The Collapse of Complexity and the rise of Social
Because games are built out of much of the same conceptual materials as the web itself (code and art), they’ve resisted a lot of the economic shockwaves that have created such a disturbance in traditional media. But they’re not immune to it. We’ve had ample proof over the last year that any genuine growth is going to come from outside of the console and “big game” model, but there are still a lot of people who think that it’s all going to “settle down”, and that what we’re seeing is an aberration.
Clay Shirky’s latest column proposes an interesting idea: That not leaving behind the big, dumb business models could be catastrophic.
It comes out of a theory that discusses how civilizations collapse:
Tainter’s thesis is that when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some.
The ‘and them some’ is what causes the trouble. Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.
In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change. Tainter doesn’t regard the sudden decoherence of these societies as either a tragedy or a mistake—”[U]nder a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response”, to use his pitiless phrase. Furthermore, even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites.
The system needs change to survive.
While it’s not always useful to try and fit large scale models over smaller ones, in this case I think there are some useful lessons to be drawn from the idea that our current inefficiencies and rapid shifts may actually be fundamental to the survival of media.
Here’s the money quote:
To pick a couple of examples more or less at random, last year Barry Diller of IAC said, of content available on the web, “It is not free, and is not going to be,” Steve Brill of Journalism Online said that users “just need to get back into the habit of doing so [paying for content] online”, and Rupert Murdoch of News Corp said “Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use.”
Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:
“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”
But it the more turbulent and fluid environment of games, we do know how to do it. And the ones who accept that are the ones who are going to thrive.
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