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Can we have some actual democracy, please?

Something is seriously screwed up in the way Americans vote for their presidential nominees.

Whether it's because this campaign is a tight race for the first time in a while or something else, the byzantine ins and outs of the American election system have never been clearer and more frustrating than they are in 2008.

We've seen the two parties ridiculously kowtowing to Iowa and New Hampshire by stripping Florida and Michigan of delegates for leap-frogging those early states' votes (and Hillary Clinton's equally ridiculous, retroactive attempt to claim those delegates despite having already agreed to said kowtowing). And Barack Obama getting more delegates in Nevada than Clinton despite getting a smaller share of the vote. And the odd prevalence of caucuses. And Louisiana's weird rules negating Mike Huckabee's win on Saturday. And Texas' upcoming primary/caucus hybrid. And the inexplicable "superdelegates." And news of 49,500 ballots in Los Angeles County that can't be counted because they were too confusing and were marked incorrectly. (This is all separate from the GOP's usual obsession with voter ID laws, "voter fraud," and other attempts to generally suppress voting.)

And then Washington state's GOP chair unilaterally stopped Saturday's vote count and declared John McCain the winner -- despite 13 percent, or about 1,500 votes, left to be counted and fewer than 300 votes separating McCain and Huckabee. He has since grudgingly continued the count, but it's not an effort I'd trust if I were a candidate.

This Washington state business seems to be more a function of one man's (or one party's) shenanigans rather than part of the systemic weirdness. But this video (courtesy of Talkingpointsmemo) of Huckabee comparing the aborted counting to a Soviet "election," makes clear that this episode is emblematic of how messed up our election system has seemed since the 2000 Florida debacle.



There may not be brazenly antidemocratic, well-connected party bosses in every state. But the confusing electoral process behind which the Washington GOP boss thought he could hide is widespread. Here's how the Seattle Times describes the Washington caucus (as flagged by TPM's Paul Kiel):

Due to the way Republicans select their delegates, the results could bear little resemblance to the presidential preferences of the 40 Washington state delegates ultimately sent to the GOP national convention in September.

"Nobody won or lost anything on Saturday," said Vance, now a public affairs consultant and McCain supporter. "But every other state had been able to report a 'winner,' so there was expected there would be a 'winner' in Washington state."

Here, the number of delegates elected at precinct caucuses means very little in terms of which candidate will ultimately get the most delegates heading into the national convention, he said. Delegates are "unbound free agents," who are not required to vote for one candidate over another. They can tell people whom they're supporting, but they can also change their minds, Vance said. Also, the roughly 16,700 delegates elected at Saturday's precinct caucuses will be winnowed down at legislative district caucuses and county conventions. Those remaining will go to the state convention, where only 18 of them will be chosen -- two from each of the state's nine Congressional districts -- to go on to the national convention.

This is absurd. All the caucuses are absurd. The national and state parties and the cronies who run and staff them are doing nothing less than hijacking the Democratic process.

According to this Slate column, all of the above (excepting the Washington vote stoppage, but including the Washington caucus rules) is legal. The political parties can make their own rules for the nominating process (short of some egregious exceptions involving race). But that doesn't make the parties' actions right. They're certainly violating the spirit of "one person, one vote."

I don't expect the candidates to grapple with the election system when they're in the middle of it (except for Hillary Clinton, who has managed the feat of embracing the silencing of Florida and Michigan voters and then acting like she won real races in those states, while simultaneously bad-mouthing contests she views as undemocratic or sexist simply because voters didn't pick her or were, um, black).

But it would be nice -- especially if Barack "Change, Not Danger, Is My Middle Name" Obama or John "I'm A Straight Talker 'Cause The Press Says So" McCain ultimately wins -- if our next president embraced serious election reform as an important step in that fabled and perpetually promised healing of America.

McCain beats Obama! (In viral videos, that is)

Here's a great response video/parody to that too-serious Barack Obama vid. Besides being a pretty hilarious takedown of John McCain, it also nicely punctures the overwrought atmosphere of the will.i.am. project.

