Deus Ex Machinatio

Publishing, Self-Promotion, and Amazon v. Macmillan

It's been a fabulously interesting weekend in the publishing world. The Cliff's Notes version: Amazon pulled all print and digital editions of Macmillan's books from sale when the two reached a negotiating impasse regarding the pricing of Kindle editions of Macmillan titles. Macmillan is one of the six big publishing houses, so this was a big deal; basically Amazon removed about a sixth of their stock. If you're interested in the comprehensive details, check out these analyses written by John Scalzi, Scott Westerfeld, and Charlie Stross.

A fun time was had by all. Or actually, now that I think about it, by nobody.

There is, however, a tangential issue I would like to address. I've seen a common refrain bubble up over this hullabaloo: "Soon, the entire publishing chain will collapse, and an author will be able to sell to readers directly!" Or a variant: "When the iBookstore comes, authors will be able to publish their own work and set their own book prices!"

Oh god, I think. What a nightmarish future that would be, indeed, in which every author is reduced to self-publishing. Why would anybody think such a thing is desirable, much less inevitable? Even aside from the stigma of self-publishing, let me explain just why this is a dystopian endgame.

First, as a reader, I look to the publisher as providing a sort of affidavit of quality. If I weren't interested in quality, I could buy books indiscriminately on Lulu or iUniverse. I do not do this. And if you look at the numbers... nobody else does, either. This teaches us two important lessons: First, promoting a self-published book is really hard. Second: Nobody is going out on a limb to try out cheap but potentially lousy ebooks. There's a reason people get paid to read slush, and not the other way around.

It's also no big secret that I'm trying to claw my way up the ladder into the treehouse of traditional publishing. Hopefully it won't fall out of the tree first (or at all). As a writer, if the traditional publishing model ceased to exist, if your only choice as an author were to put your work out there and promote the hell out of it your own self, you know what I'd do? I'd probably stop writing novels. 

I have a trait that is not rare among writers: I loathe promoting myself and my own work. 

In the golden world that exists only in my head, I make stuff, and then somebody else hands me cash for it. I at no point need to hustle for clients, network, chase payments, or any other pesky administrative task. In reality, these are necessary evils to keep my freelance business running. But I only need to successfully market myself to a handful of people in order to be successful as an ARG writer. Those are the creative directors, project managers, team leads, etc. at the agencies I look to work with. 

After that, the marketing muscle and know-how of wiser heads than mine combined with the quality of the experience I am designing work together to build an active and engaged audience. The people hiring me have the dollars to put up commercials, billboards and posters; the designers to make them interesting; and the savvy to know where they should go. They attract attention. My job is to keep it and build on it.

If I were completely on the hook to build that audience all by my lonesome, I'm sure I'd do a pretty miserable job. I know this because I have done a miserable job many a time before! The participation and readership numbers I get for my personal projects - this here blog, My Super First Day, what have you -- they aren't in the same ballpark as my big games, not by multiple orders of magnitude. I frankly don't think I could build an audience of several thousand or more for a book without any marketing support. And it's not because I think my work isn't pretty great. It's because self-promoting is hard, it's expensive, it takes time away from creating, and just plain isn't the talent I've spent my life honing. 

I'm curious to know where other people see the future of publishing heading, though. Think I'm wrong-headed, misguided, pessimistic? Go ahead and comment. I'd love to hear what you think.

And Now For Something Super!

So yeah, that soup thing is pretty crazy, right? Just to spite Campbell's, I totally ate a 320-calorie frozen meal for lunch today. 

This is the kind of post that was on my mind when I was talking about personal and professional personas a few weeks ago. I've traditionally shied away from talking to much about ideology, unless it's related to my work. But this is something that is important to me, even though it doesn't have much to do with games, and certainly is only a tangent from my career as a storyteller. 

Which brings me to today's topic: My Super First Day! I'm gearing up for another round, folks! If you're an MSFD alumnus, you're free to build onto your Super Second Day, work with others on a big collaborative Rashomon piece, or start fresh with a new character. 

If you haven't participated in MSFD before, it's dead easy! Just scribble out the story of your Super First Day and email it in by... oh, let's call it Feb. 7 at 6pm EST. 

