Kickstarter and Profit

Once upon a time, I wrote a short story. It was a lovely short story, one of the finest pieces I'd ever written, but alas, I couldn't find a market to sell it to. Then one day, a shiny new toy came out that I desired but could not afford. An idea sprang into my head: I will ransom the story to the public! If I could raise $250 to buy the shiny toy on Kickstarter, I would publish the story on my blog under Creative Commons as a gift to the world.

This Kickstarter was very successful; I got the object of my desire, and my husband got one too.

None of this should be news to you if you've been around here for a while. You lived through it with me! But I recently shared this experience on an online forum and was very taken aback when I was told that the project was unethical. Not what Kickstarter is for, probably a violation of their ban on "fund my life" projects, and in general a terrible thing to have done.

I disagree with this line of thinking, of course. Worse, I think there's a terrible, poisonous idea lurking in its heart: that artists don't deserve compensation, and that artistic work is without value.

The Debate

There are several more specific arguments regarding why the Shiva's Mother Kickstarter was unethical; the first is that the story was already written. Another seems to amount to an insufficient purity of heart; my motive in offering the Kickstarter was personal gain. One is: Kickstarter money should be spent solely on things that are required for the execution of the project, like editing or cover design for publishing, or music and graphics for a game. 

Let's focus on that last one first, because that's the key to this whole discussion. If I require outside services, like, say, an illustrator, it's OK to pay them with Kickstarter money, right? Absolutely. There's no argument there. And then that illustrator, having earned their wage, can spend it on anything they damn well please. I'm compensating that artist for time and craft, and their personal finances are their business. They're under no obligation to spend that money only on colored pencils and licenses for Adobe products, and if you suggested as much, they'd laugh in your face.

If I need several kinds of services -- even a whole team of game developers -- then it's fair to expect every single one of those people will be earning a wage in compensation for their time and skill. You might even say they're making... a personal profit.

Does that work suddenly lose its value if the person running the Kickstarter does it? If I have the skills and chops to design my own cover or run my own website, is it OK to pay myself for those services rendered? And indeed, is it not right to budget a wage for the time you spent in conceiving and excuting your own artistic project? According to the people calling me unethical and deceitful, the answer is no: that's not what Kickstarter is for.

So my question is... why would it be OK for everyone except the core artist driving the project to earn a wage? Must all artistic works rest on a core of volunteer labor out of love? I say absolutely not, no way, nohow, good lord no. 

It all comes back to that pernicious art vs. commerce tension that riddles our society, the idea that the work an artist does, all of the time and craft and passion they pour into it, is morally purer if there is no profit motive. That is isn't right for an artist to make or think about money. And yet you cannot eat art, you cannot live in it, it does not keep you warm in the winter nor does it put shoes on your feet. It is a hard fact that an artist must earn money to live. And if an artist does well enough to afford shiny toys on top of that: more power to you, comrade.

The time you spend in writing is still work that has value in the world. It is fair and just to at least try to earn something approaching a wage for it.

So was the story already written? Yes; call it owed wages for labor done before the Kickstarter ran. Was it a "fund my life" project? No; I executed and delivered an artistic work, just the way I said I would. Was my heart insufficiently pure because I went into it wanting an electronic device? No; how I spend my wages earned is my own business, not yours.

And should I have only spent the money on something necessary to the execution of the project?

...You know what? I did. Because without my own labor, there wouldn't have been any project at all.

Barbie's Quiet Dignity and Progress

Some days it's easy to despair that sexism will ever be over.

Let's take the latest SFWA* scandal. The upshot: Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg, two icons of science fiction from yesteryear, made some kinda sexist comments in a Bulletin article entitled "Literary Ladies." Which was, well, you know, sometimes it's hard to keep up with mores that have changed dramatically over your lifetime? Regrettable, but old habits die hard. When called on it, though, rather than apologizing, these gentlemen (and other, presumably male, members of the SFWA) reportedly went on a rampage on the SFWA forums and in a whopper of a rebuttal, among other things telling complainants that they should emulate Barbie and maintain a "quiet dignity."

