My Gaming DNA

One of the questions form yesterday tickled my fancy, so I'm going to talk about the games I've loved.

I started out with D&D, which I got into because another kid at summer camp had it when I was, like, 8 or 9. The thing I noticed was the diagram of the dragon's breath weapon shapes, and for some reason that struck me as particularly awesome. I think my parents ended up getting me the red box (Erol Otus cover) which I literally read by flashlight, under my covers because it was SO AWESOME. I later got the Expert set, which totally blew my mind, especially the magic items. I'd though the Gauntlets of Ogre Power were awesome, but then I saw the Staff of Wizardry![1]

At the same time, a cool older kid (the son of one of my dad's co-workers) showed me there was this whole _other_ D&D, with illusionists and rangers and stuff. So from about age 10 to 13, my understanding of D&D came from the boxes, half remembered bits read from the Players Handbook, a copy of the Monster Manual that I bought at Waldenbooks (because I had the money and didn't know which book to buy), a copy of one of the Slave Lords modules I got _somewhere_, then eventually a DMG my parents got me for Christmas and eventually a PHB gifted from that same older kid.

Tellingly, at no point during this period did I actually play D&D. I made a LOT of a characters (mostly Rangers named Aragorn who rode silver dragons) and rules for things like a Jedi class. I did play some other games - One friend got a Star Trek RPG, and it was totally incomprehensible to is, but it had ship weapon systems, so we used those to make a ship to ship combat game, that later became a giant Robot Fighting game[2]. At anther summer camp, I got to read the James Bond RPG (notably the Q manual) and Top Secret, and made a lot of Spy Cars, and even played in a sort of ad-hoc Top Secret game with no sheets or rules, just us talking. I lost.

During High School I actually got around to playing D&D, and if you think this has been stereotypical so far, you ain't seen nothing yet. We played D&D with all the bad habits you can imagine. We had party members who existed to steal from party members. We screwed up the Dragonlance Modules. We arranged mass suicide so we could bring in new characters when we lost all our gear n the Slave Lords modules. We were _terrible_, but we had a lot of fun.

College was when I started branching out more. I met a lot of folks through the UVM Science Fiction and Fantasy in Literature program, and got exposed to many new games[3] like Champions, Star Wars, DC Heroes, Traveller, GURPS, Vampire, Paranoia Shadowrun and such, but the big go-to game for the group was Rolemaster. We played the hell out of Rolemaster, with a constantly evolving set of house rules designed to fix problems and to reflect the game currently being played. Those were some of the best games of my life, the sort I still have War Stories from.

During this time, the Amber DRPG also came out, something I had been very excited for, both out of my love of the books and my curiosity about dicelessness. My attempts to actually run the game failed miserably, but I did get involved in playing AmberMUSH, which was good and bad in many ways.

The real zenslap for me came near the end of college when, intrigued by the back copy and some comments online by Bryant Durrell, I picked up a copy of Over the Edge. Holy crap, that book totally upended my view of games. Sure, the setting was cool and all, but the potent, elegant minimalism of the design absolutely knocked my socks off.

After college I moved to DC and hooked up with some people I'd met on AmberMUSH, and got involved with a very large monthly game involving about 20 people form up and down the east coast who got together, played all day Saturday, drank all night, had breakfast and hangovers on Sunday. It was awesome, all the more because it was really more adult gaming than I was used to. The social element of the game was as big a deal as the game itself, and I really dug that. I also ended up as one of the GMs because, well, I had a knack.

Years of Amber followed. There were other games, sure - Feng Shui was a big hit, and I actually ran some very successful Rolemaster games - but Amber was the default mode of the group. But the thing about Amber is that it's really, really easy to retool. We ran Amber under a ton of different systems, most of them being weird hybrids of ideas stolen from the game book I'd most recently read [4].

Somewhere in here I also started paying attention to what people were doing on the Internet. Fudge was fascinating, and Ron Edwards and John Wick were both writing interesting things in random places. But I tried to stick to the edges. For me, RPG.net was a place for reviews, not forums.

