Games People Play

During my sophomore year at RPI, I had a housing crisis. I’d moved out to some apartments fairly distant from the campus with a couple of guys, both of whom had cars, and I did not. Actually, one of them flunked out before the beginning of the year, so that left just the two of us, me dependent on him for transportation to and from campus. It was possible to walk the distance, but it was definitely not a fun thing to do when the air temp was hovering near zero, as it did a lot in Troy in the winter.

It also turned out that the two of us ceased hitting it off, something that can happen when you go from being a buddy to a roommate. That’s part of the “education” thing that we hear so much about.

Anyway, long, painful, and somewhat embarrassing story short, in mid-winter I moved out, to a place nearer to campus, on Hoosick Street.

The Hoosick house had been a fraternity and some locals had bought it after said fraternity moved out, with the idea of making it into student housing. I’m pretty sure they hadn’t taken the flunkout factor into account, so when I moved in, there was plenty of room. I got what had been a double room all to myself. The other guys in the place had mostly come from my freshman dorm; that’s how I knew them. So it was back to semi-communal living, only this time with kitchen privileges.

There was a fair amount of mischief to be had in a place like that, and I had some of it, and watched some other people engage in it, and formed my opinions as to which mischief was safer than the other sorts. Good stuff to know. Also, that was the spring of 1970, when Kent State happened, and all other sorts of hell broke loose, so no one was paying attention to the more benign ways of being naughty.

So, loud music, soft drugs, alcohol (the legal drinking age was 18 in NY at the time, so that wasn’t even illegal), various girls running around at odd times, (though not nearly as often as salacious or puritanical minds would like to think), those were some of the activities. Also, there were the ice hockey games in the back yard, in which I did not participate, and the card games in the living room, in which I did.

One was the standard collegiate bridge game: the one that starts sometime on Friday afternoon, and finishes up sometime Monday morning, with no break as such, just people shifting in and out of it. I played fairly intensively for a while, then I gave it up.

I gave it up when I realized that, if I continued to play, all that would happen was that I’d become better at bridge. And nothing else. All playing bridge was doing for me was making me better at playing bridge. Bridge is just a game. So I quit.

On the other hand, there were also poker games, and poker isn’t just a game. Poker deals with probability, deception, and money. Poker is like life. Later, I took up poker on a regular basis, in an attempt to improve my skill at deception, to mediocre results. That has nothing to do with my appreciation for poker, however.

The poker games at the Hoosick house did suffer from the fact that “dealer’s choice” often wound up being some wild card game or another, like baseball where threes and nines are wild. It was about that time that I formulated my rule that any game where a royal flush can lose isn’t poker, and I don’t want to play.

I’ve come to divide games into “just games,” “good games” and “great games.” Like I said, bridge is just a game, though there is a social aspect to it, and if the company is good, it can be a good game. To be sure, some bridge terms are common parlance, like “trump,” “finesse,” and “slam,” but those terms are adapted to bridge; they don’t originate there. Contrast that to poker, where “bluff” originates, along with “busted flush” “inside straight” “ace-in-the-hole” and others. Great games leave their mark on the language, and they leave their mark on lives.

There’s a long standing dispute between chess and go enthusiasts over which is the better, or more profound, game. Both are great games. Chess is complicated, while go is complex. That’s the way I’d put it. But learning either (or both) will sharpen your wits as well as teaching you something about yourself, your opponent, and the very idea of opponent.

From out in left field, I came across a game that’s definitely a good game, and it may be a great game, but I haven’t seen enough examples of it to be sure. It’s a variant of Monopoly, sometimes called Auction Monopoly. In this variant, when you land on a piece of property that is un-owned, it goes up for auction, with the minimum bid being the board-listed price.

Oddly enough, the auction rule dates back to the predecessor of Monopoly, which was called The Landlord’s Game. It was designed and patented by one Elizabeth Magie (thank you, Wikipedia!), based on the economic theories of Henry George, old Mr. Single Tax himself.

With the single rule change, you get a vastly different game from standard Monopoly, because the auction sucks all the money out of circulation pretty quickly. At that point, a serious deflation settles into the game, and prices would drop – except for the price controls, which render most property too expensive for purchase. The first time someone lands on Boardwalk, for example, it almost invariably goes without sale. No one has enough money left to buy it. On the other hand, the winner is usually whoever manages to get the monopoly on Baltic and Mediterranean.