Reading a book vs. Reading the Web

Over at Publishing2.0, Scott Karp wrote an interesting post exploring why he now prefers reading online to reading books. He has discovered that he prefers reading and thinking across the network rather than in a linear fashion:

When I read online, I constantly follow links from one item to the next, often forgetting where I started. Sometimes I backtrack to one content “node” and jump off in different directions. ...

So doesn’t this make for an incoherent reading experience? Yes, if you’re thinking in a linear fashion. But I find reading on the web is most rewarding when I’m not following a set path but rather trying to “connect the dots,” thinking about ideas and trends and what it all might mean.

His post reminds me a little of the discussion about video games vs. "linear" media. Some video game evangelists argue that games are superior to movies, books, etc. because only games allow players to choose their path and create the narrative and experience themselves. According to this argument, just as Karp finds "reading on the web is most rewarding when I’m not following a set path but rather trying to 'connect the dots,'" gamers find video games more rewarding than other media because players don't follow a set path but connect the dots however they want (within the confines of a game's rules and boundaries).

My general response to that argument is that giving players control isn't inherently better; it just means players may be looking for something different than movie-goers. I went to Juno to see the story Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman created; allowing me to take part in that or direct some scenes myself would have made it partly my story. As I've written,

if you have a story to tell, why would you want to dilute it by making it into a video game where each interaction changes the story you want to tell? That's what authorial control is: Setting the pace of the story, the speed and manner in which information gets to the reader to move the narrative forward and fill out the dramatic arc; discovering things about the characters while writing the work and incorporating that into the story; not letting the narrative get caught up on conversation asides or thematic tangents.

Thus you can't defend games against other media by saying "Games make better stories because they give you control and movies and books don't." (Michael Chabon is a far better storyteller than I am; I look to him for stories because I can't write them myself; and telling my on-screen avatar where to go and who to shoot is not a better story than Kavalier and Clay). Instead say "Games are better because they give you control at all and that's more interesting than being told a story by a talented storyteller." I disagree with that, but it's a fair argument.

I think there's an element of that argument in Scott's post. And while I'm much more sympathetic to his view of non-linear reading than I am to the superiority of non-linear (or pseudo non-linear) gaming -- I am addicted to the Internet, after all -- I still sometimes prefer reading a book to reading hyperlinked strands of thought online, for the same reasons I don't buy the games-are-better argument.

I read a fair number of books, almost exclusively non-fiction. And I read them because when I want to really learn more about a topic, I want to find the expert (loosely defined) who has already "'connect[ed] the dots,' [thought] about ideas and trends and what it all might mean."

For example, I'm currently reading The Omnivore's Dilemma. Now, to learn and think more about How We Eat, I could have instead gone to The Ethicurean, found their posts on the book, followed links from there, and tried to make sense of it all without certain expertise to guide me. But I prefer to start by learning from someone who's done all that work already, who has read the scientific studies and industry reports as well as the blog posts, who has conducted interviews and visited the farms himself -- and then constructed his argument based on that knowledge and experience. Just because the book is linear doesn't mean I'm passively absorbing it. While reading, I'm still connecting dots, asking questions, and making mental notes about things to follow-up online later.

Scott asks:

Is there such a thing as networked human thought? Certain there is among a group of people enabled by a network — but what about for an individual, processing information via the web’s network?

I guess I would make the case that reading a good non-fiction book is ultimately tapping into the same network in a different, possibly more effective (if you're interested in a specific topic), way. Instead of exploring the network yourself, you're accessing the network as filtered through the expertise of someone who has explored far more of that network than one reader ever could.

About those "failing" newspapers...

A couple of things jumped out at me in this New York Times story about the sorry state of newspapers. Richard Perez-Pena makes the case that while things have been bad for a while,

what is happening now is something new, something more serious than anyone has experienced in generations. Last year started badly and ended worse, with shrinking profits and tumbling stock prices, and 2008 is shaping up as more of the same, prompting louder talk about a dark turning point.

Most of the evidence is nothing new: circulation keeps dropping; print advertising is falling (especially real estate ads) and online advertising both doesn't make up for that loss and isn't growing as quickly as it was; "Job cuts have become all but universal."

