Carving Out the Middle Spaces

During the Sunday morning press conference with Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins at PAX 2010, I asked Holkins some pointed questions about his recent missives regarding the used games market. When the conference was finished, I went up to say hello and we got to talking for about 20 minutes, and eventually returned to the subject of used games.

Holkins has carved out a middle space for himself. He is still very much the high school kid who just wanted to write about video games, and partnered up with an artist to give life to a web comic, but in the intervening twelve years has also become someone with real industry insight through relationships with developers and careful observation of the publishers. Holkins takes some of the intricacies of the video game culture and business and makes them accessible to the fans, but most importantly he asks questions. I still think that comparing the purchase of a used game to piracy is dangerous ground to stand on for a public figure that in many ways represents the fans that need the used games market…but after speaking with Holkins at length on the subject, I think those of us in the press missed the point, on several levels.

Perhaps Holkins wasn’t using his bully pulpit as a call to arms to fight the used games industry, but rather as a way to point out moral purchasing choices as an option, not an absolute dictum. There are many purchasing decisions that people make on an ethical basis, for instance buying only free-range chicken eggs, or conflict-free diamonds, or clothing that wasn't produced in a sweatshop. This is not to suggest a 1:1 comparison between any of these items and their specific moral questions, and purchasing used video games, but merely to point out the existence of "moral purchasing" as something which is not alien to our way of life. Yet when Holkins chose to voice his own moral perception on the issue of used games, none of us who chose to respond publicly thought about this. Rather, we jumped onto the obvious bandwagon of "comparing used games sales to piracy is stupid," which is pretty much what the responses boil down to no matter how they were specifically phrased.

We in the gaming media don't just sit with things very often. We don’t pause, contemplate, churn the data, and then come back with a thoughtful response. We very much live in a knee-jerk space, much of which is governed by the sometimes unfortunate but real need to keep the page views coming. Holkins’ comments were food for thought, an attempt to kick start a conversation which, as he said in the press conference on Sunday, has been a long time coming, and is far from over. I'm not sure that any of the responses from the video game media really moved the conversation forward, because we weren't writing from the same sort of middle space that Holkins sits in, but rather from our journalists' seats that dictate coming back with a concrete response rather than posing more questions.

To a point, Holkins really didn’t say anything egregious. From the perspective of a developer, piracy and used game sales really aren’t very dissimilar. Where Holkins may have erred was in failing to flesh out his thought process beyond his own, personal desire to reward developers, or rather relying on the rest of us to understand what he meant – but when someone pirates a copy of a game, they are gaining access to the work of those developers without giving the developers their cut of the profits owed. When we buy used games, the same result occurs.

There are some very interesting places to take that discussion. If we follow his thread just for the sake of it, where, precisely, does the sin in this point of view lie? In the selling back of used games to fuel the market in the first place, or only in the purchase of those used games, or both? I'll admit to pausing at selling back Battlefield: Bad Company 2 this weekend as I contemplated this very question.

Mike Krauhilk responded to one of my questions about used games at the press conference with the statement that he "didn't buy" the argument that video games were too expensive (and hence why video gamers need the used games market for the trade-in credit such that they can afford games). Yes, video games have always been "too expensive" - Krahulik cited $70 SNES cartridges from back in the day as evidence that this is no new problem - but I've considered this response, and it doesn't really speak to the issue. Stating that video games have always been expensive is merely establishing the duration of this problem, not questioning its validity. What's changed is that the marketplace has evolved to finally give gamers the ability to do something about it...so doesn't his counterargument actually validate the historical inevitability of the used games market coming into existence?

And where does the culpability of the publishers lie in all this? They waste money frivolously on PR campaigns they don't really need, the cost of which comes back to us in raised game prices. They back-load the majority of their AAA releases to the holiday season which means that gamers can't afford to buy all of those titles, and if developer profits are tied to number of original sales as Holkins argues, then aren't the publishers deflating the total number of their titles sold by putting so many great games in competition with one another, rather than spreading out the release schedule?

These are the sorts of conversations I'd like to see gamers having with each other more often, rather than the snarkiness and obvious nature of so much of our writing - and I'm just as easily swayed into this trap. There's a middle ground between being intellectual and being practical, and therein lies the path of advancing the average quality of video game discourse, and by extension the maturity of the medium itself. We all need to take responsibility of helping to create these middle spaces like Jerry Holkins carved out for himself, in order to have more places to host the discussions that will ultimately make video games better for everyone. When we ask more of ourselves as gamers, eventually we're going to ask more of the people who design and publish our games, as well.

Dennis Scimeca is the Editor in Chief of the website Game Kudos and a writer at Gamer Limit.. If you tweet him @DennisScimeca, he will stop maniacally playing Dragon Age: Origins and get right back to you.

(4)

Ben Villarreal

September 14, 2010

Dennis, I continue to be humbled by not only the quantity of output you have hear (and elsewhere on the net) but the quality, as well. Bravo.

I definitely thought there was something amiss with the attacks on Holkins' comment, but I couldn't quite put it into words. This makes sense to me.

Dennis Scimeca

Thanks, Ben. I try. :) I'm thankful for a site like Bitmob where I can post this sort of content.

Ben Cook

I love how the issue is described here - not "don't do it" but "I choose not to do it".

I agree with virtually everything, except one small sentence - I think that PR is important and we risk the growth of our industry if we sacrifice it in order to lower prices. We the fans are always involved in the community, so we know when a game is released, right down to the exact minute our retailers are going to put it on the shelf. Anyone outside of our group, however, may not visit the bitmobs of the world so often, and they won't know what is coming out next Tuesday. Halo Reach is a good example because their huge sale numbers are tied to the casual gamer. MS's PR, be it commercials or advertisements or subway posters, is the only way to inform some people about the game. Similarly, Psychonauts and Stranger's Wrath received very little PR, and the only copies that were sold were to people who read articles telling them what an underappreciated title it was.

Of course, the argument that they may go TOO far in some areas is likely valid (and probably your point, based on the links :) ). Personally, I think they waste too much money on us, the average gamer who is already sold, and they need to get more advertisements in Time, Newsweek, or the evening news.

Anyway, great article, keep em comin'! The Bens approve!

LOL! Thank you.

PR is certainly important, but I still think the industry does it wrong when it comes to big titles. Psychonauts and Stranger's Wrath might need more PR money, but Halo: Reach does not, even to reach the "casual" gamers, though I'm not sure what that phrase means anymore. Word of mouth is the best advertising there is, and SO many gamers are going to be playing Reach this week that I can't imagine anyone who wasn't reached by the E3 hype and constant, constant Reach coverage by every video game website and magazine that counts over the months since E3, wouldn't have been reached by a friend with the game.

I don't think these big ad campaigns are about reaching people who otherwise can't be reached, I think it's about building up a frenzy so that companies can brag about how many copies they sold on the very first week of release. It's the same garbage that the film industry gives us about opening weekend sales. My response to that is: Who gives a damn? If you want to impress me, show me a movie so good that it stays in first-run theater for two months. Give me a total number of ticket sales over a 12-month period.

Likewise, if you want to show me a good game, show me numbers after three months when gamers tend to forget the "new" titles. That's not how the industry thinks right now, however. We take too many bad cues from Hollywood.

(Note to BM staff - What's up with a single carriage return in the comment fields not translating into a hard break between paragraphs anymore? Have to double-space everything to get a single line between them now. Not a big deal, just curious as to whether this is a 2.0 issue that will be addressed or whether I should get used to double-spacing my comments. :) )