First MP3s, then DVDs, then books. Perhaps the Academy thought itself to be a little too esoteric to find itself squarely lined up as the next target in digital piracy's electronic crosshairs, but this week's arrest of Aaron Swartz for the theft of over 4 million articles from JSTOR, a nonprofit archive of scientific journals and academic papers, should shatter any such conceit and serve as a wake-up call to librarians and content providers alike that the tremors currently rocking the publishing world (academic and non-) are merely the opening act for the kind of tectonic change that turned the entertainment industry on its head.
According to JSTOR's statement, Swartz, a 24-year old programming wunderkind turned digital activist and former fellow at Harvard University's Center for Ethics, allegedly had been systematically downloading articles from JSTOR in a manner designed to avoid detection by the system involving unauthorized access to MIT's computer network and illegal entry into a restricted wiring closet on the MIT campus. Once JSTOR got wise to what was going on, they stopped the bulk downloading, contacted Swartz, and confirmed that the content he had obtained was "secure" and had not been saved or uploaded elsewhere. Shortly thereafter Swartz was indicted by the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts.
This is not the first time Swartz has been involved in a brouhaha concerning downloading activities. In 2009 he downloaded over 19 million pages of court documents via a free trial of the Federal government's Pacer (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) system, following the call of open-government activist Carl Malamud to help make such public information more accessible. Swartz had managed to download approximately 20% of the entire database before angry officials at the Government Printing Office suspended the free Pacer trial and threatened an FBI investigation.
(Iinterestingly enough, it was United States Attorney's Office, not JSTOR-- or MIT, whose computer network and facilities were illegally accessed to permit the downloading activities-- who opted to pursue criminal charges in this case. Coincidence much? You be the judge.)
Swartz had also downloaded over 400,000 law review articles, this time as part of a research project to determine the source of their funding, the results of which were published in the Stanford Law Review in an article written by Shireen Barday. While he was at the Center for Ethics in 2010 and 2011, Swartz engaged in additional research involving large data sets on the issue of institutional corruption, and though his motive for the JSTOR downloads is still unclear some have suggested that he may have had a similar data-mining project in mind and not an attempt at wholesale data liberation. As JSTOR points out in their statement that they welcome such research and have even set up a site to facilitate these kinds of projects (http://dfr.jstor.org), however, this alternative explanation seems unlikely.
Whatever his motivation was (I'd recommend this post at Weibel Lines for the best overall personal assessment of Aaron Swartz, as Stuart Weibel has followed the career of this digital "phenom" for over a decade), the Feds brought down the hammer on him and then some. If their intent was to make an example of Swartz so as to prevent any additional acts of bulk downloading and/or distribution, the news today that someone just uploaded 33 gigabytes of JSTOR content to the Pirate Bay in apparent retaliation for the arrest suggests that this strategy might end up backfiring big-time.
Indeed, just a casual perusal of the largest Reddit thread about Swartz's indictment (Aaron Swartz was one of the founding members of Reddit) finds little sympathy for JSTOR or publishers in general. "He's now officially my hero," one commenter says. "I hate journal publishers. Every scientist hates journal publishers. They're parasites that control access to content someone else created and that the taxpayer already paid for. How can I get on his jury?" Another chimes in with a decidedly egalitarian perspective: "God forbid anyone should read a scientific journal without paying for the privilege. What would the world come to if the common people got hold of the knowledge reserved for corporations and universities?"
Now, to be fair, JSTOR is a nonprofit organization whose business model explicitly includes options for affordable and sometimes even free access to the scholarly content they have collected and digitized. But as library budgets continue to dry up, access to online resources-- however reasonably priced-- will increasingly find themselves on the chopping block as administrators frantically search for more things they can cut, driving more and more students, scholars, and researchers to the digital black market to get what they need.
Have you ever emailed a colleague from another institution a PDF from your online holdings, whether or not you had the license to share said resources with outside parties? Odds are you have. Did you know, however, that there are entire swaths of the internet where people with valid library credentials to proprietary databases provide articles on demand? The Scholar "Subreddit" on Reddit.com is just one instance of this scholarly digital black market, which runs its own parallel course to traditional resource sharing (i.e. commercial document delivery and interlibrary loan).