Read the MSFD FAQ for our guidelines and other important info. Get cracking, supers!

Campbell's, a Pro-Ana Company

Campbell's, the generally benign and beloved soup company, is running some commercials that are driving me insane. In them, women are mindlessly shambling through the frozen foods aisle of a supermarket, tossing various light and diet frozen meals into their carts. And then... they come to their senses. They  look at the nutritional information of these meals they are buying. Horrors, if only they had known! 

"310 calories?" one woman says, clearly shocked. 

"340 calories?!" another says with disgust. 

The solution: Campbell's Select Harvest Light soups, with as few as 60 calories per serving!

OK, somebody tell me if I'm missing the boat here, but... since when is 340 calories a completely unacceptable amount to eat for a meal? Ignore the underlying message that all women should be on a restricted-calorie diet. That's just too big for me to tackle right now. This is a matter of degree and simple math. Note that Campbell's isn't in any way playing these ads in the light of "eat our soup for lunch so you can have that cheesecake later." I'd be a lot more OK with that, even though it still buys into the problematic social imperative for all women to restrict their food intake. But no, the message implicit in that ad is that 340 calories is simply too much to eat, ever.

Let's do a little math, here, so I can explain in more depth why I'm up in arms. Most weight-loss experts recommend that a woman eat between 1500 and 1800 calories in a day. (A man would generally need somewhat more.) If you were to eat five of those 340-calorie frozen meals in a day, you'd be at 1700 calories, which is a perfectly reasonable amount for a typical woman to eat. Not that most people are eating frozen meals every time they open their mouths, or are even eating five meals a day, which is the trendy thing to do nowadays. 

Most sources I've read say 1200 is the absolute lowest limit a dieter should go to, without risking various nutritional deficiencies or damaging your metabolism. Let's go with 1400 calories for our imaginary woman on a diet. That's 466 calories a meal for three meals. 

Or if you were splitting your food into five smaller meals, that gives you a lower limit of 280 calories per meal, assuming that you're dividing your calories equally between meals. And that's a big assumption! Want to see how the calories in a typical (recommended) dieter's day stacks up, with three meals and a couple of snacks?

Breakfast: 

1 hard-boiled egg, 70 calories

1 grapefruit w/ tsp. of sugar, 60 calories

1 piece whole wheat toast w/ 1 tbsp. peanut butter, 200 calories

TOTAL: 330 calories

Morning Snack: 1 cup lowfat yogurt, 120 calories

1 apple, 80 calories

TOTAL: 200 calories

Lunch: 1 "horrifying" frozen meal, 340 calories 

Afternoon Snack:

1 cup baby carrots, 60 calories

2 tbsp. light ranch dressing, 70 calories

TOTAL: 130 calories

Dinner: 1 garlic-mushroom chicken breast, 120 calories

1 cup egg noodles w/ 1 tsp. butter, 249 calories

1 cup steamed broccoli, 31 calories

TOTAL: 400 calories

GRAND TOTAL: 1400 calories

Now let's replace that 340-calorie frozen meal with a 60-calorie serving of Campbell's. Whoops! The total is 1120. We've gone 80 calories below the lower limit recommended by nutritionists. If you also take away half of those butter noodles, because (horrors!) we went above 340 calories for dinner, that brings us to a grand total of 995 calories for the day. You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone recommending that level of calorie restriction without medical supervision.

There was a famous study about starvation conducted in Minnesota in 1945. Let's quote Wikipedia:

Among the many conclusions from the study was the confirmation that prolonged semi-starvation produces significant increases in depression, hysteria and hypochondriasis as measured using the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), a standardized test administered during the experimental period. Indeed, most of the subjects experienced periods of severe emotional distress and depression. There were extreme reactions to the psychological effects during the experiment including self-mutilation (one subject amputated three fingers of his hand with an axe, though the subject was unsure if he had done so intentionally or accidentally). Participants exhibited a preoccupation with food, both during the starvation period and the rehabilitation phase. Sexual interest was drastically reduced and the volunteers showed signs of social withdrawal and isolation. The participants reported a decline in concentration, comprehension and judgment capabilities, although the standardized tests administered showed no actual signs of diminished capacity. There were marked declines in physiological processes indicative of decreases in each subject’s basal metabolic rate (the energy required by the body in a state of rest) and reflected in reduced body temperature, respiration and heart rate. Some of the subjects exhibited edema (swelling) in the extremities, presumably due to the massive quantities of water the participants consumed attempting to fill their stomachs during the starvation period.