Anyway, towards the end of my time in Maryland, Fred Hicks ran a great Amber game called "Crown of Amber", using Fudge. it was a lot of fun, but what was most telling was that when it came time to end it, Fred ran a final session to actually bring everything to a conclusion. This blew my mind, and when 3e came out, one of my priorities with the Big Epic Game I ran was to have a satisfying conclusion. It worked out OK, I think. That same game also lead to Fred wanting to run another Amber game, Born to Be Kings. FATE was basically invented for that game lut of a long car ride to Lake Tahoe where (Fred and I geeked so hard that it drove his (infinitely tolerant) wife to the other car.

From that point on, things have taken a weird route, weird enough to probably merit their own post someday. But I figure that's a decent snapshot to get a sense how the hell I ended up here.

Extra Bonus: Games I Can Remember That Have Blown Open The Top of My Head[5]

• Over the Edge
• Amber DRPG
• Feng Shui
• Fading Suns
• Run Out The Guns
• Everway
• Dark Space
• FUDGE
• Trollbabe
• Donjon
• Birthright (Setting)
• Planescape (Setting)
• Silver Age Sentinels
• Aria
• Heroquest
• Changeling (both versions)
  

1 - One of my great regrets is that I left the expert box, with all content, on top of the heater one day. it singed a bit, but more importantly, all my dice (my crayoned dice at that) melted.

2 - Which I then programmed. In BASIC. On my Commodore 64.

3 - Including a bootlegged French game on of the guys was translating called "Magnas Veritas" which was more fully titled "Magnas Veritas: In Nomine Satanis", which lead to a big of cognitive dissonance for me a few years later.

4 - I did not make much money, but every payday I took the Metro to Twinbook and walked over to Dream Wizards to see what my extra cash could buy me. Over time, that made for a lot of books.

5 - List is far from comprehensive. I'll be regretting absences all day.

Mulligan

Ok, so it's a non-post-post, but I am willing to blame the complexities tied to 30 inches of snow.

But to be fair to anyone who actually reads this, if you've got a question you want to see me try to answer in the main blog, go ahead and ask in comments. I'll do my level best.

The Price of Books

Writers are, unsurprisingly, good at crafting a narrative. As such, the writers have managed to steer the ship of the Amazon story much more effectively than either Amazon or Macmillain. It's no shock that this narrative favors Macmillan - almost everything about ebook pricing is hypothetical, but amazon not selling books is a direct threat to authors. Its reasonable that they favor the side that keeps selling their books.

Unfortunately, that's resulted in the sense that Amazon blinking was some kind of victory for authors[1], and that worries me. First and foremost, there's a big echo chamber in effect here: the book trade has definitely convinced the book trade that this story went a certain way, but that perception is not reflected quite so fervently in the public press. Sure, there are a few op-ed pieces from authors espousing the party line, but the actual news stories are a lot less invested.

And this leads to things like the declaration of the death of the $9.99 ebook, a declaration that is, I think, a bit presumptive. I've said before that I'm sympathetic to the cost of ebooks being non-zero, but the fact that book nerds grasp the fine points of the pricing enough to appreciate that does not mean that knowledge is widespread[2]. Here's an unfortunate reality: the readers who make up the ebook market are never going to be more saavy than they are today. It is currently a field full of early adopters, and that means there's a high proportion of knowledgeable folks. If the ebook market grows, its going to grow to the people who do not give a crap about the problems of production and distribution: they are people who will look at a product and simply decide if it is too expensive or not based on its own merits.

These people are going to be hard pressed to justify spending $15 on a computer file.

And the thing is, the publishers are more ok with this than not. If the whole ebook idea were to just die, they'd mostly be ok with that - lord knows they were happy to see it happen the first time. Sure, there's be the O'Reillys of the world who might soldier on, but for most big publishers, it's a big unknown that threatens to disrupt their already tenuous business model. Amazon and the kindle made it necessary for them to address the market, but if they can keep it priced high enough to stay a niche market, then that works well for them.

Of course, there's no real chance of that happening.

