine and 2 Player Productions, and hopefully Psychonauts 2 will be made before too long (with less collecting and better-tuned difficulty), because I really like the first one.