I'll let other people take this from here. Say, Jim Hines and his fabulous linklog.

And that's just one more drop in what seems like a never-ending stream of sexism. Let us not forget Anita Sarkeesian and the Feminist Frequency Kickstarter and ensuing barrage of death and rape threats. Or that one time the New York Times started an obituary of a female rocket scientist by talking about her cooking and devotion to her children. Frankly there's not enough time in the world for me to catalog all of the sexist garbage that's gone down in the geek spaces of SF/F, games, comics, tech. Even if I were to limit myself to the last year or two!

Given that big hot stinking mess of sexism, it's easy to lose hope and think we're not getting anywhere. Sexism can't possibly be going away if we're hearing so much about it, right? The dudebros have won and we might as well cede control of geek spaces to them, alas.

Au contraire, my comrades for social justice. That the SFWA scandal exists and is being perceived as a scandal -- and that the leadership is taking it very seriously indeed -- is amazing and awesome. It means we've made tons of progress. We're winning this fight. No, for real.

You know the famous quote from Gandhi: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." It's easy to think it's just a nice piece of rhetoric, but actually it's a pretty deep and accurate portrayal of how social change happens. Those "ignoring you" and "laughing at you" steps are what happens when the bulk of an affected population don't agree that a problem is a problem.

If I were to tell you that having long hair was offensive to the follicle-impaired, and if someone subsequently posted a magnum opus on how to style hair a la Princess Amidala, there would be no scandal. There's no perception out there that this is in any way a problem.

We have enough critical mass behind gender equality now that ongoing reports of sexism are being treated as a problem, and a serious one, too. Better, there's a snowball effect in play: Some of the men (and women!) who didn't really think there was a problem before will see, have seen exactly how people are treated when they speak up. Increasingly, you're seen as a total dinosaur or a total dick if you persist in engaging in problematic behaviors. Anita Sarkeesian, bless her, had to live through some horrible things -- but she did so publicly, and in doing so persuaded a vast body of people who hadn't cared about this stuff before that there truly are some awful things out there, and that it's worth fighting them.

The army grows. The battle rages. And then we win.

* I still don't qualify to be a member, of course, even though I've made proper non-ARG narrative games since then. Which makes me very sad. Oh, legitimacy, you are ever found elsewhere.

Spots

I was walking through Times Square on a breezy, sunny spring day when my doctor called to tell me I had cancer.

Finding out you have cancer seems like it should be a dramatic, life-altering moment, but the reality of it brought absolutely no sense of drama. "Superficial," she said, and "non-life-threatening." No chemo nor radiation for me; the entire course of my treatment would be a scrape-and-burn procedure in her office. The two-minute cancer cure. Bam.

I've always known I'd eventually get skin cancer. There's nary a risk factor I don't have: The family history, the light eyes, the fair skin and hundreds of freckles, the bad childhood sunburns, the weekends spent clinging to the edge of a pool. In the Philippine Islands. All year round. And so I've been visiting dermatologists for all my adult life; I had my first biopsy at twenty years old.*

But even knowing that this was destined to happen, I'm yet having a very complex and difficult reaction to the manifest reality. We all know we're going to die one day, too, but that doesn't make it something to look forward to, not exactly.

Cancer sounds terrifying. It is terrifying. Typically in the face of peril, I arm myself with knowledge that helps me triage risk and prevention strategies. But there is no strategy for getting rid of your skin and growing an all-new one. Sunscreen and shade are all I have, and it's unclear whether even that's too little, too late. So I'm trying very hard not to read much about recurrence rates and additional primary cancers. Knowing the odds does not change them. It just gives my anxiety-prone brain more to gnaw.

I tell stories, and so it's natural that I slip into telling myself the story in which I am a cancer patient. Against my better judgement, I find myself worrying about how my family could manage without me. I make sure my husband knows important passwords and lock codes. I worry about whether the girls would get enough calcium and vegetables. I contemplate whether I would feel moved to keep writing if I knew how fast my clock was ticking, and what I would be moved to write.

