Essentially, it’s the same arguments that have been repeated for years, but presented clearly and filtered through a more purely academic analysis. “Game stories suck.” “Games aren’t stories.” “If you put more emphasis on story than game design, you’ve made an interactive movie.” When I saw the essay linked on Facebook, I had to double-check the date to make sure that it was written recently and not pulled from the archives from 5 years ago.

I really don’t want to sound too dismissive, since Koster makes his points well, and it’s clear that the essay is more of a definition than an indictment. But I can’t agree with most of his assumptions or conclusions, partly because I think Koster uses an over-exclusionary definition of what constitutes a “game.”

A few days later, he addressed similar concerns with a follow-up essay: Narrative isn’t usually content, either. This one’s a bit harder for me to over-simplify, but essentially: he acknowledges that there is a category of games where the gameplay consists of piecing together a narrative, but says that the narrative is still being used as a resource, not a mechanic. You could change the individual pieces of narrative to fit any theme, but the actual game mechanics, what the player actually does with those pieces of narrative, don’t change.

That’s an insightful observation, but it still doesn’t do anything to address my problem with the claim that narrative isn’t a game mechanic. Most of my objections are rooted in his insistence that a “game” is by definition systematic, replayable, and deterministic.

If it were just a simple matter of definition, I wouldn’t really mind. He doesn’t use “experience” as a pejorative. He does use “interactive movie” as a pejorative, but I think we’ve all got a general idea of the distinction between a satisfying game story and an interminable series of cut-scenes interspersed with limited interaction. And if Koster were to say that, for example, a traditional adventure game was a great “experience” but not a good game design, then what’s the harm?

For one thing, it continues the tradition of drawing a clear do-not-cross line between “gameplay” and “storytelling,” which is bad for both. Back when I was working on narrative-driven games, I was looking for ways that games could be used to tell stories. But even then, I was starting to get more interested in systematic games, and I started to develop a greater appreciation for board game design. Now I want to understand how stories and games can work together.

Understanding how games work and how to design games as systems, instead of just cranking out minor iterations on the same set of established game genres, will only make for better games. There is one point that I agree with completely: it’s foolish to ignore or diminish the interactivity in a game, because the interactivity — the game design — is what’s unique to games as a medium.

But my main objection to Koster’s basic assumption is this: If you treat game narrative as nothing more than feedback, then your game narrative will never, ever be satisfying.

A digression about replayability

Most of Koster’s arguments reduce to the core problem that narratives aren’t repeatable:

There’s nothing wrong, to my mind, with using narrative as feedback. But we have to keep in mind that all that narrative and visual content is the expensive part of making the game. It is also consumable, whereas a systemically driven game system can provide many many problems to solve and heuristics to develop (and therefore fun to be had), with relatively few rules. Because of this, narrative content is destined to be expensive, short, and over.
[…]
You’re not going to get people to keep playing unless you keep releasing more content. This will matter quite a lot for any service-based game, be it MMO, F2P, social game, whatever.

I was a little baffled by his last statement, since “service-based” games are exactly suited to supplying more content. Downloadable content, in-app purchases, expansions, and sequels — an entire industry has been built on players wanting to buy more content. It’s very rare that these significantly change the game mechanics, and a lot more common that they provide more narrative. (For the simple reason that designing genuinely novel game mechanics is a lot more difficult and time-consuming than developing narratives).

Still, Koster insists that a systematic game that is indefinitely replayable is the ideal. That seems reasonable enough on the surface: if the player’s interaction isn’t meaningfully changing the outcome of the experience, then it would seem to be non-interactive by definition.

But consider a partial graph of a simple game, where the circles are the player’s decision points and the squares are the moments of feedback that lead to the next decision:

But whenever a player plays the game, he has to walk the graph:

The game itself is a system, but no matter how complex the game, the player’s experience with the game is always linear. Like a story. That’s just as true for the most systematic, abstract game as it is for the most linear, narrative-driven game.

You can never actually circle back to a junction point and make a different decision to arrive at a different outcome. Even if you go back to a saved game, you’re still arriving at the decision point with more information than you had the first time you made the decision.

I’d even take it a step further and say that because humans aren’t “stateless,” we can never truly replay a game from the beginning. Whether we’re re-rolling a character in an RPG or starting a new game of Tetris, our subsequent play-throughs are actually just a continuation of our last. Because this time, we know that enemy X is more vulnerable to heavy weapon attacks, or we’ve learned when and where is best to place the straight-line tetrominoes. All of our experience with a game lands on a linear timeline from the start of our first play-through to the end of our last.

I believe it’s a mistake to ignore that when we’re talking about good game design vs bad game design, to focus on an academic definition that requires replayability instead of looking at the player’s experience as a whole. I’ve got a board game called Macao that’s a perfectly enjoyable game, somewhat similar to Puerto Rico. It’s lightly themed, only slightly dependent on luck, and is primarily driven by a system of well-thought-out game mechanics (too many game mechanics, you could argue). I can’t imagine a definition of “game” that wouldn’t include it.

Still, I’ve played it exactly one time. I have no compelling reason to play it again as anything other than a pure diversion. Not because it’s a bad game, but because I feel as if I got everything I wanted out of it from my first play-through. It’s systematic, but I won’t get anything new out of interacting with its systems.

On the other hand, I’ve played Sam and Max Hit the Road at least five times, even though little has changed from one play-through to the next. It’s not just to watch the cut-scenes, either; I could go to YouTube if that’s all I wanted. Instead, there’s something inherently satisfying about putting the pieces of the system together and making them click, whether or not I’m still getting the “a-ha” moments of first discovery. Based on Koster’s definition, that’s just be a case of my getting excited about feedback. But I’d say it’s slightly deeper than that: it’s the interaction with the system that’s fun, just as much as that of a player going through the same course in a driving game even after he’s played it dozens of times.

To put it another way: I say what makes a game is the act of playing it. Being presented with a choice, deciding on one, and responding to that decision’s outcome. As long as the choices aren’t over-simplified, the knowledge that I could do it differently a second time has no bearing on how much I enjoy playing it the first time.

Weapon of Choice

All of my graphs above reduce the decisions a player makes — the inherent gameness of the game — to simple circles, each with the same weight. You could say that putting all the interesting decisions into what are effectively black boxes, and dropping them all onto the same line after the decision has already been made, ignores what it is that makes a game a game: the ability to choose between several different predictable outcomes.

Koster reminds us that our brains love feedback; it’s why slot machines are so profitable, and it’s why long strings of cut-scenes in a videogame can trick us into believing that we’ve actually accomplished something, even when we actually haven’t.

I’d make the claim that even more than the chemical jolt we get when we receive feedback, our brains love having the illusion of choice.

We hate the idea of choices being closed off to us. We love the idea that we’ll be able to explore every possible opportunity and get the chance to see every possible outcome. We agonize over restaurant menus, even when we know we’ll be back. We throw bachelor and bachelorette parties as a kind of wake to mourn a person’s decision to enter into a stable, committed relationship with only one person. We even value the potential of a choice as much as the outcome — the old expression reminds us that eating a cake means losing the option of having a cake to eat. It’s a big part of why we like stories, simulations, and games in the first place; they give us the chance to try out the choices we wouldn’t be able to make in real life.

The prospect of having multiple choices is so compelling, in fact, that we think of it as a virtue even when we’re not equipped to handle it. One of the terms you’ll hear frequently in regards to board games (and occasionally with video games) is analysis paralysis — it’s when a player has so many equally appealing choices available, she can’t decide which one to take. The best games circumvent this by introducing mechanics that limit the player’s choices at any given opportunity, scale the number of choices up or down as the game progresses and the player gets more information, or give context to the player so that some choices are more appealing than others.

So we love having plenty of choices with lots of possible outcomes available to us, even though we’re generally bad at predicting what those outcomes are going to be. And “anecdotal data” from my own experiences with games, and from reading and hearing other players’ accounts of games, leads me to believe that we value the potential of multiple outcomes more than actually seeing multiple outcomes.

I’ve heard plenty of accounts of players praising the Grand Theft Auto series by saying “I solved this mission using one method, but my friend solved it completely differently.” But I’ve never heard of players saying how great it was to successfully solve the same mission multiple times in multiple different ways. (I’ve absolutely no doubt that there are players who do exactly that; I would just categorize them as “completionists” and still say that playing the game that way isn’t the series’s main selling point).

And I’ve heard lots of accounts of players finishing BioShock, or any BioWare RPG that presents a series of binary good/evil choices, and then playing through again on the “opposite” path. But I’ve never heard anyone claim that it significantly changed the gameplay, or even that it was as satisfying as the original play-through. It’s more like my replays of Hit the Road — going back through a game I enjoyed, in an attempt to see what I missed the first time.

All of which leads me to conclude that it’s the player’s agency that’s most important. Koster says that

The bar that designers should strike for should include a rich set of systemic problems precisely because that is what the medium of games brings to the table. It’s what lies at the center of the art form.

That’s game design, which is the field that Koster is interested in. What I’m interested in is “interactive entertainment,” which is a combination of game design and storytelling, and therefore isn’t constrained by the definition of a “pure” game.

The appeal of a simulation is that it allows the audience to do both A and B. But a game, much like a story, has an end goal. What lies at the center of the art form is presenting the audience with the information to make an intelligent choice between either A or B, then showing the outcome of that choice. The act of solving the problem is what’s important, not the chance to see an array of alternate solutions.

