Infinite Lives » Zines and Small Press

Excerpts from Ben Jackson’s essay in the upcoming ‘Distance’

Jenn Frank — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 02:26:28 +0000

My friend Nick Disabato recently founded a quarterly print publication called Distance, which pledges to underscore “longform essays about design and technology.” It launches next month.

Nick himself is something of a comparative media Renaissance guy, and on the whole I trust his judgment. Last week he recommended I skim an excerpt from one of the magazine’s first essays. The piece was written by somebody named Benjamin Jackson. Nick suggested I might find Ben’s work “interesting.”

Um, yes. Yes, I found it interesting. Why, a week and a half earlier I had hemorrhaged something passingly similar to Ben’s excerpt, albeit nothing so cohesive.

You owe it to yourself to read Ben’s essay, too, because it connects seemingly disparate ideas about patternicity, carrot-dangling, “gambling,” and the ethics of the con:

It was later revealed that the machine, more commonly known as the Mechanical Turk, was an elaborately constructed ruse, where a highly-skilled human chess player of extremely small stature was hidden in the cabinet. Openings on the sides revealed gears, levers and machinery designed to misdirect the viewer into thinking that the Baron had devised some mechanical means of intelligently responding to a player’s moves.

The Mechanical Turk is an early example of unethical game design. Later examples include three-card monte, in which a spectator is shown a card, is asked to follow it with their eyes, and is then misled into following the wrong card. Many casino games are unethical: for example, slot machines usually randomize their payouts to ensure that players keep coming back, even when they’re clearly losing money. But unethical traits can appear in any game, no matter how subtle, and a recent crop of games shows a fuzzier moral ground.

The primary characteristic of unethical games is that they are manipulative, misleading, or both. From a user experience standpoint, these games display dark patterns: common design decisions that trick users into doing something against their will. Dark patterns are usually employed to maximize some metric of success, such as email signups, checkouts, or upgrades; they generally test well when they’re released to users.

For example, FarmVille, Tap Fish, and Club Penguin take advantage of deep-rooted psychological impulses to make money from their audiences. They take advantage of gamers’ completion urge by prominently displaying progress bars that encourage leveling up. They randomly time rewards in much the same way as the slot machines described above. And they spread virally by compelling players to constantly post requests to their friends’ walls.

This trend is not just limited to social games, though: many combat games, like America’s Army, are funded by the U.S. military and serve as thinly-veiled recruitment tools5. Some brands have launched Facebook games like Cheez-It’s Swap-It!, and they serve as tools to sell more products. These techniques can be used in any sort of game, in any context.

What, with all these concurrent ideas about “scams,” is Ben readying to describe to us?

ZYNGA. He is about to discuss ZYNGA.

A longer excerpt appeared this afternoon at The Atlantic. Now you can really see how cohesive Ben’s piece is. It is all about the maturation of the con, how Zynga lands us, hook, line, and sinker.

Here is an especially magnetic aside about “what” makes a “game” “good,” and why we might choose to invest in any game the way we do (it strongly borrows from the sociological idea of “cost,” wherein every human relationship is a type of transaction):

At IndieCade in October 2011, Adam Saltsman, Canabalt’s creator, discussed the notion of “time until death.” All of us have a finite amount of time on earth, and any time we spend on a particular activity is time that we can’t spend doing something else. This means that the time we spend gaming represents most of a game’s cost of ownership, far more than any money that we spend. If that time is enjoyable (or rather, if its benefits outweigh its costs), then the game was worth our time.

Really exciting stuff; I can’t wait to see what the entire essay contains.

You can help Nick Disabato kickstart Distance over here.

On writing for print

Jenn Frank — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 02:47:05 +0000

I am about to try something really new. I’ve said that before, but this time I definitely totally mean it.

Lately, I have been getting messages from friends (Allan) about an essay of mine that appeared in Kill Screen Magazine, Issue 3: Intimacy. People, this thing was published in April. Come on.

