Strange Bundle

I was reminded recently of the latest string of boycotts that had rippled through video game consumers in reaction to video game producers doing questionable things or allying themselves with questionable people. Folks decided not to buy Shadow Complex because the author behind the multimedia push for that game is an demagogue, others didn't like that Modern Warfare 2 was breaking precedent by going with a specific, dedicated server system rather than allowing users to create their own hubs, others regarded a sequel of the zombie shooter Left 4 Dead came too early and was heralding the end of promised support for a game that had only been around a year, and the recent revelations about poor working conditions for the team behind the upcoming Western game Red Dead Redemption had some ready to withhold their bucks for that already beleaguered game.

A lot of this may seem like gibberish to the uninitiated, but I guess the point isn't so much that this is about video games, I just happened to be paying attention that, but about the idea of the boycott in general.

A lot of people get irritated at the very idea, as if these people were otherwise required to buy these products. I'm betting a significant proportion of boycotters were already looking for an excuse not to buy, and this just clinched it, while people who were buying it anyway, or had already pre-ordered it, were prepared with justifications even if they agreed with the reasons behind a given boycott. That's human nature.

What I don't like is that we assume that the boycott in itself is wrong, or that boycotting for a certain reason is wrong, as if we have a moral imperative to buy things. We don't. Money is ours to do with as we like, at least according to some capitalism theory. In a sense, money is the new vote, because if you support a product or service, it's much more likely to flourish. I would say that even if you're doing it for the wrong reasons, when you boycott you are sending a signal to the producers of that product that they've lost your dollar. This is something that companies listen to far better than flaming some poor customer service rep. with an all-caps email.

There are a bunch of different triggers for boycotts, too, and while I don't believe in moral equivalency, I do think some have better founding than others. I won't say, though, that because some reasons are better than others that the poor reasons are somehow invalid just because they're weak. They're invalid if they're invalid.

Case by case:

1. The author behind the book that is part of the multimedia push for Shadow Complex is outspoken in his condemnation of the tolerance of a certain minority group. The people who actually made the game, for the most part, are silent about the controversy and their own views on the subject. The target of a boycott here is indirect, and since the game is generally regarded as a success, there are going to be a lot of people who will buy the game despite the controversy, ignorant of it, or even buying it because of the controversy (although that last one's a bit silly).

If you withhold the dollars you were going to spend, you reduce the developer's gross revenue, an undisclosed part of that going to the author, maybe, for licensing or whatever.

If you buy it, you support that company, whose game does not, as far as I know, profess any of the opinions the author has stated, either personally or in connection to the fiction he has written in conjunction with the game.

A better target might be not buying his books, since that's the author himself, but you have a right to spend your money how you like (within reason, of course), and no one is ordering you to buy the game, critically acclaimed or not.

2. The creators Modern Warfare 2, in a bid to increase reliability and decrease cheating, is chopping off what is apparently a small industry in private server hosting. They also have been fairly obvious in their attempts to grab headlines, not that they needed it. Modern Warfare 2 has been a huge hit, despite boycotts for both reasons.

If you withhold the dollars you were going to spend, you won't make enough of a dent to bring them down, whether you're targeting their server policy or their tasteless publicity grabs.

If you buy it, you support the ad policy (unfortunately ads are always a bit blurry when it comes to their affect on consumer behavior) as well as their choice for server setups. You also get what is, by many accounts, a good FPS with tons of players to play against.

A better target might be building up an competitor FPS. The more competition the game series has, the more they're going to have to woo you the next time around. Again, you have the right to spend your money how you want, and submitting to the bullying on either side of this strangely animated debate just shows you should spend more time realizing how powerful that 60 dollars could be in other contexts.

3. Left 4 Dead 2, the partnership-focused zombie shooter came only a year after its predecessor from Valve, a company notorious for taking a long time crafting its games. This quick turnaround alone had many people protesting, people who wanted Valve to continue its long-running Half Life franchise instead. Others didn't like the idea that the first Left 4 Dead was barely out of the gates, and that this new release promised to overshadow the old so quickly that the content that was promised as part of the original would be ignored in a drive to support its sequel.

If you withhold the dollars you were going to spend, the company that was willing to up its production cycle to meet the high demand for its game will have to scale back its speed. Maybe they'll get your message about not supporting Half Life, or maybe not. Likewise, they may not get the message that they're not supporting the first game. They may even think that the reason sales weren't as good as expected was because it was a bit too soon for another zombie game, no matter how good (please, god, let this be the reason).