The responsibility of the game designer is to present the player with a set of interesting choices. The responsibility of the storyteller is to make a sequence of interesting decisions and form a narrative from their repercussions. They’re not mutually exclusive. Anyone making a narrative-heavy game has to be good at both.

Press B Button to Ruin Game

So far I’ve side-stepped (I hope) the question of authorial control. All of the discussions I’ve read on that topic tend to be prescriptive: because games are by definition like this, you’re violating the integrity of the medium by doing that.

But I’ve played outstanding games that give the player absolute control over the storytelling (like The Sims). I’ve played outstanding games that give the player no control over the storytelling (like Half-Life 2). And I’ve played outstanding games that have no storytelling at all.

The only absolute must-follow rule is to be consistent. If you make a game with the intention of making the player the storyteller, then don’t impose narrative decisions on him without his consent (as in Grand Theft Auto 4 and a couple of unfortunate quests in Skyrim). If you’re making a game on the assumption that the “gameplay” is the focus, and the narrative is there solely to provide context and feedback for the game, then follow Koster’s advice: don’t let the narrative overpower the player’s actual interaction with the game.

In his example from Arkham City, Koster points out the problem of having a very small, very stupid game (turn camera and press A) followed by a huge cut-scene. But the problem with the Quick-Time Event isn’t just one of scale, but intent. It fails as both gameplay and narrative.

My interaction with the game is inconsistent with everything else I’ve done to that point: the A button doesn’t mean “leap through window and glide safely to the street below as the cathedral explodes behind me.” If I remember correctly, the A button means “jump.” And my interaction with the narrative is inconsistent with the story as presented up to that point: even though I’m ostensibly the Batman, and I could safely predict that I’d be walking into a trap, I was given no way to prepare for it or to circumvent it. I wasn’t an active participant in the storytelling; I was simply moving the character into place for the next cut-scene the designer wanted me to see. That’s not storytelling, it’s blocking.

Quick-Time Events happen when the developer wants to show the player an elaborate non-interactive cut-scene, but then feels the need to throw in some token amount of interaction because hey, videogames.

To fix the problems with the gameplay, you’d need to make the interaction more interesting and more consistent with the game as it’s been presented so far. Let me take any of the dozens of bat-gadgets I’ve acquired and learned how to use, and figure out a way to either defuse the bomb or open the window. That still doesn’t fix the problem with the storytelling, though. I’ve accomplished what I set out to do by making my way to the top of the cathedral, but I haven’t actually learned anything useful to advance the story; I’ve simply completed one in-game objective and been assigned a new one. In storytelling, you’re supposed to eliminate scenes that do nothing to advance the story. Even if they have cool explosions.

Sharing the Role of Storyteller

I’ve played plenty games that use narrative as feedback or “reward” for the gameplay. Solve a puzzle, get a cut-scene that introduces the next puzzle. Shoot a bunch of bad guys, get a cut-scene that introduces the next bunch of bad guys. It can be perfectly entertaining, but it’s still the least interesting type of interaction.

When Koster limits narrative to the role of just feedback, he also limits the amount of interaction the player has with the narrative: I’m making decisions in the gameplay that have little to no bearing on the story. He dismisses what I believe is most exciting about the potential of interactive entertainment: to create games where the gameplay is the story.

If you’re on board with the assumption that an indefinitely repeatable system with different outcomes isn’t required for something to be called a “game,” then it’s easy to see how a player’s walk-through of a game can be mapped directly to a plot-driven story:

Nothing particularly earth-shattering there; that correspondence is why game developers thought it would be a good idea to use games to tell stories in the first place. The interesting part is figuring out exactly how you map the game design to the narrative, and deciding how to divide the roles of “game designer” and “storyteller.”

First, you have to take the narrative and imagine it structured as an enormous game graph. (Or alternatively, start with your game design and assign narrative beats to it). Start with the setting, introduce the protagonist (the player), establish the protagonist’s goal (the win condition), and define what the protagonist can and can’t do (the rules).

Next, identify the significant plot points and translate them into decision points for the player. That’s the part that requires a familiarity with “pure” game design — determining how to present the player with a set of interesting decisions.

You could just stop there and turn the role of storyteller over to the player. Say that the player’s in charge of the decision points, the developer’s in control of everything else. In that case, the narrative is feedback for your game. I play a game, and when I accomplish an objective, I get to watch a moment in somebody else’s story.

Koster calls narrative a “parallel medium” to game design. But narrative is a lot more interesting when it intersects game design. To do that, I believe the developer has to share the role of storyteller with the player.

Earlier I said that a game designer presents the audience with a set of interesting choices, a storyteller decides among choices and pieces them and their repercussions into a sequential narrative. So in this case, the developer would have to:

1. Map the story onto a game graph
2. Walk the graph, deciding on a “best” subset of choices at each decision point
3. Encourage the player to reproduce the steps you took to walk the graph
4. Enjoy the accolades from your audience and your peers

My feeble attempts to translate this into the terminology of game design is making it sound more complicated than it really is. (It’s been almost two decades since I’ve been in an academic environment, so I’m not the best person to be talking about game theory). In the simplest, highest-level terms: turn the story into a game, “play” the game until you get the most satisfying result, and then encourage the player to replicate your play-through.

In the case of the Sam & Max games, it meant:

1. Figure out the narrative “arc” of the episode: typically opening, act 1, act 2, finale
2. Break that down into obstacles for the characters: getting into a room, getting past a character, searching for a key item
3. Since the games had only one solution for each puzzle, decide on the single funniest or most satisfying solution that we could think of
4. Putting context into the setup for each puzzle to make it feel as if our choice for the funniest or most satisfying solution was actually the best solution

Obviously, the magic happens (or doesn’t happen) in that last step. Adventure games are particularly susceptible to the “having to read the designer’s mind” complaint. But I believe that’s more due to the often ridiculous complexity of the puzzle solutions compared to the player’s actual interaction with the game, not the fault of the process itself. By which I mean: it’s kind of difficult to subtly suggest the idea “use sea slug on gong.” It’s not as difficult to suggest less specific things, like “this character is untrustworthy, you should check him out” or “that bridge looks rickety and is about to collapse.”

Most games do this kind of thing already, not just puzzle games. A huge part of level design is encouraging the player to do certain things instead of others: go this way, take this corridor, notice this object, climb on this ledge, get ready for the boss fight here.

Game stories do it as well, even though developers usually like to believe that they’re dropping huge unexpected plot development bombs on the player. In the Arkham City example: you’re Batman, heading to the top of an old building to meet the Joker, in the first 30 or so minutes of the game. Did any player, anywhere, not realize that he was walking into a trap? Instead of forcing me into a narrow corridor of cut-scenes and limited interaction, wouldn’t it have been more satisfying to reward me for realizing that I’m walking into a trap?

After the “read the designer’s mind” complaint comes the “interactive movie” complaint. If the developer is making all the so-called “best” choices for the player, then the player’s not actually interacting with the game. He’s just pressing buttons to advance to the next stage of the developer’s story.

But when you make a game that treats the narrative only as feedback or context for the game, instead of as an actual game mechanic, what you’re doing is making a non-interactive movie. It’s just one that happens to be separated by sections of interactivity. I get an objective, I kill a bunch of monsters, I watch the next scene of the movie to get my next objective.

That’s why I insist that a linear, non-systemic sequence of repeating decisions already made by a game developer can still be called a “game.” Because when it’s done correctly, the player’s doing exactly what the developer did while he was designing the game. During the design process, you start with a game state and a set of tools with predictable results, and then you have to decide “what happens now?” The “a-ha” moment comes when you decide “Of course! He should storm the rebel base!” Whenever I’ve hit one of those moments, it’s given me exactly the same jolt of satisfaction as when I’ve made a decision in another game.

If you were just to show the player a cut-scene, with the notice “New Objective: Storm Rebel Base,” then you’ve guaranteed that the player won’t get that same feeling of piecing together information to arrive at a decision. The narrative has no chance of being a game mechanic.

But if you give the player the exact same information of the game state, the exact same set of tools with predictable results, and an appropriately subtle nudge making the rebel base look like an awfully ripe target, then there’s a good chance he’ll get the exact same “a-ha” moment that the designer did. Assessing the game state, knowing the rules of the game, knowing the available moves, and making an informed decision about what to do next. How is that not a game mechanic?

Watching it felt like I was being unfaithful.

But now that I’ve got Bill Willingham’s approval, I can admit it’s a pretty good series. And it’s really not all that much like Fables.

They both start with a bunch of disparate fairy tale characters living together in the same town in the modern world. After that, though, Once Upon a Time feels like it owes less to Fables than it does to Lost.

That’s fair enough, since all the marketing material reminds us that two of Lost‘s executive producers are behind the show. So you can excuse all the appearances of Apollo bars, and the fact that the entire format of the series is taken directly from Lost: TV-pretty people trapped in a secluded location trying to figure out a series-long conundrum; each episode featuring two parallel stories in two different timelines, with each timeline giving context to the other.

And that’s okay, because that format is just as clever and flexible now as it was during the Dharma Initiative days. Even better, it actually makes sense here. In Lost, the flashbacks were used to stretch out the intrigue: we’d learn details about the characters based on past events. In Once Upon a Time, the situation is flipped: we in the audience know more about the characters’ stories than the characters themselves do. The premise is that they’ve all been placed under a curse that’s made them forget they’re storybook characters, to guarantee that none of them will have a happy ending.

