I heard a pretty strong strain of thought that naturalized the proposition that the first thing to do with games in a class is to interrupt the activity of play, to stop the fun, to compel students to a critical attentiveness to the content and experience of a game. The student who knows how to play video games well was taken to be a sort of pedagogical enemy, both because they ‘split’ the instructors’ attention between the skilled player and the students who have never played and because the expert gamer was taken as a figure who actually has few or no critical thoughts about their consumption of games.

The problem of a class with split levels of preparation, competency, or cultural capital is a real one that comes up in much of higher education, so I don’t mean to belittle it. But because it’s so common, it might be a good thing to not see as specific or special to games except in who has that expertise or cultural capital within a classroom.

But the idea of the expert gamer as a sort of idiot savant who doesn’t want to talk about games, doesn’t think about games as a critical subject, and who is having altogether too much fun with games to be trusted as a practicioner of criticism worries me. Here too I don’t think this construct is limited to games as a cultural form. There’s a mirroring construction in film and television studies, indeed, in the relation of most bodies and pedagogies of academic cultural criticism and communities formed around and through cultural consumption. Literature professors often encounter and complain about the student who arrives in their classes with a professed ‘love of literature’. We sometimes come to see our job as grimly breaking those blithe spirits on the wheel of the hard labor of criticism and dismissing them from our company when they refuse to come into the quarry and break stone.

We set our teeth to this bit first because we hold dear the notion that criticism is work because it has work to do, that criticism has a function which requires training to perform, which is desperately needed as a part of the critical transformation (or preservation) of some wider sociocultural project, and towards which there will be opposition. A labor to learn, a labor to enact, a labor to endure.

We also do it because something which is fun, pleasurable or passionate seems an easy target for elimination within the academy, or indeed any contemporary institution with limited resources and a productivist sensibility. Yet it is against this sentiment particularly that humanists so often howl in protest in other ways, resisting the idea that what they do should ever be reduced to its naked, barren utilities. Why then it should be so urgent to disrupt, prevent or spoil the experience of culture when it seems passionate, pleasurable or fun is something of a mystery.

Nor do I think there is much sense in making the expert gamer, the romantic reader, the artist who creates for personal satisfaction, either an enemy of criticism or absent of a critical faculty. “Expert gamers” engage in a great deal of criticism: it simply isn’t expressed in terms that are native to scholarly enterprise, nor is it often concerned with the things that earn academic critics their reputation capital. But there’s a lot of value in the discourse of expert gamers for academic critics, and I think academic critics would find that this door swings both ways: there are things expert gamers want to know that they would gladly look to scholarship to engage.

1) Occupy is already a success if the model is to provoke reaction from its chief targets. It’s hard to imagine pundits passing up the chance to comment on anything: the 24/7 news cycle is a harsh taskmaster. Nevertheless, the number of surly, whiny or malicious commentaries as well as the dropping of any pretense of an ethos of objectivity from some reporters has been pretty striking. What’s more interesting is the extent to which active responses (as in Oakland) or threatened responses (as in New York City) from the powers-that-be have taken place. I honestly expected municipal and other authorities to just patronize and wait it out. I think there may be real anxiety inside the crony-capitalist/Washington nexus about the possible spread of mass protest or public discontent.

2) I’d continue to argue that there is a sociological limit in the current iteration of Occupy that mirrors similar limits in progressive electoral politics, and that this is where the reaction of Tea Party representatives has been instructive: they don’t want to explore the obvious connections and real overlaps between some of their rejection of the status quo and Occupy because they don’t like the sociological habitus of the people involved (a sentiment shared very much vice-versa). However, the single least interesting, least useful criticism of Occupy in circulation is that it lacks a concrete set of demands, that it needs some kind of concrete policy platform that politicians could adopt. This misses the point in every way possible. First, that Occupy’s critique can’t be boiled down into something like “Pass a new version of Glass-Steagall”, that the real issue is “Why did we get rid of sensible governance and guardianship of that type in the first place, and why can’t we have it back now?” You can’t solve our current situation with the passage of some laws if the institutions charged with implementing them will subvert, ignore or supercede those laws. You can’t solve our current situation if the next regulation you create will promptly be evaded or mocked by those it was intended to regulate. (Bank of America’s debit-use charge, I’m looking at you.) It’s the system that’s broken: you don’t solve systemic failure with a five-point legislative plan. Demands in this context have to be something more like, “Unelect everyone and comprehensively reform the process of electing a new group of representatives and leaders, expect accountability in both economic and political life and set real consequences for the failure of that expectation, make transparency in both business and government one of the sacred watchwords of a democratic society”. Maybe Occupy needs more of a boiled-down, two-sentence root-level philosophy or viewpoint (parity with something like “down with big government”) but it doesn’t need a set of demands that the political-financial complex can promptly ignore or play pointless legislative shell games with.