A born digital generation of scholars do not stop to think about copyright or licensing terms-- they want what they need for their research, and they want it now. Combine this group with the "hacktivist" demographic who laughs at the notion of paying for MP3s or DVDs and feel that failing to offer DRM-free versions of your software is more than legitimate cause to pirate your warez, and you can see why the government and content providers might be a wee bit concerned that Aaron Swartz is just the tip of the iceberg.
They are of course exactly right to be afraid. The same revolution which turned the entertainment industry upside-down and devastated the traditional publishing industry has now reached the rarefied heights of the Ivory Tower, where years of growing inequities of access and cost and runaway prices have made academia ripe for just such a reckoning. For years now the music business has had to learn how to compete with widespread availability of free downloads, something that video and book producers are still only trying to figure out themselves. Scholarly publishers, aggregators, and content providers would do well to watch these markets, learn from their successes and failures, and adapt quickly to the new reality... or else.
For if well meaning and reasonably affordable non-profits such as JSTOR are not safe from the digital pirates, then who is?
Disclaimer #1: I work for Harvard University
Disclaimer #2: I was an undergraduate at MIT
Disclaimer #3: I am a librarian who specializes in the lawful/licensed sharing of library resources
Disclaimer #4: I have assisted the JSTOR Project in my work activities
Disclaimer #5: I am an active member of the Reddit community
Disclaimer #6: I have never, ever illegally downloaded anything in my entire life
Disclaimer #7: One of the above disclaimers may not be 100% true
Showing posts with label digital publishing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label digital publishing. Show all posts
Friday, July 22, 2011
Friday, July 15, 2011
On 800-pound Krakens and missing the boat
On her excellent blog Attempting Elegance Jenica Rogers has a great post about the current brouhaha surrounding Netflix and its recent announcement that it would be changing its pricing structure more or less to disincentivize its DVD business and shore up its streaming revenues in advance of what are going to be catastrophic increases in digital licensing fees over the next year or two as its current sweetheart deals with content providers expire. Rather than express shock or outrage at Netflix, Jenica says the only surprise here should be that any of us-- especially those of us in the library community-- are still surprised:
Guess what? It was too good to be true. No one expected Netflix to make such a bold end-run around the content providers and traditional lines of distribution-- least of all the companies that had been disintermediated-- but as soon as it became clear that this is indeed what happened and that Netflix represented a clear and present danger to the home entertainment market the battle lines were quickly drawn. Internet service providers suddenly started to rediscover the joys of bandwidth caps (even while the prices of delivering hi-speed broadband services were dropping), while rightsholders began jacking up the aforementioned digital licensing fees or denying permission altogether for content that Netflix had originally been able to license for a song.
The old media dinosaurs may be slow on the uptake, but they can still be quite ruthless. Personally I don't blame Netflix in the slightest for doing what they felt they had to do in light of such organized resistance to their business model, and I suspect that a lot of the animus currently being unleashed at Netflix for its pricing changes would be directed elsewhere if the company had done a better job of explaining to its customers exactly why it was doing what it was doing: i.e. "They are trying to kill us." Netflix instead chose to downplay the context of these changes, and thus missed a unique opportunity to enlist us in their battle to provide a better entertainment alternative.
There's an unprecedented amount of anger and mistrust towards traditional content providers out there right now, and I think Netflix underestimated how much they were tapping into that as part of their business model. Whether or not they can regain the trust of those whom they have alienated remains to be seen. Meanwhile, Jenica wonders if we as librarians are not yet again ignoring the window of opportunity that the Netflix fiasco has reopened regarding the proper balance of access to information and the fair remuneration to content creators and/or rightsholders in the new digital marketplace:
We have been told over and over that we as librarians need to be more vigorous in our interpretations of Fair Use, while at the same time we are watching Georgia State get the pants sued off of it for doing just that. Already our institutional legal counsels are as a whole gunshy about pushing the boundaries of copyright law-- what do you think will happen if the publishers carry the day against Georgia State? No one wants to be a target, but unfortunately U.S. Copyright Law is designed such that the only way to fully exercise your rights to Fair Use and other perfectly legal exceptions to the rights of the copyright holder is to paint a bullseye on your chest. Is it any wonder then that few if any individual libraries or librarians are willing to take a stand on this issue?
