The Bridge: Game Design as a Tool for Reflection and Self-Exploration
by Doris C. Rusch The Bridge is a short, single player Flash game, made during the spring semester of 2009 by a team of students. I was the product owner and lead designer of this project. Although I have my doubts regarding The Bridge's qualities as a game (for which I take full responsibility), I still regard it as one of the most interesting works I've ever done. The focus, however, is on "work" as in "process", not the result. Working on The Bridge showed me what a wonderful tool for self-reflection and insight game design can be. The following is an account of how using the tools of my craft helped me and two of my team members to more clearly map out our emotional landscapes. Feel free to try this at home!
Guided by Images
Saying I wanted to make a game about "mourning" or the connection between "love" and "fear of loss" would be bullshitting (Def. bullshitting: terminus technicus for making a process appear intentional and focused in hindsight when it actually was not). So, let's just stick to the dirty truth of how it really went. It started with an image of an empty tire swing that suddenly bubbled to the surface of my subconscious but never quite made it into the more analytical realm of my mind. The image didn't come with an explanation, only with an emotional overtone of loss, frustration and hoping against hope. A bit like a cone without ice cream, a tire-swing is a sad affair when it just hangs there without a child on it. Of course, one can take either image both ways: as a promise for future fun or as the memory of past pleasures. In the moment my mind decided to release the tire swing from its swampy depths, I gravitated towards the darker reading of it. But why a tire swing? Why not a more traditional metaphor for loss, such as a gravestone or a couple dressed in black, huddled together under an umbrella? How I would love to be able to give a clever and coherent explanation now. But I vowed to adhere to honesty and will thus further refrain from bullshitting. The best I can do is share the stream of associations with you that (to me) accompanied the tire-swing metaphor. Imagine being the one pushing the swing with the child on it. You push, you watch the swing perform the familiar motion, you wait for it to come back to you, and you push it again. The "here-gone" dichotomy strongly resonated with me. The necessity of letting go of the swing in order for it to fulfill its purpose (i.e. provide a pleasurable experience for the child) and at the same time distancing yourself from the precious freight it carries, experiencing a moment of anticipation (anxiety?) before the swing starts to come back, and the relief upon its safe return. But this relief is not really due to the return of the swing, but to the return of the child on it. In most cases, these two things are coupled. While the cycle of the swing will not be interrupted as long as one keeps pushing (what goes up must come down, right?), it is possible to lose a person forever. Fate is less predictable than physics. If the swing is "gone" it will transform into "here" again. A person, once dead, will remain gone. Child and swing - once fused together - are indeed separate entities; they can part ways. The stubborn mind, however, is reluctant to dissociate the two. The swing has always brought the child back, so maybe pushing an empty swing will magically return what has been lost. But some things cannot be changed, no matter how hard we push...
The Initial Idea
The interactive piece I initially envisioned (I wasn't even going to call it a game!) was strongly inspired by this crude image of an empty tire-swing and the foggy feelings of loss and mourning I associated with it. The player would enter an empty space with nothing but a swing in it and nothing to do but to push it. Pushing the swing would produce faint laughter and the transparent outline of a child would become visible on the swing. The implied goal would be to push until the child materialized completely. In truth, no such thing would be possible, though. The player would have to realize that all her efforts were for naught, that there was no way of bringing the child to life and that the only way to "win" was to accept that and walk away. In order to make this (emotionally) difficult for the player, every time she stopped pushing, the child would fade again, the laughing would grow faint at first, then maybe turn into whimpering (good audio would be required for this or instead of inducing guilt, the whining would create the wish to quickly leave the wretched child behind).