3) I think Matt Taibbi provides as good a “root-level philosophy” as you can ask for: that Occupy is not against wealth, is not against competition, is not against business, is not against banking. It’s a very specific argument that the game as it stands is rigged, that the cheaters are being allowed to operate with impunity, that the safeguards against cheating are compromised, and that the cheats are running the risk of destroying the game itself.

As my readers and colleagues know, I’m hopelessly addicted to analogies and metaphors. Here let me try an analogy that I don’t think is particularly metaphorical, that is in fact quite directly applicable to this situation: the history of the computer game Diablo II.

The game was a huge commercial successes and initially supported a large, thriving and heterogenous multiplayer community where the range of participation went from casual players who played few other games (online or otherwise) to dedicated, hardcore players with long experience in a variety of gaming genres and forms.

Diablo II allowed players to trade magical items obtained through play, as well as to compete with one another in various ways. It was consequently one of the first multiplayer games to generate an unplanned real-money transaction (RMT) market, as players offered desirable items to other players in return for cash payments through various third-party venues. This being a fairly new kind of thing at the time, neither the player community nor the game’s producer really anticipated what would follow. Initially, crucial data about characters was kept client-side, and so was relatively easy to hack. At first, only a small number of players used cheats in order to gain an edge in RMT transactions. At that point, the game’s multiplayer ecosystem was still relatively healthy: a large number of customers, a small number of cheaters. Arguably the cheaters may even have helped a bit by introducing highly desirable duplicates of items at a faster rate into the multiplayer economy. In short order, however, the ease of cheating, created mostly by a lack of governance and control over the playing environment on the part of the game producer, devastated the multiplayer community. Items lost all value as they were illicitly duplicated in massive quantities, and any sense of genuine competition between players evaporated as cheats proliferated. In the end, the cheaters were left to prey on each other, an activity which defines “diminishing returns”.

In the end, open cheating, or cheating which proliferates in the absence of governance and enforcement, is not even in the interests of the cheaters. But once a socioeconomic system moves headlong in that direction, its acceleration towards generalized disaster can be exponential. Cheaters themselves cannot be expected to stop that movement even if they understand that it’s not in their own interests, because they’ve specialized their economic activity to take advantage of cheats. The biggest hackers of Diablo II when it was at the tipping point probably couldn’t have played the game even marginally well if denied access to their hacks: the game had become about hacking at that point, and about the incomes they could obtain from doing so. When the prey left and the cheats become more difficult, the cheaters just went looking for some other racket. A parasite at some point can become too specialized in its reliance on a complex vector and on the ecology of a particular host: if through its own efficient depredation or in concert with other stresses, it kills too many hosts, the parasite can’t undo its evolution. At some point in the 1990s, a fraction of financial capitalism became so dependent upon subverting or unraveling safeguards and so expectant of a level of profit obtained through government-protected market manipulation that it became effectively unable to back off and seek some more stable equilibrium–and its political partners became the same. The idea that Goldman-Sachs in the last decade represents “the free market” is as laughable as saying that the 19th railroad industry in the US was a laissez-faire triumph: in both cases, plutocracy was secured through and within the state rather than in the absence of it.

Stopping that isn’t a matter of a policy here or a single bugfix there. It’s about a comprehensive change to the paradigm. It’s about the government of the people, by the people, for the people, not perishing from this earth.

I’m sure I noticed this pattern in the letters to the editor in this week’s New York Times Book Review because they were complaining about Laura Kipnis’ review of Maggie Nelson’s The Art of Cruelty.

Kipnis’ review started off with a wonderfully bracing slap to that most tedious kind of middlebrow NPR-listening muddled complaint against mass culture: “Well-meaning laments about violence in the media usually leave me wanting to bash someone upside the head with a tire iron. To begin with, the reformist spirit is invariably aimed down the rungs of cultural idioms, at cartoons, slasher films, pornography, rap music and video games, while the carnage and bloodletting in Shakespeare, Goya and the Bible get a pass.” Kipnis continues, “Low-culture violence coarsens us, high-culture violence edifies us. And the lower the cultural form, or the ticket price, or — let’s just say it — the presumed education level of the typical viewer, the more depictions of violence are suspected of inducing mindless emulation in their audiences, who will soon re-enact the mayhem like morally challenged monkeys, unlike the viewers of, say, ‘Titus Andronicus,’ about whose moral intelligence society is confident.”

If I could fit that on a tattoo, I’d get it put on my arm, just to save time the next time I want to say roughly the same thing, which my friends and colleagues can tell you is about once a day.

It’s just about as predictable that after saying it, you can expect some kind of rebuke from purveyors of the conventional wisdom, often one that speaks past rather than to the original critic.