Book pricing doesn't follow the same rules that many other products have. If I want to buy a book, say Gladwell's "Blink", then it has a price set by the publisher. I might get a better or worse deal based on how steep a discount an individual reseller offers[3] but the base price of the book is fixed. There is no secondary company offering me the same book with a different cover for a lower price tag, or another company offering me the same book with extra bells and whistles for the same price. There's one source, and it dictates the price, without competition.[4]

So now these books are going to move to the ipad at a price set by the publisher, and it'll be high. This'll hurt the larger ebook market[5] and that's going to murder the kindle in the short run. The kindle is expensive, and reasonably priced books are part of its value proposition. The iPad, on the other hand, only has ebooks as an incidental aside, so their price has no part in its value proposition. That is to say, if ebooks are $15, then I might decide not to get a kindle because the total price is too high, but that same price point is unlikely to affect my purchase of an ipad because that's only tangential to why I'm making the purchase.

But here's the problem: The value of ebooks is arbitrary.

Consider for a moment a copy of "Blink". Now imagine a book of the same size filled entirely with thousands of lines of "row, Row, Row your boat". Now, there is a _cost_ difference in producing these two books (paying the write, editor and so on), but per the echo chamber above, no one outside the book trade really gives a crap about that. For the book buyer, looking at these on the shelf, there is a value difference between these two books that he's willing to put a price tag on, but it's always a question what that price point will be. If you price the real book for $15 and the junk book for $0.01, the buyer will balk. The junk book may be junk, but it's clearly worth more than a penny - clearly the difference is just markup. So you try to close that gap.

Now, there _is_ some price point at which the customer will be comfortable, but how your reach it can be rough. Remember, there's no competition, so the market can't really decide what your book is worth, except possibly in terms of other books (is Blink worth more or less than The Tipping Point?). The alternative is that you fix prices.

Now, publishers have been fixing prices forever, so they're ok with this, but that old model doesn't hold up as well online, partly because there's greater visibility, but partly because the feedback cycle is faster. Basically, you need to set a perceived reasonable price (as Apple did with 99 cent music tracks) or else you'll experience a race for the bottom as everyone involved moves to compete on price.

And this is why punting Amazon may ultimately hurt the publishers. The terms were not what they wanted, but Amazon had been very successfully creating a default perceived value for an ebook at 10 bucks. That seems like a terrible thing when you think you can get more than that for an ebook, but its going to look MUCH better when the price you can expect to sell for starts getting lower.

Am I confident that book prices will get driven lower than $10? Absolutely. They will get driven as low as they can while still turning a profit for the publishers[6] unless something artificially keeps them higher. Right now there are a lot of inefficiencies tied up in legacy business (y'know, actual books) but those will get trimmed down with time, technology and outsourcing and prices will reflect that[7] (again, unless they are artificially set in some fashion). Right now, book prices are something of a walled garden more than a marketplace, because the book trade wouldn't survive in its current form in a true market.[8]

I worry that publishers are making a decision in favor of short term gain and fear of change that is, ultimately, going to hurt themselves and the book trade immeasurably. That this may mean greater opportunity for small publishers with new ideas and greater flexibility is cold comfort at best.

(Of course, the reality is that the publishers are probably already colluding to create a fixed price structure on the ipad - it's not going to be a coincidence that their best-sellers are all identically priced - and the question is whether they can get away with it in such a visible place as out in the open on the internet?)

1 - Because authors will see so much more money under this deal...OH WAIT.

2 - Especially since the information out there is laced with a lot of self-serving misinformation.

3 - This, by the way, is part of why the "The publisher takes all the risk, the retailer exploits them!" argument is not as strong as it looks. Retailers need high margins so they can offer deep discounts. This is not a terribly reasonable model.

4 - This is, by the way, why Amazon's complaint about Macmillan's monopoly on their own products is not as silly as it sounds on the surface. It's into a great choice of words simply because it was so easily twisted into a joke, but this sort of exclusivity is actually a real problem, especially if you expect prices to be rational.

5 - Though that pain may mean more opportunity for the small players, and I'm good with that.

6 - The publishers, not the authors.

7 - I don't see that going great for authors, but I may be cynical.

8 - And there's a lot of pain associated with that. Publishers don't come of great in my perspective, but they also get checks to authors and put books on shelves, many of which are _not_ going to be the next best seller. While, as companies, they don't do this out of any generosity, the actual people involved tend to be real book lovers who have chosen this business because of their passion for it, not any sense that books will make you rich. If the book marketplace were to become rational, it would kill the midlist, at least for a while. That would suck immensely, and there's no guarantee that what would come next would be any real improvement.