If you buy it, they may very well skip over the old game if it succeeds well, or they may even have enough money to justify creating a new branch dedicated to concentrating on legacy properties while having others focused on the new stuff. Wild success sometimes, but not always, breeds enthusiasm on the part of the developers.

A better strategy might be how you deal with Valve from now on. If it turns out to be true that they don't plan on updating the original game, that they really are abandoning it for the sake of the new kid, you have pretty good grounds to tell them to fuck off. But remember that the cool stuff, the Half Lifes and the Portals in Valve, may get hit alongside the Left 4 Dead franchise.

4. Read Dead Revolver, the upcoming open-world Western shooter was revealed to have some taskmasters you'd expect from a stereotyped report on the conditions a salariman has to deal with. False production goals, mandatory overtime, and other questionable decisions. Some have suggested boycotting the game to send a message to the management that their poor treatment of their workers shouldn't be tolerated.

If you withhold the dollars you were going to spend, all the work those poor assholes DID put into the game will be ignored in a genre game that already won't appeal to a lot of people. Even their particular branch of Rockstar seems to have projected poor returns on a game that has already overrun the budget. The managers are much less likely to suffer than the workers, too, by a lack in revenue, unless someone more benevolent than its current head makes some serious changes.

If you buy it, you may be getting a revolutionary game that blows away open-world conventions, and your money MAY be perceived as exactly what the potential boycotters feared: a justification for their behavior. Although let's be honest for a second: the software world has very often been shit as far as overwork and unsung efforts. This goes all the way back to Atari's beginnings, and helped bring about the smaller developers that have managed to crush bigger companies, whether or not the bigger companies were nicer than their predecessors.

A better target might be this same group of people if they don't make a public attempt to change their policies, because getting those poor blokes their money on a project that even the bosses don't think will break even is the least you can do. Beyond that, boycott them if you don't like what they're doing.

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I think boycotting is great, even if there was a bit of sarcasm in some of the above, because it's better than what I've seen a lot of in the past. People threatening to kill the developers of Heroes of Might and Magic because they tried to inject some science fiction into their strategy game (even though M&M was built on that sort of thing) need to be institutionalized if they're serious, and need to seriously rethink their sense of entitlement regardless.

This isn't the state making these games; these are companies. We don't pay taxes to them, we voluntarily give them money so they can entertain us. If we don't like what they're doing, no matter how dumb our reasons are, we speak clearest when we spend or money elsewhere (or save it-- that's something people keep forgetting to do). If we expect them to entertain us before we've paid, and get angry when they don't obey our wishes, in this age of comment boards we can voice our complaints and hope they hear us, but if we're bitches about it, if we threaten them, we'll get nowhere in the long run, even if they capitulate to our demands.

Because this is entertainment. The amount of energy we spent on trying to Save Farscape or spend voting in the next American Idol was spent on shit that mattered COULD go elsewhere, but it doesn't. Entertainment is obviously very important to us as a species. We need it. But it's still just entertainment, and in a way should be afforded the leeway that qualifier suggests.

We should also remember to afford boycotters that same respect. If they're being civil then they're doing the minimum that entertainment protesting deserves, no matter how dumb the reasons are. The debates are better when people point out where the flaws are, but beyond that, it's up to them to spend their money, and you most likely will NEVER KNOW what these internet people actually do. Just don't make the mistake in assuming anyone has to buy any damn thing. Again, this is entertainment. We're throwing bucks at these people so they'll dance for us, not making the world a better place. So if people want to hold off, for whatever reason, it's not the end of the damned world.

Ultimately, though, remember that companies, like individuals, also have a right to do pretty much what they want with the money they earn from their games. Don't pretend they're going to build an orphanage with parts of the proceeds, or support other games in their franchises, or get the message about their dumb ads or their petulant co-designers if you withhold the dough. Even if it is a vote, it's just about as mute as a political vote can be.

As in, explanation; I have no regrets.

Getting started on the Tromsø International Film Festival a bit late this year. Saw two movies today, the first of which is already up for you to read about.

Roads were slick in town, and the people a bit antsy, but the lines were by far some of the best I've seen. Maybe I've just been lucky because it's a weekday.

If you're curious about it, go to TIFF.NO for more information!