When I’ve been on panels about media-effects arguments, I’ve always been a bit amused at the gentle chaos that articulating a critique like Kipnis’ tends to sow among researchers or audience members who follow the standard line. They’re ready for dramatic self-righteousness if by some chance an executive or producer from the culture industry should happen to show up and disagree, but not for zooming off in a more perpendicular direction, such as a more academic dismantling of the methodology or conclusions of long-standing media-effects work, or Kipnis’ point about how much criticism of violence in mass media is rather open in its pimping for high-culture snobbery.

As an example of what that gentle chaos can lead to, Josephine Hendin’s response to Kipnis is a really prime example of the aforementioned rhetorical transposition of an act of interpretation with a statement of a fact. Moreover, because Hendin talking about violence, art and popular culture, she does a pretty fair job in two paragraphs of demonstrating why there was a scholarly revolt against limiting the subject of literary study to high-culture works.

Hendin complains that Kipnis “does not clearly distinguish” between valuable artistic uses of violence and “shock value”. I’m sorry, were literary critics the people who were supposed to be especially skilled at close reading? Because as a starting observation, this leaves me a bit confused. Kipnis starts off her book review rather clear on this point: she thinks this distinction is bollocks. So perhaps Hendin meant to say, “I don’t agree with Kipnis: I’m going to argue that there is a distinction”. See, speaking of distinction, I think there’s one between saying, “I don’t agree with you” and “you didn’t make my argument and made your own instead, so I think you’re being unclear”.

The rest of the letter has the same problem: interpretations are converted by some invisible table into empirical data. I understand, it’s a two-paragraph letter, and not a monograph. But it’s not that hard to find monographs by literary critics that make the same rhetorical slip for hundreds of pages, refusing to characterize or imagine a claim as an interpretation and instead stating it as something which is. “Much of pop culture is about endemic desensitization to anything but the action of violence”. Much? Well, what have you got in mind? Tomb Raider and Andy Warhol, really? Not what I’d call major foundation stones of contemporary popular culture, but that’s how these arguments usually work: highbrow critics and audiences reach out desperately for the one or two pop culture texts or properties that they have some paratextual familiarity with, maybe from a panel four years ago at the MLA or from their teenage child’s unrefined cultural consumption.

“Does not clearly distinguish” is of a rhetorical piece with some of my least favorite repeated phrases in undergraduate papers. For example, the venerable favorite: that the author of a text “forgot” to make an important point in that work. For some reason, my students think this is a gentler, fuzzier way to say that the author is wrong on some important point, while also hoping that they will keep me from noticing that they don’t really have a fully worked-out understanding of what is wrong with the author’s argument. What I point out to my students is that this is both a more condescending characterization than simply saying that they disagree with the text (I’d rather be argued with than have it insinuated that I didn’t do my work properly) and it calls attention to rather than disguises a lack of command over the issues.

I agree that direct and declarative language is a good thing, whatever the length of an analysis. But it’s important to use language that always recalls what interpretation really is, and what it’s not. One of the requirements of that language is self-awareness. By all means generalize, but know that it’s you that’s doing it.

I don’t understand why Tron: Legacy has come in for so much critical abuse. I like it as much as my colleague Bob Rehak does. Just taken as an action film, it’s considerably more entertaining and skillful than your usual Michael Bay explosion fest, with set-pieces a good deal more exciting than its predecessor. However, like the original Tron, the film also has some interesting ways of imagining digital culture and digital spaces, and more potently, some subtle commentary about some of the imaginative failures of the first generation of digital designers.

Some critics seemed disappointed that the film takes place in a closed system, the Grid, created by Jeff Bridges’ Kevin Flynn, expecting it to ape the original film’s many correspondences between its virtual world and the technology of mainframe computing and early connectivity. In the original Tron, once Kevin Flynn finds himself inside the world of software and information, he finds himself meeting embodied programs that correspond to actual software being used in the real world, he has a companion “Bit” who can only communicate in binary, he has to make it to an I/O tower so that the program Tron can communicate to his user and so on. Critics seemed to expect that Kevin Flynn’s son would be transported inside a world built on the contemporary Internet, that he would venture from Ye Olde Land of Facebook on a Googlemobile past the some pron-jpg spiders scrambling around the landscape of Tumblr and then catch a glimpse of the deserted wasteland of Second Life.

The director wisely avoided that concept, but I nevertheless think the film is in fact addressing at least one “real” aspect of contemporary digital culture. Kevin Flynn, trapped inside the Grid for more than a decade, discovers that his basic aspirations in creating a virtual world of his own were fundamentally misdirected. He sets out to build a private, perfect world populated by programs of his own design. The complexity of the underlying environment that he creates turns out to be a “silicon second nature” that spontaneously generates a form of a-life that uses some of what he’s put into the environment but that also supercedes his designs and his intentions. Too late, he realizes that the unpredictability of this a-life’s future evolution trumps any aspiration he might have had in mind for his world. Too late because his majordomo, a program of his own creation, modeled on himself, called Clu, stages a coup d’etat and continues Flynn’s project to perfect the world by eliminating contingency, unpredictability, organicism, redundancy. In exile, Flynn realizes that the most perfect thing he’s ever seen is imperfect, unpredictable life itself: the son he left behind, the life of family and community, and the life he accidentally engendered within a computer-generated world.