Using "The Tools" for Self-Exploration: A Conversation With The Inner Game Designer
When I talked to my friends Jaroslav and Eric about this initial idea - both very game savvy - they saw the potential for an emotionally compelling experience. However, they thought it should be more "gamey". I was reluctant at first. The simple tire-swing sequence felt so right that I wanted to do it exactly as I had described above. And then, they popped the Question (yep, it deserves the capital letter): "But what exactly is this about?" Mourning, clinging, loss, attachment - whatever I said to explain it didn't quite capture it. I couldn't put it in words. Since I'm strongly advocating purposeful design, not knowing my own mind was a problem. How can I purposefully create an experience for someone else if I don't understand my own feelings? This had to change. I decided to follow my friends' advice and make it more "gamey". Because although the game itself can be ambiguous and allow multiple interpretations, coming up with the rules forces the designer to be precise and concrete. I started to explore what I already had in mind in terms of game elements. Here's a rough transcript of the dialogue I had with what I call my "Inner Game Designer" (IGD):IGD: What exactly is the GOAL?I will spare you the rest of the conversation because it involved giant flying puddings and the monster with 14 toes, neither of which had any relevance to The Bridge. But you can see how the concept had dramatically evolved from the simple initial idea to a system that tackles the mechanisms of a certain kind of love and the problems that come with it. What was still lacking was an idea of how to overcome those problems, to get "unstuck" and break the pattern. Obviously, you had to fight your fears so you weren't dependent on your love object anymore and could love it in a more selfless way. And then what? It was at the speakers' party at this year's Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco when Trey (the game's producer) and Jamie (code and animation) approached me with the words: "we have been thinking." Sitting in front of cocktails called "The Game Designer" or "Achievement Unlocked", they spoke to me of closeness, emancipation and sacrifice in a serious and insightful way. We pondered how the game could end. We knew the goal, we had grasped the conflict. Now we had entered the final stage of the process: finding a solution. What happened when you killed the monsters that represented your fears? What happened to the girl that represented your love object? What exactly would "letting go" look like? It was Jamie who dumped the solution in my lap: every monster you killed would help form a bridge across the river that divided the playground (the game's main space) from the untended field (representing an unknown future). I loved the symbolism that the road to a better future was paved by one's conquered fears. We further entertained the rather disturbing idea that the girl would sacrifice herself to complete the bridge, that her (self-inflicted) death would produce the last missing piece. We let this sink in. Nah...no good, since it would undermine the emancipation process which depends on taking responsibility for one's actions. So, maybe the player had to kill the girl before the bridge solidified? No, no, no! Not reconcilable with the idea of selfless love! We finally agreed that to win the game, one would have to kill all the monsters in the playground and refrain from "reclaiming" the girl on the tire-swing. The bridge would solidify upon the death of the last monster and one could cross it. Crossing the bridge would "free" the girl (she'd dissolve into a could of particles). This should not mean that one abandoned love itself, but had overcome functionalizing it.
Me: To "let go".
IGD: A goal without CONFLICT makes for a lousy game. So what is the conflict? What makes "letting go" difficult?
Me: Attachment makes it difficult.
IGD: What creates attachment?
Me: Hm...love?
IGD: So, the way to overcome attachment is to overcome love?
Me: I don't think so. That would be terrible. Love is important.
IGD: Are you sure it is love, then, that bothers you? Maybe it's fear?
Me: Oh yeah? Well, what do YOU know?
IGD: I'm you, remember?
Me: Attachment and fear. Fear of losing love. You cling because you are afraid...
IGD: What exactly are you afraid of?
Me: Haven't I just said that? Afraid of losing love! Isn't that obvious?
IGD: Aren't you a bit negative?
Me: Don't play the Eliza trick on me!
IGD: All right, I'm sorry - couldn't resist. Seriously now, why would losing love be bad? It sounds like love serves a purpose.
Me: It protects...makes you feel good.
IGD: And since you don't want to lose what makes you feel good, love itself creates fear. It is both the curse and the cure, it seems.
Me: That's right. Fear creates clinging, you want to stay close to the "love object".
IGD: May I point out that you don't seem to have internalized love? It's this outside thing on which you depend. That attitude will always kick you in the butt.
Me: You're my inner game designer, not my freaking therapist.
IGD: Seems like pretty much the same thing to me...
