Abdication

Let’s talk about stores.

Humans like to acquire things. We invented the idea of trade in a time before knowing, and we invented systems of commerce basically as soon as we coalesced into cities and started making goods worth exchanging for other goods or services. Systems of currency came along eventually, too, and lo and behold here in the 21st century we’ve got a major case of economics and capitalism.

Part of maintaining a storefront has always included being picky about what you choose to sell. If you are a fruit vendor, under an awning in a long-ago and far-away agora or souq, you are not hawking cloth. If you are a cloth-maker, you are not selling cows.

The art of business, of course, has changed over the centuries. But curation has always been a major part of it. The Gap is not going to have a display of bananas between two shelves of skinny jeans. Lowe’s is not going to sell you crappy third-rate knockoff counterfeit appliances, if it can help it. Best Buy won’t have a shelf full of badly-subtitled bootleg movies in the middle of an aisle.

Brick-and-mortar stores, limited both by their physical square footage and also by the world of competition, curate. They choose what to sell, and they focus narrowly on that thing. Even in a massive big-box retailer like a Walmart, or a classic, five-story department store, every item for sale within those walls is there as the end product of careful, detailed negotiations between the product’s producer and the retailer. It’s no accident where the Post cereals, the Kellogg’s cereals, and the Kashi cereals are, in your local supermarket; that’s highly negotiated, proximity to you, the consumer, itself a commodity to be bought and sold.

There are, in fact, three major things a brick-and-mortar retail experience provides the modern consumer, in the year of our digital overlords two thousand eighteen:

1. Curation: Someone has already taken the full world’s supply of available goods, which is legion, and winnowed it down to a smaller selection you, the overwhelmed consumer, can work your way through decision paralysis to make choices within.
2. A middleman: Someone is responsible for being the bridge between the end consumer and the producer of goods, which means you, personally, don’t have to try to chase down someone ten time zones and fourteen languages away for support if your product has a problem.
3. Customer service: If something goes wrong, you have a place you can go and a person you can talk to about it. Theoretically, that person is even empowered to help you with most issues you are likely to have. Your needs are hard to ignore, because you can be present, literally in the face of the person from whom you seek assistance.

Now let’s talk about Steam.

Over a decade ago, Steam was this strange kind of half-store, half-DRM thing you would install in your PC if you wanted to play Portal or a Half-Life game.

Today, Steam -- the major product of Valve Corp. -- is basically the major storefront for PC games and gaming. Its dual functions as shopping mall and easy DRM led to widespread adoption by indie and AAA publishers alike, as alternative systems like Games For Windows Live sputtered briefly and horribly into life before blessedly guttering out again.

And it’s easy to see why. Steam is easy to use, for the consumer, a one-stop shop where you don’t have to worry about a thousand awful, competing little failure-prone DRM systems screwing up your machine. It’s cloud-based, meaning you have your purchases tied to an account, rather than to a disc, and can re-download them on any new computer as needed. And it started out friendly, masking its purpose as DRM product in an overlay of social tools to connect you to a community.

Over the years, as players have flocked to it, Valve has consistently added more features to Steam, like integrated screenshots, streaming, and family sharing. Those features make more players sign on, which makes more developers and publishers sell games on the platform, which in turn makes more players sign on: a virtuous cycle, leading to an estimated $4.3 billion in sales in 2017 alone.

Unfortunately, Steam has long since lost its virtue. It’s not actually a monopoly, but like many of its digital-age counterparts -- the Netflixes and Facebooks of the world -- it has enough power in a market the Sherman and Clayton Acts never foresaw to dominate the competition handily and be seen as a must-have in the PC gaming world.

That sure is a lot of power.

So let’s talk about responsibility.

Steam has opened up its storefront to basically all comers in recent years. The platform abandoned its ill-conceived “Greenlight” program, which required users to upvote would-be games like some kind of horrible reality show production board, in early 2017. Since then, developers have more or less simply been able to apply and pay a fee to sell their wares in the Steam store.