Live the Fantasy (Football)

I try not to mock things that other people find fun. I don't always succeed, but it’s a good goal. See, I figure I'm totally happy to mock things people find important, because 'important' isn't really that useful a yardstick - lots of dumb things are important. But "fun" is pretty meaningful, in part because it’s sincere – people don’t talk about the things they find fun to sound cool or to impress other people[1]

That sincerity is a big deal, because it's not obvious why people find things fun, especially things you just don't understand. The instinct is often to find ways to justify your original idea (that the thing isn't fun and these people are wrong in some way) and look at it strictly through that lens, but I've consistently found it more valuable to really try to get my head around the fun people are having because that often gives me ideas I can steal for my own fun.

So I've been staring at Fantasy Football. Yes, I've passed around the jokes. It's D&D for people who beat up D&D players in high school. It's nerdier than D&D ever was, it just doesn't know it. Har har.

But, man, people play it. Lots of people. People who would laugh in your face (or at least look very pained) if you were to print up the rules for this game, put it in a box, and expect them to play. That's amazing, and it's something that really makes me stop and think.

Now, the obvious explanation is that fantasy sports succeed because they're tied to something people are already passionate about (sports franchises), it's a social object (people can talk about it[2]) and by extension it's socially acceptable. Those are all valid points, and while I am certain they're contributors, they are equally true about the discussion of the games themselves - there is something more that comes out of the game element of it.

Fantasy Sports still take many forms, and there are lots of variants out there, but their general shape has evolved through heavy use and revisioning[3]. In many ways, they're a better example of "Crowdsourcing" than anything the black turtleneck crowd would put forward (though that's become less true as it's gotten co-opted). For all that, I'd like to point to five things fantasy sports do that might provide useful lessons for other games.

Understanding is Not Required for Decisions
The rules you need to know to play a fantasy sport are incredibly simple. You have a list of players. From that list, decide how you want to fill a team roster this week. Bam. Done.

While it might be helpful towards your final score to understand what the numbers next to someone's name are, it's not necessary for you to be bale to play. You could pick people at random, because you like their team, because you like the sound of their names or because your cat told you to.

Perhaps even more potently, because the score you generate is based on events yet to come (who plays and how well) then there's often a lot of luck in the decisions you make, enough so that *any* method of selection will probably produce enough hits and misses to feel satisfying.

This means that it is incredibly easy to start playing and probably do ok.


Potential for Understanding is Bottomless
If, on the other hand, you want to really delve into the minutiae of the games, you absolutely can. There is more information (stats, news, personalities) than can ever be absorbed, and its utility as a predictive tool is questionable at best. But that's not important. You can gravitate towards whatever level of understanding you are most comfortable with, and that will be a perfectly effective platform to play.

Pacing
"Turns" are long in fantasy sports, and the window of when you need to act is fairly small. As with understanding, this supports many different levels of interest. The guy who just picks out of a hat the day before game day is taking his turn just as well as the guy who spends his week poring over ESPN looking for details.

But that also has an extra bonus: you can be playing the game even when you're not playing the game. For a certain personality (like players of web-based games like Kingdom of Loathing) that's huge. It's a time-filling activity (to say nothing of fodder for discussion) and people are often desperate for that.

Cognitive Focus
It takes a fair amount of knowledge to appreciate most sports. Without it, football is just guys hitting each other, and baseball is a bunch of guys standing around in their pajamas.

The problem is that beyond a certain level of basic understanding, the potential depth of knowledge is HUGE - all the players and coaches, all their stats, all their careers.[4] The average fan is not going to have all that information.

Playing fantasy sports provides a narrow slice of that information you may want to care about - the stats and careers of the players on your roster. You can relax your brain a bit and worry less about the rest of the league, and just worry about "your guys."[5]

Social Game is Supplemental
Like most good games, there is a technical game and a social game to fantasy sports. In this case, the social game is that of trading roster members with other players. Importantly, the Social game can _improve_ the technical game, but it is not *required*. This offers the best of both worlds - players how enjoy the social game can dive in, but more tentative players can stand back, or just dip a toe in if they're inclined.