Reading Alastair Reynolds' blog, I saw the section for appearances. Since I admire his work, my imagination immediately thought "oh, what if I could make it all the way to Helsinki for his appearance there, and show up and..." What, exactly? What would I do? I've read 1 and a half of his books, and although I like them a lot, what would I say? How would I connect with the guy?

Truth is, I couldn't. And it feels like the closer in physical space I could get to the man, the further away I'd be. For all my lamenting digital journalism combining with everyone's sense of entitlement to form the requisite comments section, I find myself glad that in some way it seems that creators are more accessible than they used to be. I feel like I could probably make better contact with the man through email than I could in person, and I've actually contacted people I've admired for decades through electronic means, Gary Gygax, Bob Pepper, and Roger Ebert among them.

But, again, how much of a connection do I make? It tends to feel incomplete to me, and it's a blip in the day of the person I'm contacting, so it feels a bit weird to even do it. Maybe some of this feeling of weirdness comes from one of my first author signings. Through a coup (which was a story in itself), a former girlfriend and I managed to slip into the Ritz Carlton in Montreal for a book signing by post-modern Canadian author Timothy Findley. I'd read The Wars and all during my reading of it, I came up with all sorts of questions I wanted to ask the guy. But standing in front of him, all I could muster was what must have sounded like a caveman speaking, something like "Me think you write good."

Worthless. At least my girlfriend managed to say something more sensible.

Some years later in my hometown, after that girlfriend was in my past, independent comics writer Harvey Pekar showed up to promote some new releases. I listened to his speech, and was really happy to see him in person. This time I managed to ask a few well-formed questions, including asking why he wasn't updating his movie-related blog anymore (answer: if they started paying him to update it again, he would). I had already bought one of the books he was promoting, so instead I asked him to sign my journal. I don't think he was too happy with that.

Both he and Findley years before gave me a similar look, or at least my memory plays it out that way. A sort of rolling of the eyes to look up at me, as if I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I didn't really, and I still don't get what the ritual is supposed to be. I don't understand the protocol, I suppose.

They're there to promote their books, and maybe gauge reactions on things they're writing. We're there to get closer to a dude or dudette who is otherwise a disembodied collection of thoughts on paper. Who are we to them, really? Who are they, really, to us?

Not too many years ago I managed to brave another signing, this time of comic book artist and writer Lise Myhre, creator of Nemi. I learned a bit about her past, and managed to get her book signed for my wife. I guess my timidity had increased by then, probably because my wife was standing next to me as I got it signed.

It felt easier than it had been before, and I think part of it was because I wasn't a huge fan of her work. I was doing it for someone else, so all the pressure of getting to the top of the mountain and asking the guru three questions wasn't there. I got what I wanted, a specialized gift for my wife (who, yes, was standing right there), and Myhre got what she wanted, another book sale. Commerce, and all that.

I was better at the protocol, but it felt like a cold, cynical exchange. Not much of an alternative to the prior encounters' embarrassment or awkwardness.

I imagine there are people who get a great thrill seeing someone they admire in person, and maybe there are few writers, at least early in a tour, who enjoy the admiration. I can't help but think, though, that this is the exception, that most writers trudge through it, and most fans feel disappointment.

I guess the perfect moment of interaction, the one that really mattered, happened a long time ago, when the writer was long done with the work that the reader is now reading. To the reader it feels like a connection in that moment, but the author is unaware, and by the time the reader can put the feeling into words, the spark has already faded a bit. They cup their hands around the spark, blowing on it, sheltering it long enough to keep it burning so they can show it to the author some day, late at night in an over-lit bookstore, one person in a line of hundreds, each of them eager to finally say hello.

When growing up, I was given the impression that figuring out a math problem meant that you understood how the machinery of an equation worked. Once you understood the machinery you could apply it anywhere and its results were always true for the given number set. I was given the impression that charting things out and figuring out the problem by hand meant that you didn't understand the nature of the problem, and thus you were doing it wrong.

When trying to work out the probabilities for the combination of two dice, I lacked the equation. I searched in vain for the proper expression which would allow me to simply plug in numbers and make the dice combinations make sense as I wanted them to.

What was I supposed to do, then, lacking as I did the proper terms that would allow a web search to give me the tools I needed? Should I have begged a math expert for help? Is that what we're supposed to do if we don't understand, if we weren't of the mindset to absorb things in math class back when we had the chance (assuming they even talked about the thing you want to solve)?