Whether the analogy was intended or not, that narrative strikes me as a near-perfect retelling of the history of virtual world design from its beginnings to its current stagnant state. The first attempts to make graphically-based persistent virtual worlds as commercial products, all of them built upon earlier MUD designs, sometimes made a deliberate effort to have a dynamic, organic environment that changed in response to player actions (Ultima Online’s early model for resource and mob spawning). But even products like Everquest and Asheron’s Call offered environments which could almost be said to be shaped by virtual overdetermination: underutilized features, half-fleshed mechanics, sprawling environments, stable bugs and exploits that gave rise to entire subcultures of play, all contributing to worlds where the tangle of plausible causalities made it difficult or impossible for either players or developers to fully understand why things happened within the gameworld’s culture or what players might choose to do next.

Some of the next generation of virtual worlds, such as Star Wars: Galaxies, ran into these dynamics even more acutely. Blizzard, on the other hand, launched World of Warcraft with a clear intent to make a persistent-world MMO that was more tractable and predictable as well as one that had a more consistent aesthetic vision and a richer, more expertly authored supply of content.

That they succeeded in this goal is now obvious, as are the consequences of their success: other worlds have withered, faded or failed, unable to match either the managerial smoothness or content supply offered by Blizzard. Those that remain are either desperately trying to reproduce the basic structure of WoW or have moved towards cheap, fast development cycles and minimal after-launch support with the intent to make a profit from box sales alone, in the model of Cryptic’s recent products.

With the one major exception, as always the lone exception, of Eve Online. In terms of Tron: Legacy, Eve is the version of the Grid where the a-life survived. Though in the film, the a-life, the isomorphic algorithms, that appears are said to be innocent, creative, imaginative; the moral nature of Eve’s organic, undesigned world is infamously rather the opposite.

But what Eve proves has also been proven by open-world single player games like Red Dead Redemption or the single-player version of Minecraft: many players crave unpredictable or contingent interactions of environment, mechanics and action. In RDR, if you take a dislike to Herbert Moon, the annoyingly anti-semitic poker player, you can go ahead and kill him, in all sorts of ways. He’ll be back, but more than a few players found some pleasure in doing their best to get rid of him in the widest range of creative ways. You can solve quests in ways that I’m fairly sure the designers didn’t anticipate, using the environment and the mechanics to novel ends. You can do nothing at all if you choose, and the world is full of things to do nothing with.

Open-world single-player games allow a range of interactions that Blizzard long since banished from the World of Warcraft. In the current expansion of WoW, I spent a few minutes trying to stab a goblin version of Adolf Hitler in the face rather than run quests on his behalf, even knowing, inevitably, that I would eventually end up opposing his Indiana-Jones-derived pseudo-Nazis and witnessing his death. I’d have settled for the temporary resolution that RDR allows with Herbert Moon, but WoW is multiplayer and Blizzard has decided that the players aren’t allowed to do anything that inconveniences, confuses or complicates the play of other players.

I don’t know that this is Blizzard’s fault, exactly: the imperfections of virtual worlds are precisely what so many of us have spent so much time discussing, worrying about, and trying to critically engage. Trolls, Barrens chat, griefers: you name it, we (players, scholars, developers) have fretted about it, complained about it, and tried to fix it.

The problem is that the fix has become the same fix CLU applied to the Grid: perfection by elimination, perfection by managerialism. What now strikes me as apparent is that this leaves virtual worlds as barren and intimidated as the Grid has become in the movie, and as bereft of the energetic imperfections of life. That way lies Zynga, eventually: the reduction of human agency in play to the repetitions of code, to binary choices, to clicks made when clicks are meant to be made.

Where the spirit of open worlds survives, it survives either because the worlds are open but the hell of other players has been banished and the game stays safely single-player or minimally multiplayer or because the world has surrendered to a Hobbesian state of nature, to a kind of 4chan zeitgeist.

I can’t help but wonder, as Flynn does, whether there’s some slender remnant possibility that is neither of these.

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So yes, we got a Kinect at our house. I am the very model of the modern gamer tech geek. As an incremental change to the wand-driven interface design of the Wii and PS3, I admire it. I’m far more fascinated by the really imaginative hacking of the powerful capabilities of the device, and the unintended ends to which they may lead. I confess I was also a bit disappointed that the interface didn’t function like a combination of “Minority Report” and the Bat-Computer to the extent that I’d secretly hoped it might.