But the conditions under which a developer is welcome on Steam have not always been clear. In mid-May, the service began contacting the developers of a very specific sub-set of games, visual novels with sexual adult content, saying the games needed to have some of that content censored or else be removed from the platform.

Developer Christine Love, whose most recent title, Ladykiller In a Bind, features lesbian erotica, tweeted eloquently about how the capricious nature of Steam’s actions could harm small, independent development studios like her own Love Conquers All Games: “Regardless of how you feel personally about the games affected, Valve pulling harmless content on a whim, with no consistency or policy, will absolutely have a chilling effect on small developers,” Love wrote. “This is terrifying.”

Regardless of how you feel personally about the games affected, Valve pulling harmless content on a whim, with no consistency or policy, will absolutely have a chilling effect on small developers. This is terrifying.

— Christine Love (@christinelove) May 18, 2018

She added, “The developers being hit by this are being unnecessarily forced into a no-win situation, and it’s hard to trust Valve when it doesn’t honour agreements with devs. This hurts developers, it hurts players, and it hurts the entire medium.”

Developers of affected titles quickly sought alternative distribution, with many ending up on Steam rival GOG.com or smaller indie publishing platform itch.io.

Merely days after Steam began to excise adult content, however, the execrable misogynist dump Agony, chock-full of sexualized situations and sexualized violence, landed on the service. That created an understandable wave of pushback from customers and developers alike, seeking to know why certain kinds of sexual content were being ousted but others were being welcomed.

And so on June 6, Steam admitted what its users have always known: The company is utter crap at curation. But rather than issue a standard mea culpa or promise to do better in the future, Steam doubled down on its failure.

Instead, Valve's Erik Johnson posited, what if Steam just… didn’t?

After reviewing the situation, Johnson wrote, Valve decided, “the right approach is to allow everything onto the Steam Store, except for things that we decide are illegal, or straight up trolling.” Sex, violence, all of it -- who is Valve to judge, if your local regulators don’t object?

Johnson conceded the upshot of Valve’s decision “means that the Steam Store is going to contain something that you hate, and don't think should exist.”

That, in part, is fair as it goes; there’s a lot of garbage art in the world and taste is far from universal. But it also misses the point so widely that the light from the actual point may not reach Valve for another eight or nine million years.

In choosing entirely to abdicate curation, Steam is saying it no longer runs a store. What it runs instead is something else entirely: a cesspit, perhaps.

Because long experience has taught us two important things. First: any online marketplace without stringent, intense curation becomes prone to fraud almost immediately. For example, put almost any popular app or game into the Google Play (Android app store) search, and see how many unauthorized clones come up. For some games, there are hundreds, and many are malware. It’s not just digital goods, either: Amazon is rife with counterfeit products and outright fraud, despite the company’s attempts at policing its third-party marketplace.

Second, and perhaps more importantly: Any online platform left untended inevitably devolves into hate speech, maximizing the voices of the noisy few and marginalizing minority voices -- women, people of color, anyone anywhere in the LGBTQ spectrum -- even further, a problem Steam already has.

Valve has chosen to stop caring about the experience its end consumers have on its platform, which harms consumers. But likewise, by entirely abandoning curation, it has also made its platform into a place publishers may not want to be.

Luxury brands in recent years have chosen to stop selling their goods in department stores in order to, basically, not be seen among the riff-raff, and maintain their cachet of value and exclusivity. In short, Macy’s is not a neighborhood Michael Kors wants to be in. Will Ubisoft want its next Assassin’s Creed for sale along a virtual shelf full of Agony clones? Or will all the publishers who can afford to pull an EA and stick with their own exclusive, highly curated digital storefronts instead?

Steam has been dominant for a decade, but it doesn’t have to be.

I Am Andrew Carnegie

I.