Obviously I think you should buy the US$15 magazine, which is still available. I know a lot of people get irritated at the idea of spending that kind of money on printed media, which baffles me, but some people believe everything should be online for free. They’ve gotten used to a certain type of accessibility, and I guess that’s OK.

There are a lot of reasons you should buy the magazine, though. For one, it isn’t that old, and it’s a really good issue, and $15 isn’t that much money, and you will have this magazine forever, unless you lose it. For two, we need to support print media right now. (This is very much like a plea I meant to post back in April.) For my own part, I was already paid for my contribution to the magazine, so just buy the magazine, already. For another, we owe the person who ably and singlehandedly edited the piece, writer Chris Dahlen, because he really did do most of the work. Without a good editor, I A) would have given up, or B) would have written something much longer/shorter/worse, but probably just option A.

I wrote this essay, “All the Spaces Between Us,” very specifically for Kill Screen Magazine. It had occurred to me to pitch it to Chris one night in the car, I think in October 2010, when I was going down the highway. (This is how the magic happens, you guys.)

I realized I had some things I wanted to talk about, but if I wanted to go all the way, all-in, I’d have to write for print. That’s because the printed word affords you a freedom you don’t really get with Internet writing. Everyone can see Internet writing and then pass it around, so you have to watch what you say. Plus you don’t want to experiment with putting your whole soul on the line for strangers, and then here comes Joe Dickhead in the comments, picking it apart. Listen, Dickhead! That’s what college was for! OK!

With print, though, people have to pay for the privilege of taking your writing seriously, and because your writing isn’t very muscular anyway, a lot of people are going to flip past your essay. That’s a very freeing feeling, to know that a lot of people won’t stop to read, or else they will get exhausted and stop reading before you ever start making your Very Important Points.

What this all means is, if you can put a humiliatingly personal essay behind the wall of a garden—that is, if the reader has to pay for it, wait for it to arrive in the mail, flip to it, and then stick with it, which, these are an awful lot of hoops—then you are free to say what you like, because all the readers you never even wanted to read your essay already got weeded out. See?

For awhile I’ve thought about just posting the first two sections of the essay right here on this website. The parts about Second Life, sex, and avatars might be interesting to a lot of people who play in virtual worlds, I reasoned, but I chickened out anyway. Or maybe I think the sections about neurology are more important, and I worried that just putting up a chunk would somehow undermine everything.

But I haven’t yet convinced you to spend $15, and that’s fine. And that’s why I’m going for it!!

For a nominal fee, I will let you have a copy of my essay! I know, what a jerk! And I know that not everyone will want to pay a tiny fee, and that is why I feel so liberated!

For 99 cents—that’s the cost of one measly MP3!—here’s what you will get:

~15 real-life pages of the overwrought written word
which comes to about 8,500 written words, actually
in .pdf form
set in Garamond!

And that’s all I can promise.

Once you have it, maybe you can print it out and pretend like you are having the Full Magazine Experience. Maybe you will even decide that you would like to read it in Kill Screen instead, with the glossy pages and all the strange and wonderful paintings that José-Luis Olivares made for it, and then you would like to go spend those 15 hard-earned dollars I was talking about before. Or, possibly, none of those things will happen, you’ll get bored with the essay, and then you will have 750 KB of dead weight on your computer.

And there you have it! That’s my idea of a sales pitch!

So here it is. You may download it for 99 American pennies. (Don’t worry: payment processing eats up 56 of those pennies, I have discovered.) I’ve never done this before, but it is pretty easy to get ahold of me if there are any problems.

Kill Screen, issue #1: the No Fun Issue

Jenn Frank — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 23:15:07 +0000

Hi, mom. Hi! It’s me! Yeah, hi!

What? No, I haven’t taken the GRE yet. Hang on, hey, I was calling to tell you—hmm? My driver’s license? Um, nuh-uh, I didn’t renew it. But I—huh? Well, I mean, probably. No, I mean, I’ll get the oil changed, I think I can do that for twenty bucks at the Car-X. What? Yes, we are. No. Yes. Yes. Probably a movie or something. No, I think I’ve actually stopped losing weight. What? Well, ramen and granola, mostly. OK. OK. OK. I don’t think so? OK.