And yet: superficial, non-life-threatening. A non-event. I am not a terminal cancer patient; you could argue that I'm not a cancer patient at all, except by the barest technicality. This is all not a big deal, and as far as anyone knows I still have another forty years on the clock. But I don't have a narrative structure for cancer that is the yapping chihuahua and not the angry lion with a taste for human flesh. I'm telling myself the wrong story, the story that ends with me dying at a tragically young age, because it's the only story I know.

Then again, given personal history, it's extremely unlikely that this will be the only time I have skin cancer. So maybe, I think, I'm just practicing. Maybe I'm bracing myself for the inevitable worst. I don't know that it's the wrong story, not for sure.

The spot that turned out to be cancer was a freckle that had been there for as long as I could remember. It hadn't grown enormous or turned red and blue or transformed into an open sore, none of the showy signs you're supposed to look for. It was just like it had always been. Unremarkable compared to all of my other dozens of spots. Except it itched. In my case, having cancer is a lot like having a mosquito bite that just won't go away. 

The biopsy that turned up cancer was the third I'd had in my life. On Monday they took five more out of an abundance of caution; I have medical photographs proving they hadn't changed at all in ten years, but now we've moved on to "just in case." After all, the one that turned out to be cancer looked the same in photographs ten years ago, too.

Even now, as I wait and worry for more results -- results that are almost certainly going to be "nothing to see here" -- I find myself staring at my spots, the ones that are still there and the holes where some used to be, wondering which ones will be the treacherous ones. Wondering if they'll all turn out to be superficial and non-life-threatening, or whether they'll do me the courtesy of itching when they develop that hankering for human flesh. 

And then I feel ridiculous, because I didn't even have the dangerous kind of cancer. I don't have a right to all of these scared and morbid feelings I am feeling. And yet: There they are.

*Fun fact: That first biopsy was from my, ah, upper buttock. It was a "crescent-cell nevus," completely benign, but apparently unusual enough that my dermatologist used the slide at a conference. So yeah, my butt has been of scientific interest. No joke. 

Social Media for Old People

Oh, old people. We love you, really we do. You're so wise and loving and experienced, and we would not be here today without you. But we have to talk about the way you use the internet. It's... it's just... you're doing it wrong.

You're embarrassing us.

You're embarrassing yourselves.

But look, we know it's hard to pick up subtle social mores through observation once you're out of your teen years. And there are plenty of amazing things you know that we never will! Like the proper etiquette for a sock hop, or how to darn socks, or even how to find your way to a place that Google Maps doesn't think exists. You're amazing! We get it.

But we want to help you be your very best, modern, social media-savvy selves. And we know you don't mean to be... you know, kind of off. You just can't help it. So let's try to fix that, OK? Here, just for you, is a rundown of how to use various internet sites now called "social media."

Ready? I promise it won't hurt.

Tumblr

This is not for you. Do not use it.

Facebook/Google+

You probably are already on Facebook! This is great! If you're not familiar, Google+ is like Facebook except with fewer people and fewer ads, and I'm only including it here for completeness because you don't need to be on it. Pretend I never said anything.

These two sites are mostly for sharing things that you agree with, and stuff like baby and vacation pictures. And picking fights about religion and politics, if you like that kind of thing.

It is OK to friend your younger relatives and other loved ones to see what they are up to! But you should know that every time you post a comment on something they say, you are probably speaking to an audience including their other relatives, boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse, close friends, boss, coworkers, classmates, and everyone else they have ever wanted to impress.

It is not the right place for "We are so proud of you!" or "How did the doctor visit go?!" UNLESS you see other, younger people not related to them say those kinds of things first in comments before you. Repeated for emphasis: Everyone they have ever wanted to impress is watching.

If you do not understand something, do not comment on it, because they probably are not talking to you. If you are not quite sure if you understand something or not, do not comment on it.