I surveyed the land, then built my home exactly where I pleased: just far enough away from the railroad station and center of government, but close enough to them for easy access. Right on the river, with a nice view. Knocked down some old-growth trees and local flora to do it, but the land was mine to command.

Then I expanded the mansion, until the gaudy gold-plated curiosity became the centerpiece of the town.

I put down sidewalks where I wished, then razed them, then put them somewhere else. I added landscaping, cut down trees, planted strange and foreign orchards in their stead. I financed the expansion of a museum, then filled it from my own personal collections of art, antiquities, and hunting trophies.

Eventually, I built monuments to the greatness I had achieved, and even made clear my full ownership over everyone and everything I surveyed by redesigning the town hall to my satisfaction.

I exist to build, to buy, to expand. To be is to consume: I partake solely of the natural resources; I clean out the shops. I spend and save and spend and resell and give, strategically, knowing I will receive tokens in return.

I rule: not through election, but through the power of my pocketbook. The world is mine to command, because I have wealth and privilege. But I must do so lightly, and with compassion. With great wealth comes great responsibility, and my fortune is not for me alone. I spend it helping to better the lot of the working classes, to add art and music to our town. I pay for renovations, and bring in public goods and services.

In Animal Crossing: New Leaf, Nintendo has created the perfect capitalism simulator. Or perhaps a simulator of capitalism as perfection. It is the ideal game for the 19th century.

I rule the town of Villains -- or properly, I suppose, New Villains. The first is but a rust-belt ruin waiting hopelessly for young blood that will never come, languishing away without industry or income on an Animal Crossing: Wild World cartridge I misplaced in 2012.

For 243 days, I have dominated. I have built a paradise of unfettered but benevolent capitalism, one fruit, fish, and bug at a time.

I am Andrew Carnegie.

I am John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt.

I am that which founded and which underlies the 20th and 21st centuries, both for good and for ill.

II.

I believe in public art.

DC is a woefully impersonalized city. Planned and regulated from the start, and required to support its residents without any support for them, it lacks in personality.

But it still has a soul.

Its soul is money and greed and power and craven climbing but sometimes, sometimes, its soul sings.

There was a jazz trumpeter, a good one, busking his heart out at the Metro station this morning.

It's 2014. I pay for my morning coffee with my phone. I never have cash.

I found my reserve parking meter quarters, put them into his case, and used them to hold down a $1 bill that kept trying to fly away.

He couldn’t chase it. He was playing.

There are many buskers. I need to carry more cash.

III.

I support somewhere between 5 and 10 people on Patreon. I forget how many. The number just keeps going up anyway. I will continue to do so for as long as I have a salary and budget with room for discretionary spending. I am duty-bound to pass along my privilege and good fortune where I can.

I hate Patreon.

I hate deciding which of my talented friends and peers deserves $2 for hard work well-done and which of them deserves $0.50. I hate deciding that I shouldn’t support friends who are popular, because I have less-popular friends who need the money more. I cringe at the thought that anyone might feel they owe me anything in their work, or that they owe me any work at all.

I would like to buy a magazine. When I buy a magazine I do not have to decide what percentage of my $5 goes to the cover story and what percentage goes to two other shorter but no less important features and what percentage goes to opinion columnists and what percentage goes to photographers and artists and editors and layout artists and and and and and.

The magazines aren’t on Patreon.

They’re on Kickstarter. Same problem. Different tools.

I hand over my credit card number. If people whose work I believe in are going to be forced to busk hat in hand, when the world won’t pay them honest salaries for honest (so raw, so honest, so good) work, then by god I will be their patron.

At least I don’t need cash.

IV.

A pop culture journalist writing about the events of the past terrible month wrote to me this week to ask why I left gaming journalism.

In the course of conversation, I told him that one of the things “they” never tell you when you’re growing up is that leaving a job can be every bit as much of a relief, if not more so, than getting one.

My reasons were deeply personal and somewhat accidental.

