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Manifesto destiny

September 27, 2005 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

My old friend, game designer extraordinaire Greg Costikyan, has been ranting about the depressing state of the games industry recently. Tonight he announced that he is getting off his rhetorical duff and going to try to do something about its problems. He quit his job and is forming a new company called Manifesto Games.

  Its motto is “PC Gamers of the World Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Retail Chains!” And its purpose, of course, will be to build what I’ve been talking about: a viable path to market for independent developers, and a more effective way of marketing and distributing niche PC game styles to gamers.

Greg is also planning to write about the whole process of launching the company on his blog. Since he’s argued that one of the roots of the industry’s malaise is its business structure, he intends to write publicly about the fascinating game of financing his startup. He’s a sharp writer and he doesn’t suffer fools gladly, so that should be…fun!

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Deja vu all over again

September 25, 2005 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

Those of us who lived through successive waves of the media industry’s infatuation with the Internet from 1996 through 2000 or so may have thought we’d seen every possible folly that can arise when people mistake the Web for a broadcast medium. We had Webshows and Netshows and Netcasts and all manner of awfulness from MSN and AOL, Time-Warner and the TV networks and Disney. (I fumed in Salon about this profusion of “channels” on the youthful Web back in 1997.) When the dot-com bubble broke, it seemed we could finally bid farewell to the delusion that you can “program” for the Web just like you program TV. Through all of that nuttiness, Yahoo was one of a small handful of companies that seemed to understand the fundamentally un-TV-ish nature of the Web, and it profited steadily from that understanding.

So I nearly sputtered out a mouthful of coffee Saturday morning when I read the New York Times’ piece about Lloyd Braun, the former TV exec who is now running a big chunk of Yahoo.

  As chairman of ABC’s entertainment group, Mr. Braun had a penchant for big offbeat concepts like “Lost,” which won the Emmy for best drama. At Yahoo, why not create programs in genres that have worked on TV but not really on the Web? Sitcoms, dramas, talk shows, even a short daily humorous take on the news much like Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” are in the works…. So Mr. Braun’s job is straightforward: invent a medium that unites the showmanship of television with the interactivity of the Internet.

If you read the entirety of Saul Hansell’s piece, it seems clear that Braun and his boss Terry Semel aren’t entirely ignorant of the nature of the medium they’re working in. They know that Net-based video comes in little pieces, gets remixed by the multitude and spreads virally. But I guess they can’t shake off the habits of their professional lifetimes, because it sure sounds like they’re saying something remarkably similar to what we’ve heard from the discredited peddlers of “Net shows” past: Move over, all you amateurs and geeks, and let some real broadcasters teach you how it’s done! They may be publishing material on the Web, but they still think in terms of big-splash Events and boffo shows.

I know that a lot of smart people who deeply understand the way the Net functions work at Yahoo. The company made a savvy move in bringing on Kevin Sites to lead their first real effort in original content — he’s a versatile journalist who’s been living in the online cross-currents for several years now. Maybe Yahoo will prove my skepticism wrong, and its programmers will be the first of the multitude to go down the road labeled “Let’s make the Net more like TV” and find that it’s not a dead end. But it seems more likely to me that we’ll be reading headlines in two or three or four years about Yahoo shutting down a lot of its experiments in this area, just as its predecessors did.

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Notable events

September 23, 2005 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

I have been hunkered down writing, sticking religiously to the schedule I’ve imposed on myself. But I’ll venture forth from my den over the next couple weeks for a few things.

Tonight, I’m planning to go hear Ray Kurzweil talk at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco, as part of the Long Now Foundation’s seminars. I’ve always found Kurzweil’s vision of “the coming singularity” as interesting to ponder as it is hard to believe. He’s got a new book on the subject, too, titled “The Singularity is Near.”

A week from Monday, I’ll be back in San Francisco to hear B.K.S. Iyengar, the founder of modern yoga, speak. I’ve been practicing Iyengar-style yoga for more than 10 years now, though I still feel very much like a beginner; it’s kept me sane through some major crises, including becoming a parent, being a parent, nursing a company through financial straits, and trying to write a book. Iyengar is 86 now, and says this visit to the U.S. (in part a book tour) will be his last. I’ll just be hearing him lecture; my wife, Dayna Macy, leaves this weekend for a week-long conference in Colorado organized by her company, Yoga Journal, where he’s giving a workshop, too. And she’ll be blogging about it (along with a former Salon colleague, Kaitlin Quistgaard, and other Yoga Journal folks).