Do not post on someone else's wall. NOT EVER.

Do not try to have a detailed catch-up with someone else and their life on Facebook. If it's not a conversation you should have at top volume on a bus filled with everyone you have ever wanted to impress, it is not a conversation you should have on Facebook, either.

Also, do not comment on someone else's post about something completely different from what they were just talking about. It is like barging into the middle of a conversation and changing the subject, and it is very rude! If you want to talk about something else, post it yourself on your own profile, and type in +THEIR NAME to catch their attention. That plus sign turns their name into a TAG, and it means they will be sure to see the comment. They'll get a notification about it! Awesome!

Instagram

This is not for you. I'm not even kidding. Just don't.

Twitter

Remember how I said that talking to someone on Facebook is like talking to everyone they've ever wanted to impress all at once? Twitter is like attending a party where all of those people are hanging out, and also the whole world, too. It is even archived in the Library of Congress! Twitter is for keeps, yo, and so you need to be really careful about how you use it.

Twitter is not a way to talk to one specific person and catch up. It's a public conversation. Even when you use an @reply on Twitter, other people can see it!

That includes information you may not even realize you're giving away, like where someone works, the names of their friends and relatives, when family birthdays are, and other stuff that could potentially help a bad person perform identity theft. Be cool, OK?

Private Communication

But if you can't catch up with people on Facebook and Twitter, you demand, where IS it OK? Didn't you think the purpose of all of these newfangled tools was being able to keep up with their lives?!

Yes and no. It's to keep tabs on things that people are sharing on purpose -- NOT to ask questions about things they have not chosen to share online. Asking questions and talking about personal stuff is OK... as long as you do it in private!

Fortunately there are a lot of ways to contact someone privately.

On Facebook there are "Messages." They are only readable by the person you send them to!

On Twitter there is such a thing as a "direct message." That's a private message to only one person! A DIRECT MESSAGE IS NOT THE SAME AS A REGULAR TWITTER MESSAGE STARTING WITH @theirname. Twitter can make it very hard to find direct messages; they are located on the "Your profile" area, accessible through a button with an envelope on it.

Of course there is the classic: email! Email is a fantastic way to keep in touch with people privately!

And of course there are the reigning methods of private conversation these days: The text message, or instant messaging (either through your phone, or a service like AIM, ICQ, Google Talk, etc.) If you're using text messages or instant messaging, be sure to keep them short and to the point. It's a conversation, so say one or two sentences and then wait for a response. Don't get offended if someone doesn't reply right away (or at all.) You never know what they might be busy in the middle of! 

Oh, and... signing "Love, Your dad" is sweet and all, but you don't need to sign a text or an instant message. It's not a letter.

The Telephone

I am confident you know how to use the telephone already, being old and all. Probably you are a MASTER of the phone compared to young people today!

Just one thing, all right? DO NOT EVER CALL a young person because of something you just saw posted online. Likewise, don't ask a question on Twitter about something you saw on Facebook. This is called context-switching and it is rude.

I'll give you a pass for very major life events, such as "I am getting married," "I am pregnant," or "I have been sentenced to twenty years." If something of that magnitude occurs, then yes, do call.

And of course you're free to call your younger people just because you love them and like to hear their voices! We all expect this from our old people.

Tumblr

Seriously, just stay off Tumblr. It will only confuse you.

MySpace/AOL/Friendster

Oh, you sweet, adorable thing. If you're still on any of these platforms, you can do whatever the heck you want. Nobody else is paying attention anymore. Just have fun and stay safe, you crazy kids.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is basically just an online resume and not really important unless you are looking for a new job. If you are retired, you can safely ignore it entirely. If you're not retired and somebody sent you this post, um, maybe you should stay away. You know, to avoid embarrassing yourself in front of a potential 24-year-old boss. Just sayin'.

One Final Warning

I have a terrible thing to tell you. It's... well, there's no sugar-coating this, brace yourself. Many things on the internet are lies.