That’s the most intriguing part to me, because it means that we have a better chance of getting a happy ending from Once Upon a Time than Lost was ever able to deliver. Everything in Lost depended on stretching the mystery out for as long as possible. Fables is in the same position, more or less: it’s an indefinitely ongoing story that has to keep building on itself. But with Once Upon a Time, we already know how the story’s going to end: they’re going to live happily ever after. The intrigue comes from the telling, and the re-telling.

Are Mary Margaret/Snow White and David/Prince Charming going to get together? Of course. Who are the bad guys? The Evil Queen and Rumplestiltskin. How did they all end up trapped here? It was a curse from the Evil Queen. We know what’s going to happen, the appeal of the stories is seeing how they happen. No “Are they in Purgatory?” style blue-balling here.

Of course, they get to take advantage of their series-long intrigue as well. It’s all in the details, filling in the stuff that wasn’t covered in the original stories. What exactly was it about Snow White that made the Evil Queen so angry? Plus there’s all the secret origin stories — they’ve already done Prince Charming, Jiminy Cricket, Rumplestiltskin and the Huntsman, and made them more interesting than I would’ve thought possible.

And for those of us who watched Lost looking for occurrences of the numbers, the Dharma logo, cross-overs of familiar characters, and implausible coincidences, there’s plenty of material here. Familiar and not-so-familiar characters pop up, and we can speculate on who they are and how their stories intersect. In this week’s episode, we saw how Snow White first met the dwarves. Before the Christmas break, the sheriff that everyone assumed to be the Big Bad Wolf turned out to be a different character.

On top of that, there’s the recurring appeal of Fables, which is seeing how fairy tale characters get translated to the modern day. And they’re usually clever and subtle. A bearded pharmacy owner reveals his fairy tale identity as soon as he sneezes. Red Riding Hood works for her grandmother and delivers food. A cleaning woman named Ashley turns out to be Cinderella. (That one was my favorite). I’m still hoping that they do an episode with a young blonde girl breaking into the home of three big, hairy gay men.

Another thing that I really like about the series is that it’s completely driven by female characters. The two heroes and the main villain are all women. And it’s done seamlessly, by virtue of the source material. Most of the fairy tales focused on female main characters, and yet still managed to make them all passive. When you update those characters to the modern day — or when you retell the original stories with a modern sensibility — you end up with stories centered on strong, intelligent, and independent women.

The casting (and stunt casting) helps, too. Jennifer Morrison is cool as hell and had me hoping for an entire season that she’d be Ted Mosby’s kids’ mother. It’s nice to see Ginnifer Goodwin not in insipid romantic comedies that try to pretend she’s not astoundingly beautiful. I have to admit to having a voice-crush on Raphael Sbarge since he played a Han Solo rip-off character in Knights of the Old Republic. Lana Parrilla has one note she has to keep hitting over and over again, and she’s still managing to change it up slightly between episodes (but they really need to give her something more to work with instead of just saying “You’re not welcome here, Miss Swan” repeatedly). And Robert Carlyle does fey, creepy, and menacing better than most.

Plus they’ve done plenty of guest appearances from actors from just about every nerd fantasy series I like: Pam from True Blood as Maleficient. Krycek from The X-Files as Hansel & Gretel’s dad. Anya from Buffy the Vampire Slayer as Hansel & Gretel’s witch. Charles Widmore from Lost as Prince Charming’s father.

I don’t think Once Upon a Time is as ground-breaking a series as Lost was. I can’t see it ever doing anything as stunning as the season two reveal of what was inside the Hatch. It’s not quite as hip or self-aware. (Which is partly a good thing, since going too self-aware with fairy tale stories would be insufferable; remaining a little bit square is exactly the right tone to hit). It relies a little too much on green screens and CGI (although it makes up for it with great costumes). And I do have to wonder how they’re going to get a series’ worth of material out of the premise.

It didn’t grab me instantly, like the Lost pilot did. But it’s had a great slow build-up so far, plenty of clever moments, great pacing, and just enough intrigue to carry it through the first season finale. And it’s really nice to see a series that doesn’t rely on dragging out mysteries, but recognizes the value of a familiar story told well.

I was thinking that the timing couldn’t have been better: here was proof that the government already had plenty of power to take down infringing sites outside of the US, and SOPA and PIPA were completely unnecessary. The reason I jumped so hard onto the anti-SOPA bandwagon was only partly being a joiner, and mostly because it’s just such a transparent abuse of power: the MPAA and RIAA had been going batshit crazy attacking individual litigants for years, and they wanted to be able to circumvent the system entirely and just go after sites themselves.

And after reading an article on Ars Technica called Why the Feds Smashed Megaupload, I thought it’d be clear to everyone that these were the “bad guys,” and here was a clear case of the system working as it should:

As for the site’s employees, they were paid lavishly and they spent lavishly. Even the graphic designer, 35-year-old Slovakian resident Julius Bencko, made more than $1 million in 2010 alone.

The indictment goes after six individuals, who between them owned 14 Mercedes-Benz automobiles with license plates such as “POLICE,” “MAFIA,” “V,” “STONED,” “CEO,” “HACKER,” GOOD,” “EVIL,” and—perhaps presciently—”GUILTY.” The group also had a 2010 Maserati, a 2008 Rolls-Royce, and a 1989 Lamborghini. They had not one but three Samsung 83″ TVs, and two Sharp 108″ TVs. Someone owned a “Predator statue.” Motor bikes, jet skis, artwork, and even 60 Dell servers could all be forfeit to the government if it can prove its case against the members of the “Mega Conspiracy.”
[…]
But the government asserts that Megaupload merely wanted the veneer of legitimacy, while its employees knew full well that the site’s main use was to distribute infringing content. Indeed, the government points to numerous internal e-mails and chat logs from employees showing that they were aware of copyrighted material on the site and even shared it with each other.

The internet joins together to protest heavy-handed legislation, and the “industry” works within the system to take down one of the most egregious offenders. Win-win, right?

Maybe not. Ars Technica also ran “Megaupload wasn’t just for pirates: angry users out of luck for now”, part of the emerging backlash against the takedown as an abuse of power. Apparently, individual creators’ losses due to piracy are statistically insignificant, but the number of people who are for some reason keeping their sole copies of their work on file sharing sites are a legitimate concern.

On Twitter and his blog, Jonathan Coulton wrote about the takedown of Megaupload and how it’s a complicated issue. Because sure, for the people running that site to be knowingly profiting off of copyright-infringing material is “kind of a dick move,” but what about the people using the site legally? (Instead of Dropbox, Box.net, iCloud, Amazon Web Services, Google Docs, RapidShare, a private FTP site, or any of thousands of other sites and services?) And more significantly, does piracy actually hurt anyone, really?

Looking at the music business, yes profits have gone down ever since Napster, but has anyone effectively demonstrated the causal link between that and piracy? There are many alternate theories (people buying songs and not whole albums, music sucking more, niches and indie acts becoming more viable, etc.). The Swiss government did a study and determined that unauthorized downloading (which 1/3 of their citizens do) does not create any loss in revenue for the entertainment industry. I remember but am now too lazy to find links to other studies that say the same thing. I can’t think of any study I’ve seen that demonstrates the opposite. If there is one, please point me to it. So I have a lot of trouble with the idea that the federal government is directing resources toward an ultimately ineffective game of piracy whack-a-mole (with some unknown amount of collateral damage to law-abiding citizens), when we are not even sure that piracy is a problem.

Well, for starters: the Swiss government’s study, as described by completely objective research site TorrentFreak.Com, concluded that piracy doesn’t necessarily create a loss in revenue for the industry, since the people in their study who downloaded copyrighted material still spent about the same amount of money on concerts (and concert souvenirs), videogames, movies, etc.

Which, if anything, says that the industry is large enough to write off the loss. But how many of us are paid by “The Entertainment Industry?” How is that anything other than ominous to anyone who believes in the value of independent artists and objects to the idea of entertainment corporations consolidating into ever-growing monolithic entities?

I can’t speak for anyone else (seriously, I don’t speak for anyone else, including companies I used to work for), but whenever I would google for “Sam & Max” and came up with dozens of torrent listings, I never thought, “Well, that’s kind of a drag, but at least people are still buying Madden, so no harm done.” Instead, I’d usually think about what would be possible if you had enough revenue to make a game with no limitations and without being reminded about dwindling sales and niche markets.

Coulton talks about Tim O’Reilly’s Google+ post piracy’s effect on “the industry”:

Tim points out that he and a lot of other content creators have been happily coexisting with piracy all this time, and I’m certainly one of them. Make good stuff, then make it easy for people to buy it. There’s your anti-piracy plan.

Sounds simple. Make good stuff, make it easy for people to buy it. Oh yeah, and one more thing: get lots of promotion from famous people.

I’ve got no doubt that a significant part of Coulton’s audience discovered his music via YouTube videos, remixes, word of mouth, and the like. That’s not how I heard of him, though. I first heard of him through John Hodgman’s books, published by a subsidiary of Penguin publishing. And I never would’ve heard of Hodgman if not for his Mac ads (paid for by Apple, Inc) and his appearances on The Daily Show (broadcast by Viacom). I’m sure lots more people have subsequently heard of Coulton via his work on the Portal series (developed and published by Valve and distributed by Electronic Arts).