I decided to chart it out. I made lines, made a simple, mundane matrix, and plotted the thing out by hand. The results were finite, so it wasn't like I was trying to solve for all dice, just the two I was interested in. It took time, and I made many mistakes, but as I made mistakes I began to understand the NATURE of the problem. Every time I checked and rechecked, looking for the patterns that I knew would pop up in such a regular system, I felt like I was feeling around in a darkened room and learning its dimensions. As I spent time, on the ground, feeling my way through the problem I came to have a SENSE for the problem.

By the time I was finished I had a nice graph that listed all the results for the dice as I wanted them displayed. It was way more work than what an equation would have given me, but without that crucial step I HAD to do something to solve the problem. And I did. I just dove in and I did it.

Some of us don't have the mindset to learn math the way it is commonly taught. Some of us need to know why, and some of us need to see the machinery inside, to feel our way around to understand it like we would when studying anything. Rather than being handed down the tools and just memorizing them, we feel the need to get our hands dirty, and if we're ready for it, if we're not told that what we're doing is wrong, we learn best when we make mistakes. Mistake is another way to say the overstepping of a boundary. We need to break the machine in order to fix it, to tear it apart to understand how it's assembled.

I now understand the ins and outs of this probability matrix, and I think I can slowly expand it to encompass number ranges and amounts of any size. This is how the first mathematicians figured things out, before there was Algebra and before other techniques that made mathematics accessible to others. In a sense, that same curiosity is now adrift, cut off by the professed need for rote repetition.

I like to hope that some day there will be at least two ways to learn math, and that they will be held with equal esteem. There are many of us out there who love to solve problems, but find being handed a list of tools to memorize to be incompatible with our thinking. We are not incapable of solving the problems; we are just incapable of speaking that particular language.

Just like we don't expect someone who grew up speaking English to understand Chinese right away, we need to provide those with a different mindset the chance to bridge the gap. Not only will we be helping expand math competence across the board, but we may well also be introducing the field of mathematics to an entire outlook that may help cause an explosion of new thought and explorations into the field.

All you have to do is have the patience to give those of us who are not wired to repeat by rote the chance to catch up.

Just posted the below as a response to an interesting essay about the demographics of game players and the state of the entertainment media industries.

Depending on who you’d talk to (yes, I play games, though I think I’m below the average demographic on all three of those data points), gaming has already achieved some measure of “renaissance.” I know Bob’s not big on games but it seems like he’s addressing the design side of the industry as it has been for a few years now.

Independent titles seem to be making more headway into mainstream markets with digital downloads allowing game makers to sidestep production cycles and add to existing games, sometimes greatly improving the value of a single game purchase. Games like Fallout 3 seem to lead the way in digitally-downloaded add-ons in this regard, although I don’t know how tenable it can be for less dedicated game makers who don’t have the staff to spare.

What’s remarkable, though, is that the design philosophies seem to be more and more risky. You see much more adventurous ideas than you would ever have imagined happening during the last generation of consoles, and they are being noticed by game media and users alike. This doesn’t translate into higher sales given the numbers Bob quotes, but when you combine the nearly palpable increase in excitement over the design choices behind some games, combined with the market penetration that the Wii has managed, video games stand to see a real upsurge both in quality and in sales.

But the tentative first steps that the game design houses and smaller developers have already taken are what will help fuel this. They’ve been targeting this hidden demographic in small ways; and as the success of certain adventurous titles, the notoriously skittish producers that survive the economic downturn may continue to reward developers who make waves through novel design. Christmas sales are purposefully being dispersed this year by a lot of developers afraid of the next slew of big releases, by the way, so don’t look at the classic holiday sales numbers for the signs of video game industry recovery. 2010 will be the make-or-break year for many.

The renaissance part isn’t news; it helps to be familiar with how things have changed in this short span of time. That, or maybe your definition is different than mine.

What, Bob, do you think would qualify as a true gaming renaissance for you? I thought you didn’t care for games at all :)

I keep wanting to write about Metal, I guess because I've sorta learned a lot about it researching it as a little hobby for the past few years. This sort of renewed when I saw the track list for Brutal Legend (with or without umlaut, I don't care. Many people who will play this game wouldn't know how to pronounce the umlaut properly, anyway. I only happen to know because my old Chinese teacher told me one of the sounds we had to practice sounded a lot like the German one).