My reasons were completely impersonal and utterly systemic.

I’m not sure my reasons matter.

V.

The fight destroys careers and lives and jobs.

The fight is for careers and lives and jobs.

VI.

I am not Andrew Carnegie. But his is the role I play.

How Microsoft Actively Chose to Cut their Customer Base, or: a Parable of Cousins

I have these cousins.  Or, rather, my husband has these cousins, but, y'know, family through marriage.

So.  There are these cousins: three kids, teenagers.  Good kids, and I like spending time with their parents, too.  Their dad really likes video games.  The girls really like video games.  The family has a Wii and definitely gets heavy use out of it, playing the hell out of every game that they buy.  Whenever we all get together at the beach in the summer, the girls love playing whatever we've brought and last year we talked Mass Effect with their father.  This year, the oldest came to visit and stay with us for a few days and my husband and I sent her home with a burned disc full of our favorites from GOG, for her and for the rest of her family.

Because here's the thing about this family: they live in a rural area.  A really rural area.  Their internet service is satellite-only, and it's got a cap of 5 gb per month.  5 gb, for two adults and three teenagers, in 2013.  And even without the cap, the speed doesn't support streaming much of anything and since it's satellite, a good rainstorm can knock their service out.

These cousins are a middle-class American family of five, and Microsoft is emphatically rejecting their money or the idea that they could ever be an audience worth courting.

"Because every Xbox One owner has a broadband connection..."

This is how Microsoft desperately tries to clarify their stance on whether the Xbox One is always-on or not.  Those are their own words.  "Because every Xbox One owner has a broadband connection."

It's not that Microsoft doesn't understand that plenty of people in the US and worldwide don't actually have reliable broadband connections.  It's that they don't give a damn.  If your connection isn't reliable, then by default, you are not an Xbox One owner.

It's almost a relief how clear and cavalier Microsoft is being about this, in fact.  If you have concerns about this system, that's okay with them: they do not want your money, your business, or your patronage.  They do not value you as a potential consumer of their goods, and they do not care if you are aware of their contempt.

It's good to know, I suppose.

Of course, American broadband infrastructure is notoriously spotty and challenging.  For the first two years my husband and I lived together, our connection was unstable and prone to fits of going at dial-up speeds or simply dropping out altogether.  Comcast eventually fixed the wiring and solved the problem, but this was not long ago or far away.  This was 2008-2009, in metro Washington, DC.  The nation's capital.

Yes, our internet service was fixed and now works as well as we pay for it to.  And yet Comcast can throttle service to our whole building anytime they want, if my media-savvy neighbors and I appear to be sucking down too much of their precious bandwidth.  So it goes, in densely populated areas: a thinly-shared resource can mean rationing.

And all this, of course, does not even make mention of our global neighbors, and how tricky heavy reliance on high-bandwidth internet connections can be in such tiny countries as Australia and Canada.  Nobody in those places wants to play Xbox games, right?

The always-on, fully global web really is the wave of the future.  I won't fight it (though I might tie an onion to my belt and tell you all to get off my lawn) but the truth of the matter is, we're still not there yet.  Tiny pockets of us are, and Microsoft is doing the best they can to erect stockades around those pockets and hanging handwritten signs over the gates that say "go away."  It is certainly their right do do so.  But contemptuously driving away groups of people who could spend their money with you strikes me as an incredibly bad idea in an ever-tighter and more crowded entertainment market.

Holiday Shopping

It's the second week of December, so here in the USA at least nearly everyone's out buying something.  Hanukkah and Christmas have a tight overlap this year, and in my circle of friends and family there are a surprising number of birthdays between December 24th and December 31st.  Half the internet is all about gift guides, and Game of the Year voting and arguing rings more in the air than "Jingle Bells."  When the big Steam Holiday Sale lands, I, like many others, will find myself stockpiling games to last me through all of the next year.  In short: 'tis the season for consumerism.