How much do you think those men were eating? I bet you guess too low. It was roughly 1560 calories a day. Makes you think a little harder about those extreme calorie restriction diets, huh?

Campbell's, by running these ads you are supporting -- nay, advocating -- disordered eating, even unto anorexic behavior. I call shenanigans.

Updated to add: I acquired the video for a shorter version of the ad:

It looks like when I was writing this from memory, some of the specific numbers were off, but not by much. My point stands.

Deconstructing Farmville

I started playing Farmville a couple of months ago, as a part of my continuing education in games and game design. The surprise? I'm still playing it. And I even ponied up some of my own cash to keep Zynga running. (If you like a creative work, it behooves you to support the people who made it, right, kids?) 

It's not like me to play a game for more than a few weeks. Treasure Madness and Packrat? Ancient history. Kongregate keeps me coming back for twenty minutes a pop, but I hardly ever play the same game twice. Oh, sure, Clockwords, Chain Factor and Boomshine all kept me for a while, and I might still play from time to time, but it's nothing like the dedication with which I play Farmville. So what is it about Farmville? What makes it so special? The answer is that it absolutely nails all of the things I like best in a casual game.

1. Multiple goals. For those of you who don't already know, Farmville is at its heart a very light, easy resource management game. You have a limited amount of land and money, and it's up to you to work out how to use them to get what you want. Better, it's up to you to decide what you want. Farmville offers experience points and levels, achievements and ribbons to earn, and sets of objects to collect. You can play to make the coolest 8-bit image on your farm, play to master all crops, or change from one goal to another depending on your mood. The more things there are to do, the more likely it is any given player will find something that floats their boat and stick around.
2. No penalties. You might be able to lose Farmville, but you'd have to work really hard at it. The only limited factor is time -- you need to harvest crops before they wither. But you know how long that takes, and the time between ripening and withering varies from 2 hours to 4 days, depending on what you planted. And even if you neglect and lose all your crops, you're unlikely to have lost all your money. If you have managed to burn through it all, you can always visit neighboring farms to earn a little seed money for your next crop. I don't know about you, but I play games to relax. For me, keeping the stakes and pressure low works way better than ticking clocks and hordes of zombies shambling toward me. And I don't imagine I'm a special flower, unique in my gaming tastes.
3. Effort is always rewarded. In Farmville, you get out of it what you put into it. It's just like the grind in Warcraft, an invigorating contrast to the uncertainties of real life. In Farmville, as long as you keep trying, you'll keep moving up. This is the secret sauce that makes World of Warcraft the behemoth it is, and one of my foundation principles of game design.
4. Shiny new content. Farmville is very much not a finished product. Zynga's developers are constantly unrolling new features and virtual items, holding limited-time events, and refining the interface. The game hasn't been the same from one week to the next since at least Halloween, when I began playing. And a lot of this content has limited availability -- you can plant forget-me-nots and buy moose right now, but they'll be gone again in five days. (But something else will come along.) That keeps players coming back; there's less chance to become bored if there's always something fresh.
5. Collaboration, not competition. The only rivalries here are the ones you make yourself. But Farmville's social mechanics encourage you to not only play yourself, but to get your friends to play, and to play more often. There are objects you can only receive if a friend has sent it to you, and collections you can only complete by interacting with a friend's farm. The more friends you have in Farmville, the better you'll do. Peer pressure to play is a subtle but powerful thing.
6. Value for money. Farmville lets you buy FV money with real dollars, not to be confused with the lesser gold currency. FV money lets you buy some things that you might otherwise have to save up scads of gold for; but there are also animals, objects and other incentives you can only get with FV money. The game is very cleverly designed to show you the advantages of paying Zynga for play without being a spammy pest about it. They put the incentives for paying in front of you, but they aren't shoving your nose into it. Their method works.
7. Low time commitment. This is the kicker. I can play Farmville for ten minutes in the morning, for ten minutes every couple of days, or I can spend all day planting 2-hour raspberries, visiting my neighbors' farms, and rearranging my orchards and flocks. And if the phone rings, or my kid spills Goldfish all over the floor, or I remember it's time to make dinner, I can walk away and come back later. (See point 2, No penalties.) I wish more games were like that!