I realize, though, that listing favorite bands is about as boring as it gets for blogs. I'm at a loss here, really. I also know that a lot of the bands I happen to like are a bit fringe, even as far as Metal is concerned. Last thing I want to do is deal with nitpicking in a realm as broad as Metal-- in a field of music that I feel compelled to capitalize :) If you're curious about one person's peripheral journey around the outskirts of Metal, read on.

In My Metal Beginning, There Was Eddie

My life's experience with Metal had always been on the fringes. It pretty much started with a pen pal of mine from a neighboring town I met through some class-induced pen pal thing that would culminate in us all getting together and being disappointed by each other. Dude drew me this huge -actually pretty awesome for a sixth-grader- drawing of Iron Maiden's Eddie done in black charcoal. I didn't know what to do with it. My religious obsessions at the time had me vaguely fearing the thing, so I didn't keep it for more than a few years, I think. It was actually a pretty great gift, I can't imagine my selfish little self doing that much for anyone back then. When we met he shied away from my geekishness and that was pretty much it.

I was suckered into a particular brand of religious propaganda which tends to try lying in order to do the greater deed of saving. Now I think that's hypocritical, but then I had no idea they might trump up what I saw into something it wasn't. Twisted Sister may not strike you as Metal, but at the time their video for "We're Not Going to Take It", which had a kid rebelling against a patently verbally abusive father in a rather humorous way, was characterized (as the whipping boy of the decade video games are now) as changing nice little boys into monsters. I hadn't actually SEEN the video until I saw it on Youtube a little while ago, (and it's damned funny). I just assumed it was satanic and steered clear.

I can see why people hell-bent on making a false interpretation for the sake of a higher one would look at it the way they did, but now it seems pretty tame. Still, it would take a long time for me to shake that stigma, and I probably carried with me the same prejudice I had for the music to the people I would soon meet.

Now, Actually Listen to it

My estrangement from the group that tended to listen to Heavy Metal continued into Junior High. Kids started wearing jean jackets with penned in band names, black T-Shirts with bands my Weird Al Yankovic listening self had never heard of. One kid, as a joke, asked me if I even knew who Ratt or Def Leppard was. I figured they were bands, but I made some joke feigning my ignorance.

I got into acting then, briefly (I was never good at memorizing lines. Even then I enjoyed making stuff up as I went along rather than trying to stick to a script) as part of an after-school activity thing. There I met upper-classmen who were a bit more forgiving of my ignorance. I saw the T-shirts of one of them with the crazy art from Iron Maiden covers. He told me about the lore, the seventh son of the seventh son bringing about apocalypse or some damned thing, which at the time sounded vaguely satanic to me (I guess it was always sort of designed to sound dangerous. Metal seems to always have been about pushing boundaries and staring into the abyss, even thought most of it isn't quite as "evil" as the sheltered think it is). I still kept my distance until next year, when that same guy introduced me to Testament.

It was loud, but full of energy. It was modern rock (like the stuff I'd begun experimenting with when I was transmogrifying into a teenie-bopper replete with a wall full of posters, zits, and growth anxiety), but it was rougher, and it cut deeper. I was intrigued, and I slowly realized that a lot of the guys who listened this stuff were sort of like me. They were still scary to me, still people I wouldn't want to hang out with, but they weren't monsters. Some of them even became my friends, at least for a time. Around that time someone gave me a dub of Dr. Feelgood, and my outlook on Metal (as well as my hearing) was never the same since. Sadly I was too stupid then, convinced that I had to follow the rigid class system that was endemic at my school, so I eventually looked the other way, abandoning a few of my friends, including the one that introduced me to Testament so long ago. I've done stupid things since, but few that I still feel bad about after all this time. This was one of those.

Into high school, I learned of Metallica and Megadeth. I remember seeing at the local dime store a big poster of Megadeth's mascot Vic Rattlehead standing in front of a burned-out wasteland. Not as afraid of the BS propaganda of sheltered folks anymore, I kept my mind open. I don't know why I picked Rust in Peace as my first album of theirs to try out, but that has to be one of my favorite of theirs ever, one that I'd play over and over (too bad I used earphones all the time. My hearing was never quite the same after a while).