Two weeks from now (10/7-9) is the latest edition of the Digital Storytelling Festival, to be held for the first time in San Francisco, over at KQED headquarters. I’ll only be able to attend part of the fest this year (I’ll be participating in a presentation about the work of the late festival founder, Dana Atchley) because it’s the weekend we celebrate our boys’ birthday, too. But I’m sure the whole thing will be great.

Finally, also that week, I’ll be trying to keep up with as much as I can of the second edition of Web 2.0, Oct. 5-7. The John Battelle/O’Reilly production will be my last chance to try to keep up with this ever-fermenting industry before I go into deep-retreat mode and attempt to finish my book. (Except I’ll have to emerge some time in November, because that’s when Salon is planning special, not-yet-announced but stay-tuned-for-more, 10th-anniversary festivities!)

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The Times, they are a-chargin’

September 19, 2005 by Scott Rosenberg 1 Comment

I registered for the New York Times Web site on the very first day it went live back in 1995 or 1996 or whenever it was. I never minded that the Times asked you to register — after all, they were providing valuable material that I wanted access to. If the registration helped them sell ads, so be it. As a once-and-likely-future editor at a Web publication that has experimented with the subscription model over the years, I’m also sympathetic to the company’s desire to add a new revenue stream. I can’t say I understand the logic of the new New York Times Select program, which takes the most popular and most-linked features of the Web site — mostly, the op-ed columnists — and puts them behind the gate. But who knows; time will tell the Times whether it made a good move.

In the meantime, the actual launch of the service seems to have encountered a mountain of glitches. I found that even though I followed the Times’ confusing double registration process for people who subscribe to the print edition (you have to create another account that’s apparently different from your basic login to the Web site), and successfully created the new account, I couldn’t actually get through to any of the “Select” content. The site reports me as logged in, but won’t show me the for-pay features. I thought maybe it was something to do with my Opera browser, but it seems like the problems are widespread.

I am always torn in these situations between compassion (I feel your pain, ye fellow launchers of complex new Web operations!) and schadenfreude (aha — if even the New York Times can’t get this stuff right, then all the difficult launches I’ve been involved with don’t hurt quite so much).

I’m sure they’ll get it worked out in a little time. We always did, too.

POSTSCRIPT 11:30 PM: It appears they’ve already fixed the problem — at least, my problem. I’d say that’s a pretty good bug-fix turnaround time!

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Josh Kornbluth’s new show

September 13, 2005 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

A long long time ago, I saw Spalding Gray perform Swimming To Cambodia and many of his other monologues. One favorite bit was his account of being rejected for a part on some hack TV show. As the casting agent told him, there was one problem — a moment when a certain look passed over his face that could only be described as…thought.

If you like to see the expression of thought on TV, I think you’re going to like The Josh Kornbluth Show. I watched my old friend’s new interview show on KQED TV for the first time tonight. (If, like me, you missed the debut show Monday night, with Rita Moreno, they’re replaying it Friday at 10:30 p.m., and apparently a bunch of other times.)

As we watched Josh talk with Sen. Barbara Boxer about her new novel, my wife said, “Look, he’s still got the notebook in his back pocket!” Sure enough, the spine of a reporter’s pad was plainly, if minutely, visible on screen.

I smiled. Ages ago, when Josh was starting out in comedy and solo performance, I’d suggested that he carry a pad around so he could capture random ideas. (It’s a good idea for anyone who expects to create stuff.) Reporter’s notebooks are the best combination of capacity and pocket-fit. I became Josh’s supplier for many years. I don’t know where he gets them now; in the old days they were hard to find outside of newsrooms, but they seem more generally available today, online and from office-supplies warehouses. (The Long Tail delivers access to the Long Notebook!)

I can imagine virtually any TV producer I’ve ever met advising the host of the show: Lose the notebook! Maybe its presence on screen was an oversight, but I’d like to think that it is instead an indication of the show’s determination to present Josh, and his guests, in all the happy untidiness of our real lives.

If I remember correctly, I offered my “carry a notebook” advice to Josh around the same time that I had the enormously fun (though also nail-biting, for reasons that will become clear) experience of performing on a live radio show with him, broadcast regularly on the MIT station, WMBR. The show, titled The Urban Happiness Radio Hour, was an eclectic combination of humor, skits and music, loosely inspired by The Prairie Home Companion but with a Josh spin of mid-80s indie hip, Red Diaper Babyism, insane puns and self-deprecating neurosis. I was one anchor of a small voice-acting troupe. Our job of enacting Josh’s skits was complicated by Josh’s habit of writing the scripts, literally, up to the last few minutes before we went on the air. In certain cases, our performances had the spontaneity and verve of first readings because…they were first readings.