There are studies out there showing that actually, money does buy happiness.  To anyone who's gone an extended period without any money (and for me, those were years 1-28 of my life), this is no surprise.  Being poor sucks and surely, the opposite is better.  But one piece of information keeps catching my eye: studies by various psychologists say that if you want your money to buy you happiness you should spend it on experiences, not on things. Do something amazing!  Go to that concert!  Take that vacation!  Throw that party!  Go bungee jumping!

Play that video game?

I was mulling over my Christmas and entertainment budgets blearily in the shower (where all good thinking happens) one recent morning and realized that generally, I put games in the "experiences" category.  Except that literally, video games are things: $5 or $20 or $50 worth of bits and bytes, sent virtually or pressed into a plastic and aluminum disc, a consumer good through and through. And they are a consumer good.  One look at the structure of game studios, at the sheer amount of money involved in creating a AAA game, at the opening-week-sales race, or at the marketing structures around gaming leaves no doubt about that.  But if my $20 buys me 30 or 50 or 100 hours' worth of an emotional journey, is it really just a thing, anymore?

Being pissed off at Anders is definitely an emotional journey.

This year's Thanksgiving sale on Steam allowed me to send several gifts.  To the two friends who received Audiosurf, I thought I was sending the stomach-dropping thrill of that moment when the music soars and the track bottoms out from under you while hanging a sharp right.  The gift to them was of flow and motion.  I wanted them both to be granted the singular experience of finding their favorite music take color and form before their eyes, to ride it and feel its shape in a way different than even the most trained musician's ears do.

To the friend who received Fallout: New Vegas and all its DLC, I was hoping to grant a hundred little experiences of exploration and understanding.  I was giving that moment of stumbling across Chance's map, the shock of discovering Christine, the puzzle of history left behind in a hundred audio logs and forgotten pre-war relics.  I was giving him the chance to choose a future for New Vegas, a chance to look at anarchy and government and war and decide what, if anything, changes.

To the friend who received Bastion, I was giving the gift of Zia's song and the soothing tones of Rucks's narration.  He was granted the history of Caelondia to explore and the tangled, tragic dreams of three people to uncover.  I gave ruined streets to walk and he received a chance to give survivors and a society hope in the face of pointless destruction and damnation.

The first experience: waking up...

To each friend, I hoped to be granting the feelings of discovery, victory, joy, defeat, mastery, color, flow, awe, decision-making, and so much more.  Four people received Steam codes through the ether, but none of them were given "things."

I have always felt that, at their core, games are experience.  The heart and soul of every game is about the players being able to tell themselves, and each other, a story.  Whether it's the immediate, quickly-forgotten, short-term thrill of getting the long block at just the right time, or the strategic thrill of building a city with good infrastructure, or the grim tactical deathmarch (deathsail?) of eliminating the Spanish navy in a 4:1 firefight before your ship is boarded... all are experiences and stories.  A deeply strategic toppling of your opponent, a frenetic scramble to a goal, or something in between; a fairy tale about two brave but not always bright young Wardens; a jarring exploration of an unstable cop's awkward investigations; a chance to be a badass space marine... all stories.   

So: pastime, or thing?

The truth is, it's an unfair question to level at games, or at least to level at games alone.  It's the core of the human experience with art.  If every time I watch the Lord of the Rings DVDs I feel the passion and the pull of that story all over again, if I feel the hope and desire and pain and faith I felt when they were in theaters during a vulnerable time in my life, when I needed them most -- have I bought an item, or an experience?

If Neverwhere and The Hunger Games and The Sun Also Rises and Macbeth and and The Book of Three and "The Sound of Thunder" each make me feel a certain way when read them, if I feel thrills and joy and despair and excitement as I revisit them, and if my readings change as I age and mature and experience my life -- am I holding paper, or am I holding experiences?

It's a trick question; the answer is "both."  Art, I think, was ever thus.