Going home from school, I would ask the ex-con who sat in the back of the school bus questions about Metal all the time to keep him from picking on other people, and he would list off Megadeth albums, other bands he listened to (like Slayer, with its pentagram logo, still scary enough even after I'd stopped pretending an evil spirit could have power over me), and the pronunciation "Sepultura," which I could never get right. Through his recommendations I tracked down the older Megadeth albums, buying them over a period of years well into my post-High School haze until I was disillusioned with one of their latest only a few years ago and quit. By then I'd also bought Metallica's eponymous (which I thought had an all black cover until I caught the snake in matte ink hiding there), several Pantera CDs, begun by hearing Cowboys from Hell late at night on the local college's radio station and ending with buying the Great Southern Trendkill.

It's Getting Crowded/Not Crowded Enough

On cable was stuff I didn't even know was considered by some to be Metal. I still don't quite imagine Nine Inch Nails that way, nor KMFDM, nor many of the other bands listed in the Brutal Legend soundtrack or elsewhere. When I listened to Manowar, it sounded a bit too light to be what I thought of as Metal, and a lot of the bands like Def Leppard that I finally heard years after those kids in black t-shirts faded from my memory sounded way too weak. I even took a stand, classifying the Crue as hard rock, because it didn't have that bite.

Metal has a problem with classifications. Just look at the Wikipedia page on it. Tons, tons of sub-genres. There are some sub-genres which have a PARTICULAR VOCAL STYLE, growling, screaming, whatever. A particular mood. Most of the stuff I liked turned out to be Glam, Nu, Alt, Speed, Power, or Thrash. To me they always seemed a bit more versatile, but I didn't really know they belonged to any classification at all. It was just about how it sounded.

I think that's why I'll always be on the edge of Metal, never feeling quite there. Even after I grew to love it, I began to hate classifications for things and people in my post-high school years, realizing what BS it was to put other people, (or myself) into a category like I was trying to package them for sale. A lesson I wished I'd learned before I'd rejected those friends of mine (I'm sorry Alex, Tim), but once learned it made me feel on the outside all over again when people were trying to let me know about their favorite bands and their hated bands, while dressing the part of a Metal fan.

I've gotten past the point where I need to let other peoples' work define me, and where I need to feel harder core than the next guy. To me it feels a bit backward for Metal to be sequestered in all these tiny categories. I continue to explore it, learn about new bands, ask metal-heads about their favorites and their recommendations, but at times I wonder if Metal is only done a disservice being divided, so I don't bother taking sides.

When taken as a whole, even if separated from lighter rock, the pantheon of Heavy Metal consists of a very diverse bunch, singing about things that are often anything but rote rock cliches. When I said that Metal was about pushing boundaries and staring into the abyss, I meant it. No matter the focus of a particular band, you always feel like they're on the edge of something. Anger. Glory. Doom. All the stuff we're scared of. I'd sometimes wonder why it was these kids were listening to stuff that seemed so bleak or terrifying. But Metal is safe, to me-- safer than most other music styles out there. It lets you explore these strange, frightening emotions and ideas with little risk to yourself. It lets you stare directly into life's intensity and blackness with a flick of a switch.

And when you've had enough, you put it down and go out into the sun again. Suddenly, the world doesn't seem quite so dark anymore.

I sat down to write this entry and noticed that Roger Ebert had said he liked my "Kindle" entry. Being an admirer of his work for a long time, and even more of an admirer of his recent blogging habit, I was cheered up quite a bit to see he'd mentioned my essay in his own blog, in his entry playfully discussing reincarnation from a relatively more scientific perspective. Read it yourself and you'll get what I mean (he's a fun essayist anyway, so check his work out even if that particular subject matter sounds unappealing to you). Thanks, Roger!

... While Giving Your Eyes Some Rest

An hour or so ago I was watching videos, playing a little Kingsburg, and basically winding down at the end of my day. As things went on, though, my eyes started getting very irritated. Almost like sparks were hitting my eyes, or hot smoke. Very uncomfortable, and I'll probably have to get my eyes checked to see if it isn't some of the very stuff I talked about in my "Kindle" entry.

The pain was making me pretty irritable, though at the time I thought some fresh air might help jolt me out of this mood I was in. By the time my wife and I were finishing up our little walk to the corner market I'd just about had it. I wouldn't have shared this experience with you, though, unless there was more to it than that.

My wife and I have a little thing we do now and again as a sort of game. We don't do it regularly, but once in a while, one of us will tell the other that we can't see. The other will take him or her by the hand and lead them for as long as they can stand walking blind. It may sound strange to you, and it's a bit dangerous if you're not careful, but I can't recommend this (or something like this) enough. It's remarkable how, after just a little time, we'll adapt ever so slightly to our environment, paying attention to some sense data that we'd likely ignore before.