I like Coulton, but I’ve got to say that it’s disingenuous bordering on arrogant to reduce it to “make good stuff” without acknowledging how much goes into promotion. (Not just distribution, promotion). I say arrogant because it perpetuates this myth that everything’s a meritocracy — if your work were just better, you’d have a bigger audience. And it makes it sound like greed if you want to protect your IP.

So: make good stuff, make it easy for people to buy it, and spend lots and lots of money on promotion to make people aware that your good stuff even exists in the first place. And, I’m assuming, cross your fingers and hope that you’re one of the lucky ones who gets paid for his work to guarantee no net loss for the industry as a whole, not one of the ones who’s repeatedly told — by people wealthier than you’ll ever be — that piracy isn’t an issue.

For me, the topic of piracy always comes down to the same issue: it’s about fairness. It’s always made out to be some big, complicated issue with lots of gray area, and no doubt in legal terms it really is. But it ultimately comes down to individual responsibility, and as I see it, that couldn’t be more simple. We know what genuine fair use is, even if the RIAA and MPAA don’t. We can distinguish between genuinely legitimate sites and ones that profit off the work of others, even if SOPA and PIPA can’t tell the difference. We want people to be paid for their work, even if we forget about the work of PR and marketing people. We want people to be free to make cool things, instead of having creative decisions determined by accountants.

People are going to pirate stuff for as long as they can get away with it, that’s a fact. But it’s not a justification; “people are going to do it anyway” is about the weakest possible defense of anything. “Make it easy for people to buy it” means you don’t load your stuff down with egregious DRM in an attempt to grab every last sale at the expense of your loyal customers.

But the concept of “happily coexisting with piracy” is just plain bullshit. Saying “it does no harm” turns into “it’s not really theft, actually” turns into entitlement and then you can’t make a living doing what you love unless you’re employed by a huge company. I just hope nobody has the gall to act surprised when we end up in an environment where it’s impossible for indies to make a living.

It also borrows the concurrent-timelines gimmick from Lost and the police procedural plot-of-the-week/series-long conspiracy combo from The X-Files and virtually every TV series after The X-Files. It almost seems as if Fox wanted its own version of Lost but forgot that it’s already got its own version of Lost and it’s called Fringe.

Based on the pilot and first episode, though, it seems to be doing everything it can to discourage interest. Part of it’s built into the premise — right before Alcatraz shut down, hundreds of prisoners and guards just went missing. They’re showing up in the present day, un-aged and on the loose, still looking to pay back whatever was bugging them enough to get sent to a maximum security prison in the 60s. And, apparently, they may or may not have been given subliminal/post-hypnotic suggestions to kill folks on behalf of some yet-to-be-revealed shadow organization.

The problem is that murderers coming back from the past just isn’t all that compelling. They kind of used up every possible twist on that in the first two episodes, and there’s still an entire series and hundreds of bad guys left to bring back, over and over again. If all the episodes were done from the criminal’s perspective, as the first part of the pilot was structured, there might be some interesting future-shock material. But they got rid of that as quickly as possible, to focus on a police detective and Jorge Garcia playing basically Smart Hurley.

(Jorge Garcia is one of the best aspects of the show, incidentally, which is kind of a problem, since he’s a character actor who works best when he’s making observations from the sidelines).

As it is, you’ve got the super-secret high tech agency led by Sam Neill plus a cop using 2012 technology and an author who knows every detail about the prison and its residents, against… a bunch of guys from the 60s. Even murderers from the 60s seem relatively quaint compared to the post-Hannibal Lecter serial killers on every other crime show. I foresee lots of ominous scenes of the killer slowly approaching his victim, and then freaking out at the sound of a cell phone ringtone or the sight of an HDTV. “Now I’m going to gut you to appease my dark master and… my God! The screen is so thin! What sorcery is this, a portrait of the cast of Glee and yet it moves?!”

And let me get back to “super-secret high tech agency led by Sam Neill.” For some reason, I’ve had the idea stuck in my head for years that Neill lends an aura of integrity to whatever project he’s working on. But thinking back on everything I’ve seen him in, I have no idea where I got that idea. (Maybe The Hunt for Red October?) The man agreed to do everything asked of him in Event Horizon, for Pete’s sake. If that’s not reason enough to question his judgement, then his performance in Alcatraz might be. I’m sure it doesn’t help that he doesn’t have a lot to work with; his lines all seem to be taken directly from the master handbook of “Things Ball-Busting Heads of Secret Conspiracies Say.” But his delivery seems tone-deaf throughout, as if he’s playing everything a little camp while everyone else is trying to be straightforward.

My biggest problem with the show, again at least from the first two episodes, is that it doesn’t seem very smart. To be clear, I don’t mean real-world smart, but TV smart. Lost was, we all have to admit, a soap opera with pretty people in pretty scenery and lots and lots of crap science and implausible plot twists. And Alias was even goofier. But they both had a kind of swagger to them. Like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, they were fully aware of how silly their core premise was, but they presented everything with the confidence of being in on the joke. They knew when to just drop something matter-of-factly, and when they were getting into weirder territory, and make it all sound like they knew exactly what they were doing.

Alcatraz takes an already somewhat dull premise and tries to milk intrigue out of it. How are these people coming back looking exactly the same as they did 50 years ago?! Well, time travel or some kind of stasis, obviously. And what does it have to do with this mysterious medical experiment?! It could be any one of a hundred different medical experiments we’ve seen on TV before, from cloning to alien-human hybrids to just run-of-the-mill tachyon injections. Showing a doctor taking a few vials of blood from a guy does nothing to pique my interest. Making an incision and it shoots out a jet of toxic gas which incapacitates an ambulance and gives everyone black ink running out of their eyes: that’s got my attention.

It’s disappointing, because I was kind of looking forward to getting wrapped up in and ultimately disappointed by another big-mystery series. But this one just strikes me as another show like the Sci Fi channel’s Haven: the main cast is competent but not charming enough to keep me coming back, the premise is inherently repetitive, and the events aren’t weird enough (in TV terms) to make for must-watch television.

The first time I saw Sweet Smell of Success, it was in a double feature with Ace in the Hole, and it was such a perfect pairing it became one of those transformative movie-going experiences for me. Both are dark, nasty movies with big performances and some of the best dialogue ever delivered in a movie. One of Ace in the Hole‘s standout lines: “I’ve met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my time, but you… you’re twenty minutes!”

(Both Sweet Smell of Success and Ace in the Hole have Criterion editions that are highly recommended).

I spent the first half of The Duellists looking for anything it could have in common, thematically, cinematically, contextually, or otherwise, before I just gave up. Then I started trying to think of all the ways the two movies are the opposite of each other, and gave up because there are too many to list.

Apart from “both run at 24 frames per second” and “both have music,” the most charitable thread of connection I could come up with was that both are very much movies of their time. (I do actually know the real reason they ran together: they showed Sweet Smell of Success because it’s a classic to lead into the upcoming Noir City run, and they got a 35 mm print of Ridley Scott’s first film and they really wanted to show it off. But I’m trying to make a point here).

I wouldn’t say that The Duellists is a bad movie; it actually has its moments, and to an extent I can appreciate its attempts at authenticity. But it is overwhelmingly a 70s movie. It’s packed full of 70s cinema tics and cliches; it proclaims itself as a product of its time as loudly as David Fincher’s movies scream “1990s movie.” (Or more accurately, say “1990s movie” in text scratched onto magnetic tape with Nine Inch Nails music playing and bugs crawling over it).

It’s especially remarkable how much The Duellists conveys the 1970s when you consider that it’s a period piece, set in Europe and Russia in the early 1800s. The color of the film, the languid pacing, the scenes that have two lines of dialogue before ending abruptly, the smoke and fog piped in from just off screen, the presence of Harvey Keitel and Keith Carradine and Tom Conti, the “realistic” lighting — all of it date the movie squarely in a narrow window between about 1973 and 1982. No one who’s ever seen a movie or television show from the 1970s would believe that The Duellists was in the era of Napoleon and not the era of Jimmy Carter.

That’s probably my most useful takeaway from the movie — finally I can identify what it is that’s always bugged me about movies from the 1970s, why I find them all (except Star Wars and Annie Hall) creepy, unsettling, and unpleasant. So many of them try for a kind of neo-realism, making a point to reject the glamor and over-production of pre-60s Hollywood and the experimentation of the 60s, and instead just be straightforward and tell it like it is. But it resulted in its own language of mannerisms and flourishes that today seem even more artificial than the most conventional Hollywood movie. For all of its effort to stay true to the costumes, hair styles, historical accuracy, and locations of 19th-century Europe, it’s telling that all of the stylistic flourishes of The Duellists end up being even more dated and distracting than casting Harvey Keitel and Keith Carradine as French military men.

There’s no question that Sweet Smell of Success was made in 1955: it’s in grainy black and white, newspapers not only exist but are important, jazz quintets play in nightclubs, and the plot’s biggest scandal involves marijuana and allegations of communist sympathies. And yet once the bombastic opening music dies down, it never once feels dated. Instead, much like His Girl Friday, it feels as if it’s been pulled from an alternate universe where time doesn’t exist, everything happens in a perpetual now, and everything everyone says is really cool.