Using Tools
Fantasy sports are aggressive in their use of tools to make things easier. This is a good sentiment in general, but it also is interesting given how simple the actual act of playing is. If the tools were solely focuses on play, they would be small and sparse, but the reality is that they're robust as all hell. That's because the tools support play, not the game.




Looking at these all together, I want to call out the thread that runs through most of these[6]: letting the player find her own comfort level, and making that rewarding. This is not an idea I see a lot in most games, be they board, RP or video. The assumption of most published games is that there is a particular mode, and the player should be brought to it.

It's not a bad assumption: the tradeoff for that expectation is that it guarantees a certain level of player investment in the game, at least in theory. Still, I can't help but wonder what a game that takes these ideas to heart might look like.[7]



1 - Ok, they sometimes do, but not often, and you can tell. Usually it's because they want to impress someone in particular, and I can forgive that since it's usually under the "Trying to score" umbrella.

2 - And oh god they do. If you want to have your assumption that only geeks of various stripes drone on and on about minutiae nobody cares about from a game, hang out with some Fantasy football fans. I don't say this to criticize the fans but rather to suggest that being a colossal dork is not something limited purely to geeks - it's a human failing, albeit one needs an appropriate trigger.

3 - Rapid Revisioning is another great strength of this form. The rules are not terribly calcified, and there's incentive to tune them every season. Since each season provides copious sample data, there is also enough data to base revisions on.

4 - Some people can rattle this stuff off, and I am in awe of them. It is the greatest proof I know that very few people are truly stupid, rather that people are very smart about things they actually care about, though that list may be quite short.

5 - Paradoxically, reducing interest in the sport at large serves to *increase* interest in the sport at large. Your narrow group of guys you care about give you a reason to care about games and teams you might previously have been indifferent to.

6 - But not all, I concede. Some of the lessons depend on the timeframe fantasy sports operate on, and that's not necessarily applicable to all games. Not to say it can't be informative - play during downtime between sessions is a surprisingly robust topic.

7 - To some extent, this is something Fred and I have kicked around a lot, leading to the initial idea of FATE as a "fractal" design. There's an idealized game out there where character sheets trade off granularity for control, so one player might have a simple, Risus or OTE-like character sheet while another might have a vastly detailed one. As an example, imagine a World of Darkness game where my character sheet said "Ex-Soldier ********, Phone Phreak ******, Bully *****" and Fred had a fully filled out sheet. For 90% of the game, those two sheets could be used equally well with only a few rubrics in my head for handling odd cases. The advantage is that first sheet is appealing to one sort of player, but the second appeals to another. The ultimate question is how you turn those into a scale that people can find their place on.

Solipsistic MUSHing

Just a quick though in a particular flavor of geekiness.

In MUSHing, a lot of players are uncomfortable assuming GM authority, even for a single scene, because they are uncomfortable about the boundaries. This is rough to wrestle with, but I wonder if it might be addressed by creating a lesser, but perhap smore intuitive, level of authority: that of the protagonist.

The idea is simple: in a given room, one player is the protagonist. If this was a book, it would be about their character. If other players aren't cool with that, they go elsewhere[1] but otherwise, he can resolve issues and answer questions based on how it suits his story. It requires no broader knowledge of the game, nor authority beyond ht escope of regular play, it simply makes it clear where the focus of things is, and allows for that to flow.

Certainly some protagonists may be selfish, others generous, and that's fine because it works either way. Because you're not opting into a another player's authority, you're opting into their story, and that's a very different sort of dynamic. And ideally also helps address the instinctive 14 year old in a lot of MUSHers.

Anyway, not a lot of bandwidth today, So I figured I'd share one of the weirder ones.

1 - This can even be handled with virtual spaces, as a nice compromise between all stages and fixed geography. If I want to be in a location, but I want to do it for my story, not for the guy who's already there, then I can 'shard' the location, creating a new version which is "Bob's Dark Alley", and it'll show up appropriately on exits and such (so people in the adjacent room might see Dark Alley, Steve's Dark Alley and Bob's Dark Alley and be able to at least glimpse who is in what. There's also a lot of implicit information in this kind of sharding: you can automatically find out where scenes are happening in a location, and you can also pass through or around them if it does not interest you.