What we fail to realize as a profession, however, is that none of the other advocacy that we do as librarians will amount to so much as a hill of beans if we allow the digital future to be written wholly by other parties. If we don't collectively demand a seat at the table on this issue, the content producers and their providers are perfectly happy with locking us out the restaurant for good. How I wish we could permanently enlist someone like Cory Doctorow-- a friend of libraries and outspoken critic of current intellectual property laws-- to help mobilize librarians around this cause as he so clearly has with other issues, but fundamentally it rests on the shoulders of every librarian to recognize that our very enterprise is at stake here. Like Jenica, I'm not optimistic at all that anything will happen this time around, but I still hold out hope that we will get our shit together before it's entirely too late.
UPDATE: Who better than iCarly's Jerry Trainor to offer some closing thoughts on l'affaire Netflix...
Why is anyone surprised by this? Or outraged? If you’re an information professional paying attention to the information economy, why did you not see this coming? Why are we doomed to repeat our shock and horror over and over and over again? What is with this naivety we have that somehow The Next Big Corporation won’t actually act like A Big Corporation about their information commodities? This is our world. This is the information economy. Elsevier, Wexis, the American Chemical Society, HarperCollins, Amazon, the RIAA, the movie studios — they don’t love libraries (or the consumer) the way we think that we should be loved. And they sure as hell aren’t looking out for our best interests. No one is. Only us.This has been more or less my reaction as well. The beauty of Netflix's streaming online video is that it so successfully flew under everyone's radar for as long as it did, but perhaps by doing so they actually did us a massive disservice. For one brief shining moment Netflix seemed to be offering a product that embodied everything that the techno-utopians said the Internet should be offering us. Instead of paying cable companies a cool C-note every month for a paltry selection of "on demand" television shows and movies (many of which we had to pay extra for anyway), the slayer of Blockbuster comes along and gave us a thousand times the selection for the price of a small cheese pizza. How could Netflix not succeed? It seemed to good to be true.
Guess what? It was too good to be true. No one expected Netflix to make such a bold end-run around the content providers and traditional lines of distribution-- least of all the companies that had been disintermediated-- but as soon as it became clear that this is indeed what happened and that Netflix represented a clear and present danger to the home entertainment market the battle lines were quickly drawn. Internet service providers suddenly started to rediscover the joys of bandwidth caps (even while the prices of delivering hi-speed broadband services were dropping), while rightsholders began jacking up the aforementioned digital licensing fees or denying permission altogether for content that Netflix had originally been able to license for a song.
The old media dinosaurs may be slow on the uptake, but they can still be quite ruthless. Personally I don't blame Netflix in the slightest for doing what they felt they had to do in light of such organized resistance to their business model, and I suspect that a lot of the animus currently being unleashed at Netflix for its pricing changes would be directed elsewhere if the company had done a better job of explaining to its customers exactly why it was doing what it was doing: i.e. "They are trying to kill us." Netflix instead chose to downplay the context of these changes, and thus missed a unique opportunity to enlist us in their battle to provide a better entertainment alternative.
There's an unprecedented amount of anger and mistrust towards traditional content providers out there right now, and I think Netflix underestimated how much they were tapping into that as part of their business model. Whether or not they can regain the trust of those whom they have alienated remains to be seen. Meanwhile, Jenica wonders if we as librarians are not yet again ignoring the window of opportunity that the Netflix fiasco has reopened regarding the proper balance of access to information and the fair remuneration to content creators and/or rightsholders in the new digital marketplace:
More important than my personal frustration, I think that libraries have a moment in the next 48 to 72 hours in which someone in our community could draw the line publicly connecting our information brokering challenges and The Netflix Thing. The public is furious about this, and there’s an advocacy moment that we should leap on. “Libraries are in trouble and suffering — just like you are. This is part of a bigger problem, and we’re feeling the pain, too. Think Netflix and the studios suck? Check out THESE stories about ebooks!”Jenica is exactly right-- this is part of a bigger problem. And I think she's also right that we as librarians will collectively miss the boat in seizing the moment to address it. This boat will be missed because we have not yet learned to advocate as a profession on the digital front, as we do on other issues such as the right to privacy and intellectual freedom. Part of the reason for this is that a given library or consortium's access to digital content is dependent wholly on whatever individual contract it is able to secure with the provider, creating a divide-and-conquer situation in which our collective advocacy powers have effectively been disrupted. But I suspect that the real reason that we're unwilling to to do so is the very real prospect of getting sued for testing the waters beyond what has been established as being absolutely safe. This is the 800-pound Kraken that nobody wants to talk about, but it's lurking out there nevertheless, waiting to sink anyone impetuous enough to steer their boat out past the metaphorical bar.