What frustrates me most about the Kinect, however, is not the device itself but the common misapprehension of some middlebrow game and digital media critics, most prominently Seth Schiesel of the New York Times, that the Kinect is the future of a naturalistic, real-world mode of interacting with digital appliances and media. Schiesel states the hope succinctly: that the banishment of game controllers, iPod dials, keyboards and other control devices in favor of intuitive motions of physical bodies and natural language commands is the end of a geek-favoring barrier to the consumption of digital media and the use of digital tools and the beginning of a great democratization of the digital.

This is in the end a very geek-oriented way of imagining why some media practices seem to cohere to geeks, that design is destiny, that technology intrinsically favors or excludes users because of its particular material or conceptual nature, usually a feature or architecture that a critic or designer believes can be and should be changed.

I don’t entirely disagree with this perspective. Design matters, and it matters in ways that are not purely a mirror of sociology or culture. This is even true of the Kinect or Wii or Sony Move control systems in particular. Schiesel and others are perfectly correct to say that kicking a virtual soccer ball or doing a virtual exercise routine with a motion-capture system is intuitive in a way that using a multi-button controller is not, and that this intuitive design permits many people to play some digital games when they would otherwise think that the effort of learning a control scheme doesn’t justify the reward of playing the game.

What bugs me about the middlebrow celebration of the downfall of the multibutton controller and its kindred devices (keyboards, etc.) is the naive understanding of mimesis buried inside that enthusiasm. The driving faith here is that representation and lived experience should have a 1:1 correspondence in order to rid ourselves of the work and difficulty that comes from a slippage between the two. There’s at least a kissing-cousin resemblance between this view and older positivist ideas, lingering on in some scientific and social-scientific circles, that we should tinker ceaselessly with language until all ambiguity is banished from it and it thus can be used for the efficient description of the real world.

Let’s say that Microsoft continues to hammer the bugs and quirks out of the Kinect, making its recognition of both language and motion closer and closer to how we hear and interpret speech and action with our own perceptual systems. Let’s even pretend that there won’t be a more and more obvious uncanny valley of some kind as it does so. As the system becomes more and more mimetic, at least in theory, will that truly rid of us of complex control schemes that only a geek could love?

Of course not, at least not if digital games work with the unreal, the imaginary, the impossible. What an odd thing that anyone should wish for games to become more restrictively mimetic to “reality” at a moment when digital technologies are otherwise opening up representational possibilities in film and television.

Stick for a moment even to sports games. A programmer could make a better and better Kinect-controlled soccer game, but if that is only going to involve those actual physical routines we use in a real game of soccer (which are themselves not something that human beings are born knowing, and are in some cases anything but intuitive: a game where you can’t use your hands? Not exactly a natural idea for a primate with opposable thumbs), two problems will quickly arise. First, if the action I see on the screen is to be synchronized with the action I perform in real-world space, the action can be in general be no faster or slower than my real physical motion. Maybe you’re different than me, but I don’t play soccer at the speed of a Ronaldo or Beckham. So nothing in the digital game can appear to be enhanced from the world unless everything is enhanced or exaggerated to the same degree, and every computer-controlled player or physical action has to be as slow and boring to watch as I am in real life. Second, I can’t do anything that doesn’t involve a match between an on-screen avatar’s motions and my motions. The avatar can be first-person or third-person, but I can’t do something like control multiple avatars, or control markedly non-human objects or creatures unless I learn to do something very imaginative, abstract or counter-intuitive with my body in real-world physical space. I can be a tiger in a Kinect game, but that either has to involve translating my normal bipedal ape motions into the motions of a four-legged feline or it has to involve my mimicking the motions of a four-legged feline.

From there, it’s a pretty short step to the Kinect version of having to memorize a series of finishing moves. It’s not as if this is something that digital media force upon our normally naturalistic, intuitive bodies. A boss fight in World of Warcraft has always seemed to me to have a very strong analogy to choreography, and I can easily see a Kinect-style future for a game of that kind where getting the right sequence of heals on the tank would look more like T’ai Chi than keyboard typing. But all of that will involve something as intricate and complex as contemporary controller interfaces (or real-world multiperson dance recitals). Without that slippage-filled interfacing complexity, I won’t be able to be a Jedi in a Kinect game: a game could interpret my raised hand as a Force choke, a push as a Force push (much as it looks in films and cartoons) but I can’t tell my avatar to do a eight-foot tall Jedi backflip without a gesture which is very fundamentally not an eight-foot tall backflip.

We can’t be freed of the work of representation, the ambiguity of language. Why should we want to be? That is like imagining a freedom from life itself. It will be all to the good if the Kinect makes a game designer deep in his or her cubicled warrens wonder if the best way to connect a player’s actions with the attack of a fantasy warrior in an imaginary world is X O O X left trigger long-hold-on-X as opposed to the player making a fist in the air and waving it around. Anything that unsettles byzantine practices of culture by reminding us of their contingency is good, because that’s what catalyzes the creative discovery of the novel and unfamiliar. That creativity will be stillborn if it has to satisfy the expectation of the Schiesels of the world that they will never again have to learn something unfamiliar in order to control the unfolding of the imaginary.

