WrongBot

I have many more words forthcoming on the problem that has so oddly been labelled "piracy." But not yet, not today. Today, I have been rather cruelly preempted by the fine gentlemen over at Penny Arcade, who have an astonishing gift for saying in three panels what I could not say in a book. Read today's edition of their fine comic, and marvel at their wisdom.

This is the first part of an occasional series on consumerism. 

Every time you buy something on sale, you're contributing to the destruction of our entire economy.

Or, maybe that's a touch strong. Maybe not every time you buy something on sale. Maybe just most of the time.

I should back up and explain, probably. As many of you may have noticed, our economy is a touch in the shitter at the moment. The obvious and proximal causes for this are complicated and boring and mostly involve bankers doing terribly naughty things because no one in our government was paying enough attention to stop them. That stuff is pretty bad news, but unfortunately there's not much we can individually do about that, unless we happen to be bankers, members of the SEC, or congresspersons not yet purchased on the open market.

All that messy financial market stuff accounts for the depression going on in our financial markets: the real estate prices, the stock market, derivatives, all that stuff I don't really know much about. And that stuff has an impact on things that matter to real people, like wages and unemployment. But (and, as a disclaimer, I don't know anything about economics; everything here that's based on any sort of technical knowledge has been gleaned from the words of those far more knowledgeable than I) the banking shenanigans of the last couple years don't entirely account for all the bad stuff that's trickled down to the rest of us, especially depression of real wages and underemployment, both of which are things government statistics are good at ignoring.

The other factors that contribute to those kinds of problems are many and complicated, but one of them (and I think this is one of the more significant ones) is the disconnect that exists in our culture between price and value. The price of a good or service is how much you pay for it; this fluctuates a lot over time and between goods and services in the same category. Value is how much a thing is worth; this varies quite a bit within classes of goods because some things are of higher quality than others, but it doesn't vary nearly so much over time, because things don't suddenly become much less useful on the day after Thanksgiving.

The disconnect I'm talking about is this: when we think about how much a thing is worth, we think about the minimum possible amount we can expect to pay for such a thing. This is an unfortunate instinct that can be quite hard to shrug off, even when one is aware of it. And one often isn't.

(For this essay, I'll be drawing on the music industry for a series of examples; other essays to follow will draw on other kinds of products.)

Think about, now, briefly, how much an album of music is worth. Most albums sell for $9.99 on iTunes; CDs in big-box retailers are more expensive; CDs in independent record stores are, on average, more expensive still. But when we think about the value of an album, we tend to think that all albums are approximately equal in value. There are sales and such, discounts on older music, occasional premiums for the most popular stuff. But the price of an album has very little to do with how good it is, and so when we think of the value of an album (which is, still, a dollar value), we don't price discriminate much based on quality. Or, at least, I don't think that people do. I have a big stack of CDs on my desk as I write this, and if you were to ask me if I thought that any of those were worth even twice as much as any other, I'm not sure that I'd be able to say that was true. But I certainly have CDs on my desk that are ten times better others, and would freely admit as much.

There's a disconnect there. It's a problem. Without being able to perform that kind of price discrimination individually, our markets can't do it either. Good musicians make no more money, per unit, than bad ones, even when you take the effects of popularity into account. So our markets don't incentivize good music, just popular music. There's your explanation for the 90's.

The 00's are even worse, from the standpoint of this particular theory, because our disconnect between price and value has gotten worse. Way worse. We now live in a world where the minimum price you can expect to pay for a piece of music is zero dollars. And if people have trouble telling price and value apart, which I think it's clear that they do, then there are a lot of people who think that recorded music isn't worth anything at all. Now, this is an obviously erroneous belief, because these people listen to music, and therefore it has value to them. But they don't realize that. They think that the value is the price, which is nothing. And by "they," I mean "all of us." 

Well, except for me. I don't engage in piracy. My brain's value of an album is firmly connected to what I pay for them -- $9.99, usually. But most people pirate music, despite the obvious immorality and illegality of doing so, so most people have at least some part of them that thinks that recorded music is entirely worthless. This belief reinforces itself: if music isn't worth dollars, then who on earth would pay dollars for music? I'll just download some of that for free, thank you very much, and in doing so I will reinforce my beliefs as to the value of said music.

This is, of course, far from restricted to the music industry. Piracy extends to many other forms of digital media, and the price-value disconnect extends everywhere, from Walmart to Wall Street. I'll be writing some more on this topic in the coming weeks. In the mean time, I'd like you to think about your favorite album of music, and ask yourself a question: what is the greatest amount of money I would be willing to pay for this collection of music? The absolute maximum. Decide what that dollar figure is, to you. That's how much music is worth.

(With immense thanks to my father, who provided many of the ideas upon which this essay is based.) 

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has an excellent piece (mildly NSFW) up today about Second Life and how people in the industry seem to be ignoring the market for games with sex in them, as Second Life's own developer, Linden Labs, seem to be. Which is a bit silly, as Quinns points out, considering the big chunk of the Second Life economy that sex-goods represent. But I'm not much of an expert on Second Life, so instead I'm going to try to answer the question presented near the end of that article: "Why is it the only people in the West making millions of dollars from videogame sex or simulated romance are amateurs working within someone else’s game?"

This is, I think, an excellent question. For all the idiotic noise in the network media about Hot Coffee or the SEXBOX, there aren't really any mainstream games at all with sex in them (with the exception of user created content, which is a whole different kettle of fish). Sure, you've got games with plenty of anything-but-the-pink-bits nudity (Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball, Bayonetta, countless others), and there are a few RPGs that don't shy away from PG-13 love scenes with characters you've spent some time romancing (The Witcher, anything Bioware), but certainly no graphic sex, and certainly no games that are centered around it. Those RPGs are about saving the world or other such heroic nonsense, and offer romantic sub-plots as a break from the action. Games with scantily clad female heroines are about playing volleyball or beating up angels or shooting people or some combination thereof, and the fact that said heroines are wearing next to nothing is hardly ever mentioned within the context of the game itself; it's just eye-candy for the player needing no particular explanation.