We have been told over and over that we as librarians need to be more vigorous in our interpretations of Fair Use, while at the same time we are watching Georgia State get the pants sued off of it for doing just that. Already our institutional legal counsels are as a whole gunshy about pushing the boundaries of copyright law-- what do you think will happen if the publishers carry the day against Georgia State? No one wants to be a target, but unfortunately U.S. Copyright Law is designed such that the only way to fully exercise your rights to Fair Use and other perfectly legal exceptions to the rights of the copyright holder is to paint a bullseye on your chest. Is it any wonder then that few if any individual libraries or librarians are willing to take a stand on this issue?
What we fail to realize as a profession, however, is that none of the other advocacy that we do as librarians will amount to so much as a hill of beans if we allow the digital future to be written wholly by other parties. If we don't collectively demand a seat at the table on this issue, the content producers and their providers are perfectly happy with locking us out the restaurant for good. How I wish we could permanently enlist someone like Cory Doctorow-- a friend of libraries and outspoken critic of current intellectual property laws-- to help mobilize librarians around this cause as he so clearly has with other issues, but fundamentally it rests on the shoulders of every librarian to recognize that our very enterprise is at stake here. Like Jenica, I'm not optimistic at all that anything will happen this time around, but I still hold out hope that we will get our shit together before it's entirely too late.
UPDATE: Who better than iCarly's Jerry Trainor to offer some closing thoughts on l'affaire Netflix...
Sunday, March 28, 2010
PAX East Day Two- Hurry Up and Wait in Line
(This is my Day 2 recap from PAX East, cross-posted at 8bitlibrary.com!)
As if the Disney World-like lines to see Wil Wheaton weren’t enough of a test of one’s stamina and willpower, it appears that every event and/or panel here at PAX East has a queue going out the door, down the hallway, around the rotunda, and back down the hallway in the other direction. One the one hand good for PAX, as this is the surest sign that this East Coast spinoff of the Penny Arcade Expo is an unqualified success, but on the other hand a conference this well-attended is really pushing the limits of the facilities. I wonder if Penny Arcade will attempt having PAX East 2011 at the Seaport Convention Center? There’s a ton more space, the building is still virtually brand spanking new, and judging from all the Twittering librarians the wi-fi there is lightyears beyond what Hynes has to offer.
Also daunting are the crowds in the Exhibit Hall for the product demos. All but the smallest indie booths are mobbed with gamers waiting for a few minutes at the controllers, but that doesn’t stop JP and myself from pushing our way through the lines to try and talk to as many developers, CEOs, and PR folks that we can about games and gaming in libraries. And how cool was it whenever we met a developer whose face lit up when JP said we were from 8bitlibrary and they told us that they’d seen us online? It’s interesting to take in the reactions to JP’s 8bitlibrary “elevator speech”- some game companies clearly see how gaming, education, and librarianship all potentially intersect, but other shops seem just as at a loss as do our librarian and educator peers when we try to demonstrate the relevance of gaming to our discipline. This suggests that the silos we’re trying to break out of are not entirely of our own making, and that maybe the game content producers themselves could benefit from thinking outside the traditional confines of their current business models. There’s a lot of fertile ground here for advocacy.
The Death of Print- a panel lead and moderated by The Escapist’s Russ Pitts, featuring freelancer Julian Murdoch, Jeff Green from EA, Chris Dahlen, managing editor of Kill Screen, and John Davison, E.I.C. of Gamepro
Niche printing as a craft market
In the US % of newsstand sales ae pulped
Print has copyeditors and fact-checkers- how much of this can carry over?
Advertiser balance with media changing over time
No ads can result in a “pure craft” product a la McSweeneys
In the US people expect free magazines whereas in UK customers pay for premium print content
Ipads and the new tablet magazine format- you can charge for content without the waste of print
Social media will always win in terms of delivering information
E-print pubs need to focus on content that isn’t news, because paid news is dead
However, sometimes people just want something on your shelf, and Kindles on a plane still need to be turned off
Q: How many of you have a magazine subscription? Most of room- half are game-related pubs
Q: How many go to game websites? All in room. How many use Adblock? 3/4’s of room.
