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.

While it’s easy enough to figure out what the most popular games are simply by going over to AppData and looking at the numbers, I thought the end of the year might be a chance to reflect on what were some of the most significant games of 2009, and discuss their impact, for better and for worse.

Some of these games were hits, and others were bombs, but they are all games that will have (or should have) an impact on the way we’ll make our games in 2010.

Amazon reviews never reflect the product, they reflect the passion people have for the product. As Jeff Bezos has pointed out again and again, most great products get 5 star and 1 star reviews. That makes sense… why would you be passionate enough about something that’s sort of ‘meh’ to bother writing a three star review?

A product that inspires intense responses will almost always have more success then those that only inspire a middling reaction.

1) Figure out what your fundamental gameplay dynamic is going to be as early as possible. IE, what is it the fundamental unit of play that the user is actually going to be doing (including the physical button/key presses)?
2) Define and integrate your social model and your monetization model.
3) Express your concept in wireframes.
4) Determine the minimum viable level of product you will need for launch.
5) Determine the size of your post-launch including your development window, goals, and top priorities.
6) Execute on development.
7) Launch.
8) Begin to execute on your post-launch goals. These will change based on metrics and user requests.

Completing some later steps will often send you back to step one. Don’t be afraid to loop.

That’s led to Facebook taking action– in this case, temporarily shutting down the Fishville application, which would seem to be a just punishment if the allegations turn out to be true.

Obviously, this isn’t over yet.

UPDATE: Zynga now says they’re pulling all offers from their games.

If you haven’t checked them out, go take a look.

One thing that’s important to remember as the industry pushes forward is that while the actual game is the most obvious content, it’s not necessarily your actual business. In the end what makes your money is the real business that you’re in, and we’re giving the content away.

Newspapers have, for the better part of the last century at least, been using news as an effective way to deliver ads into their reader’s homes.   That’s not to say that the reporting isn’t a key feature of the user experience, but in this article on why newspapers are failing, there’s a very interesting point:

Remember “shoppers,” the poorly designed throwaway publications filled with tacky little ads? Daily newspapers are high-end shoppers. They spent a lot of money on original content to class up the operation and give people a reason to ask for the ads to be delivered. Long before the web displayed the power and leverage of critical mass, newspapers benefited from it; once you got the franchise in your particular locale, you tried not to stir up trouble, because it just distracted you from time better spent cashing checks.

The newspapers had found that the could afford to lose money on distribution by making it up in ad-revenue, along with user subscriptions. Sound familiar?

Luckily for Social Games the user revenue portion of the model looks to be rapidly outpacing advertising as a key factor in monetization. That’s important because, like many things on the internet, the cost of generating a new, and more effectively targeted platform for advertising is so cheap that unless you can deliver a focused demographic in large numbers, ad revenue is always going to be minimal.

Games also have another advantage, which is that our relationship to our community is more explicit. News  media is often disdainful of the fact that they were ever a “social media”. They think that they own their audience, and are pushing hard to get government to enforce what is, at it’s heart, a social relationship between the people who make media and the people who consume it.  And once you think you’re speaking for your audience instead of to them, you’ve already begun to unravel the bond with your customer.

So why is gameplay imoportant? Because while gameplay may not be the core of your business, it is the heart of the relationship with your audience.  The experience you are giving them is the reason that they engage with you each day, and are willing to give you their money.

And because we have such strong methods of tracking our users, we can more effectively streamline that relationship.

I’m concentrating on articles about social game development, including the opportunities and challenges of making games for social platforms. If that interests you definitely take a look.

Meanwhile, I’m still thinking about new entries for Mediashifters. I may talk about more general gaming trends, since no one seems to be following mainstream gaming in general, and I’m hearing too many people saying Sony “won” E3. Hint:They did not.

If you have any ideas about what you’d like me to be writing about here that I’m not covering over on ISG, please let me know.