Hey Malstrom, I have two things I’d like to hear you talk about as you’re wading through your ocean of emails.
1) Pokemon was a huge hit (I think, don’t have sales numbers), and it looks like a “simplified” RPG. Is that the main reason? The RPG being more accessible so that little kids could play? There was also the huge cartoon/marketing thing though.
Pokemon was based on the idea of bug collecting, I believe. When the concept maker thought of it, he imagined gameboys with their multiplayer cords to be crawling with bugs as they traveled to one gameboy to another. Bugs ‘evolve’ and are captured in little containers.
Of course, Pokemon are much cuter than bugs.
I think Pokemon captures that child like past time of collecting bugs and watching them “grow”. But your guess is as good as mine.
2) You’ve mentioned previously that the book industry underwent a serious decline. I’m an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy, and I can tell that these two genres have definitely become niches, as well as book-reading in general. There is still a “large” number of people who enjoy reading books and those genres, but when comparing books to something like TV or movies, well, books just aren’t “cool”. So how does Harry Potter, and more recently the Twilight series fit in? There were certainly stories of wizards and vampires before, and stories with wizard and vampire children in love. Harry Potter I’ve read, and I did enjoy them growing up, and there was a lot of word-of-mouth for it when the first book came out. Twilight I haven’t read, but I have several female cousins who adore it, and I’ve seen people outside/on the subway from all ages reading it (for the most part also female). As far as I can tell there was also a big word-of-mouth component to Twilight.
The book industry is as corrupt as Hollywood if not worse. But the book industry has certainly collapsed. Steve Jobs doesn’t want to put books on iTunes because he says no one reads books. Ouch.
If you ever wonder what the future of gaming would be like if there was no Blue Ocean and disruption, the book industry is your answer. There, the ‘developers’ (i.e. writers) all believe they are Great Artists and do not care about the reader. Publishers are very much in the hype and ‘industry’ type mindset. Those that do read books are praised by the book industry as ‘sophisticated’, as ‘cultured’, as ‘refined’, and they even have little shops in the book stores where you can buy really expensive coffee.
Book industry HATES used books. They are pushing digital distribution hard. Sound familiar?
A big difference is that a book isn’t as financially risky as a video game is. Gaming is a very tough business. Books aren’t that tough. Even though many books at the end of the day get burned. Even Harry Potter books. They get sent back and off into the furnace they go. Better to burn the books than to allow so many copies, unsold, wandering around.
The book industry is also highly entrenched by political tentacles. Books by politicians are sold in mass to unions (who don’t read them but I guess just leave them in boxes. Must make that politician a ‘best seller’ of course). And if you put out anything that annoys a book publisher, I mean annoying not professionally but the completely unrelated sense of politics, they will cut you off. For an example, an award winning sci-fi and fantasy author tried to make a modern mythical type book about a tale of a woman who falls in love and wants to marry the Moon (to be more precise, the ‘god’ of that moon. Something based on Eastern myths I guess). The book got scrapped by the publisher not because the book wouldn’t sell or that it was badly written but entirely because the editor didn’t like the idea that the book was about a woman who was looking at marriage as a release from her daily and dull work. In other words, the book got nixed entirely due to the editor being a feminist (which for some reason, the book industry attracts).
Incredibly, the book industry is not even about selling the most books. When best selling books come out that are not what the “Book Industry” likes, they make the book ‘go away’. For example, they didn’t like Harry Potter books staying in the NY Times best seller’s list. So they made a new list called “Children’s Books” just to get rid of it. When Jane Fonda’s exercise book dominated sales charts, they made a new list to get rid of that exercise book. Currently, there is a book selling by a prominent politician who the feminists obviously don’t like, and I am already hearing they want to create a new ‘best seller list’ to get rid of the book. It’s unreal.
I’ve been so hostile to the idea of the “Game Industry” separating games they do not like into a ‘new sales list’ such as ‘Casual Games List’ and there was talk about banishing all ‘casual games’ from E3 since it would put gaming on the same death spiral as books. It is incredible that anyone gets personally ‘offended’ if a game like Brain Training is in the best seller list. But this type of bizarro anger is everywhere in the book industry.
The writers often see themselves as ‘Creative Gods’ or ‘Great Artists’. Prominent sci-fi writer, Kim Stanley Robinson, complained in New Scientist how all the awards were going to historical novels and not to science fiction novels. I own the Mars trilogy that Robinson wrote (which was used very much in the creation of the game, Alpha Centauri). I have always wondered why I never read through the three books. So I began with Red Mars and then I remembered. When the book is about describing Mars, how people live on it, or about the terraforming, the book is fun (this is what you expect science fiction to do). But then the book incredibly blasts the reader with political and economic monologues. Hilariously, it really dates the book. Nations of the world today are not suffering the problem of ‘overpopulation’ but underpopulation. Population decline is going to be what creates the upcoming depression and a decline in standard of living. Where I thought I was reading a book about terraforming and living on another world, I instead get pulverized by tracts and advocacy of political/economic monologues. I don’t want to continue the book (but I’ll try to make it to the end). And I have zero desire to start the next book in the series because I suspect it will be more of the same.
Science Fiction used to be fun. Think of Asimov or Heinlein. Now, the books seem obsessed over non-sci fi issues such as gender issues or whatever crank theory of the day is. Sci-fi is increasingly being used by many to sell a utopia based on their political beliefs. The idea of a fun story no longer seems to matter. Fantasy books are obviously stemmed from the root that is Tolkien. But now, there are bizarre fantasy books that are like ‘Pagan Power’ stuff. No one wants to buy this garbage. This is, perhaps, why the sci-fi / fantasy is becoming more niche. People want a story, not a political sermon.
With gaming, if a game developer makes his own company and sells his games, he is highly respected. With books, if a writer makes his own company and sells his own books, he is sneered at and declared a ‘Vanity writer’. The Book Industry believes everything must go through them.
I’m not sure how the “Book Industry” can be disrupted. But perhaps it already is. There are more publishers coming around to selling books to people the “Book Industry” has previously sneered at because there is so much money to be made. A ‘blue ocean strategy’ of appealing to non-book readers would be really big I think.