The True Reward Was The Journey
My team had an equivalent of two 40-hour work weeks to develop this game. This is not a lot of time, but they did an amazing job. Our biggest problem, however, was that the theme was so personal. If a project is too big, you can always scope it down. But if you are very invested in the concept you want to convey, to do it justice and get it right, the problem starts much sooner than scope. It starts with understanding what exactly you want to model. We tried something big with The Bridge. Too big, maybe, for the given timeframe. I felt bad for a while after our last official work session, because how can you close the book on "love" and walk away feeling like you've accomplished anything? Also, eighty hours of development time do not leave a lot of room for tweaking and polishing and thus many of the ideas in the game are still latent and could be communicated to players more clearly. But then again, I have learned a lot. The process of designing this game made many things apparent to me, helped me map out some of my emotional landscape. In that regard, The Bridge was a huge success. It confirmed my belief that while making profound games that tackle the human condition is a worthy goal which I will keep pursuing, game design itself can be a wonderful tool for insight that greatly enhances our understanding of ourselves.Well, I'm back from my recent travels - and utterly exhausted. I've been trying to catch up on my sleep for a week, but that doesn't seem to be actually working. Last night, for example, I slept for a good eight hours and still woke up exhausted. This is disturbing, as I have a long list of requests from friends, clients and fellow travelers that I'm trying to get to (250+ such requests in my inbox greeted my return Stateside with the pitiless chirping of tiny flaming hell-birds) and this lack of energy, simply put, ain't helping. If yours is one of these requests that I've not managed to get to yet, I deeply apologize - it's entirely likely that it's one of the ones that requires some Serious Thought, or perhaps some Intense Labor. Either way, I'm doing my best to get to your request in a timely manner. Please stand by.
In other news, I'm finding myself somewhat befuddled by today's death of Michael Jackson. After Ed McMahon and Farrah Fawcett, my fiancée and I were discussing how this is sort of how it goes, and how weird it will be when Brad Pitt dies, et cetera et cetera, but Michael Jackson dying is something truly beyond the pale. Michael Jackson dying is like Mickey Mouse dying. The King of Pop was less a person and more of a persona, perhaps; you can almost hear Obi-Wan Kenobi sadly shaking his head over one of Michael Jackson's surgeries and intoning, "He's more cartoon than man now." 'Iconic' doesn't begin to describe it. It's just... Odd. True, the Michael Jackson of recent years had devolved into something truly bizarre, and especially his recent fiscal scenario was a completely befuddled mess, but still... My friend Derek also adds another strange insight into the whole fiaso: "Oh, I forgot. We're not supposed to speak ill of child molesters who bought off witnesses once they're dead. Right." Whether the whole lawsuit was trumped-up or paid off is still a matter of debate (the Wikipedia page on the 2005 case of The People of the State of California v. Michael Joseph Jackson notes that all charges were dropped and the plaintiffs seemed to be a bizarre, lawsuit-happy bunch) but D has a point - Jackson certainly does leave behind an unsettling, surreal biography.
Still... Still, it feels weird to have him gone. I was never a Michael Jackson fan, to be honest - that is to say, I can sing along to "Billy Jean" and "Thriller" when they come on the radio, but I've never owned a Michael Jackson album. Growing up in the 1980s, I had an odd distrust of Michael Jackson and Madonna alike, perceiving both of them as weird. I always preferred U2 or R.E.M., Duran Duran or Genesis, even especially more out-there acts like Information Society. Michael Jackson and Madonna were, to me, oversexed sideshow acts that somehow held the entire world in thrall, and I wasn't interested. Looking back, Information Society may have been even more bizarre than Michael Jackson, but any techno band that sampled Star Trek (, 1988, although this video of "Repetition" is way better) won points in my book - and, for extra nerd points, I discovered InSoc on the CD+G sampler that came with the Sega CD add-on I bought for my Genesis. Aw, yeah. Old-school nerdery, right there.
Like I said, I'm exhausted and now I'm rambling. I'll leave with a quote from Kevin, another of my friends: "I am speechless. A deeply troubled man, sure but what an unbelievable talent... In spite of the rest, he was capable of greatness." If you get a chance, check out the eulogy Roger Ebert wrote for Jackson (and Kevin referred me to), "The Boy Who Never Grew Up". "Michael Jackson was so gifted, so lonely, so confused, so sad," Ebert writes. "He lost happiness somewhere in his childhood, and spent his life trying to go back there and find it."