But then there's this, about three-quarters of the way through:

Newspaper profits remain healthy, but they are dropping fast. For example, the newspapers of Media General, a large Southern chain, had a 17 percent operating profit margin last year, but the dollar amount fell 23 percent from the year before. The Gannett Company’s newspaper division, the nation’s largest chain, had a 21 percent margin, but a 10 percent decline.

Excuise me? I baking powder? Profits are healthy, Gannett has a 21 percent margin -- and the fuss is about what now? You want real economic doldrums? Check out the auto industry. Ford lost $2.7 billion in 2007 and $12.6 billion the year before -- and those aren't just losses in market capitalization (that was probably a heck of a lot more), but $15 billion in actual money down the drain. Think they wouldn't kill for that 21 percent margin? (Their 2007 margin: minus-6.8 percent.)

Obviously Wall Street only cares that Gannett's profit fell 10 percent from the year before, not that the company is still making money. And Gannett and Media General undoubtedly maintained those high profit margins by cutting some (or a lot of) news space and firing some (or a lot of) people. But I wish these kinds of stories did a better job of putting the gloom in at least some perspective. In a great New Yorker column a couple years ago, James Surowiecki did just that:

(N)ewspapers remain a surprisingly robust business and generate tremendous amounts of cash every year. Most of them have profit margins that dwarf those of the average company; McClatchy’s operating margin last year was twenty-eight per cent*, while ExxonMobil’s was around sixteen per cent, and the typical supermarket’s is around four per cent. The reach of newspapers remains huge. Daily circulation is around fifty-five million (not including online readers), giving the industry more customers than any other traditional media outlet. And those customers have the kind of demographics that advertisers like; even as circulation has dropped, revenue from print ads has stayed healthy, to the tune of more than forty-seven billion dollars last year. Newspapers are classic cash cows: solidly profitable businesses in a stagnant industry.

(*McClatchy obviously no longer has 28 percent margins, partly thanks to its purchase of Knight Ridder. But replace McClatchy with Gannett and the point still holds.)
Now, Perez-Pena seems to be arguing that a coming tipping point will make Surowiecki's observation moot, that the cash cows' multiple stomachs will collapse. (How's that for a mixed metaphor!) But Perez-Pena's casually tossed-off "Oh, by the way things may not actually be so bad" makes the rest of his piece unpersuasive.

As does the graphic that accompanies the story. First, the graphic shows that the newspaper industry still has circulation revenues greater than $50 billion and ad revenues greater than $40 billion. More significantly, the graphic shows that while Media General and New York Times Co. had respective ad revenue drops of 9.1 and 4.7 percent in 2007, Lee Enterprises -- which owns more than 50 local papers -- only had a 1.1 percent drop in ad revenue. Yet the story quotes a Bear Stearns analyst who claims local advertising has fallen while national ads are doing fine: “Local advertisers have been swallowed up, and there are just fewer," Alexia Quadrani said. "Your local pharmacy becomes CVS; your local hardware store becomes Home Depot.”

How can this be if a local newspaper company fared much better than the six national media companies whose figures the Times reported?

Like the Times video game article I dissected the other day, this story tries to extrapolate a blunt trend from some numbers without really considering all that's going on here -- instead of trying to make sense of the very real problems facing the industry and figure out what the heck we can do about them.

Many apologies...

For the very long post after this one. I tried to set it up so only the first few paragraphs show up and you have to click a "Read More" link to get the full post. But that added a "Read More" link to the end of every post, even the shorter ones. If anyone knows how to break up select posts without having "Read More" on every one, please let me know!

Mario Party is not Meet the Spartans

In a recent New York Times piece, Seth Schiesel looks at 2007's top-selling video games and finds that social and easy-to-pick-up titles are crowding out more complex and critically acclaimed stuff. His basic point -- as anyone who has played Wii Tennis at a party could tell you -- is pretty reasonable:

Paradoxically, at a moment when technology allows designers to create ever more complex and realistic single-player fantasies, the growth in the now $18 billion gaming market is in simple, user-friendly experiences that families and friends can enjoy together. ...