The first time I saw Sweet Smell of Success was much like my first time seeing Miller’s Crossing; I was so swept up in the dialogue that I was barely able to process anything else. (“Hey Falco, come down here so I can chastise ya.”) Each time I’ve seen it since then, I’ve noticed something new. This time:

• There’s more subtlety to Tony Curtis’s performance than I ever gave him credit for. (And I already thought it was a great performance just for being able to deliver all those lines and make them sound natural). It’s made explicit that he’s an unscrupulous social climber who’ll do anything to get back into J.J.’s good graces. It’s even made explicit that he’s so duplicitous that even the people who know he’s lying to them can’t tell when he’s lying. But what I’d never noticed is how quickly and subtly Curtis had to shift gears from scene to scene and often within the same scene.

  Whenever one of Falco’s schemes goes awry, you can see the flashes of expression change on his face: a moment of panic, a recalculation, and then he snaps back into character. Sometimes, when it’s crucial to the plot (like when he’s trying to blackmail a columnist, or when he’s trying to trick a hack comedian into becoming a client), the change in expression is almost silent-movie obvious. But he’s doing it constantly — trying one tack, panicking, reconsidering, and then popping into a new character. One of the best is when Falco’s confronted by Steve in his office, and Falco is simultaneously posturing and trying to play all of the characters against each other.

• The scene in which J.J. is finally introduced, at a dinner table with a senator and Falco trying to get back into J.J.’s good graces, is one of the movie’s most famous. And with good reason: there’s a ton of nasty dialogue showing just how ruthless Hunsecker is, and it’s Burt Lancaster’s chance to establish just how dominant his character is. But Curtis is still doing his whole range of Falco’s dramatic shifts in mood, desperately looking for an opportunity in anything that’s been said, trying to measure how much he can get away with, and scavenging like a hyena for any information he could possibly use to his advantage.

  And he has to do it all from his carefully-staged lap dog position behind Lancaster’s right shoulder, and all without taking any of the attention away from Lancaster. For all of its good points, Sweet Smell of Success is not a movie you go away from thinking, “Man, that was subtle!” But Curtis’s performance in that scene does so much, while seated, in the background.

• The still above, taken from that scene, is a great example of what I’m talking about. Curtis has that expression through most of his interaction with Lancaster’s character: Falco absolutely despises Hunsecker, but at the same time worships him as an example of someone who’s achieved everything that Falco wants for himself. That expression combined with his body language are a perfect combination of hatred mixed with admiration and fealty.

  The best illustration of that dynamic, however, isn’t subtle at all. It’s a fantastic moment from later in the movie, when Hunsecker tells Susie and Steve that he wouldn’t hesitate to take a baseball bat and break it over Falco’s head. He then raises a cigarette, and Falco immediately jumps up with a lighter to light it for him.

• Curtis also gave Sidney Falco a tic to show that he’s in a perpetual panic for fear of losing everything: in the moments where he’s most desperate, he bites his fingernails. He doesn’t do it constantly, and he doesn’t make a big show of it, but it’s a clear signal that everything is about to fall apart unless he thinks quickly.
• To really appreciate what a balancing act it is to pull off subtlety in a movie whose style and dialogue require such broad performances, contrast Tony Curtis’s performance with Gabriel Byrne’s in Miller’s Crossing. Both are playing characters who are playing both ends against the middle, and both are having to deliver fantastic dialogue in a way that makes it sound, if not natural, then at least plausible. But the character of Tommy in Miller’s Crossing has to be not just cool, but completely impenetrable. We can’t ever know what he’s really thinking, or else the entire movie falls apart into nothing more than snappy dialogue, cinematic flourishes, and a really cool gunfight in a burning building. The only indication we ever get that Tommy is anything other than cool and composed is when he loses his hat.

  Curtis, on the other hand, has to play a despicable, obsequious, and ruthless character and make him sympathetic. Otherwise, his crisis of conscience makes no sense. And the only dialogue he gets to convey that with is his speech to his secretary at the beginning of the movie (and even then, he’s having to posture as a world-weary tough guy). So we need to see his expression changing throughout, for it to read as desperation instead of cold-bloodedness.

• I wouldn’t call the movie a noir, exactly, but the high contrast and the lighting sure do make a solid case for it. In particular, the shadows from Burt Lancaster’s glasses frames perfectly complement his I’m-boring-deep-into-your-soul squint, making him look more evil and intimidating than any stage makeup would have.
• It’s easy to believe that everybody in Sweet Smell of Success speaks in the same otherworldly, impossibly hip banter. But there’s a clear class divide separating the “normals” from the people who’ve immersed themselves in the world of newspaper columns and press agents. Even the older couple that Falco tries to blackmail use the same expressions, as if they’ve been in that world too long to stop talking like that. But Steve and Susie are the couple we’re supposed to root for, the ones who are free of all that corruption, so they talk more or less like normal people. (Even though Steve’s the leader of the jazz quintet, he’s supposed to be the least hip).

  Contrast that with His Girl Friday, where Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell’s banter establishes them not only as a couple, but as a couple fully immersed in the news world. Ralph Bellamy’s more straightforward dialogue makes him not just a dullard, but an outsider.

  And again, contrast it with Miller’s Crossing, where everyone speaks in deliberate Coen-ese. In that movie, the dialogue isn’t supposed to establish character so much as build a fantastic world where everybody’s corrupt. (And still, Garbriel Byrne and Marcia Gay Harden’s characters get the best lines because they’re the smartest).

• All that said, I do wish the character of Susie in Sweet Smell of Success had been given more to work with. You can’t fault the actress, since it’s clear she was portraying a character who’d been all-but-broken by her creepy relationship with her domineering brother. She just wasn’t given enough dialogue other than “Steve…” to be able to make her character seem anything but insipid. Every time I see the movie, I forget how it ends, because I can never read what exactly her character is thinking during the final scenes. That’s partly because as in the rest of the movie, she has almost nothing interesting to say during her final scenes.

After going into cinema studies student mode for that long, I’ve realized that Sweet Smell of Success and Miller’s Crossing would be another excellent double feature. Look into your heart, Castro Theater!

One of the side effects of the attention that SOPA and PIPA have been getting: more outbreaks of discussions about piracy, copyright protection, and intellectual property. Which means more of the same comments that get me all riled up.

For the record, I’m firmly in the Yes, Piracy Is Indeed Theft camp. I’ve heard and considered all the counter-arguments, and haven’t heard any that are convincing:

• “It’s not theft when there’s no physical copy.” These days, the cost of distribution is almost insignificant when compared to the costs of production.
• “With digital media, you can make infinite copies.” That’d be great if there were an infinite market of consumers, but in actuality there’s a finite number of people and a finite number of opportunities to make a sale. Most digital media is consumable, so there’s little benefit to ownership, which means once a person has watched/played the torrent of a movie or game, there’s no incentive for them to buy a copy and pay the original creators.
• “Torrents and free copies act as word of mouth. They promote sales, not hurt them.” You know who really promote sales is marketing and PR firms. And they have the undeniable advantage of doing so with the creator’s consent, instead of assuming “I’ll just put this on YouTube and I’m sure they’ll thank me later.”
• “Copyright and ‘ownership’ of intellectual property are outdated notions in the internet age.” Unfortunately, buying food and paying rent are still very pressing concerns in the internet age. It’d be nice to still be able to make a living doing what you like instead of having to get a soulless job for any corporation large enough to be able to write off millions of dollars in lost sales.
• “The people who pirate it wouldn’t have bought it anyway.” There is, literally, no way to prove that. And even if you qualify that with “Most of the people,” that still means the creators and publishers are losing money.
• “It’s the responsibility of creators, publishers, and distributors to make their offering more appealing than piracy.” And here I thought it was the responsibility of individuals not to steal from people trying to make a living. I’m skeptical that the wide availability of YouTube videos invalidates millennia of philosophy and ethics.

And so on. Piracy is bad, SOPA and PIPA even worse. It’s especially disheartening to see it hit creators who aren’t quite “the little guy,” but are also far from being huge, multi-national media corporations:

CinematicTitanic.com will be going dark on Weds to protest SOPA/PIPA. We have been hammered by piracy, but ruining the web isn’t the answer.

— Josh Weinstein (@JElvisWeinstein) January 16, 2012

The Cinematic Titanic guys are doing exactly what the whole “internet age” is supposed to support: making something on their own, directly targeted at a very niche audience, without (to the best of my knowledge) a huge sponsor or corporate backing. To hear they’re getting “hammered” by piracy (and so are the Rifftrax guys, from what I’ve heard) just makes all the attempts to defend internet piracy seem even more hollow.

But instead of hearing about the creators who actually are affected, it’s a lot more common for us to hear the examples that work, with the spin of “hey this is the new way of doing things, the system works, and people are actually good at heart!” Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, and I think Coldplay have put out “pay what you want” albums without DRM. Cory Doctorow’s constantly putting forward his DRM-free books as great examples of how free distribution increases exposure, and Wil Wheaton followed suit with at least two of his own works (maybe more).

And Louis CK sold his concert performance for $5 and made a profit! (That’s the one I would actually support, both because Louis CK’s kind of awesome, and because he’s been transparent and bullshit-free about the entire thing the whole way through. So buy it.)

What they all neglect to mention, though, is that all of them are already famous. Doctorow from a hugely popular zine turned blog turned bully pulpit, and the rest through years of exposure thanks to well-paid marketing juggernauts. It is specious bordering on insulting to claim that any of these artists’ work was successful based solely on the merits of the work itself and the electrifying potential of the try-before-you-buy internet.