From what I’m reading on the blog for Josh’s new show, his current producer is running a much tighter ship. But one of the cool things about the Josh Kornbluth Show is that Josh and KQED clearly want it to feel a little raw, a bit rough; there’s nothing amateurish about it, but it’s utterly un-slick. It’s a world away from Urban Happiness — but not a galaxy away.

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In search of lost time: a fourth-anniversary dialogue

September 11, 2005 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

Here is how the conversation might go if we could step into a Wayback Machine and travel back to, say, a couple of months after 9/11 to have a little conversation with our previous selves:

“2005?!?! My god, fill me in. These last few weeks have been rough! Give me some hope, okay?”

“Well…”

“Come on! Four years! Where did they finally find Osama? And what did they do to him?”

“Well…”

“I assume the Taliban are long gone from Afghanistan, right? This war we’re fighting can’t take too much longer.”

“Well…”

“And what with the outpouring of international support for the U.S. these days, there must be some wonderful achievements in global cooperation!”

“Well…”

“Oh, yeah, now there are these bizarre anthrax incidents… Who was it, anyway? What a relief it must have been to find that out!”

“Well…”

“You’re not saying very much. What gives?”

“You remember all that talk about Iraq at the start of the first Bush administration? They invaded.”

“Yeah? Don’t tell me — Saddam was behind the anthrax!”

“No, no…”

“Or, what, did he finally find a way to launch his own terrorist attack?”

“Nope.”

“They caught him building a nuke!”

“Well, no.”

“So…?”

“They told us Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But we never found the weapons, even after we toppled him. Then they told us it didn’t matter because we were building a better democratic Iraq. Then they told us not to give up despite thousands of American casualties, because if we pulled out we’d be dishonoring the soldiers who’d already died.”

“Damn. I guess that means Bush lost the election in ’04, huh?”

“Well…”

“Anyway, the most important thing is that, four years later, the U.S. has had enough time to plan and prepare for another horror. The next time an American city is endangered, we’ll be all set, right? Swift response. Leaders who spring into action. Better communications. Organization. The can-do American spirit.”

“Well…”

“Enough! Get back to the future already! You’re just bumming me out.”

“Hey, you’re bumming me out, too!”

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Just gimme some truth

September 10, 2005 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

Today’s New York Times has a piece analyzing the “recall” of FEMA’S Michael Brown to Washington. The article does not wonder how this incompetent beneficiary of patronage — and, as more recently revealed, resume-padding hack — managed to avoid being totally canned. No, this was a piece largely guided by anonymous White House sources desperate to paint the story in the light the administration sought. So we get an astonishing paragraph like this:

  Mr. Bush, angry, directed the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., to find out what was going on. “The frustration throughout the week was getting good, reliable information,” said the aide, who demanded anonymity so as not to be identified in disclosing inner workings of the White House. “Getting truth on the ground in New Orleans was very difficult.”

As Brad DeLong interjects here: “Ummm… Watch the television?”

But pause a minute and ponder this line and you realize that the administration’s difficulty “getting truth” here is simply a case of chickens coming home to roost. If you run a government where you reward people who tell you what you want to hear and fire people when they tell you unpleasant truths, you should not be surprised when truth becomes a scarce commodity. The Bush administration’s “tell me no truths” stance was at work in its economic policy long before 9/11; after that calamity, it became the central modus operandi for the Executive Branch, which picked its policies first — invade Iraq while continuing to cut taxes — and then retroactively doctored its information and intelligence (either overtly, or simply by promoting those with the “right” message and firing or silencing dissenters) to fit the policy.

It’s one thing to spin, to present a doctored version of reality to the public in order to sell an agenda. But it became clear long ago that, in the Bush administration’s advanced case of delusional megalomania, the doctored version of reality has become gospel on the inside as well.

So of course Michael Brown, and all the other Michael Browns in the Bush administration, didn’t tell Bush the truth about what was happening. “Everything’s fine, sir! Carry on with your vacation!” Even if they actually knew, which seems unlikely, they understood — as you can bet every commander in Iraq knows — that to do so was to ask to be fired. Mr. Bush is to hear only what Mr. Bush (and Messrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rove) wants to hear. Anything else is disloyalty — a firing offence.

Any organization run on such principles is, of course, a juggernaut of dysfunction, headed for the ditch.

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