Put another way, it may be a sign of the industry’s nascent maturity that as video games become more popular than ever, hard-core gamers and the old-school critics who represent them are becoming an ever smaller part of the audience.

But taking a closer look at the numbers, his argument starts to break down.

Here are the top 10 games of 2007, via Kotaku:

1. Halo 3 (Xbox 360) - 4,820,000
2. Wii Play with Remote (Wii) - 4,120,000
3. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Xbox 360) - 3,040,000
4. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (PS2) - 2,720,000
5. Super Mario Galaxy (Wii) - 2,520,000
6. Pokemon Diamond (DS) - 2,480,000
7. Madden NFL 08 (PS2) - 1,900,000
8. Guitar Hero II (PS2) - 1,890,000
9. Assassin's Creed (Xbox 360) - 1,870,000
10. Mario Party 8 (Wii) - 1,820,000

Pokemon Diamond doesn't really apply to his thesis because kids are always nuts for new Pokemon games; likewise with Madden, which is a perennial best-seller (thanks to the Guys Rain Man Gene). Before it was released, Halo 3 -- the very top seller, mind you -- had hard-core gamers and critics salivating over every screen shot and nugget of information about new weapons. Call of Duty 4 has a Metacritic score of 94 (I'm not a fan of Metacritic, but that's what Schiesel uses to define what's "critically acclaimed"), and intense first-person shooters are hardly the stuff of casual and family gamers. Assassin's Creed, as Schiesel notes, is a one-player adventure game.

So basically he's talking about Wii Play, Super Mario Galaxy, Guitar Hero II and III, and Mario Party 8. But Mario Galaxy is also a one-player game, and it got a 97 rating on Metacritic. And critics knocked Guitar Hero III for being too difficult -- especially given the mass audience it's attracting -- so I'm not even sure that applies.

Right, so now we're down to Wii Play, Guitar Hero II, and Mario Party 8. Now, the Wii was the top-selling home console of the year, with 6.3 million sold. Plus Wii Play was basically a $10 add-on when you bought an extra Wii controller, which all those millions of people had to do if they wanted to play with their friends and families.

What the top 10 list really seems to show, then, is that hardcore gamers (including Madden fans and Pokemon kiddies) still buy the most games, and that most Wii buyers were content to play Wii Sports, which comes with the system, and Wii Play when they needed a second controller.

Schiesel's piece has a bigger hole in it. He tries to make the leap that as the mass market takes over, critics are becoming marginalized:

That is not so unusual in other media. In most forms of entertainment there is a divide between what is popular with the masses and what is popular with the critics. Plenty of films get rave reviews but never make it past the art houses. Plenty of blockbusters are panned.

His main support for this is the absence on the top 10 list of atmospheric shooter BioShock, the ambitious sci-fi role-playing-game Mass Effect, and a couple of other "acclaimed" titles. Again, the numbers bely the argument.

Mass Effect sold 1.6 million copies around the world in 2007 (in less than two months!); being conservative, let's say 800,000 of those were sold in the U.S. BioShock sold 490,000 in its first month, and according to market analysis site Seeking Alpha, it shipped 2 million copies total; again conservatively, let's say that means 1 million copies sold in the U.S. Sure, they might have missed the top-10 list, but those are pretty strong sales for supposedly "complex" games.

Compare BioShock's success to an "art house" movie: No Country for Old Men. For the Coen Brothers film to have had the same relative success compared to the top-grossing movie of 2007 -- Spider-Man 3, at $337 million -- as BioShock had compared to the top-selling game, the movie would had to have grossed $70 million instead of $42 million. There Will Be Blood would needed to have grossed $56 million instead of $22 million to match Mass Effect's relative success.

So in terms of sales, Schiesel's critics' picks are actually doing twice as well as their film counterparts. But even that doesn't tell the whole story.