It’s important to point out that I’m not saying that any of those are bad works, the success is undeserved, or their fame wasn’t the result of a lot of hard work on their part. I’m simply saying that you can’t build a career from the work of marketing, PR, and promotional people and the publishers who hire them, and then turn around and deny that they exist. It’d also be a mistake to neglect that none of those people are supporting themselves solely on sales of their DRM-free experiments.

There’s also the counterpoint in the form of “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” which was never a monster hit but did manage to build up a large and faithful audience (myself included), mostly thanks to the quality of the show but also due to the efforts (and investment) of the two networks who aired it and promoted it. The two spin-off groups Cinematic Titanic and Rifftrax should in a just universe be famous enough not to have to worry about piracy.

So the latest example of arguments that bug me came today from Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media, in a post on Google+ called Before Solving a Problem, Make Sure You’ve Got the Right Problem.

O’Reilly makes what I think are a lot of good points in rejection of SOPA and PIPA, and how it’s fallacious to claim that they’ll in any way benefit job creation or the national economy. But he also says:

In the entire discussion, I’ve seen no discussion of credible evidence of this economic harm. There’s no question in my mind that piracy exists, that people around the world are enjoying creative content without paying for it, and even that some criminals are profiting by redistributing it. But is there actual economic harm?

In my experience at O’Reilly, the losses due to piracy are far outweighed by the benefits of the free flow of information, which makes the world richer, and develops new markets for legitimate content. Most of the people who are downloading unauthorized copies of O’Reilly books would never have paid us for them anyway; meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of others are buying content from us, many of them in countries that we were never able to do business with when our products were not available in digital form.

I see that as just another variant of the claims made by Doctorow, Wheaton, and anyone else diminishing the impact of piracy. They say, in effect, that piracy isn’t a problem because it’s not a problem for them. I don’t for one second believe that they’re lying. I don’t even doubt for a moment that they have the best of intentions.

But I do believe that they’re making a mistake by glossing over what’s unique about their own situations, and assuming that it’s the same for everyone. In O’Reilly’s case, I imagine it’s easier to extol the virtues of the free flow of information when the bulk of your business is selling paperbound reference books at hardback prices. That market has built-in anti-piracy; when you are in the market for a reference book, you want your own copy.

Again, that’s not intended as a slight against O’Reilly books or their publishing practices: the prices are competitive, I’ve bought plenty of their books, and I’ll continue to do so for as long as I use computers. I do believe, however, that it’s irresponsible for O’Reilly to be speaking in terms of national policy without considering his special situation. I have to wonder if the publishers of more consumable and disposable media, like paperback fiction, would be as quick to agree that there’s no actual economic harm from piracy.

Suing housewives for hundreds of thousands of dollars for allegedly using a file-sharing service obviously isn’t the solution. Neither is ridiculously restrictive digital rights management. Neither is pro-big-media legislation designed to shift the blame from the actual offenders to the businesses whose only fault or negligence is being visible enough to be sued but not profitable enough to defend themselves.

But taking the Randian “it’s not a problem for me, so it can’t possibly a problem for anyone else” tack isn’t the answer, either.

In the 15 years I’ve lived in the Bay Area, I’ve had the luxury of not having to be that informed about politics. Whenever an election comes up, I don’t need to research the candidates for the Senate or House; it’s always Pelosi, Boxer, and Feinstein across the board. And whenever I’ve been urged to write my senator or congress people on a hot-topic issue, I’ve never felt the need — my senators and representatives have pretty much always reflected my interests exactly.

That came to a crashing end with the NDAA. I ignored all the entreaties to write my representatives, because I believed my senators would never support a bill with such blatantly unconstitutional provisions. After learning that both of my senators voted Yea, I realized that I was going to have to actually become a responsible citizen again.

That’s why I’m asking you, as one of your constituents, to reverse your support of PROTECT IP and SOPA. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the workings of the internet can see that it does nothing to actually protect IP, because it does nothing to stop the most egregious pirates. It is a transparent attempt by media rights holders, frustrated that they’ve failed to do anything to stop piracy, to find someone — anyone — that they can sue. It should be clear that suing a content provider for the actions of one of its users would be as ludicrous as suing a department store whenever someone shoplifts a DVD.

In an environment where all of Washington is promoting “job creation,” it’s baffling to see a bill proposed that so clearly stifles start-ups and favors profitability (through lawsuits, not sales) of major corporations. While I appreciate the opportunity to be an informed citizen once again, I’d much prefer my representatives to vote on behalf of all their constituents, not just the most wealthy ones.

But according to Steam I’ve spent over one hundred fifty hours in Skryim, longer than a lot of real places I’ve been to. It’s an outstanding game, and it’s joined the growing sub-genre of Games Good Enough to Make Me Angry.

Team Fortress 2 was annoying because it was so much better than it needed to be. Portal 2 bugged me because it took “feature-length” storytelling beyond the FPS and delivered a novel puzzle-based sequel with new mechanics and had an opening sequence that went past virtuoso presentation into just plain showing off. But Skyrim doesn’t draw attention to its art direction (even though it’s often astonishingly beautiful). And it doesn’t depend on spectacular set-pieces (although there are a few). Skyrim pissed me off by invalidating almost all of the assumptions I’ve made about open-world sandbox games in the past few years.

You’ve been having strange dreams, Outlander?

Playing Skyrim, I kept having unsettling flashbacks to Morrowind, my first exposure to the Elder Scrolls series. I played that the HellOblivion out of that game when it was released, but all memory of it had been buried under sandstorms (seriously, the entire last third of Morrowind is one interminable sequence walking through the desert during a sandstorm) and the lackluster sequel Oblivion.

But gradually, all those hours in Morrowind started to come back to me: I remembered that Bretons are good at magic, Khajit are cat people who make good thieves. I remembered jumping from rooftop to rooftop in a city building my acrobatics skill. I remembered making potion after potion and crafting ridiculously overpowered spells using the souls of monsters I’d killed. I remembered reading dozens and dozens of books scattered throughout the world. I remembered traveling from city to city on the back of giant bugs. More than anything else, I remembered being completely transported to a different world with centuries of history.

I’d saved the world, too, but I couldn’t tell you from what, exactly, or how I’d done it. Something about a prophecy. That’s a big part of why I’d dismissed open-world games as nothing more than diversions: completely engrossing while you’re playing them, but they evaporate as soon as the insubstantial main quest ends.

The Elder Scrolls games are all about world-building and giving the player near-infinite flexibility in creating his own character and his own story. So it would seem that criticizing Morrowind for building a completely immersive, memorable world but failing to deliver a compelling plot is missing the point. If anything, it’d seem to be a criticism of my own failure to tell a good story.

But that gets back to my core complaint about sandbox games: too often, they act as beautiful echo chambers. I’m not actually interacting with the game developers in any significant way; I’m spending hours telling a story to myself. (And a pretty tedious story at that, since videogame stories take place in real time).

And what’s annoying and tantalizing about Skyrim is that it’s full of instances that do more than that. They don’t form the bulk of the game, and they can be outweighed by the constant push-and-pull of a linear main narrative and an empty “do whatever you feel like” game design. But when those instances reveal themselves, they hint at how videogame stories are supposed to work.

Books: Check ‘Em Out

Here’s an example, left somewhat vague so as not to spoil it for anyone: while I was heading to my clearly-marked destination for some quest or sub-quest or sub-sub-quest, I wandered into a house. I killed a couple of lower-level monsters, and I found all the occupants of the house had already been killed. A new quest popped up: find out what caused the murders at this house. I wandered around, collecting the personal journals of the murdered occupants and reading them to find out what went down. They had clues telling me where to go next and where to find helpful potions or weapons along the way.

All of this is standard stuff, I had dozens of similar quests already in my quest log and had done countless more just like it in other games. (The first rule of creating a videogame world is populating it with characters narcissistic enough to document every detail of their lives either in journals or voice recordings). I followed the instructions, found the cause of the murders, and killed it. Boom, quest completed.

But then: I remembered a detail I’d read in one of the journals, a detail that had seemed like something of a throwaway. The game had already told me that I was done with that quest and could move on, but I decided to take a few minutes to role-play what my character would actually do in that situation. Without prompting from the interface, I went off course and followed one of the murdered people’s last requests as mentioned in a journal. Surprisingly, the game recognized it and rewarded me for it, with a permanent boost to my character’s stats.

Most of the discussion in support of open-ended games talks about “emergent storytelling,” but there’s nothing emergent about my example. It was a moment deliberately left by the developers for me to find, and they acknowledged me when I found it. But the key is that I was never explicitly told what to do. I wasn’t rewarded for following instructions, I was rewarded for understanding the story.

There are plenty of more conventional examples scattered throughout the game, where books give you explicit context for what you’re doing and what you should do next. There are also plenty of terrific examples of purely environmental storytelling. My favorite is wandering up to a burning house in the middle of the woods, exploring the interior, and finding a charred corpse next to a summoning circle and a spellbook describing how to conjure Flame Atronachs.

But the bulk of the storytelling in Skyrim uses the most conventional means possible: cut-scenes, dialogue trees, and books scattered about to give context to the world and to specific dungeons. And that’s fine, because Skyrim isn’t a storytelling game.