My negative reaction to Lanier’s views wasn’t quite as strong as Gary’s was, but I had some similar feelings. I think what Lanier says about the economics of cultural production is basically true, in some respect. As Gary notes, cultural monopolies of various kinds were profitable for much of the 19th and 20th Century, at least for the folks who were at the top of various productive hierarchies. The entrepreneurial revolution which began with post-Gutenberg literature moved steadily through other cultural media and forms, and a lot of people earned both spectacular wealth and ordinary livelihoods as that wave spread.

Lanier’s quite right that this economy is seriously threatened now. It relied upon scarcity and it relied upon a closed shop in order to produce for those at the top of those systems of production and those further down the pyramid. Modern cultural production has always had its doubles, however, who did not realize value primarily through the sale of cultural products and who were seriously impeded by the way that copyright and control of dissemination interfered with their own work. Academia is one of those doubles: the circulation of academic knowledge was and remains impeded by many profit-seeking publishers, when all that most academics ever wanted to do was accrue reputation capital through dissemination.

Still, I also think there’s something to Lanier’s point that there are aesthetic as well as livelihood costs to an open-source paradigm for producing culture. I tend to think a bit about digital games that have significant systems dedicated to user-produced content. You come across maps or skins or quests that are both brilliant and something that the main designers would never have thought to make. And you come across a huge number of totally shit disasters that make you sorry you ever heard of video games. That’s both because creativity isn’t evenly distributed and because not very many people have both the time and the resources to do something that’s basically a big gift to the world, which will produce no value for themselves. Even in the best cases, however, user-created content has a diffuse sort of feel to it, without the coherence and tightness that a work which has the full force of a controlling author backed by a publishing institution can sometimes create.

It’s a different kind of culture, and that’s not always a good thing. Lanier may also have a point about the economic circumstances that will confront culture-makers in the mid-21st Century. Gary is hopeful that we’ll soon know who the real creators among us are, that we’ll be freed from the kind of middlemen who don’t greenlight the right movies, pass on the best manuscripts, sneer at the art which inspires the world, judgments which are only corrected through the serendipitious interventions of other middlemen at some later date. But I do wonder if the real creators are going to be rewarded commensurately with their talent, should an open-source culture be better at finding and recognizing them. One thing you could say for the high-water mark of the old culture industry from about 1920 to 1990 or so, we often held our best authors and poets and musicians and filmmakers in high esteem and paid them well beyond a living wage.

If the economics of cultural production are changing, however, I think that both Lanier and folks like Lawrence Lessig on the other side of the issue are sometimes trapped in a debate about copyright and digitization that misses some important fundamentals that have nothing to do with any of that.

There’s two important factors at play in the consumption of culture that don’t tend to enter into the sound and fury around intellectual property. The first is time, specifically leisure time. If the 1950s-1990s were a highwater mark for the commodification of culture in the United States, it’s partly because they were also a highwater mark for the sequestration of leisure time from labor time. For the last three decades, working Americans have seen that leisure time slowly clawed back for the sake of work or for the sake of a productivist temperment even outside of work, towards a belief that the things we do should somehow always be generating value, towards a classically bourgeois construction of virtuous leisure. This is what a lot of folks writing about childhood have been commenting on lately, that middle-class children have been increasingly yoked to the proposition that what they do when they are not in school should still somehow be productive of skills and talents which will have value later in life.

The consumption of popular culture can sometimes get a piece of that action, but the less leisure time we have, the less we can watch or play or read.

When the vector of decreasing leisure time crosses the other major vector of the past fifty years heading in the other direction, namely the increasingly affordable availability of vast catalogs of cultural works, you’re heading for a kind of trouble which has nothing to do with intellectual property rights. We can buy or otherwise obtain the rights to view or read or listen to almost all commercial television programming, almost all films, virtually all video games, and so on now. Old comic books that I once would have had to prowl to find are reprinted as trade paperbacks. I can search online catalogs and find used books that would have taken me a lifetime to track down. And what drove the boom time sales in many media forms in the 1990s was precisely this availability and affordability: consumers took the opportunity to build libraries of material that previously would have been possible only for a wealthy and eccentric collector.

The thing is, once you’ve got it, you don’t want much more. The production of new material in any medium, whether it’s by old-style publishers or new media creators, can’t possibly keep pace, can’t possibly provision us with novel experiences which demand that we continue to buy or rent or consume culture at the same pace. There aren’t enough new people coming into the system who want to build libraries themselves, and in any event, some of them inherit the libraries of their parents or siblings or friends. Most of us don’t want a new device or technology for viewing or reading or consuming culture, either. What we have is good enough, and many people have gone through at least one or two cycles of replacing already acquired works, enough to know that they don’t want to do it again and don’t have the resources to do it again anyway.

