Players, they grow up so fast

Last week at D&D, I noticed nearly all my players brought their own dice. When we started playing 3 years ago, I provided dice for everyone. I was so proud of how far they've come.

So proud, I almost killed them all with a blue dragon and a behir.

Movie: Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist
(official site | imbd)

How long can Michael Cera play the boyish, charmingly naive buffoon? I would hate for his career to become one-note, but he does it so well. Am I overstepping my bounds if I want him to be George Michael Bluth forever? What's wrong with that, really?

Lost, and the way of the gun

M and I watch Lost on DVD, so we're working on season 4 now. Last night, I finally figured out why I am so annoyed any time somebody pulls a gun on that show.

First, nearly everyone's character is loosey-goosey on the show.* But that's about why people draw guns. I'm talking about the guns themselves.

In drama, a gun is a promise from the writer to the audience: "I promise that this character is in serious danger." Anton Chekhov's famous principle is in literal play -- "One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it."

For the first three seasons of this show, no one was seriously thinking of firing a gun. A main character was never safer than when locked in a tense gun standoff. You could practically summon another character to interrupt you by pointing a gun at a random friend. (Shannon was killed accidentally, and I don't count Ana-Lucia as a main character.)

So the promise of the gun got more and more meaningless. Characters calling each other's bluffs came way too late for me to continue suspending my disbelief.

M was alarmed when I was so VERY happy that a bunch of people got killed on the beach at the end of season 3. The fact that those characters were barely named blunted my joy, but main characters finally fulfilling the promise of the gun was such a relief.

Now in season 4, with the show seemingly out of stasis, guns have a little menace again, although we're still stuck with some tired standoffs. Any character with a flashforward is certain to be in no danger from a gun in the "present." Yawn.



* Whenever I put on my drama critic shorts, I can't figure out what several of the main characters' overarching goals are, or what they're afraid of. Those things seem indistinct from episode to episode. Alliances and motives shift, not based on a character's choices, but seemingly according to what somebody thought might be cool in the writers' room. Sawyer's arc in particular stumbles all over the show like a drunk donkey.

WotC pres speaks on PDFs

Greg Leeds, president of WotC, started doing some PR work, giving an interview at EnWorld.org over the the PDF brouhaha. According to bios I found on the Web, he's worked at Hasbro since 2001 in a couple of capacities -- as General Manager of the boys toys group, and some time later head of Hasbro's international marketing -- and was general manager at Samsonite before that. Look it up if you care.

Leeds took over at Wizards a smidge over a year ago, and started by killing WotC's vaunted, but woefully-implemented social networking site, Gleemax. Then he laid a bunch of people off. As I understand, some of them had it coming, and some were simply expensive expendables. Cleaning house is not the worst way for a new, corporate-appointed CEO to start, especially when the house was in such disarray. But it tends not to endear one.

His background is in neither publishing, nor games. True, Hasbro and Wizards both produce "games", but think of that in the same sense that humans and lamprey eels are both in the same Phylum. It doesn't mean we have anything to say to each other at parties.

So Mr. Leeds appears to be an experienced, not-incompetent marketing manger, cast into an entirely new industry. He's been on the job for a year, which, in my experience, is enough time to understand what it is that you don't know about what you're doing now. So that's who we're dealing with.

The interview is a by-the-numbers kind of thing. "Piracy is a substantial concern... We need to have a strong retail base...." Very little here that you couldn't have said if you knew who you needed to protect and who you needed to placate.

Couple of points of interest:

We do not have any plans to resume the sale of PDFs, but are actively exploring other options for the digital distribution of our content....
Along with the rest of the publishing industry, Wizards is also looking into new means of digital distribution. For our novels, we have recently introduced titles to Kindle and to Sony’s E-Reader and will continue to add titles to those offerings over the coming months.

PDFs are effed, but Kindle is in. If I'm reading him right, Leeds seems to think that other peoples' bandwagons will prevent piracy the iTunes way. By locking books into certain partner hardware, maybe they can slow piracy. Of course, they're already offering their books through their own system.

Its EULA says:

You understand that Wizards or its representatives may monitor all communications made by or received by you while using the Feature. You consent to the extraction of hardware system profile data and any data related to operation of the Feature.

Which means they will try to trace piracy of users through their Feature. I dunno... I call snoopware a Bug.

Exerting control like this seems likely to reduce piracy. Somewhat. It will definitely reduce sales. The installed base of people who can read is much larger than the base of people who own Kindles. Is the market not niche enough for WotC yet? Did they need a way to cut it finer?

If this does work, Wizards is in for an ugly 3 to 5 years while their hoped-for customer base follows them through the necessary hoops to make piracy somewhat more difficult. Seems like that's asking a lot, though.

Another quote:

...we conservatively estimate the ratio of illicit downloads to legally purchased copies was 10:1.

Listen, I can unconservatively estimate that by halting PDF sales, you have moved that ratio to 10:0. Great work, fellas. It's Miller time.