I told her how much the pain was annoying me, and that I'd like to play that game again. We set about walking from the market, my hand in hers, leading me forward, telling me to step over rough spots and turn sharply to avoid your usual collection of walkway hazards. It's also a nice trust exercise, although I think she and I are beyond needing those by now :)

While walking we passed by a bus shelter and I could hear the hollowness of it; cars that passed by us seemed to be much closer than they were, and after a time it felt like this familiar route, which we've walked hundreds of times before, felt like it was in a different spot in my mind. When she told me to open my eyes to see the play of the sunlight on the clouds and mountains a ways away, I felt momentary surprise that these familiar landmarks looked that way, and were in such positions.

For people who have no choice it's a logarithmically greater challenge because you know you can't just switch senses back on. For those of us with the privilege of sight though, I don't think we realize how much we ignore. Some say that these senses are more intense when others are switched off, but I don't think that's quite accurate. I think what we do is attune ourselves to what's available.

During the walk (which was one of my longest without sight, if memory serves) my perspective was altered quite substantially. I was surprised at how long it took to go from the market to home; not so much in the time it took for her to lead me, obviously it would take longer than a normal strolling pace, but that my sense of space seemed to tell me we should have been done long before we were. I also got some relief from the pain in my eyes (suggesting I may need a new prescription), and had a laugh when she told me that the people that drove by us were staring at our little show. I imagine some people might think it was a stunt, but it wasn't, and I'm glad we did it.

Perhaps you've heard about the United Kingdom's National Portrait Gallery is at odds with Wikipedia over the latter's appropriation of thousands of finely-detailed digital photographs from the NPG's own website. NPG argues that the portraits are theirs to control, and that they lose potential revenue from the loss of exclusive control of their collection. Wikipedia argues that their being a nonprofit service allows them to appropriate public content with lapsed copyright for the educational benefit of everyone.

The problem is, they're both right.

In the United States, the time for holding on to these portraits (and their reproductions such as the digital photographs in question) has expired a long time ago, and now they are in the public domain like so many other works of art. Wikipedia, a US-based non-profit, took these works under the same rubric that they take all their images: if it's in the public domain, it's fair game.

In the U.K., reproduction of images transcends copyright expiration, so it doesn't matter that these old portraits of rich people are so old that most conventional views on copyright go out the window. When Wikipedia volunteer Derrick Coetzee slipped past the NPG's flimsy protection of the detailed photographs of their works, he was, from the point of view of British Law, doing what Wikipedia tends to be rather hard on its own users for: taking images without permission.

Figuring out what should be done may be up to the lawyers, but when we look at Wikipedia's own philosophy of preserving materials for the sake of public enrichment, one has to ask how this is threatened by having these well-preserved works of art preserved in a different place. It seems like one of the main thrusts of Coetzee's own argument is aimed at the supposed revenue that the NPG is losing by the lack of exclusive control of the works, which he implies would be negligable. Conversely, destruction of the reproductions as detailed in the request from the NPG would cost Coetzee the time and effort spent harvesting them, but such is the life of a Wiki volunteer.

In response, Wikipedia cites numerous examples of their work with other museums and collections to display artwork through exclusive contracts, demonstrating how it benefits both parties. This is missing the point, though. Every one of the organizations they mention agreed to work with Wikipedia. As long as NPG has asked for the right to control the work which they are allowed to control already, and which they continue to display publicly, the only thing that is threatened is Coetzee's labor.

Wikipedia, win or lose, will likely benefit from the publicity of this battle, and so will the NPG, but while Coetzee and Wikipedia will be represented pro bono by Fred von Lohmann, NPG will be expending money in legal fees to fight. NPG may stand to lose even more money, whatever the real tally already is, protecting work that is already free for the public to view. Should Wikipedia win, they will be able to point to the case as justification for further appropriations, which may have an unintended chilling effect on galleries who don't want Wikipedia copying their collections.

It's a strange set of circumstances, but it strikes me as a silly rivalry that could easily end by Wikipedia doing the honorable thing and directing people to the NPG website. The public still benefits from Wikipedia's articles and the NPG's images, Wikipedia's public education goals are met, and the NPG gets to keep control over their collection as recognized under their regional laws. Everyone wins. Except, perhaps, Coetzee and his sore wrists.