Artifacts of Play

I had an interesting exchange with Ethan Skemp the other day[1] about the selfishness or generosity of the art of RPGs. One one hand, RPGs are very selfish: they create something ephemeral for a small group of people, usually with a lot of effort and creativity going into that creation. That much work for so few people seems inherently selfish. On the other hand, that ephemeral nature means putting in a lot of effort with neither reward nor recognition. When you are finished, there is no novel or painting to show, only an experience, and the act of putting so much effort into something without something concrete to walk away with an add to your CV is an exceedingly generous one[2].


I feel like these things are both true, and I don't see a lot of mileage in resolving the contradiction. Life is full of contradictions, and if you can coax one out into the light, it's wiser to leave it there so you know where it is.

But this did remind me of something that's been bugging me for a while. I have played in a great many games in my life. Most have been fun, and a handful have been really powerful, really amazing experiences. The problem is that unlike other powerful experiences in my life, from which I tend to have photos or other mementos, there are very few artifacts of these experiences.


There are exceptions. For Fred's magnificent "Born to be Kings" game (seriously: READ THE QUOTES), we commissioned an artist to do character portraits for the group and gave them out at Christmas. My wife and I also shelled out for our own characters to make a complete set. We still have them, framed and hung with pride of place in our home. I walk past them and the memories come back.

But for most other games, the best I can hope for is that I might find a folder full of old character sheet some day. That seems a lackluster fate for something that may actually be quite important to me, and i find myself wrestling with a question: how can the pursuit of this hobby create artifacts that celebrate it?

There are some obvious ones - art, for example, can work. However, it's a bit tricky to do remotely, and we're not all lucky enough to have Storn Cook at our table. More traditional trappings, like dice and books, are a bit less compelling because of their fungibility[3]. Those may be the dice I used for a particular great game, but I could have used them for any game, so there's no natural association with the game I want to remember.

If I want to shell out a little bit of money I can easily make mementos. Cafe Press or the many corporate branding sites make that relatively easy. And that's an option, certainly, but it's external to the game.

The web is a weird hybrid space for such things. One one hand I still love the flash movie for Second Stringers, but on the other hand it's not quite a physical thing.

What this all comes down to for me is the question of whether it is possible for the creation of artifacts to be part of play. Maybe as part of the rules, maybe as part of the social structure around it, I dunno.

In retrospect, I think I'm inspired by this in large part by my experience with the Amber DRPG, where player contributions were rewarded with points, and many of the contributions explicitly created artifact of play, whether they were short stories, character journals or (most prized) decks of trumps.[4] Maybe the success of the idea can be laid at the feet of player reward, but that got diluted by also rewarding efforts that leave no legacy (like bringing food) so that's muddied. But at the same time, that invitation to create is, I think, one of the reasons that the ADRPG fandom is such a robust one.

I'd love to see ways to make this work in other games, especially longer campaigns (though a memento of a good one shots would be both cool and a great thing for conventions) but almost every solution I can think of is a bit too ad hoc. Maybe that's how it has to be, but maybe not.

So let me ask, oh ye who have been patient enough to get this far, have you had any games create artifacts or mementos? How and what kind?


1 – Oh yeah, watch him namedrop like a MOFO

2 - While there's something to be said in comparing it to performance art - the performance is a fleeting thing - most performance has a degree of repeatability. Sure, two showings of Hamlet will never be identical, but you an still do it again, or at least try to. You can't really do that with a game session. There's probably some overlap with improv performance in that regard, but that also usually has a bit more of an audience, so it's less muddy.

3 - This is one of the roughest parts about using cards for play. They're so interchangeable that it's hard to build strong associations with them the way you can with a character sheet. if I ever figure out a good card-based ruleset, one step is going to involve marking cards with a sharpie so they can't even be used for anyone else.

4 - Cards with images of characters and places. In the setting they are artifacts used for transportation and communication.

Books

My writing time this weekend was eclipsed by other things (both writing wise and sick-kid wise) so I'm going to fall back on a few bullet points about this whole Amazon/Macmillan nonsense.