Its emphasis is on exploration and experience, and it seems that the design mandate throughout the Elder Scrolls series is: “Do everything possible not to interfere with the player’s experience.” The player’s free to take on the main quest at his own pace, or to ignore it altogether. The player can make his own weapons and armor as he sees fit, and then add (almost) any enchantment he wants, until his character is practically invincible. (Which invariably leads to complaints that the game is “unbalanced,” which is a silly thing to complain about in an open-ended single-player game, especially one in which the central story revolves around a mortal man who became so powerful he joined the pantheon of gods).

More significantly, the game avoids the usual binary good/evil morality choices and instead offers a multitude of completely linear quests. There’s frequently only one linear path through a storyline, and instead of choosing one branch or the other, you simply choose to follow the storyline or drop it completely. In most games, that wouldn’t be an option, but Skyrim has dozens of stories to choose from. In fact, it’s when the game tries to impose a more complex story on the player — when it forces a moral decision — that it starts to break down. There’s a sequence of events in the city of Markath that forces the player’s character into prison and into an alliance with one of the fellow prisoners. It feels the most structured of any of the storylines in the game; you can tell that the developers were trying to present a complex, multilayered subplot of political intrigue with its own warring factions and its own exploration of relative morality. But it ends up feeling the most artificial and frustrating of all the game’s storylines, because it breaks that central design tenet of player freedom (literally). The game just isn’t designed to give the player as much control over interaction with characters as he has with the rest of the world. In the rest of the game, when the player’s presented with an unsatisfying choice, he can simply choose to leave.

A Game of Drones

After all that, it would seem like I agree with Tom Bissell’s review/analysis of Skyrim on Grantland.com. He says that it’s frustrating when Skyrim insists on presenting its fantasy world via cinematics, long expository dialogues, and text:

Are we not at the point where dramaturgical incompetence in a game as lavishly produced and skillfully designed as Skyrim is no longer charming?
[…]
Dense expositional lore has no place in video-game stories — especially stories that go without highly wrought cinematics — and it seems increasingly clear that video games are neither dramatically effective nor emotionally interesting when the player’s role becomes that of a dialogue sponge. More simply put, the stories of Demon’s and Dark Souls are told in a way that only video games can tell stories. They don’t suffer in comparison because there’s no comparison to make.

But while I agree with the kernel at the core of Bissell’s argument — videogames are capable of telling stories in ways that no other medium can — I don’t agree that the more conventional storytelling used by Skyrim was clumsy or overbearing.

For starters, Bissell offers Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls as RPGs that don’t sacrifice their core “gameness” in order to establish a fantasy world. I must be in a completely separate circle from Bissell on the Venn Diagram of people who play RPGs, because I’ve tried Dark Souls and found it completely, almost offensively, uninteresting. I found myself dropped into the most generic fantasy world possible, and I was given absolutely no context for what I was doing, or why I should care. I refuse to believe that the solution to “bad” storytelling in games is to bury the storytelling so completely that I’m just wandering around, killing dudes because they’re there, and collecting experience points.

I also disagree that the more conventional storytelling of Skyrim was, on the whole, clumsy or overbearing. I enjoyed all of the storylines that I played (there are several that I still haven’t completed, even after over 100 hours), and they all ranged from above-average to quite good. The “main” storyline is obviously the one dealing with the reappearance of the dragons, and I thought it had a very satisfying, suitably epic and heavy metal finale that was cleverly inspired by Norse mythology.

I didn’t enjoy the Civil War storylines as much, although I do have to give them credit for making them more nuanced and less black-and-white than you tend to see in videogames. You don’t side with pure good or pure evil, since both sides are pretty much dicks, and the unabashed transparently evil characters are constantly looming in the background. (If the DLC doesn’t let me kill a lot of the Thalmor, I’m going to be sorely disappointed).

But calling the cinematics, dialogue, and expository text in Skyrim good or bad is completely subjective. Calling them unnecessary is less so.

Of course, Skyrim would no longer be Skyrim if it were to strip itself down to the spectral narrative simplicity of Dark Souls. No one, least of all me, wants the game to lose its special character. That does not mean the next Elder Scrolls game would not benefit from a measure of radical distillation.
[…]
Like most who play Skyrim, I’m greatly drawn to these incredible environments because the act of exploring them becomes uniquely my experience. When I’m listening to and watching Skyrim’s interminable characters, I’m skipping through the same dumb cartoon everyone else is. Video games can tell involving, interesting stories — but they can’t do it like this. It’s high time we start thinking about another way or ways.

Here’s my biggest disagreement with Bissell’s argument: the storytelling in Skyrim is already inherently interactive, because the world-building and exposition are entirely opt-in. After the lengthy (and unfortunately, unskippable on subsequent play-throughs) opening sequence, the cutscenes rarely overstay their welcome. They give just enough exposition and information to give context and keep from degrading into “You. Go kill that dragon.”

For those of us who want more context and world-building, there are dialogue options, where we can ask most characters for more details on recent events and the state of the world. And for those of us who want to go all-in on the high fantasy, there are tons and tons of books detailing the history of the world, its leaders, and the various races. And many of the details are provided purely via background dialogue, like the amazing vocal performance of the devotee of Talos who rants/preaches in the square of Whiterun every morning. But none of it is required.

Contrast that with all the movies that have struggled to present a novel’s worth of fantasy world-building exposition. They’ve varied in success from the horribly inept (Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings) to the baffling (David Lynch’s Dune) to the pretty interesting (Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings). And even with the explosions and elf battles, the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring could seem like an information dump, even to those of us who’d read the books. A game can give the audience the option of saying, “Yes, I know this already; let’s move on.”

We’ve seen what happens when you take a complex fantasy world and give it a “radical distillation:” it becomes generic. There’s no shortage of elves, dragons, and wizards in videogames; it’s only via the Elder Scrolls’s stories of racism, political intrigue, lost races of dwarves, conspiracies, and dragon languages that this world distinguishes itself from hundreds of other Tolkien- and George R.R. Martin-inspired game settings.

So how to convey that to the people in the audience who choose to opt out of much of the storytelling?

Ideally, you do it through the gameplay. But I don’t feel that the focus of Skyrim is on killing dragons or even killing bandits, even though that’s what the player’s doing 99% of the time. The focus is on becoming completely immersed in a fully-realized world and having the freedom to shape a character however you want. And Skyrim only works as well as it does because it doesn’t impose too much on the player, instead relying on the “uncanny valley” effect — its stories are generally linear and its characters generally one-dimensional, allowing the player to extrapolate subtleties of character and cause-and-effect chains in the plot.

I believe Skyrim is on the right track. Even for those of us who’ve enjoyed the game’s conventional narratives, they’re not the most compelling parts of the experience. Skyrim works best when we’re given a sense of agency, allowed to stray from the static list of instructions and explore the world on our own terms. But more than that, it’s most compelling when we interact with the world and it responds.

All of us speak the language of games — even if you’ve never played a computer RPG before, you can’t proceed far in Skyrim without understanding how the game works. As such, we learn to control and throttle our interaction with the game’s storytelling. We learn to distinguish main quests from subquests; random monsters from the end-dungeon boss; significant books from ones just provided for color; and actions that are pure exploration from actions that will trigger the next big story moment.

I think almost all of the storytelling in Skyrim is competent, but it’s only when it breaks out of the predictable cycle of exposition-then-action that it excels. Staging a dragon attack on a city that I’d assumed was a “safe zone.” Having a random NPC in a tavern unexpectedly transport me to the other side of the continent and force me to retrace my steps. Giving me a quest reward that wasn’t on my list, a reward I wouldn’t have known about if I hadn’t picked up on a detail in a private journal.

You could punch up and trim down the dialogue of a cutscene all you want, but it still won’t resonate if the player’s been conditioned to think that the cutscene is just getting in the way of the real game to follow. It’d be the equivalent of trying to improve a roller coaster by making the valleys and lift hills more interesting.

What I’d like to see in the next Elder Scrolls game, and in all the open-world games to come that are going to build on Skyrim‘s success, is an attempt to blur the line between the main quest and the game. I shouldn’t feel as if I’m either furthering the story or straying from it and exploring, with the difference between the two clearly marked on my quest list and map. I should feel that the game is actually responding to what I’m doing, recognizing when I’ve done something that wasn’t explicitly asked of me, and rewarding me for it. And ideally, changing the world as a result of those actions.

It’d mean closing off some of the content, but Skyrim is the first game in years that I’ve resolved to give a second playthrough and then actually done it. I wouldn’t mind having parts of the game closed off to me. And if Bethesda has proven anything, it’s that they’ve figured out how to generate tons of content without its spiraling out of control.

The Radiant System as originally rumored was supposed to do a lot of this, constantly adjusting the world in response to the way you were developing your character. In one huge aspect, it worked: throughout my game, I always felt as if dungeons and random monsters were at a suitable level of difficulty, and that I was actually progressing and getting stronger. (Contrasted with Oblivion, for example, where after a certain point, you were discouraged from wandering, for fear of encountering a random bandit who had even finer armor and weaponry than you did).

The quest assignments, however, still felt noticeably computer-controlled. I didn’t feel as if I was interacting with Bethesda’s story, but with a random number generator. That’s the danger of relying too much on a “virtual world” to take the place of pre-generated content. I’d like to see the system expanded not so that I get infinite content — there’s already more content in Skyrim than I’ll ever see — but so that the content I do see is in response to what I’ve decided to do, not simply as a result of my checking an item off a To-Do list.