It's horrible, I know, but... look, if something seems too good to be true, like you won a foreign lottery or a company is donating absurd amounts of money to charity if you forward an email, it probably is. And if this is proof that your worst enemies are doing evil perfectly calculated to blow your brittle arteries apart... be skeptical. Or if someone is helpfully warning about a danger but you don't personally know anyone who died that way, don't believe it.

Remember, anyone can type something that looks like a press release. Anyone can say that they checked with their cousin the chief of police, or their brother-in-law who works at the company, or their second cousin who's a lobbyist on Capitol Hill. That does not mean it's 100% true. People lie! A lot! So just... check before you share, OK? And check before you answer. A lot of bad people are trying to get your money. Don't let them win.

There's this site, Snopes.com. It collects common rumors and scams that go around on the internet and tells you if they're true or not. Use it. Live it. Love it. If you're not sure how to use it yourself, ask for help. Just about anyone will be happy to help you sort it out.

Fellow Youngsters

In order to make this a better and more useful resource for the old people in our lives... what am I missing? What elements of the new social contract might need spelling out? What habits would you like the gentle opportunity to break? And old people... is there a way to call your attention to these small matters of etiquette without hurting your feelings?

Do weigh in in the comments. We're all friends here.

WTF is Transmedia? (2013)

It's become fashionable to hate the word 'transmedia' in some circles. 

The T-word has been very good to me. It's netted me any number of speaking engagements and website hits and sold me a book, among other things, so I feel a certain loyalty to it. I don't think I'd be enjoying the same degree of professional success if I hadn't very consciously embraced That Word back in 2010 or so. 

But I will admit that we have a problem with the T-word. Or maybe not the word itself -- maybe the problem is how we're trying to use it.

Rehashing the Past

If you're looking for historical context on where I'm coming from, you may be interested in these earlier posts, though some are missing their pretty charts now: WTF is an ARG? (from 2009). WTF is Transmedia? (from 2010). WTF is Transmedia? (from 2011). 

In a nutshell, though: I come from the community of alternate reality games, and for several years, I tied myself in knots trying to view every innovative piece of online or pervasive or physical narrative through that lens: Gameplay + Story + Community. The problem was that a lot of the projects I was enjoying (and even making myself!) didn't fit into that Venn diagram. Not at the center; maybe not at all. 

We speculated that 'alternate reality game' was just a subset, then, of something bigger and potentially more exciting. And then our little games niche intersected with the Henry Jenkins and Jeff Gomez crowd, and bam! We finally had our umbrella term: transmedia storytelling.

The Definition

In A Creator's Guide and elsewhere, I've become comfortable using what is more or less the Prof. Henry Jenkins definition of transmedia: the art of telling one story over multiple media, where each medium is making a unique contribution to the whole.

It's a simple definition, an elegant one, and it's big enough to cover all manner of creative works in its leafy shade: alternate reality games like Perplex City and ilovebees, entertainment franchises like Star Wars and Pokemon, hybrid works like Lizzie Bennet Diaries, Cathy's Book, How I Met Your Mother.

Complaints against the T-word vary. It doesn't mean anything, it's too vague. It's nothing new, it's just media, everything will be transmedia. We need a different word. We don't need a word at all. 

And of course years of heartache have poured into arguments that amount to, "If what I'm making is transmedia then what you're making isn't," which grew particularly heated when bodies like Sundance, the PGA, and Tribeca began various new media/transmedia/emerging media efforts to try to spotlight, accredit, or foster new forms.

But if "transmedia" adequately describes an enormous swath of new and old forms of narrative... it yet elegantly and entirely misses the heart of what many of us get so excited about when we talk about transmedia. That standard-op definition for transmedia is lacking key words like emergent, collaborative, adaptive, pervasive, interactive, tangible, collective. 

And this is exactly correct by our definition: for something to be transmedia, it can be all of these things, but it doesn't have to be. ...So then what's the word for the stuff that is?