This doesn't sound like anything that will kill D&D, which has way more hit points than anyone would have estimated in 1980. But it does sound like a hindrance to WotC's customers -- not a deal-breaker, just one more discouragement that Wizards can ill afford right now. I suppose they could make the argument that not doing this could kill the company just as fast. I doubt it, but since we're all making it up as we go, no one's got the data to prove it. It's just a matter of who's most convincing at the top of the organization.

I have wanted to avoid comparing the current ownership to TSR in the mid '90s. I still believe they're more professional and more competent. They might have their heads in the same sand though.

Movie: Bolt

Bolt
(official site | imbd)

A fun, predictable movie. If I had kids, I'd want them to experience better art. But good-enough art is also good enough.

WotC probably doesn't care what you think about PDF sales

I got an email the other night that basically every card-carrying D&D geek got, that said "Wizards of the Coast is out of the PDF-selling business in t-minus 12 hours." There has been predictable and understandable Internet furor over that.

A WotC rep showed up at enworld.org and left a post of which I will quote the relevant bits for you so you don't have to follow the link:

...due to recent findings of illegal copying and online distribution (piracy) of our products, Wizards of the Coast has decided to cease the sales of online PDFs. We are exploring other options for digitial distribution of our content and as soon as we have any more information I'll get it to you.

Other on-the-ball PDF retailers have taken clever advantage of the free publicity to point out that they're still happy to sell you their PDFs, and now offering special ha-ha-WotC sale prices good for the next few days. (They don't call them that. I called them that.)

This all reminds me of a post I tried to write about six months ago, which got long and recursive, and I never finished thinking through. Now, it seems inevitable that Wizards would give me another opportunity to unlimber these ideas.

The applicable one here being that someone at Wizards of the Coast -- not the whole company by any means, but someone -- is working furiously to rebottle the Internet genie. Furiously. This person has no idea how to behave when the business of selling electrons turns out to have different, and largely uncharted difficulties compared to selling atoms. And no idea what to do when the customer becomes a participant in the product.

No one does. No corporation has a clear idea of how to make money shifting electrons if they are not fortunate enough to have a near-monopoly. Individuals can do it, but large companies, even large companies full of Internet-savvy employees like Amazon and Google, don't know how to do this.

Clever people like Cory Doctorow and Kevin Kelly have come up with some interesting ideas about it. But they're making best guesses. (Although I highly recommend Kelly's list of Eight Generatives Better Than Free, especially if you are a publisher considering ceasing PDF sales.)

I would like to be indignant, and come to a trenchant conclusion, but I don't have one. (At least not a good one.) I'm guessing that what Wizards is doing makes sense from a certain legally-defensible standpoint. It's hard to know which of the many, many threats a business faces will strike a crippling blow. You try to make your list, and prepare for the biggest ones, and get to as many as you can while you can.

And so, seemingly, lower on the list than they've gotten to is the threat of falling out of touch with customers.

Here's maybe the one original idea I've got on this topic: They believe they're in touch with the customers they want to be in touch with. And they believe those customers are not that into PDFs. And they might be right.

Hasbro, owner of Wizards of the Coast, is a toymaker. They are used to thinking that their entire customer base turns over every few years. Maintaining an audience is never on their radar, because by the time you are 5 years old, you do not care about Mr. Potato Head any more. They have to sell Mr. Potato Head to a brand new crop of 2-year-olds.

Therefore, I might need to conclude that the people in charge are not interested in selling games to me any more. They want to sell Dungeons & Dragons to 12-year-olds. This does not mean that D&D is not suitable for 37-year-olds. It is just that the company is more interested in 12-year-old dollars.

Even if I'm right, since I don't have a look at their numbers, I can't tell whether that's a good business strategy. I think selling D&D is a different beast than selling Mr. Potato Head, and therefore, the process and goals must be different. But I can't tell. I can tell that lately, they're not creating game products I'm very interested in, which anecdotally at least, supports my theory.

If I'm right though, the card-carrying D&D geeks on Slashdot and enworld complaining about WotC's behavior is the equivalent of the dog complaining that the cat food tastes bad.

You can eat it if you want, but it's not for you, silly dog.

Student loan forgiveness gains traction

Someone else has hit upon my idea of the federal government covering student loans, according to the Baltimore Sun:

But as the economy still sputters along, Robert Applebaum thinks he has a better idea: Cancel all the outstanding student loan debt. The impact would be immediate, he says, as people paying hundreds of dollars a month on their student loans could instead spend that money elsewhere.

Applebaum estimates student loan debt about 12 times higher than I do. (Psst Rob! Use my math, and it looks even BETTER!) And he has a Facebook group with a zillion members, which means about as much as an online petition does.

Still, this is a really sane idea which frees up our best-educated, most motivated citizens to invest in other things, while returning liquidity to the responsible lending institutions that made these loans in the first place.

The arguments posted against it are pretty weak. I can't believe someone even bothered offering up the argument that it's unfair to some people. We left "fair" bleeding in a ditch 'round about October. Also note, I paid off my student loan aggressively after college, and I'm out. My wife has some student loan debt, but nothing debilitating. This doesn't benefit us really. It's not "fair" to us, but it's still a good idea.

See, I just want something that works, and playing chess with bankers? That's not working.