Take a look at the 10 best-selling games from 2006:

1. PS2 Madden 07 - 2.8 m
2. NDS New Super Mario Bros. - 2.0 m
3. 360 Gears of War- 1.8 mm
4. PS2 Kingdom Hearts II - 1.7 m
5. PS2 Guitar Hero 2 - 1.3 mm
6. PS2 Final Fantasy XII - 1.3 mm
7. NDS Brain Age - 1.1 m
8. 360 Madden 07 - 1.1mm
9. 360 Ghost Recon - 1.0 m
10. PS2 NCAA Football 07 - 1.0 mm

For one thing, the basic mix is about the same as 2007's list. Gears of War is like Halo 3, Ghost Recon is like Call of Duty 4; Brain Age and Super Mario Bros. are like Wii Play and Mario Party. But more importantly, maybe BioShock and Mass Effect didn't make the 2007 list -- but they've sold as well or nearly as well as half of 2006's top 10. They didn't miss 2007's top 10 because fewer people are buying complex games. They missed out because more people are buying more games of all kinds -- including critics favorites.

Schiesel writes, "There is hardly a question that two years ago all of those games [Mass Effect, BioShock, The Orange Box] would have made the list." But of course that's in question. Shadow of the Colossus, Psychonauts, Okami -- there's a long list of recent critical darlings that were commercial busts. His art house games are doing so well now because a rising tide is lifting all games.

There's a more fundamental problem in Schiesel's attempt to delineate a creative/critical hierarchy of video games. As I've argued before, video games have a long way to go before we can truly compare them to movies, TV, books, etc. (Some people argue we shouldn't compare them to other media at all, but leave that aside for now.) For all their ambition, BioShock and Mass Effect don't change that reality (exactly how they fall short is a topic for future posts). Moreover, a game like God of War II -- another of Schiesel's poster titles for missing the top 10 -- is at best similar to a high-quality B-movie, not equivalent to a P.T. Anderson or Michel Gondry film.

Even as Schiesel is greatly overestimating the "high end" of games, he's doing something worse to the games at the other end of his imagined hierarchy. He suggests that the success of mass-market titles is a sign that video games are becoming like other media, which have "a highly sophisticated cognoscenti whose tastes have little to do with the mass audiences that still drive those markets." But there's a huge difference between lowbrow movies and mass-market video games. Game "critics" don't like Mario Party 8 because it's essentially the same as the other seven Mario Parties (never mind that it'll be new to all those Wii owners who haven't played video games since Pac-Man or NES). Movie critics hate Meet the Spartans because it's bad comedy, bad satire, full of bad gay jokes, and otherwise creatively bankrupt.

Mario Party 8 is not Meet the Spartans. Simple, even derivative gameplay in a game that is narrative-free and purely about the experience of playing can't be compared to lowbrow narrative art. Notice that Schiesel doesn't address games like Super Mario Galaxy and Rock Band -- mass hits that are also critically acclaimed yet have no "high-art" ambition. Or take a game like Uncharted: Drake's Fortune -- a critically hailed action-adventure game. I stopped playing after about half an hour partly because the older explorer guiding me on my jungle trip kept making sexist comments. I'm sure he has a change of heart later in the game after the female reporter character busts some heads, but I didn't want to hear any more of his nonsense before that change. How does that fit into Schiesel's hierarchy?

What emerges from his scattershot analysis is the confusion and uncertainty that are part of what's stunting game criticism -- and games themselves. There's an assumption that all of these games somehow lie on the same spectrum and can be evaluated in the same terms. BioShock and Mass Effect are by default put on one end of the spectrum because of their ambitious worlds and dialogue -- regardless of whether the dialogue and ideas are actually well-crafted, unique and intelligent. The quality of their non-gameplay aspects is almost irrelevant; what seems to be important is that those aspects exist at all. Meanwhile games without those qualities, like Mario games, puzzle games, racing games are alternately revered and slimed, depending on -- well, it's not clear on what, exactly.

All the top 10 list really tells us is that lots more people are playing and buying games of all kinds. All Schiesel's piece really tells us is that we still don't know exactly how to think about and evaluate the immensely varied world of video games.