What about you? Are you a Farmville fan or foe? Are there reasons I've missed that you think make it so successful, or do you think I'm completely off base? Let me know what you think!

Personal, Professional

I'm about to do something a little frightening. Bear with me.

A few days ago, my three-year-old daughter came to me crying. She had to go potty, but there was a monster in the bathroom. She was terrified. Specifically: Cookie Monster was in there, and I had to keep her safe from him. She did not buy my explanation that she would be safe from Cookie Monster because she was not a cookie, so I investigated. 

It was her blue washcloth hanging on the towel bar.

So! Did you see that? That terrifying act I just performed? That was a personal anecdote about my family, and possibly the first one I've ever written here that wasn't specifically about games or stories and how my children interact with them. That wasn't relevant, if you see. But was it a good idea? Do the readers who come here care one way or the other about the goings-on in my personal life? Or was sharing that one tiny story an act that was deeply unprofessional?

I keep thinking about these questions. I can't decide, so I'm taking it to you and asking you what you think. Should I keep a church-and-state kind of division between my personal and professional lives? But then where does Twitter fall? Or Facebook, where my Twitter posts are linked? What about LinkedIn, which also grabs my Twitter feed? 

Given that the work I do is profoundly personal, does it even make any sense to talk about a division between my personal and professional lives? I used to think so, but I'm less and less sure as more colleagues have become close friends, and as the edges of my internet footprint begin to overlap by a wider margin every day. My life isn't one of clear boundaries and defining lines. It's made in a single, whole piece. Everything is personal to me, and everything is professional as well. 

For a long time I kept two separate blogs. One of them was this one. If you were to visit the archives, you'd see it's heavy in opining, analysis, and idle speculation. My other blog was strictly personal, and mostly about kids, cooking and housework -- a mommyblog, if you will. But due to a confluence of time pressure, technical issues, offloading to Twitter, and sheer slackitude, the entire year of 2009 went by without an update over there. 

I wonder now if that separation has outlived its usefulness anyway. Or does this strictly-professional internet presence do me good? Would I lose professional standing if more people knew about my dirty dishes? (Do I want to work with people who would find a more complete picture of me off-putting?) I know other writers I respect and admire have done well with blending personal and professional. I speak of course of Elizabeth Bear and John Scalzi, Neil Gaiman, Jay Lake. 

So this is just one big solicitation for opinions, I guess. How do you manage the distinctions between personal and professional, if any? What do you do? How does it work, and what would you recommend?

Doing Your Best, No Exceptions

I just read a brilliant post on always aiming to do your best work by ann_leckie at LiveJournal. (Found via the wise and talented Elizabeth Bear, who has an ongoing habit of posting things that make me think harder and write better.) Go read it yourself. 

It dovetails nicely with a couple of the bullet points I wrote in my March post, Some Things I've Learned About ARG Design. Particularly this one: 

• Content is a reward. Make sure the content you provide is worth the effort you're rewarding. Even an autoresponder should be worth the time it takes to read it. 

And this one too: 

• Each discrete piece of your game should be independently entertaining in its own right, even if the player never sees another piece of it. 

It's getting at the same thing: Always try to do the best you can. Make sure you're making every possible piece of content that your audience will see is the best that you can make it. 

But this is an ideal -- or to be more specific, it's my ideal -- and it's really, really hard to do. It made me think about doing your best and trying your hardest. Comparing it to my many years of hair-raising tales from behind the curtain, I thought: "But Andrea, if you were really trying your best, why did you...?" 

This is where I think transmedia as a performance art has a particularly soft, weak point, where it hurts if you poke us too hard. We get a lot of our ideals and standards from related but distinctly different disciplines. With a novel, for example, you generally have the liberty to look at the story a month later to see if it still makes sense. With a play, you can rehearse every day for six weeks before your premiere. 