“We (the industry) may have killed print but you guys are killing online”
Online is all about reach- print is still disproportionately valued in publishing and critical circles however
What does the media future hold?
Print on demand future?
Small print run business is getting very interesting
Problem is that it’s all happening in China so you have to allow for lead time and lower quality
Higher quality and local printing equals a very expensive product
Q from audience: re: the packaging of content can we learn anything from the mp3ification of music? Can we succesfully monetize “chunked” print content?
A: Look at e-comics and Dark Horse, it seems to be a viable model for certain niche markets
Why are we buying this content? As a consumer or as a collector? If you are a consumer why not get it digital?
Can we get away with timely digital content for premium pricing (i.e. download now for $15, buy next week for $5)
What about the New Yorker? Can that mixed/exclusive model survive?
Q: What about a “freemium”-tipjar model for opt in payment? Didn’t Penny Arcade do it this way in the first place?
These kinds of operations can work but they don’t necessarily scale
Q: How do you fit online features like streaming video etc back into print? Tell the right story for the right medium.
Some stories will work in some media but others will fail miserably- e.g. do people really want a transcription of a podcast?
There’s a palpable difference between a print byline and An online personality
Online is still evolving as well
Journalism is suffering from the “flight instructor” problem. There are alot of people who are passionate about games of which a fair percentage who can write. Do the math. If you want to make money as a freelancer, you need to do more than just game rviews
Tablet editions are a “big f***ing job” and are extremely labor intensive. Can you do this with a niche publication?
Final thoughts: print isn’t dead, it’s undead.
Fail Now!-
Jason de la Rocha
Rock band stated at MIT Media Lab- Harmonix had a very rough outing
Branded as “horrendous failure” at first
Overnite success is not the rule- failure needs to be embraced as necesary risk taking
Professor assigning game design students to create a breakout clone. Why? “I don’t know how to grade innovation” !!!
Risk aversion= reward aversion
Example of console sales- PS3 and XBox tightly coupled and steady whereas Wii and DS are much stepeer. Why?
(Note to @librarianjp- check out Vgchartz.com for gaming metrics!)
Playfish doing social networking- wildly rampant growth, and of course Zinga with Farmville
Traditionally there has been a stark delineation betwen games and causal gamers
Now the data is much more granular. You have power gamers, social gamers, even incidental games (like the star collector in Super Mario Galaxy)
Gaming demographics have changed radically
Traditionally “horsepower” was the driving factor in game development and the industry optimized itelf along those lines
Once you hit the saturation point you need to find new ways to break into the market- e.g. the Wii, a new interface or a new approach
The new thing is hard to predict, so established powers have no incentive to take risks
Example: Sony PS3 is wicked powerful but they don’t had a new hook
The Medici Effect- interesting things happen at the intersection of ideas
Quantity can lead to quality
You have to do a lot of crap and work through the creative process to create something good… failure is the critical ingredient
Article from The Escapist : “Why your game idea sucks”
There’s no value in “ideas”- everyone has them. The value comes from the execution.
Mark Surney (Robotron, etc). Famous for the “Surney Method”- put many ideas into production all at once – nor sure which idea will work , axes the ones that are crap
Out of this winnowing process comes one completed game which has already beeen tested
Initial risk for future benefit
Identify where your risk costs are low- that’s where you permit yourself to fail!
If you want to fail, fail fast
Agile development does two to three week schedules and reevaluates constantly rather than setting two to three year schedules- have an iterative project plan that allows for failure
Alexander Siropian (Halo) – Set up an “idea funnel” idea meetings every week would result in ideas on sticky notes
Making ideas “not precious” is key
Changing the pitch to publish ratio which is usually 1:1 in gaming circles
People who are less attached to one idea are more likely to come up with good ideas
World of Goo people, @ Carnegie Mellon a class with 50 games in one semester
Every week would be something new = more risk taking
Crayon Physics Deluxe. Petrie makes a new game every month.
Cactus. Flash development. The extreme end of this.