More importantly, the affordances of time which drove the desire for more cultural product are steadily vanishing in the economy of the moment. Those who have jobs are more and more compelled to give as much as they can to them, those who have families feel more and more obliged to overparent their children. Productivism again reigns as a supreme bourgeois virtue. Time spent just listening or reading or viewing, if you can’t recuperate it as time getting educated or improved in some tangible way, is shameful time, not a shared triumph of the middle-class milieu. Those who don’t have jobs or whose livelihood hangs by a thread are hardly in a mood or a situation to snap up those bargain-priced DVDs.

So that’s what makes the situation of cultural producers darker than it once was. It’s a pretty fundamental thing: too much product, not enough buyers. I love a world where lots of poets and singers and journalists and video game designers make a solid living. And yes, Lanier’s right that the world of the future will be less like that than the world of the past, which I think is a sad thing. If that world is constricting, though, best to stop blaming it on kids downloading or the online mob. Look instead to making the circumstances of economic and social life more favorable once again to time spent on poetry and song and news, and don’t expect the good old days of rampaging purchases of back catalogs to come again any more than you’d expect a played-out mine to suddenly magically replenish its ore.

It’s the characterization that shines, which has always been the best part of Bioware’s games. The big step forward in Dragon Age is that they’ve finally gone beyond making the “dark path” through character development simply be a matter of being a selfish, snarky asshole. That was a particular problem with Mass Effect: Shepard could either be a basically noble, decent sort or he/she was a greedy jerk who made bitchy remarks to everybody.

In Dragon Age, the characterization choices you get resolve out much more satisfyingly. First, because the branch points in the narrative are often genuinely ambivalent or agonizing, with no simple “right” choice for someone who wants to play a good or noble hero. Second, because the range of charaterizations includes pragmatism, bitterness, alienation, unselfish dedication, desire, etcera. The reactions of the NPCs are also really excellently complex and the interactions between them are really satisfying. Morrigan in particular is a really impressive, intricate female character who continually surprised me.

It’s not a revolutionary game, but it does move a certain genre or mode of interactivity forward towards much more satisfying storytelling.

We did the first couple of puzzles the obvious way. Give a chef something he wants, ok, a rolling pin. Give a fireman something he wants, ok, an axe. This was when we discovered the game’s main problem, which is that the control interface really sucks. I tried to pick up the axe and hand it to the fireman, but instead ended up killing him with the axe. Start that puzzle again.

A couple of puzzles later, I decided to try more exotic solutions. We were supposed to clean up three items of garbage in a park and get rid of a fly. It turns out that your character can just pick up two of the items of garbage and the fly himself, leaving only an item of garbage high up in a tree. So I thought, let’s get God involved. I type God and he dutifully appears. God in this game appears to take the position that he helps those who help themselves, so he just wanders around enjoying the park. My strategy not being successful, I thought, eh, let’s get Satan and see what happens. Satan appears. God kills him. Hm. So I summon a bazooka and see if we can get God out of the way. God doesn’t care for that and kills my character.

Let’s try again. How about “apocalypse”? This produces a nuclear weapon. Click on it and it counts down to activation. One nuclear blast later and the star actually appears, indicating that I have successfully cleaned up the garbage in the park. Unfortunately I am dead and can’t claim the star. So let’s try again with “bomb shelter” plus “apocalypse”. Click on nuclear weapon, get in shelter. The ground crumbles and the shelter falls through. The star appears but I am dead.

So another strategy. Clean up most of the park by hand. Now summon a flamethrower. Burn the tree with the garbage in it to the ground. Voila! Puzzle solved. The park is now clean of garbage.

What’s fun is that there are many equally creative non-violent solutions to many puzzles. It can be aggravating when things that should work don’t work: the game’s internal logic is sometimes pretty arbitrary or counter-intuitive. But still, it’s a hoot.

More importantly, I think it’s about as great an educational game as you’re ever going to find. If you wanted to motivate kids to learn to spell and to broaden their vocabulary with a game, this is about ten thousand times better than the kinds of serious learning games that educational designers typically come up with.

Wardell’s backtracking since the story began to circulate is the kind of mix-and-matching of gestures that makes me rub my temples wearily. His objection to the UPS boycott, he said, had nothing to do with Fox News or Glenn Beck, just that UPS had made a public statement that they were conducting a boycott. His own statement wasn’t intended to be a public action, because he made it on a Facebook page to hundreds of friends. He doesn’t like companies that try to push ideology, but he’s not trying to do the same. The Internet twists what people mean to say or do.