Apologies for the recent radio silence - I've been preparing for this weekend's big project. I'm currently sitting aboard an enormous Air France jetliner at Logan, waiting to take to the skies. After the briefest of connections in Paris (seriously - I'll be bolting through CDG) I'm offto Vienna, where I'll be teaching a workshop on Convergence Culture. This should be fantastic, and I've packed my videoblogging equipment, so my next post will hopefully have a really fantastic backdrop. Wish me luck!
One of the big pieces of news coming out of E3 this week is the announcement of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, scheduled to drop sometime next year and looking positively amazing. Here's the kicker, though: while Castlevania: Lords of Shadow is new, Lords of Shadow is not – Mercurysteam, the developer doing the heavy lifting for Konami this time around, actually announced Lords of Shadow at E3 2008. At that time, it looked like a bland Castlevania knockoff. Here, check out the trailer:
Not to be too harsh about it, but this trailer is a study in boring – the entire first half-to-two-thirds is a slow pan around the character. Ooh, a Gothic-looking dude who resembles a Belmont. We get it. One tiny flash of action at the end, a slowly-assembling logo, and that's it? Uh, okay. The whip coming out of the crucifix is a nice touch, but aside from that... Meh.
Fast-forward a year to 2009 and suddenly it's a beautiful example of what happens when you take a decent idea and throw all kinds of talent at it. Now it's an official Castlevania game instead of a knock-off, Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear) has been brought in to produce (!) and somewhere along the line the game picked up a whole host of top-notch voice talent, including Robert Carlyle (Stargate: Universe, 24) (!) and Patrick Stewart (oh c'mon now) (!!!). The trailer alone is jaw-dropping:
Is it too early to preorder this thing?
In this clip from the future (November 2009?) Henry sums up the basics of what he's been saying about convergence culture, transmedia storytelling and the Obama campaign.
I really like how the author describes the clip as a "viral-info-snack"; Henry would challenge the 'viral' terminology as part of his recent campaign to get us to start using the term 'spreadable' instead, but even so the very spreadability of this sucker is impressive. The flash and sizzle is a little much, but it's definitely a chewy bit of intelligent theory wrapped in a crunchy eye-candy shell.
As you might have heard, the Interstitial Arts Foundation is putting the finishing touches on its second anthology of interstitial fiction, Interfictions 2. The book is shaping up to be something really quite amazing - and now we're conducting an experiment in crowdfunding to get it onto the shelves. Here with the details is IAF co-founder Ellen Kushner:
We live in a world of niche marketing. The Interstitial Arts Foundation brings artists together to tear those barriers down.
We are asking you now to join us in our next adventure in storming the barricades: Interfictions 2: a New Anthology of Interstitial Writing, edited by Delia Sherman & Christopher Barzak. Interfictions 2 will be published in November 2009 in collaboration with Small Beer Press.
The first volume of Interfictions, published in 2007, was hailed as "A phenomenal collection...engrossing and provocative" (Hipster Bookclub) that "belongs on the nightstand of anyone interested in the development of contemporary short fiction" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution).
This second volume features original work by a whole new set of writers who joyfully explore the big imaginative spaces between conventional genres. And this time, we'll be reaching out to even more readers by publishing a series of free stories on the new Interfictions 2 Annex online!
What can you do to help? This extraordinary collection of interstital fiction needs your financial support. We're asking you to sponsor not just a book, but an idea - the idea that artists need to be able to express themselves freely and directly to their audiences, without the restraints of conventional genre limitations.
Here are some ways you can help us publish Interfictions 2:
SUPPORT AN INTERFICTIONS 2 STORY
- $500 pays one author for a 10,000 word short story
- $375 pays one author for a 7,500 word short story
SUPPORT THE INTERFICTIONS ONLINE ANNEX
8 stories will be available only online, with one appearing every week from August until November 2009.