If you allow other rule changes, rules that inject money back into the game again have major consequences (re-inflating the currency), and so forth. I’ve often wondered whether there are other rule changes that would allow for things like fraud, corruption, market bubbles, and so forth, but that’s probably more suitable for computer games, which I seldom play, except for the demon-spawn Spider Solitaire.

Playing the Rent VI –Qualms About Copyrights

“No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind.” —Mark Halpern, The New York Times, May 20, 2007

“When I appeared before that committee of the House of Lords the chairman asked me what limit [on copyrights] I would propose. I said, ‘Perpetuity.’” —Mark Twain

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it."—Thomas Jefferson

Yes, I have been hesitant about writing about copyrights, in part because the idea is apparently so difficult for some to understand, and the “some” to which I am referring includes a large number of writers.

I think the reason why writers are sometime more that a little loopy on the subject is that copyrights are our lottery tickets, chips in the Big Casino. Of course, it’s not just professional writers who are a party to this, and it’s certainly not restricted to fiction. Anyone who hits sudden notoriety has a story to tell, and if the notoriety is salacious enough, it’s worth money, sometimes big money.

But fiction seems to be where the real lure arises. There’s the ego involvement thing. Behold! I have created something where nothing existed before! I am like unto a god, and you should bow down before me, or at least pay me a lot of money, because it’s mine, mine, I tell you! Bwahaha!

Yeah, there’s a lot of that. Never mind that it’s most likely a slightly below average attempt at a bit of genre fiction, derivative, clichéd to hackney’s depths, it took effort to produce and guts to put it out there, and it’s someone’s angel child.

I don’t usually put blog links into these essays, but there was a May 20th thread on Patrick and Teresa Nielson-Hayden’s “Making Light” that was prompted by the Halpern article I quoted in the beginning of this piece. Teresa, I believe, makes several good points in the comments:

Most works are somewhat derivative. Even much-imitated landmark works like Star Wars or Neuromancer are in many ways powerful new syntheses of older material. If you own the rights to such a landmark work, then to the extent that you can keep subsequent works from copyrighting implicit or potential aspects of that synthesis, your own right to such implicit or potential derivative works will be more valuable…

…nibbling-away of the uniqueness of influential works is a normal literary process. How, then, does the entertainment conglomerate maintain its long-term hold on the valuable rights to the source work? The obvious way to do it is to make sure that other authors don't hold the copyrights on subsequent works. Any story or narrative mindspace they and their heirs own is a story or narrative mindspace you don't own. You might have to pay them something for it, further on down the road. Best not to let them lay claim to it in the first place. –Teresa Nielson-Hayden

Copyrights are not “natural.” When scribes did all the copying, there was no further need for state control of copyright, as the labor cost itself was the limiting factor in the spread of information. But with the invention of the printing press, publishing became a lucrative endeavor, all the more so it there could be some sort of monopoly on publishing generally, or, failing that, the publishing of a particular work. Copyrights, in other words, benefit publishers, the Owners of The Casino. We writers are just the gamblers holding the chips in the Big Game. But the Casino always winds up owning most of the stakes.

Without the Casino, there is no Jackpot, so writers often identify their fortunes with those of the publishers. Well, fair enough, without the publishers there are no fortunes to be made.

The Jackpot is a cruel temptation. I’ve said before, in other circumstances, that if you take up all the money spent by would-be writers of fiction, from the creative writing course fees, to the postage spent, to the paper and ink cartridges bought, not to mention the scams, dodges, vanity presses, phony agents, “readers’ fees” and all the rest, add it up and subtract it from every royalty and advance paid by the publishing industry, and you get a negative number. Maybe movie sales push it back into positive numbers, but I have my doubts, since movies don’t pay their writers that much, and it’s work-for-hire besides. And if I’m wrong, if it isn’t negative sum, it’s because of maybe ten writers, starting with J. K. Rowling and Stephen King, and ending with some writer that you’ve also heard of, Grisham, Clancy, the Usual Suspects. And you’d better ignore the vast amounts of time spent staring at the hellish blank screen, (formerly the blank page), or typing words that no one but the spouse will ever read, because if you add up that time and count it as even a quarter of minimum wage, then not even King and Rowling could make a dent in the debit.

So, one way or another, you’d better enjoy writing your stories, or at least enjoy reading them, because the likelihood of your making a living at it is comparable to winning Powerball, and in fact depends less on how well you write than a hundred other things.