When I was younger, I used to wonder why the Muppets’ movies always started with them getting together or back together. They all met in The Muppet Movie — I saw it! — so why were they acting like strangers in The Great Muppet Caper, and why did The Muppets Take Manhattan need to have them singing about how great it was to be Together Again?

I’m sure there are all kinds of screenplay-driven justifications: setting up a conflict for the first act, making sure each character gets an entrance, giving room for a song about friendship. But after seeing the version in The Muppets, I suspect there’s more to it than that. It’s to let all of us shed the parts of ourselves that are self-conscious and mired in cynicism and irony, and let us get reacquainted with the parts of ourselves that just want to be joyously goofy.

The Muppets is joyously goofy, and it’s unabashedly a love letter to the Muppets themselves. A cynic could say that it’s nothing more than a feature-length advertisement for the franchise, but lucky for us, cynicism stopped being a thing years ago.

The movie follows the basic template of The Muppet Movie, but the gang isn’t starting out as unknowns working for their big break; they’re already famous. Recognized by everyone, but still actually loved only by obsessed weirdos. When they find Kermit, he’s living alone in his Bel Air home having lost touch with the rest of the gang — in an interview for the press kit, the director mentions the setup as like Sunset Boulevard, which is a brilliant connection I hadn’t picked up on. The Muppets stayed big; it’s everyone’s hearts that got small.

The problem for the Muppets in this movie isn’t recognition but relevance. Everyone loved the Muppets as a kid, but there’s no audience for them anymore. The world’s outgrown them. Normally, basing so much of your story’s premise on the idea that your characters are no longer relevant would cross the line of “self-aware” and go straight to “defensive.” But The Muppets treats the issue just like everything else: by saying it’s silly.

So many attempts to make family entertainment make the mistake of targeting parents by taking children’s material and making it more adult. But who wants that? It’s far better to make something that lets adults remember how awesome it is to be a kid? The movie shows that the Muppets’ hipper, edgier counterparts seem laughably dated, and it’s the decades-old, shamelessly earnest original Muppet Movie that’s had the real staying power.

Those of us who dismiss the 70s as a painfully un-self-aware dark age in which someone as schmaltzy as Paul Williams could become a bona fide trans-media celebrity: this isn’t the movie for us. It’s mode for those of us who still cry at the final chorus to “Rainbow Connection.” And if you don’t tear up during The Muppets‘s version when Animal finally loses it, then you’re made of cold, hard stuff.

But then, I had tears in my eyes for the whole thing, from the short (which was a brilliant, unexpected surprise) all the way to the end. It’s at the same time a celebration of being silly, and it’s a reminder that there’s no reason we shouldn’t be silly all the time. (Speaking of being silly, I never would’ve realized how Muppet-like the Flight of the Conchords already are without seeing Bret Mckenzie’s songs performed Muppet-style. I was skeptical that it would fit without being jarring, but the songs are the best part of the movie).

When the Castro Theater did a special presentation of Labyrinth, they had a great Q&A with Dave Goelz (far too unassuming a guy for someone with his history) and Karen Prell (who has the most amazing resume of any living human). For me, it was kind of a reality check: “I’ve loved you people for years and hadn’t even realized it!” The outpouring of love from the audience made it clear that the Muppets never stopped being relevant; most of us just let ourselves forget how miserably grown-up we’ve gotten.

And everybody should go in as unspoiled as possible, so skip the rest of this if you haven’t yet seen the movie. What happens at a me party stays at a me party. Or, the first rule of The Muppets is not to spoil any of the enjoyment of The Muppets.

I think even if we didn’t know the story of how Jason Segel got to be involved with the project, it’d still be clear that the movie was made by unabashed fans. Forgetting Sarah Marshall turned out to be basically forgettable, but the one memorable part was Segel’s opera about Dracula with puppets. It was such a bizarrely brave non-sequitur. Refreshing to see someone who didn’t feel the need to make excuses or qualifications, and just be weird.

And that’s what makes the Gary-Mary-Walter triangle, not the let’s-save-the-theater storyline, the main story of The Muppets. It’s hard not to see it as a Fight Club situation, especially after the “Man or Muppet” song. There’s the lifelong Muppets fan who never felt like he fit in anywhere else, and then there’s the part who has to grow up and behave like an adult.

It’s cleverly done, since it keeps the message from being as trite as “be yourself” or “never lose your sense of childlike joy,” both fine lessons to keep in mind, but both too simple to mean anything on their own. The lesson is how to be self-aware without being self-conscious, and how to retain your childhood without being a manchild. Even Kermit has to learn it’s not enough to be loved by everyone if you end up alone. He has to get over himself and his commitment issues, and finally acknowledge who’s important to him.

Surprisingly grown-up for a movie with fart shoes. (Which are still hilarious no matter how old you are).

One of the best moments in the movie is when Walter’s trying to find out how he can contribute, what exactly it is he’s good at. He tells Kermit, “You’re all so talented,” right as Fozzie shows up with his fart shoes. Kermit’s reaction says more than any actor with an articulated face could. The appeal of The Muppets isn’t that they’re talented, but that they put themselves out there to bring us all the world’s third greatest gift.

I try to stay wary of Apple’s marketing lingo: as much as I like using the iPad, it’s not “magical;” and for all the Apple-branded products I have scattered around the house, in various states of obsolescence but each one the best device I’ve ever owned, I’d never describe any of them as “insanely great.”

But Apple’s brief memoriam is absolutely right in calling Steve Jobs “visionary.”

There were plenty of obituaries and eulogies popping up across the internet within minutes after the official announcement of Jobs’s death; most ghoulishly composed right after his resignation (if not sooner) and polished off with an edited date and time. There were a few insightful ones as well; the best I’ve seen being Slate’s analysis of the wide reach of Jobs’s vision and a more personal thanks from Stack Overflow on behalf of all computer programmers.

But the best obituary was provided by Jobs himself, his commencement speech at Stanford in 2005. You have to wonder at the time whether he was aware he was delivering what would become the best summation of his life, not content with letting other people handle it.

That wasn’t the first time Jobs provided his own retrospective; the Think Different campaign for the Macintosh was every bit as much about Jobs’s own philosophy as it was about a computer brand. Jobs says as much in that video. And that ad campaign is a better testament to his legacy than any number of rote obituaries checking off his career achievements.

It may seem crass to associate a life’s work with a product marketing campaign, but I think it’s an outstanding symbol of Jobs’s vision, that his public life and his ideals are so inextricably linked with the Macintosh. It’s because of Steve Jobs that we can even think of computers and mobile phones as having “ideals” at all.

Even the tired criticisms of Apple echo the criticisms of Jobs himself. People decry Apple devices as being overpriced status symbols, while most of us who depend on Macs and iPhones use them simply because they do everything we want and do it well. People criticized Jobs for being an arrogant, stubborn, and sometimes ruthless; while he consistently described his perfectionism as a desire to reject the less-than-perfect in favor of making something that would genuinely change the world.

People are quick to point out that technologies existed before Apple used them, or that other devices have better technical specs — more slots, faster processors, more “open” technologies. But Steve Jobs’s greatest achievement was staying true to a holistic view of computing: individual specs aren’t as important as how they all work together. Technology isn’t the focus, what you do with technology is the focus. Xerox PARC first developed the GUI. But would Xerox have produced MacPaint and HyperCard?

It was the work of hundreds of hardware and software engineers, industrial designers, and graphic artists, not just Steve Jobs, that “invented” the Mac, iMac, PowerBook, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. But without Jobs’s dogged fixation on Apple’s core philosophy, they never would’ve come together as an integrated product line — not a phone, or an MP3 player, or a computer, but a line of technological products that could inspire you and enable you to make something great.

Getting that right once or twice could be dismissed as a fluke. Getting it right over and over again can only be genius. And it’s only by “connecting the dots” over Jobs’s career that you can see the remarkable consistency and devotion to that philosophy. How much did he influence the direction of Pixar, for example? It’s always a mistake to give too much credit to one person, but then you have to realize: Pixar was the studio that developed the most advanced computer animation and put it to use not as pure spectacle, but for storytelling. Again, it’s not the technology that’s important.

I never regarded Steve Jobs as a hero, and I barely knew anything about him before I read the retrospectives after his resignation from Apple. By most accounts of his management style, I would’ve hated working for him. I tend to be annoyed at the level at which people worship him. And I absolutely reject the ideal of the auteur, and I’ve seen far too many cases of people being treated poorly for the sake of staying true to one man’s arrogant “vision.”

And still, I’m more profoundly affected by the news of Steve Jobs’s death than I’d expected to be. His arrogance doesn’t seem just dogmatic, but inspirational: not just for the people making the computers, but for all of us using them. And “think different” no longer seems like just an opportunistic marketing plan to inspire people to buy computers and cell phones; but a genuinely-felt philosophy intended to inspire us to do great things with them. Maybe Jobs’s greatest achievement was understanding that business and art don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Jobs invented the personal computer. And I’ve only just recently started to have fleeting moments of awareness of how profound that is: getting directions from my cell phone while I’m listening to music after just playing a game or reading an article, and having the sudden realization that I’m living in the future.

From now on, when I watch Apple ads, I’ll try not to see ethnically-diverse models on skiing trips or vacations to Paris, or hear the carefully-selected focus-tested music in the background as actors pretend to be a father talking to his wife and daughter. Instead, I’ll try to appreciate the bigger picture, and understand the vision Jobs wanted us all to see: friends and families using innovation to make their lives better.