An aside in the book I’m reading sparked a thought I figured might be worth sharing. First, the snippet:
From our e-mail providers to our mobile-phone carriers, most companies’ business models are too lucrative to risk by mishandling our personal information and angering the consumer. So it is safe to say that despite the many potential risks represented by the volumes of data available, our past is relatively well safeguarded.
Which reminded me a lot of economic definition of brand. Here’s The Economist’s dictionary of terms on the meaning of brand:
Many economists regard brands as a good thing, however. A brand provides a guarantee of reliability and quality. Consumer trust is the basis of all brand values. So companies that own the brands have an immense incentive to work to retain that trust. Brands have value only where consumers have choice. The arrival of foreign brands, and the emergence of domestic brands, in former communist and other poorer countries points to an increase in competition from which consumers gain. Because a strong brand often requires expensive advertising and good marketing, it can raise both price and barriers to entry. But not to insurperable levels: brands fade as tastes change; if quality is not maintained, neither is the brand.
A brand is a promise: The more valuable it is, the less a company can afford it to be broken.
I wonder, though, whether that’s as true now as it was in earlier times. The example I’ve heard most for thinking of brands in this is not killing your customers. You pay more for a Pepsi than some random house brand because you know it won’t be poisoned (you also know it will always taste the same). But something seems to be changing, especially with digital brands. Maybe it’s that there’s more of them or maybe we have far lower expectations, but I feel like large brands frequently have data breaches or other terrible things and we forgive them in a way that doesn’t really jibe with the two paragraphs above.
If we don’t hold our brands responsible, the very meaning of brand changes. Part of it is that it’s easier to show outrage than it ever was, so when people get up in arms about Facebook’s latest privacy change I suspect it’s not real. Part of it may be the insanity of the news cycle: TJ Maxx loses millions of credit cards and its only a big deal for a day. But none of it explains how a bunch of banks that nearly sunk the economy are able to bounce back (except, maybe, regular brand laws don’t apply to oligopolies).
No matter what, something is different and its important that we understand what it means.
Great … A whole new version of “the slide,” this time for mobile …
(via 2012 Internet Trends — Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers )
nba:
(Photo by Carolyn Herter/NBAE via Getty Images)
Paul Krugman wrote an interesting little post on the use of language by liberals and conservatives over the last few years. His basic argument is that while conservatives complained of “political correctness” from liberals, they’ve now taken on the strategy to a frightening degree: “Thus, even talking about ‘the wealthy’ brings angry denunciations; we’re supposed to call them ‘job creators’. Even talking about inequality is ‘class warfare’.”
It’s an interesting way to think about it, but it’s not actually what I wanted to share. He ends the post with this story of how science fiction worked in the Soviet Union:
The author — if anyone remembers where this came from — noted that most science fiction is about one of two thoughts: “if only”, or “if this goes on”. Both were subversive, from the Soviet point of view: the first implied that things could be better, the second that there was something wrong with the way things are. So stories had to be written about “if only this goes on”, extolling the wonders of being wonderful Soviets.
[Editor’s Note: Prepare for some jumping between thoughts here.]
First off, I’m trying to blog more, which you’ll be able to tell by the fact I’ve written a few things over the last few days. Whether this actually stays consistent only time will tell.
Second (and actual point of this post) thing, I want to connect a few pieces together about video games I’ve run in to. I don’t have answers, but I think it’s interesting. So here it goes.
Nicholas Carr linked to a scathing review of the effects of casual/social games and gamification by Rob Horning:
Gamification is awful for many reasons, not least in the way it seeks to transform us into atomized laboratory rats, reduce us to the sum total of our incentivized behaviors. But it also increases the pressure to make all game playing occur within spaces subject to capture; it seeks to supply the incentives to make games not about relaxation and escape and social connection but about data generation. The networked mediation of games — in other words, playing them on your phone or through Facebook — undermines the function of games in organizing face-to-face social time, guaranteeing presence in an unobtrusive way. Instead we typically take our turn in mediated games on our time and play multiple games at once, to cater to our convenience and our desire to be winning at least one of them.
Which reminded me a lot of this article from late last year about Cow Clicker, a satire of games like Farmville that against the designer Ian Bogost’s hopes actually became popular itself. Here’s how Cow Clicker worked:
The rules were simple to the point of absurdity: There was a picture of a cow, which players were allowed to click once every six hours. Each time they did, they received one point, called a click. Players could invite as many as eight friends to join their “pasture”; whenever anyone within the pasture clicked their cow, they all received a click. A leaderboard tracked the game’s most prodigious clickers. Players could purchase in-game currency, called mooney, which they could use to buy more cows or circumvent the time restriction. In true FarmVille fashion, whenever a player clicked a cow, an announcement—”I’m clicking a cow“—appeared on their Facebook newsfeed.