Jonathan blue GDC does presentationss of gaming failures
Locked a bunch of game designers in a barn and had a gamer “jam”
IGA does a global game jam
Little Big Planet rapid iteration- if someone had an idea they were sent off to make a quick prototype AMA experiment molecules. If they worked they were added as features to the game
The Apple app store is another great example. The barriers to entry are so low that it’s easier than ever to innovate
This is changing the business model of gaming radically
Traditional model is that you spend a lot of money out the outset launch and hope you make a lot of money (and maybe you’ll break even)
Now the risk model spends just enough money to get a viable game then launches
The engine is sound but the games are not necessarily content-complete
Risk is being managed in real time
If a game isn’t producing you pull the plug- similar to the tv model
Instead of one fifty million dollar bet you have ten five million dollar bets
Understanding your users better gives you tools to manage your risk and failure.
Graph of ludic to story horizontal abstract to simulation vertical
Story is more expensive than ludic simulation is more expensive than abstract
Higher costs come with less risk tolerance
More risks hapening in the ludic and abstract quadrants
Q and a time!
Unless you actually build a prototype you’re just not going to be able to evaluate whether an idea sucks or not
Indie gamers utilize the open community to test their prototypes
When have you failed? Persisting through failure is a real danger this is ESP so when ideas are “precious”
As if the Disney World-like lines to see Wil Wheaton weren’t enough of a test of one’s stamina and willpower, it appears that every event and/or panel here at PAX East has a queue going out the door, down the hallway, around the rotunda, and back down the hallway in the other direction. One the one hand good for PAX, as this is the surest sign that this East Coast spinoff of the Penny Arcade Expo is an unqualified success, but on the other hand a conference this well-attended is really pushing the limits of the facilities. I wonder if Penny Arcade will attempt having PAX East 2011 at the Seaport Convention Center? There’s a ton more space, the building is still virtually brand spanking new, and judging from all the Twittering librarians the wi-fi there is lightyears beyond what Hynes has to offer.
Also daunting are the crowds in the Exhibit Hall for the product demos. All but the smallest indie booths are mobbed with gamers waiting for a few minutes at the controllers, but that doesn’t stop JP and myself from pushing our way through the lines to try and talk to as many developers, CEOs, and PR folks that we can about games and gaming in libraries. And how cool was it whenever we met a developer whose face lit up when JP said we were from 8bitlibrary and they told us that they’d seen us online? It’s interesting to take in the reactions to JP’s 8bitlibrary “elevator speech”- some game companies clearly see how gaming, education, and librarianship all potentially intersect, but other shops seem just as at a loss as do our librarian and educator peers when we try to demonstrate the relevance of gaming to our discipline. This suggests that the silos we’re trying to break out of are not entirely of our own making, and that maybe the game content producers themselves could benefit from thinking outside the traditional confines of their current business models. There’s a lot of fertile ground here for advocacy.
The Death of Print- a panel lead and moderated by The Escapist’s Russ Pitts, featuring freelancer Julian Murdoch, Jeff Green from EA, Chris Dahlen, managing editor of Kill Screen, and John Davison, E.I.C. of Gamepro
Niche printing as a craft market
In the US % of newsstand sales ae pulped
Print has copyeditors and fact-checkers- how much of this can carry over?
Advertiser balance with media changing over time
No ads can result in a “pure craft” product a la McSweeneys
In the US people expect free magazines whereas in UK customers pay for premium print content
Ipads and the new tablet magazine format- you can charge for content without the waste of print
Social media will always win in terms of delivering information
E-print pubs need to focus on content that isn’t news, because paid news is dead
However, sometimes people just want something on your shelf, and Kindles on a plane still need to be turned off
Q: How many of you have a magazine subscription? Most of room- half are game-related pubs
Q: How many go to game websites? All in room. How many use Adblock? 3/4’s of room.
“We (the industry) may have killed print but you guys are killing online”
Online is all about reach- print is still disproportionately valued in publishing and critical circles however
What does the media future hold?
Print on demand future?
Small print run business is getting very interesting
Problem is that it’s all happening in China so you have to allow for lead time and lower quality
Higher quality and local printing equals a very expensive product
Q from audience: re: the packaging of content can we learn anything from the mp3ification of music? Can we succesfully monetize “chunked” print content?
A: Look at e-comics and Dark Horse, it seems to be a viable model for certain niche markets
Why are we buying this content? As a consumer or as a collector? If you are a consumer why not get it digital?
Can we get away with timely digital content for premium pricing (i.e. download now for $15, buy next week for $5)
What about the New Yorker? Can that mixed/exclusive model survive?
Q: What about a “freemium”-tipjar model for opt in payment? Didn’t Penny Arcade do it this way in the first place?