The irrelevancy of the nightly news

Caitlin Flanagan has a nice essay in the latest Atlantic about Katie Couric, the Today Show, and Couric's failure as the CBS Evening News anchor. Flanagan does a good job of explaining why the fluffy-unwatchable morning shows actually mean a lot to a lot of people, and why Couric was so perfect for that role (the piece is ostensibly a review of a part-hit-job Couric biography). But the best part is Flanagan's tidy put-down of the evening news:

That Katie has bombed at CBS is a testament, not to the existence of a glass ceiling, but to the fact that real revolutions are so thoroughgoing that they don’t just provide a new answer, they change the very questions being asked. ... No woman needs to storm the Bastille of nightly news, because the form has become irrelevant: Oprah has immeasurably more cultural, commercial, and political clout than Charles Gibson and Brian Williams, and no young person is ever going to make appointment TV out of a sober-minded 6:30 wrap-up of stories he or she already read online in the afternoon.

That CBS and Couric didn't realize this -- and that newspapers have wasted so much ink (also see: Dan Rather's fall from grace, Tom Brokaw's retirement, etc.) discussing an irrelevant institution that few under age, say 58, care about -- is as devastating an indictment of the news media as any stock-price or circulation drop.

Nerd alert!

I'm surprised to find that I subscribe fully to only one of the Onion A.V. Club's "20 pop-cultural obsessions even geekier than Monty Python.

I stopped being a Simpsons nerd after circa season 10 (though I still have plenty of Milhouse in me), and my Magic the Gathering obsession lasted less than two years back in high school. Now if I quit my fantasy baseball league like I promised myself I'd do, I'll be nerd-free!

David Simon as journalism's Rip Van Winkle

I'll have more to say about this season of The Wire, its misdiagnoses of journalism's problems, and David Simon's recent nostalgic column in the Washington Post. But for now I wanted to give my general response to Season 5's Baltimore Sun storyline.

At Slate's TV Club conversation about Season 5, David Plotz annoyed David Simon by referencing brief conversations they'd had at parties in which Simon bitched about the Baltimore Sun. Simon criticized Plotz's post, concluding: "The Wire's depiction of the multitude of problems facing newspapers and high-end journalism will either stand or fall on what happens on screen, not on the back-hallway debate over the past histories, opinions passions or peculiarities of those who create it." This is what I wrote to Plotz in a solidarity e-mail after Episode 2 or 3:

Fair enough. But so far his "multitude of problems" are a) Too many Stephen Glasses, b) Pompous idiot editors too dim to see the clearly telegraphed Stephen Glasses and disinterested in getting at the root of social problems, and at a distant third c) Corporate cost-cutting. That is all.

Forget that a plague of fabulists isn't (to my knowledge) currently destroying journalism from within, and that the problem with real fabulists is they aren't usually transparent fakers right from the start. This is his grand diagnosis of the ills of modern journalism?

How about, I don't know, the Internet? Or hemorrhaging ad sales and circulation (partly or largely because of the Internet). Or figuring out how newspapers can appeal to readers and stay relevant in this new competitive-media world. Newspapers are going through their most dire period of upheaval in decades and he thinks the issue is too many fabulists?

The problem with his portrayal isn't just that Simon's fictional newsroom seems like a caricature of a mid-90s newsroom. It's that, despite his response to Plotz's TV Club post, he so clearly framed his fictional view based on his "past histories, opinions passions or peculiarities." What a coincidence that his grand statement, via The Wire, on modern journalism's failures happens to exactly coincide with his oft-stated feelings about his former editors and how they dealt with (or didn't deal with) a fabulist and stories about social issues at the Baltimore Sun 15 years ago.

Jeffrey Goldberg voices similar frustrations in his TV Club post today:

We were meant to be getting a sophisticated look at the demise of daily journalism, besieged by the Internet and by venal media companies. Well, what we've got is a newspaper edited by a pair of impossibly shmucky editors who seem, in 2008, unaware of the existence of the World Wide Web and who have in their employ a reporter who is doing something no fabricator, to the best of my knowledge, has ever done: manufacturing information about an ongoing homicide investigation. Put aside, please, the fact that said investigation is a sham as well; the reporter, Templeton, doesn't know that. Is this what David Simon really wants his viewers to believe happens at major newspapers? Is he that blinded by hate for the Baltimore Sun?

For such a supposedly brilliant guy and show, it's depressing that the answers to the last two questions seem to be yes, and yes.