And what happened next:
And then something surprising happened: Cow Clicker caught fire. The inherent virality of the game mechanics Bogost had mimicked, combined with the publicity, helped spread it well beyond its initial audience of game-industry insiders. Bogost watched in surprise and with a bit of alarm as the number of players grew consistently, from 5,000 soon after launch to 20,000 a few weeks later and then to 50,000 by early September. And not all of those people appeared to be in on the joke. The game received its fair share of five-star and one-star reviews from players who, respectively, appreciated the gag or simply thought the game was stupid. But what was startling was the occasional middling review from someone who treated Cow Clicker not as an acid commentary but as just another social game. “OK, not great though,” one earnest example read.
Which brings me to this snippet from a pretty good Atlantic profile of video game designer Jonathan Blow:
As a developer whose independent success has emancipated him from the grip of the monolithic game corporations, Blow makes a habit of lobbing rhetorical hand grenades at the industry. He has famously branded so-called social games like FarmVille “evil” because their whole raison d’être is to maximize corporate profits by getting players to check in obsessively and buy useless in-game items. (In one talk, Blow managed to compare FarmVille’s developers to muggers, alcoholic-enablers, Bernie Madoff, and brain-colonizing ant parasites.) Once, during an online discussion about the virtues of short game-playing experiences, Blow wrote, “Gamers seem to praise games for being addicting, but doesn’t that feel a bit like Stockholm syndrome?” His entire public demeanor forms a challenge to the genre’s intellectual laziness.
Now I’m not sure how I feel about any of this really. I’ve found myself trapped by games, unable to put down the controller until my hands were so sore I was worried about doing permanent damage. I’m not proud of the fact that I was totally obsessed with Ski Safari (I’ve almost broken the habit). I think it’s good that there is another side to the endless games are great conversation (other than the side that says the people who talk about gamification are dumb). Not sure I have more of an answer than that at the moment.
One more thing from the article about Blow before I’m done. I particularly liked this explanation of how video games are really like movies. We frequently talk about how when a new medium is created the first thing people try to do is recreate the old medium. It’s logical and the examples people trot out (first TV broadcast was radio in front of the camera), it’s never really well explained. Thought this was pretty good:
Blow’s refusal to explain the meaning of his games, after all, stems from a profound respect for his art. Ever since modern technology first made sophisticated video games possible, developers have assumed that the artistic fate of the video game is to become “film with interactivity”—game-play interwoven with scenes based on the vernacular of movies. And not just any movies. “The de facto reference for a video game is a shitty action movie,” Blow said during a conversation in Chris Hecker’s dining room one sunny afternoon. “You’re not trying to make a game like Citizen Kane; you’re trying to make Bad Boys 2.” But questions of movie taste notwithstanding, the notion that gaming would even attempt to ape film troubles Blow. As Hecker explained it: “Look, film didn’t get to be film by trying to be theater. First, they had to figure out the things they could do that theater couldn’t, like moving the camera around and editing out of sequence—and only then did film come into its own.” This was why Citizen Kane did so much to put filmmaking on the map: not simply because it was well made, but because it provided a rich experience that no other medium before it could have provided.
I’ll leave you with that. Lots of thoughts about video games. No answers.
Yesterday I wrote about David Grann’s amazing New Yorker essay on William Morgan, an American revolutionary in Cuba. While I was reading I remembered thinking to myself, “that’s a great sentence, I should blog that,” but then I couldn’t find it again when I finished (I should have just underlined it in the magazine). Anyway, it came back to me last night and I wrote myself a note (only to not be able to find that … can’t figure out which of my three different self-organization systems I sent it to). Upon rummaging around I found it agin. (Italics are mine to denote the sentence I’m particularly fond of.)
Hoover and his men tried to detect a hidden design in the data they were collecting. They were witnessing history without the clarity of hindsight or narrative, and it was like peering through a windshield lashed with rain. As Hoover confronted the gaps in his knowledge, he became more and more obsessed with Morgan. A former fire-eater at the circus! Hoover hounded his evidence men to “expedite” their inquiries, homing in on Morgan’s ties to Dominick Bartone. The mobster, whom the bureau classified as “armed and dangerous,” had recently been arrested with his associates at Miami International Airport, where they had been caught loading a plane with thousands of pounds of weapons—a shipment apparently destined for mercenaries and Cuban exiles being trained in the Dominican Republic.
Also, since writing yesterday’s post I was informed that David Grann also wrote the amazing Guatemala murder article from the New Yorker last year (which I included in my top longform of 2011) as well as one of the most fun books I’ve read in a long time: Lost City of Z. He also has a new book out called The Devil and Sherlock Holmes and my fine friends over at Longform.org have compiled a reading list of his finest writing. Awesome awesome awesome.
.. via NoahBrier.com: http://bit.ly/JQwrWg ..