These kinds of operations can work but they don’t necessarily scale
Q: How do you fit online features like streaming video etc back into print? Tell the right story for the right medium.
Some stories will work in some media but others will fail miserably- e.g. do people really want a transcription of a podcast?
There’s a palpable difference between a print byline and An online personality
Online is still evolving as well
Journalism is suffering from the “flight instructor” problem. There are alot of people who are passionate about games of which a fair percentage who can write. Do the math. If you want to make money as a freelancer, you need to do more than just game rviews
Tablet editions are a “big f***ing job” and are extremely labor intensive. Can you do this with a niche publication?
Final thoughts: print isn’t dead, it’s undead.
Fail Now!-
Jason de la Rocha
Rock band stated at MIT Media Lab- Harmonix had a very rough outing
Branded as “horrendous failure” at first
Overnite success is not the rule- failure needs to be embraced as necesary risk taking
Professor assigning game design students to create a breakout clone. Why? “I don’t know how to grade innovation” !!!
Risk aversion= reward aversion
Example of console sales- PS3 and XBox tightly coupled and steady whereas Wii and DS are much stepeer. Why?
(Note to @librarianjp- check out Vgchartz.com for gaming metrics!)
Playfish doing social networking- wildly rampant growth, and of course Zinga with Farmville
Traditionally there has been a stark delineation betwen games and causal gamers
Now the data is much more granular. You have power gamers, social gamers, even incidental games (like the star collector in Super Mario Galaxy)
Gaming demographics have changed radically
Traditionally “horsepower” was the driving factor in game development and the industry optimized itelf along those lines
Once you hit the saturation point you need to find new ways to break into the market- e.g. the Wii, a new interface or a new approach
The new thing is hard to predict, so established powers have no incentive to take risks
Example: Sony PS3 is wicked powerful but they don’t had a new hook
The Medici Effect- interesting things happen at the intersection of ideas
Quantity can lead to quality
You have to do a lot of crap and work through the creative process to create something good… failure is the critical ingredient
Article from The Escapist : “Why your game idea sucks”
There’s no value in “ideas”- everyone has them. The value comes from the execution.
Mark Surney (Robotron, etc). Famous for the “Surney Method”- put many ideas into production all at once – nor sure which idea will work , axes the ones that are crap
Out of this winnowing process comes one completed game which has already beeen tested
Initial risk for future benefit
Identify where your risk costs are low- that’s where you permit yourself to fail!
If you want to fail, fail fast
Agile development does two to three week schedules and reevaluates constantly rather than setting two to three year schedules- have an iterative project plan that allows for failure
Alexander Siropian (Halo) – Set up an “idea funnel” idea meetings every week would result in ideas on sticky notes
Making ideas “not precious” is key
Changing the pitch to publish ratio which is usually 1:1 in gaming circles
People who are less attached to one idea are more likely to come up with good ideas
World of Goo people, @ Carnegie Mellon a class with 50 games in one semester
Every week would be something new = more risk taking
Crayon Physics Deluxe. Petrie makes a new game every month.
Cactus. Flash development. The extreme end of this.
Jonathan blue GDC does presentationss of gaming failures
Locked a bunch of game designers in a barn and had a gamer “jam”
IGA does a global game jam
Little Big Planet rapid iteration- if someone had an idea they were sent off to make a quick prototype AMA experiment molecules. If they worked they were added as features to the game
The Apple app store is another great example. The barriers to entry are so low that it’s easier than ever to innovate
This is changing the business model of gaming radically
Traditional model is that you spend a lot of money out the outset launch and hope you make a lot of money (and maybe you’ll break even)
Now the risk model spends just enough money to get a viable game then launches
The engine is sound but the games are not necessarily content-complete
Risk is being managed in real time
If a game isn’t producing you pull the plug- similar to the tv model
Instead of one fifty million dollar bet you have ten five million dollar bets
Understanding your users better gives you tools to manage your risk and failure.
Graph of ludic to story horizontal abstract to simulation vertical
Story is more expensive than ludic simulation is more expensive than abstract
Higher costs come with less risk tolerance
More risks hapening in the ludic and abstract quadrants
Q and a time!
Unless you actually build a prototype you’re just not going to be able to evaluate whether an idea sucks or not
Indie gamers utilize the open community to test their prototypes
When have you failed? Persisting through failure is a real danger this is ESP so when ideas are “precious”
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