Hey, I was actually phoning to tell you about my article in the magazine. What? No, my article. Well, the magazine is called Kill Screen—uh, no, it’s a video game magazine, I guess “kill screen” is like a video game, uh, term.

But it’s Kill Screen, issue number one, the “No Fun Issue,” and my column is about gender and sex and sexism and uh genderism, and the magazine is twenty dollars. What? No, I get one copy. No, I just get the one copy of it. No. No, I’m keeping my copy. You have to buy your own copy. No. No. Yes. Hmm? Well, even though you can kind of already read my piece online for free, you know, the magazine is published like quarterly, and it’s ad-free and glossy and ninety-six pages long, so since this is a really nice magazine or whatever, like, I couldn’t just publish the old version of the column. So I added a lot to the original piece and we all workshopped it, and so it’s like a really different article now, in some ways, but I think in good ways.

Anyway, I guess that’s all. OK. OK. I will. Mhm. Yes. OK. I will. I will. OK! Talk to you later. OK. OK. Talk to you later. Bye! OK. OK, bye! Yes. I will. Bye!

Kill Screen Magazine – Issue One: The No Fun Issue

On writing for print

The 2600 Post: something old, something new, and something lost

Jenn Frank — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 22:59:55 +0000

Of course, after a run of 100 issues over 19 years, I can certainly understand why editor Al Backiel has decided to hang up his hat. That’s a very long time, and an awful lot of issues. The 2600 Connection has been a fixture of the Atari fan community for years, a work of dedication celebrating one of the most important game systems of all time. [...]

The magazine’s demise doesn’t mean that the 2600 collector scene is dead, though; far from it. Atari Age and a number of other sites dedicated to the VCS and its siblings are perfectly alive and active. And people are still producing all sorts of interesting new homebrew games for the platform, such as the infamous VCS rendition of Mega Man that’s been making the rounds this week. -E. Jeremy Parish

1-Up MegaZine #3

Jenn Frank — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 09:12:06 +0000

Raina Lee introduces issue #3 of 1-Up thusly:

Welcome to 1-Up MegaZine, Issue #3. For those new to 1-Up, our publication represents the ghost of video game future; a world where secret golden coins and power-ups emerge out of the ruins (broken blocks), and everyone can live as many lives as they earn.

It’s a good introduction, encapsulating the dreamy-eyed intellectualism of the zine as a whole—and, for that matter, shedding light on the wherefores of this very website’s title.

1-Up is targeted at, we suspect, a particular kind of gamer. She is a cradle-to-grave gamer, to be sure, but because of the videogame industry’s current climate, she is cornered into that horrible niche called “casual” (or in Nintendo’s lexicon, “latent”) gaming. She intellectualizes and externalizes the videogames of her youth precisely because they are so internalized: her individual videogame experiences are woven into her earliest memory.

We deliberately say she, because not only does 1-Up MegaZine—for all its universality, gender-neutrality and cosmic synchronicity—focus on its many female readers and contributors, but the zine itself seems strangely feminine. It is sensitively written, meticulously constructed, and wholly lovely.

In many ways, the zine reminds us of PekoPeko: a Zine About Food. Both have gorgeous screenprinted covers (and until issue 3 of 1-Up, they were bound similarly); both feature intelligent, sensitive writing; both are labors-of-love that have effectively ceased to be published; both are tough to find, and purchasing an early issue is pretty much a matter of chance. If memory serves, both also have featured articles by Wired’s Chris Baker.

1-Up Issue #3 is loosely, thematically bound by Street Fighter 2, and each issue comes with a funny little “trading” card attached, which depicts one in a series of “Imaginary Street Fighter Characters.” Issue #3 also includes interviews with Scottish rockers Bis and legendary gamer Billy Mitchell, as well as a revelatory piece by cartoonist Martin Cendreda.

We regret that the zine is so difficult to get ahold of (after a failed attempt at online purchase, we picked our copy up at Giant Robot’s SF location), but you’ll likely find 1-Up MegaZine well worth the search.