The Washington Issue
Bismarck once said that laws were like sausages: you
couldn't enjoy them if you knew how they were made.
Well, the reasons why the making of some laws is being
fought may hardly be more appetizing.
Recently, a Washington state legislator has
introduced a bill outlawing the sale or rental of
videogames depicting violence against law enforcement
officials to kids under 17, and establishing fines of a
few hundred dollars for retailers who ignored the new
regulation.
Sounds pretty tame to me. Games in which you whack
cops upside the head with spiked clubs already carry an
industry-defined "Mature" rating. The proposed law would
simply enforce these ratings. So why is the IDSA's Doug
Lowenstein screaming bloody murder?
Maybe because the party line for every industry in
North America is that Government Regulation Is Bad. No
need to think about it; Regulation Is Bad, end of story.
Government is there to buy stealth bombers at inflated
prices and to cut taxes, not to mess with the Free
Market. (Except, of course, when screamingly incompetent
executives run a company into the ground, in which case
the public should foot the bill for a bailout and a
couple of platinum parachutes. Right, airlines?)
The IDSA has every right to want to keep government
out of the ratings definition business, or to fight any
sort of restriction on the types of content developers
and publishers are allowed to put into their games. But
why on Earth would it want to prevent enforcement of its
own standards? Especially when, as Lowenstein says,
parents already get involved in 83% of game purchase
decisions, which he claims makes the law insignificant?
I can only think of two possible explanations. Maybe
the IDSA is fighting the law out of a dogmatic aversion
to regulation. Wouldn't be too surprising; neoliberalism
is a religion, and religions tend to be freakishly rigid
that way. Or maybe they are doing it out of economic
interest, precisely because the law's effect would not
be insignificant at all. Of the 17% of purchases that
don't involve parents, there must be a couple of 12-year
olds who want Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. In the
current market, they can buy it from complacent
retailers, Mature ratings be damned. If the bill passes,
they couldn't. Their parents could still buy it for
them, but some parents might not, and as a result, the
industry might lose a portion of 17% of its sales.
The IDSA insists that voluntary enforcement of the
ratings by retailers is the right way to go. Sure it is
– as long as you don't want them enforced too much.
Which makes the IDSA's opposition to a "useless" law
disingenuous at best.
I believe that fighting this battle is going to cost
the IDSA a capital of credibility that will be sorely
missed when the real trouble begins.
Meanwhile, In The Real World
Speaking of trouble and neoliberal dogma, some days,
it is disgustingly hard to maintain any sort of faith in
the human race. This morning, I saw a news report about
grossly underpaid teachers being forced to work 10 days
for free so that the state of Oregon could balance its
budget. Then, it was an interview with a man who was
afraid he'd have to sell his house because he had been
kicked off medicare rolls after multiple strokes and
heart attacks. Meanwhile, the rich haven't quite
finished celebrating last week's gigantic tax cut, the
second in two years, which is expected to significantly
boost the economy - of the Cayman Islands. (And while
things aren't quite this depressing in my home and
native land of Canada yet, rest assured that we're well
on our way to making up for lost ground.)
To put it mildly, our global society doesn't exhibit
much of a sense of fairness. But I don't have to tell
that to an audience of game developers who work endless
unpaid overtime so that retailers can skim 50% off the
price of their games, do I?
Fact: when you really think about it, the system
makes very little sense. Which is hardly surprising when
you consider the construct on which the entire science
of economy is built: Homo Economicus, a patently
ridiculous abstraction that says human beings make all
of their decisions based on greed and that ignores such
fundamental human characteristics as the needs for
self-preservation, social recognition and peace of mind.
(Way back in the Dark Ages, when I was in graduate
business school, I was so utterly flabbergasted by that
laughable concept that I lost whatever little interest
in high finance I had left. I thought anyone who claimed
to believe in that stuff needed to be either certifiably
insane, or lying through their teeth. Then came Nortel.
Now I know they need both.)
All You Can Eat
Linda McQuaig's fascinating book All You Can
Eat: Greed, Lust, and the New Capitalism
chronicles how our current Free Market system achieved
dominance in the Western world - after 400 years of
armed resistance on the part of the people it claimed to
liberate. Here are a few choice tidbits, in no
particular order; some of them may churn your stomach.
[] In the Middle Ages, a baker could be (and was)
prosecuted for trying to make excess profit by selling
underweight bread.
[] During the so-called food riots of the Industrial
Revolution, starving peasants seized carts filled with
overpriced food for export – and instead of stealing it,
they bought it at what was generally considered a fair
price.
[] Just like corporations today claim that every
nickel-and-dime increase in the minimum wage will bring
down the Apocalypse, their predecessors fought tooth and
nail against laws preventing them from employing
illiterate boys under 12 in coal mines.
[] Eflornithine, an important drug to fight the
sleeping sickness that kills 66,000 people every year in
Africa, went off the market in 1995 because letting
Africans die was more profitable than selling the drug
at a price they could afford. It went back into
production when it was found to be an effective facial
hair remover.
All You Can Eat is also a stinging indictment of
Reagan-Thatcher-Bush-Chrétien laissez-faire capitalism.
GDP growth rates were actually higher in the two
decades before 1980 than they have been since the
privatization and deregulation frenzy began. And under
NAFTA, it is the corporations that often end up
regulating governments. Indeed, the treaty includes
several provisions to protect investor rights from undue
government intervention – where "undue" means "anything
that impacts profits, no matter the justification". In
one famous case, the Canadian government was forced to
pay millions of dollars in damages to the manufacturer
of a gasoline additive it had banned after research had
shown it caused cancer. In another, Mexico was forced to
pay up when local zoning laws denied a multinational
company the right to build a toxic waste dump where it
might contaminate drinking water. And the NAFTA
tribunals that rule on disputes have plenty of coercive
power, unlike, say, the United Nations Human Rights
Committee.
Wither The Pendulum?
Meanwhile, games are getting so big and expensive to
make that crunch times, once measured in weeks,
routinely last months or years. I even know of a couple
of projects that were started on the principle that
everyone would work like crazy from day one,
because there was "no other way" to make them
profitable. The publishers, the retailers, and the
players simply demand more and more game for the same
dollar, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
But really, why isn't there "any other way"? Why must
every game fill twelve DVDs and require 200 hours of
play time to receive favorable reviews – or even any
sort of distribution at all? Honestly, I can't even
remember the last time I finished a game. There are a
couple that I bought in recent months, played for a
while, enjoyed, and then put aside completely
satisfied before I had reached the midway point!
From my point of view, much of the effort that went into
these games was wasted. I'm sure that the poor guys who
worked 36-hour shifts to cram this extra stuff in will
be happy to know it.
Seriously, who are these players who demand $20
millions' worth of content in a game? No one I know.
(Anyone you know?) But we all know the folks who
have to make that content – and since the typical game
doesn't sell that many more copies than it did 10 years
ago, nor does it get a higher unit price on the shelves,
they have to do more and more of the work for free,
whether in unpaid overtime or because they work for a
share of royalties that never materialize - because
someone else has made an even bigger game and snatched
their publisher away.
This stuff can't go on forever. I really, really hope
that indies will soon be more profitable, on average,
than the big publishers, because we need more power in
the hands of the developers and less in anonymous
boardrooms.
Then again, as of this writing, rumor has it that
Christine Todd Whitman's replacement as the head of the
Environmental Protection Agency will be an auto industry
spokesperson. So much for power to the people.
Maybe I'll end this article here and go take a deep
breath while I still can.