Oldsmobile Rocket 88 and Other Gibson Memories -
Loved this first paragraph of William Gibson’s explanation of what drew him to science fiction:
Some of my earliest memories are of science fiction. Not of prose fiction, or of film, but of the cultural and industrial semiotics of the American nineteen-fifties: the interplanetarily themed chrome trim on my father’s Oldsmobile Rocket 88; the sturdy injection-molded styrene spacemen on the counter at Woolworth’s (their mode of manufacture more predictive than their subject, as it turned out); the gloriously baroque Atomic Disintegrator cap pistol (Etsy currently has one on offer, in “decent vintage” condition, for two hundred and fifty dollars); Chesley Bonestell’s moodily thrilling illustrations for Willy Ley’s book “The Conquest of Space.” They were all special to me, these things, and I remember my mother remarking on this to her friends. Not that I was very unusual in my obsession. The zeitgeist was chewy with space-flavored nuggets, morsels of futuristic design, precursors of a Tomorrow whose confident glow was visible beyond the horizon of all that was less wonderful, provided one had eyes to see it.
Was poking around my Kindle highlights (looking to see if there was a way to export them easily) and I ran across a quote from Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s biography “I Am Zlatan”. I was going to post that and then I thought, maybe I should just post lots of sports stuff in one big post, so that’s what I’m doing. No rhyme or reason here, just some interesting sports-related stuff I’ve run into lately.
First the quote from Zlatan on a player’s relationship with their team:
The management owned my flesh and bones, in a sense. A footballer at my level is a bit like an orange. The club squeezes it until there’s no juice left, and then it’s time to sell the guy on. That might sound harsh, but that’s how it is. It’s part of the game. We’re owned by the club, and we’re not there to improve our health; we’re there to win, and sometimes even the doctors don’t know where they stand. Should they view the players as patients or as products in the team? After all, they’re not working in a general hospital, they’re part of the team. And then you’ve got yourself. You can speak up. You can even scream, this isn’t working. I’m in too much pain. Nobody knows your body better than you yourself.
What else?
Everything from Grantland has been amazing lately. I think that’s the best site going on the web right now. It houses my favorite sportswriter, Brian Phillips (if you haven’t read it, I can’t recommend his ~100 part series of his Football Manager escapades), everything else is generally excellent, and I read the funniest thing I’ve read in awhile there recently. Here’s Bill Simmons on Dexter Pittman’s flagrant foul at the end of Miami/Indiana game 5 (here’s the video in case you missed it):
Dexter: “Yeah, that!”
LeBron: “I saw it, thanks for that. You’re probably getting suspended, though.”
Dexter: “Yeah, but he’ll never give you the choke sign again, that’s for sure! I SHOWED HIM!”
LeBron: “You sure did, Darius.”
Dexter: “Dexter.”
LeBron: “I mean Dexter.”
Dexter: “If you want, I could try to run him over in the parking lot as he’s walking to the Pacers’ bus.”
LeBron: “No, I think we’re cool.”
Dexter: “You want to grab something to eat?”
LeBron: “I can’t, I made plans.”
Dexter: “Want to play video games sometime?”
LeBron: “I don’t really play video games anymore.”
Dexter: “Well, if you ever want to hang, lemme know.”
LeBron: “Sure thing, Darius.”
In other NBA-related reading, Wages of Wins, which tries to put some science behind the ranking of players, has been excellent throughout the playoffs. Here’s how they explained Lebron’s play in case you were curious:
A superstar gives your team a five point edge being on the court. With this scale in hand let’s point something out. LeBron James has played 10 playoff games so far this season. In 4 of them, he’s put up a PoP of +10!
Lebron is playing twice as good as a superstar in the playoffs. That’s mind boggling. Oh, and before I finish the basketball section, the New Yorker wrote a little about former Knick, Latrell Spreewell.
On to soccer, put this on Tumblr earlier, but Michael Bradley’s goal against Scotland was magical. If you missed the insane last day of Premier League soccer in the UK, I highly recommend reading 200 Percent’s recap.
And since I’m writing about sports, if you’ve never read it, go back and read David Foster Wallace’s “profile” of Roger Federer from 2006. It’s magic.
That’s all, have a good Memorial Day.
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Not sure what to say about this VERY long New Yorker article about William Morgan, an American solider in the Cuban revolution, other than it’s incredibly detailed a well-written. Give yourself plenty of time to get through it, though, as it’s a good 20 pages long. Here’s a quick paragraph to give you a taste:
Menoyo cursed under his breath as both sides began shooting. Bullets split trees in half, and a bitter-tasting fog of smoke drifted over the mountainside. The thunderous sounds of the guns made it nearly impossible to communicate. A Batista soldier was hit in the shoulder, a scarlet stain seeping through his uniform, and he tumbled down the mountain like a boulder. The commander of the Army patrol retrieved the wounded soldier and, along with the rest of his men, retreated into the wilderness, leaving a trail of blood.