But you can't revise an ARG. You don't get much time to rehearse, either. The show must go on, even when something doesn't go according to plan, even when you've missed a deadline, even when something has broken. In my experience, an ARG is by definition never, ever the best you could have possibly made it, if you had had a little more time, or a little more money, or or or... 

Sometimes you craft an amazing piece of content or game mechanic, and it gets cut or unrecognizably altered or is simply never built for cruel but undeniable reasons like timing or budget. Or maybe that perfect idea conflicts with a throwaway line you shoved into the first week for color, and now you can't do it without breaking the story. No take-backsies! And sometime the implementation of an idea isn't as shiny as you'd hoped; maybe there are bugs, maybe there are typos. (And I promise you, there are always bugs and typos.) 

You could fix these things, sure... in a perfect world, with unlimited resources and development time. But you know, we don't get that. Not even close. Probably never will, either.

So I do try to live up that lofty ideal, to always, always do my best work. But at the same time, I wonder if I couldn't be more forgiving of myself during all those coulda-shoulda-woulda moments. Like the actor who falls on their face during their big entrance, it's not that I'm not trying my best, it's that sometimes my best isn't perfect. And maybe... maybe that's OK, too, as long as I'm always striving and always getting better.

The Sims & Second Nature

I am thrilled to tell you that I have an article on The Sims and narrative in the current issue of Second Nature, or as they call it, the 'International Journal of Creative Media.' It was an interesting piece to write, and I hope you enjoy it as well.

Tech Toys & Gender

I just saw my first ad for the hotly anticipated Droid, the Verizon phone based on the open-source-by-way-of-Google Android operating system. I've been interested in the progress of Android for some time, because so many respected members of the geekerati have been so very excited by it. Though admittedly I've also been skeptical; in my experience, opensourceware provides such an awful user experience that I'd rather shell out the money and avoid the sanity damage. But I'm always willing to rethink my stances, and there was always a distinct possibility that Android would wind up on my "Gimme Gimme Buy Me Buy Me" list.

Well, now that's one decision I don't need to rethink. Verizon has very thoughtfully gone out of its way to tell me they aren't interested in my business. Take a look at the ad, and then I'll explain my thought process:

 

Like whoa, did you catch that? The more I think about this ad, the more angry I get. Here's the problem: The ad is assigning to the iPhone a whole slew of traits traditionally considered feminine (pretty, glitter, hearts, tiaras) and imbuing those traits with negative value (stupid, vapid, worthless). It's the same dynamic you run into in gamer culture, which is really just a subset of geek culture; if something has a feminine trait, it inherently has less value. Because girl things are always inferior to boy things, amirite?

This widely propagated message has been toxic to me, personally, and I plan to spend some time at SXSW talking about why and how. The short of it is: I spent years and years of my life denying myself access to feminine things (no matter how much I really liked them or wanted them) because I'd internalized this idea that boy things were always better. So if I enjoyed getting my nails done, or wanted a sparkly handbag, or admitted to liking flowers: Well then, I'd be just another ordinary girl, and we couldn't have that, could we? Because girls are selfish and vapid and stupid, and I wasn't like that, so I couldn't be a REAL girl. 

Shame on Verizon. I expected better, and I'm sorry I didn't get it.

See You in Austin!

I am thrilled, boggled, amazed, and other combinations of excited-plus-surprised to say that I'm in the first batch of speakers for SXSW this year, announced today. My topic is ARGs and Women: Moving Beyond the Hot Brunette, and I find the more I think about this subject, the more I have to say about it. 

This will also be my first time at SXSW, so I feel like I need some mentoring. Anyone have any SXSW-related advice for me?

ISMAR 2009

So hey! Next week -- specifically, next Tuesday -- I'll be at ISMAR 2009 in Orlando, Florida. (If you didn't already stands for the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Realities.) I'll be there to present a paper on the game archetypes I expect to see when augmented reality matures and is combined with other technologies, like GPS and face recognition. Fun stuff, right?

If you're going to be there next week, I'd love to see you and say hi in person, and I'd also love for you to stop by and see what I have to say on AR and games. I might even sneak in a little bonus material on games ported to a platform vs. games native to a platform...

I'll be presenting during the 3:30 to 5om session on Tuesday in a room enigmatically named "Magnolia A&B." Wish me luck!