Whew. I hope that’s out of my system for a while. Maybe I can get to actually writing about copyrights now.

Playing the Rent III—Lotteries and Casinos

In reading over the previous essay on tolls, I think I gave the subject short shrift and I’ll have to cycle back to it at some point. I do notice, for example, in this week’s Economist, (May 3rd, 2007) a news story, “Rules of the Road,” that references a paper on the sort of toll-taking behavior I described. In this case it was extortion from a series of military checkpoints in Indonesia, but the economics of checkpoint extortion and toll-taking should be the same:

“The Simple Economics of Extortion: Evidence from Trucking in Aceh”, by Benjamin Olken and Patrick Barron.

Also, to backfill yet some more about what I’m doing here, I’m looking for alternative models, and especially nomenclature to what is nowadays commonly called “rents” by economists. The term has seemingly come to mean “the difference between price paid for a good or service and what would exist in a purely commodity (perfect competition) model of the transaction." I’ve already noted that this makes what we usually call rent a subset of “rent.” I also realized last night that, since ordinary rent usually also includes payments for some service functions (e.g. repairs and maintenance), then not all of what people usually call rent is “rent” in the jargon sense.

Sloppy nomenclature makes for sloppy thinking.

Anyway, to one of my favorite subjects, chance and randomness, and its problem child, gambling.

From the standpoint of conventional equilibrium “rational expectations” economic theory, the lottery makes no sense whatsoever. There is an easily calculated probabilistic “expected value” of a one dollar lottery ticket and that value is less than one dollar. So what gives?

Behavioral economics gives us some hints, and even conventional economics allows for “psychic rewards” and “entertainment.” The fact is that holding a lottery ticket assists in the holder’s ability to dream about how nice it would be to be rich. The lottery ticket adds just that little dollop of realism that we writers of fiction call the “willing suspension of disbelief.”

It’s true that there are some pathological cases where people spend the rent money on lottery tickets, etc., but those come more under the heading of obsessive-compulsive disorder than anything else. Some people also send the rent money to televangelists, and for rewards that are somewhat less likely than a Powerball Jackpot.

But lotteries aren’t at all the most popular forms of gambling, and one doesn’t play craps, roulette, or bet on the ponies or other sports because one dreams of getting rich. No those players crave action.

In action play, the jackpot or the “big score” may exist in the back of the mind, but the real payoff is the adrenaline rush. The Kentucky Derby is called “The Most Exciting Two Minutes in Sports,” a phrase no doubt coined by someone with money on the nose.

There is this notion in economics of a “risk premium,” which is the spread between stocks and bonds, the latter being safe and boring, the former being risky. Supposedly, investors are “risk averse” so that explains the difference.

But let’s consider the possibility that at least some individuals are not “risk averse” but rather seek risk. They crave the action, in other words. Of course, this is hardly an original observation; we have words for such people: speculators, traders, and at its most honest, gamblers.

The commodities pits are notorious for the action guys, but over the past couple of decades, more and more of the action ahs been spilling over into markets generally. I ran across several papers by the authors Owen A. Lamont and Richard H. Thaler several years ago, looking at the odd behavior of 3Com and Palm Inc. stock during the period when the latter was being carved out of the former. Here’s one of them: Anomalies: The Law of One Price in Financial Markets.

The upshot of Lamont and Thaler’s work was that certain stock option and warrant behaviors made no sense whatsoever from the standpoint of conventional stock valuation. Instead, the stock in the new company was so thinly traded that it was susceptible to wild swings in pricing, and that attracted, well, basically gamblers. Shares of the thinly traded stock were the “chips” needed to get in the game, and most of the players only held onto them (or horted them) for a few hours.

Why do you play this game? You know it’s rigged. Yeah, but it’s the only game in town.

In The Big Casino, I compared American economic exuberance to casino gambling and lottery payouts, and I think there’s a great deal of truth to that. If people will pay to play a game that is against them, just so they can dream, how much better is it to play a positive-sum game, where the pie expands, so, theoretically, everyone can be a winner.

In practice, of course, a lot of people still wind up losing the rent money. That is a testament to the power of dreams. But you don’t look at the guy who makes 10 passes in a row at the craps table and say he’s collecting “rents.” No, the guy to watch is the casino operator. He’s working what’s called “house odds.”