But there aren't any (Western) games that are either substantially about sex or that use sex as any kind of game mechanic. This is because it would be very odd indeed to make a game that fit into the former category without including it in the latter category as well. And there are no games that fit into that latter category because, from a game design standpoint, well, it's hard.

People don't use sex as a game mechanic because no one's figured out how to do it right. How do you show sex on screen, offer the player control, and have that be engaging for a period of time longer than it will take for him or her to rub one out? I certainly don't have the faintest clue, and I'm not even sure that it's possible. Over in Japan there are a few titles that offer you the ability to effectively "direct" sex scenes in progress (of which the famously reprehensible RapeLay is one[links NSFW]), but for the most part they don't seem to have much "game" to them, being rather more like an interactive porn DVD, a thing which I'm also told exists. This is not an area about which I'm particularly knowledgeable (or at least, certainly not that I'd be willing to admit. My mother reads this blog, after all. Hi mom!), but I'm fairly confident that if it had been done well or interestingly it would have made a sizable splash on our shores.

As for why sexy game mechanics are hard? I don't think that's hard to explain. If we had halfway decent VR technology, or teledildonics, or perhaps even something like the Wii Motion Plus (which I think we can all safely assume that Nintendo would never allow to be used for such purposes), things might be different. But too much of what happens with sex requires haptic or tactile feedback to be engaging, and that's not something modern interfaces provide. So until the day that such technology arrives, I think we're stuck with Second Life, erogames, and beach volleyball. Grim times, my friends, grim times.

Inspired by a comment made over on the atheist subsection of reddit, I have a few things to say about what one poster called the "Catch-22 Tree."

To be honest, I expected a little better from a blog titled Feminism, Sex, and the Liberated Mind. And, well, this Halloween piece starts out okay. Commercialism bad, objectification bad, sexism bad, and so on. Not the most original of sentiments, sure, but this stuff sort of explodes all over the place in the days leading up to Halloween each year. So, no points lost so far. By paragraph three the language starts to get a little worrisome, but still, relatively safe territory. Young girls dressing sluttishly opening the door for pedophilia is an argument I'm not sure I'd agree with, but it's still well within the realm of reasoned disagreement.

Oh, but by paragraph four this article's earlier promise has been thoroughly fulfilled. Sluts! Sluts everywhere! They're cold and I want to slap them! Jessica definitely doesn't like sluts. And she sure doesn't want girls to have "the expectation that Halloween is a time to dress like a slut and get away with it" (emphasis mine). Because no one should get away with being a slut. Women should be punished for dressing immodestly, and we can't allow girls to grow up thinking that it's okay for them to be loose women. It's all the fault of "expectations laid down by the porn industry," corrupting our youth and convincing them to act like whores. Also, objectification! The only reason women dress like sluts on Halloween is so that men will look at them, and that's bad!

I've run out of palms for my face. To be honest, I'm not even sure where to start. This person holds a graduate degree! And her other posts aren't much better, judging by this post's argument that capitalism is sexist because women's shoes are more expensive than men's.

Okay, wait. I do know where to start. Jessica calls herself a feminist. This is, more than anything else, my problem. People are going to run around thinking (and saying) dumb things. That's basically inevitable, and if I were to write angry blog posts at all of them (what power I have!), I'd never have time go out and do all the things they disapprove of. But being a misogynist while calling yourself a feminist, that's a little different. That's pushed me into flame-mode. There are few things I like less than hypocrisy (broccoli and cryptic error messages are the only things that come to mind).

Some people think that sex is shameful or wrong and that it should be carefully controlled and performed only with your One True Love or only in the confines of marriage. Or performed not at all. And some "feminists" hold this view. I use the scare-quotes because I am thoroughly convinced that this opinion is incompatible with anything even resembling feminism. But there's a shocking amount of disagreement about this, so I will lay out my argument as carefully as I can:

• If a type of behavior causes harm to both those who practice it and those who do not, and offers no benefit to anyone, it's bad.
• Promiscuity is such a behavior, according to this line of thinking. It's bad for "good" women, and women who are promiscuous can't possibly be happy.
• So, women who are promiscuous are acting badly.
• If they're acting badly and it's not making them happy, then they must be misguided.
• So all women who have made the choice to be promiscuous are misguided.
• Thus, no woman could ever reasonably choose to be promiscuous of her own free will.

This line of reasoning leads us to the conclusion that there are some choices that reasonable women just can't make. So no matter what a woman says about how happy and fulfilled she is, if she's promiscuous she's either misguided or lying. Now, I've always thought that feminism was about giving more freedom to women. It strikes me as anathema to its central tenets to instead try to take freedoms away from women, but that's exactly what Jessica and the many people who agree with her are doing. Though really, it's worse than that. They're not just trying to take away the freedom to behave a certain way, they're trying to take away the freedom to even disagree. If you disagree with them, you're not just wrong, you've been influenced by pornography. Or the patriarchy. You can't possibly hold the opinion that you do of your own free will, because no real woman would think that way.

Luckily, there are plenty of sane people out there who don't hold this view. Some of them even let Dan Savage write in a newspaper! In his infinite wisdom, he has defended the wonderful hetero-sluttiness of Halloween, making the argument that it's just the holiday that straight people need, as they head down the road to being less sexually repressed. Go read it. I'm out of things to say, and he's more articulate than I am.