Ok. Wardell is not the first to feel that what happens on Facebook, stays on Facebook. I’m sympathetic when the person saying that is an 18-year old who is stunned that some stranger is making fun of a humiliating picture or statement from a Facebook page. I’m not so sympathetic of a professional who has by his own recounting been in business with digital media for 20 years professing equal surprise that what was said on Facebook circulated beyond Facebook.

I’m also a bit confused by Wardell’s views on companies, ideology and advertising. Stardock makes interesting games, but it’s equally known for a taking a very strong position against conventional forms of DRM, a position which Wardell and others have definitely seen as extending beyond their own products. That makes perfect sense: DRM protection is a core issue for digital media producers. But consumer products companies that advertise on television similarly have every reason in the world to be concerned with the associations that can form between the content of such media and the products advertised alongside that content. If you were hoping to reach the audience for some programming at a particular network, but that network as a whole had gained a very strong negative reputation with some of your customer base due to one or two provocative programs, why not try to influence the network towards being a more favorable advertising environment? If you’re trying to influence the network, why not say something publically about your own company’s position?

Let’s suppose Wardell’s decision to prefer FedEx as a carrier was completely private, that he just told his fulfillment people to switch and didn’t tell anybody why he was doing it. So now UPS doesn’t know what they’ve done to lose Stardock’s business. If Wardell doesn’t want politics to influence business, he can’t even tell them that he’s made a switch for some reason other than pricing, because surely it’s a political position to argue that in some aspect of life, we shouldn’t have political positions. So what’s the point of calling down to his employees and telling them to switch to FedEx? Personal whimsy fueled by quick-fire emotional reactions, I suppose. I’m kind of thinking that’s not really the best way to run a business, but there’s precedent enough for eccentric if successful CEOs sending off OCD-fueled memos about the seams in the fabric of an employee’s shirt.

If a CEO is entitled to shift company policy based on momentary annoyance, it’s even easier for consumers to let momentary annoyance influence what are already whimsical buying decisions. I have a lot of things to play and view, my cup runneth over. I tend to find, though, that it’s these kinds of quick and emotional reactions to companies that become lasting buying rules for me. I need a lot of persuading to get involved in a formal, highly coordinated boycott campaign, but very little to trigger a kind of private decision to avoid a particular company. When I get really irked by dumb management of a product launch, for example, that tends to lock in a “don’t buy from those guys unless they give me some reason to reverse my feelings” attitude if the company’s products are ones that I can take or leave or are interchangeable with products from other companies.

On the other hand, a World of Warcraft-based film makes a ton more sense than a film based on the game Asteroids. The announcement of that signing deal, which apparently followed on a four-studio bidding war, raised a lot of eyebrows among pop culture observers.

As it should: this is one of those stories where the surface p.r. explanations just don’t cut it. Let’s say you’re a mid-level studio executive at Universal and you say to yourself, “I bet we could make a totally cool movie about a lone spaceship doing some asteroid mining”. Only the most feral, predatory intellectual property lawyer is going to tell you to pay off the people holding the rights to the video game Asteroids if you want to make that movie.

You could even say to yourself, “I bet we could make a totally cool movie about how kids playing videogames here on Earth are actually controlling spaceships that are doing asteroid mining and other jobs.” You might want to lawyer up about infringing on The Last Starfighter and Ender’s Game, I suppose, but not Asteroids.

So what’s going on here? I think again this is something less about business and profit and more about organizational sociology of contemporary cultural, economic and civic institutions. Most of them tend to have a big, amorphous layer of middle managers who make all the serious concrete decisions about resource allocation. All of those actors have strong incentives to claim sole credit for successful resource allocations and to obscure their involvement in unsuccessful ones. All of those actors need to provide a constantly renewed account of their own accelerating productivity: it’s never enough to be maintaining or supervising existing activities. And in a lot of these institutions, middling figures frequently arrange (implicitly or explicitly) to collaborate with a counterpart at another institution to mutually enhance their prospects along these lines, to manage their institutional capital and engage in quid-pro-quo dealings that make the dealers appear productive.

Hence in many cases an interest in paying out money for intellectual properties that are completely non-necessary to making a new cultural work. If you buy my mothballed intellectual property out of the attic of my megacorporation today, I’ll buy yours tomorrow, old chap. If you pay off the lawyer-troll under the bridge today in order to clip-clop across, then we’ll pay off yours too. Licensed properties are also a great alibi for failures (the source property is the problem! the adaptation is the problem!) and a great way for a studio executive to claim a successful adaptation (it’s not the film itself, it’s that I recognized the value of the property itself!)

In a lot of institutions, those middle-rank incentives drive some actions that people accountable for the total institution find frustrating or perverse, and end up constraining the generative actions of people who actually have to enact what the middle layer decides upon. Not to mention that the hidden incentives that drive institutional action sometimes produce results that outsiders find completely laughable or baffling, like a film based on the game Asteroids.