Redeeming 'Transmedia'

Let me go out on a limb here and suggest that the conversation about the word isn't really about the word at all. 

The controversy is the result of people wanting to have meaningful conversations about their art and finding that they cannot, because there isn't enough shared, precise language. And what shared language exists often means different things to different people, adding to the post-Babel frustration. A 'producer' in film parlance is a pivotal creative force; a 'producer' in games is primarily a project manager.

These are the inevitable growing pains of an emerging form. By and large, nobody argues much about what a "book" is; if we see a collection of bound-together leaves of paper, we're pretty comfortably sure it's a book. But you can't say anything true and compelling about "books" when you mean "alt-history paranormal romance." Someone who thinks "book" means "DB2 manual" will probably disagree with everything you say, and for good reason.

And yet even with as established a form as the book, similar debates still burn on in the emerging edges where art is born, like stars fusing into being. New genres are invented, flame bright, and die. Science fiction becomes speculative fiction explodes into a splintered mass of terms like New Weird, biopunk, post-colonial fantasy.

Each of us wants a word to describe exactly the things that we're making. "Transmedia" simply isn't precise enough, through no fault of its own.

It doesn't make it a bad word, nor even an unnecessary one. It's just that ARG found its umbrella term, and now we need names for all of our cousins, too.

Toward a Taxonomy of Transmedia Forms

Part of the free-wheeling joy of transmedia storytelling is that the structure itself is a part of the creative expression. Nailing down any particular structure and saying transmedia is exactly that necessarily excludes other things, things so amazing we can't even picture them yet. So we've been resistant to naming structures. I get that.

But for approaching fifteen years now, we've more or less ignored the fact that there are certain family resemblances to some structures that get used again and again. Naming them might facilitate a better quality of discussion, though, and even help us fumble our way toward still more new forms. And so I'd like to propose a fledgling taxonomy for specific forms of transmedia narrative. 

Alternate Reality Game: What's old becomes new. A story played out through media embedded in the real world as though the fictional events were really occurring. Often meant to be played by communities rather than individuals; often incorporating gamelike challenges like puzzles. (Perplex City, Why So Serious?)

Franchise Storyworld: A series of standalone pieces of traditional media (such as books, comics, films, games, TV shows) that each tell an individual story, but that tell a larger, inter-related narrative when taken as a whole. (Star Wars, Pokemon.)

Tangible Narrative: A story making heavy use of physical (and sometimes digital) story artifacts in service of another more traditional single-medium narrative. (Sleep No More, Cathy's Book, Laser Lace Letters.)

Web Series++ (or Film++, or Novel++): A single-medium narrative that makes light use of supplementary social media, video, etc. to add non-critical flavor and depth to the main work. (Lizzie Bennet Diaries, Dirty Work, How I Met Your Mother.)

Expanded Documentary: A nonfiction project that incorporates multiple vectors for propagating information about the topic, often in service of raising money or awareness for a specific cause. (Half the Sky, Bear 71.)

You'll note that none of this is exactly brand-new terminology. But I think it would help a lot for us to take that single step toward precision when we talk about transmedia, to qualify whether we're talking about transmedia as a whole (like one might talk about "books" or "video games") or a specific kind of transmedia narrative (like one might talk about "travelogues" or "hidden object games.")

Take this whole thing as provisional and imprecise. These particular terms definitely overlap -- you could potentially create a single work with elements of all of these in it. Still, I'm hoping that this can move the conversation toward better conversations about craft. Not just "How do I get funding for my transmedia project?" but on to "How do you help an audience to navigate a tangible narrative?" or "How much additional content becomes burdensome or overwhelming for a Web Series++?" or "How do I channel the traffic from my expanded documentary into direct action?"

It may even be my categories are thrown out in favor of something else. And I'm cool with that. I'm hoping that others will take this ball and run with it. Maybe by this time next year we'll have so many named forms that we hardly ever need to talk about 'transmedia' at all.

Language can shed light, and it can obscure. The fault never lies in the words themselves; it's all in how we use them.