• Neither of these companies is doing it for the customers. Customers are bags of money, and they both want to get more of that money. I've seen supporters of each side talk about how the other company isn't really interested in customers. And they're right. They just are operating under some sort of delusion that their team is different.
  
  
• Ebooks are not free. Even setting aside the costs of paying the writer, editor and other folks involved in the actual creation of content, storing, distributing and maintaining the electronic files introduces costs.
  
  
• However, it is not unreasonable to expect that ebooks are cheaper to produce (printing), distribute (shipping), and warehouse (storage). [1] While the costs for doing these things are non-zero, they are also costs that diminish as they scale up.
  
  
• Most of the reason this is any kind of argument is that neither side is particularly transparent about their figures, and the figures that they put forward are usually so obviously cooked as to be useless.[2] This is, by the way, a good indicator that both sides are on shaky ground. If one side was clearly in the right, they could break down the costs and make their case.
  
  
• Macmillan expects too high a price for ebooks. Seriously. They're nuts, and the iPad will not save them.
  
  
• Amazon's desire to control the ebook market has made them handled this very stupidly indeed.[3]
  
  
• In a vacuum, authors have every reason to back Macmillan because they need their books to be sold. Amazon taking down the books was a punch right in the affiliate link. Authors talk a lot, and do so reasonably well. That meant there were a lot more voices making the case for why Amazon were a bunch of poopy heads than the reverse. Amazon was already losing the perception war when they decided to so profoundly misuse the term monopoly as to start a meme. Authors are marketers, whether they accept that or not, and this was a marketing conflict.[4]
  
  
• The fact that one side was better marketed than the other, even accidentally, has no actual correlation to rightness.
  
  
• EDIT TO ADD: None of this forgive amazon apparently having its head firmly up its ass. They could have been entirely on the side of angels, but handling it the way they did was flipping the bird to everyone who might have been sympathetic, including authors. Authors know that publishers are bastards, and they're great spokesmen (see above) so punching them in the head with no explanation is not a great way to start out making your case.
  
  
• This was not a war, or even a real skirmish. This was a shot across the bow at best. In 10 years this will seem so charmingly dated as to be funny. Publishing and bookseller is going to change dramatically and disruptively over the coming years. And for people who have made it, the successful authors, it's going to either be a time of great opportunity or of vast and painful suckage. But I think a lot of authors have already seen this coming - this is already an era where authors need to be their own champion to survive, and that's going to become more true than less.
  
  
• I am sympathetic to the idea that as a writer you just want to write, not deal with also being a marketer and so on. That fact is, i think, going to have some big impact on the role of agents in the future. But the unpleasant reality is that if its your job, then you are subject to the whims of the industry. That can suck. I know. I feel you. But I work in a goddamned cloth covered cubicle, so my sympathy has limits.[5]
  
  
• Seriously. The book trade is a byzantine mess. The numbers on who buys books and how many they buy can break your heart. Book lovers are killing bookstores. The distinction between loving reading and loving books is leading to knife fights. Disruptive change is going to hurt, maybe a lot, but there's a case to be made that it's just what we need.

1 - All of which to say nothing of avoiding taxation on backstock and punative returns, two of the poison pills of the book trade today.

2 - If, for example, as MacMillan claims, printing represents only 1% of the cost of a book, I admit I wonder what magical trees they are using to get their paper. Oh, I'm sure it's true if looked at just the right way, but that's spin where transparency is desirable.

3 - On this point I concede that it's possible that Jeff Bezos is an ebook true believer - a lot of Amazon's decisions can be seen as promoting the medium, albeit on Amazon's terms. Ebooks and ebook readers are more than 15 years old at this point, but it took the Kindle to make it a viable market. Of course, the counterargument is that this was a cynical ploy: Amazon created the market so they could control it. Might be true. Truth is probably more mixed.

4 - This is more true of the internet than the real world, but we're talking about ebooks here, and most of that audience is on the internet.

5 - I know several authors and all of them work their asses off, and they are exactly the kinds of folks who I think will weather the transition well. If I sound snarky at authors, lets just say that some sound a lot more entitled than others.