- $400 covers author honoraria for the entire Annex
- $50 pays one author for an Annex story
SUPPORT THE NUTS & BOLTS OF ACTUAL BOOK PRODUCTION & PROMOTION
- $400 covers typesetting fees
- $200 buys Interfictions 2 a magazine ad
- $100 prints up promotional postcards
- $25 sends out five copies to reviewers
- Your Choice: Gift amount of your choosing supports the IAF's General Fund
Become an Interfictions 2 Sponsor with a gift of $500 or more, and we'll list you as a Sponsor on our Friends of Interfictions 2 web page. And if your gift of $500 or more is received by June 30, 2009, your name will be published in the printed anthology!
Your gift of $499 or less will get you listed on a Friends of Interfictions 2 web page as a Booklover, and Booklovers who donate between $375 and $499 by June 30, 2009 will have their names published in the printed anthology. Individual supporter names will not be linked to specific stories or work.
SUPPORT A STORY, GET A BOOK!
We'll also send signed copies of both Interfictions and Interfictions 2, signed by editors Delia Sherman and Christopher Barzak, to supporters who contribute $375 or more. In addition, Sponsors of $1,000 or more can choose to receive a signed limited edition print of Connie Toebe's "Moonlight", the art used on the cover of the first Interfictions.The easiest way to contribute is on our Web site at http://www.interstitialarts.org/donate.
Or you can mail your check along with the 2009 Gift Form to P.O. Box 35862, Boston, MA 02135. Contributions of any size are most welcome.
The IAF is a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization, so your contribution will be fully tax-deductible. But more importantly, when you make a gift to the IAF, you can bask in the knowledge that you are helping to build a new work of literature that can change people's lives.
Thank you for your continued support. Please feel free to link to or pass on this page to anyone else you think might be interested in art without borders!
Warmly,
Ellen Kushner
Vice President & Co-Founder,
Intersitial Arts Foundation
IndieCade @ E3: An Indie Games Showcase
What is the IndieCade International Festival of Independent Games?- IndieCade is the only stand-alone Independent Game Festival in the Nation. It is also the only event of its type open to the public. It is a completely international event.
- IndieCade holds an annual juried competition that culminates in its annual Festival. The 2009 Festival will be held in Culver City, California, October 1- 4, 2009. The festival will include an interactive exhibition of finalist games, premiere screenings, live gameplay, a conference, salons, workshops, artist talks, performances, and more. The IndieCade 2009 Festival is programmed to serve the gamemaking community, the industry, consumers of independent media, digitally energized youth, and the general public. Culver City is located between Hollywood, Santa Monica, and Downtown Los Angeles.
- IndieCade holds multiple showcase events at larger venues throughout the year including its IndieCade Europe event. These are either individually juried or curated depending upon the requirements of the venue.
The 2009 series of showcase events include:
IndieCade@E3, June 2-4
IndieCade@SIGGRAPH Sandbox, August 3-7
IndieCade@OIAF Canada, October 14-18
IndieCade Europe @ GameCity, October 26-31
- IndieCade supports independent game development and organizes a series of international festivals and showcase exhibitions for the future of independent games. It encourages, publicizes, and cultivates innovation and artistry in interactive media, helping to create a public perception of games as rich, diverse, artistic, and culturally significant. IndieCade's events and related production and publication programs are designed to bring visibility to and facilitate the production of new works within the emerging independent game movement. Like the independent developer community itself, IndieCade's focus is global; it includes producers in Asia, Europe, Australia, and wherever independent games are made and played. IndieCade was formed by Creative Media Collaborative, an alliance of industry producers and leaders founded in 2005. Advisors to IndieCade include Dave Perry, Will Wright, Eric Zimmerman, Neil Young, Tracy Fullerton, and Keita Takahashi, among many other storied industry veterans and rebels.
- Simply put, independent games are games that come from the heart, that follow a creative vision, rather than a marketing bottom line. Independent developers are not owned by or beholden to a large publisher. This means that they generally have smaller budgets than mainstream games (often no budget at all!), but they also have the freedom to innovate and to enlarge our conception of games and game audiences. Indie developers can run the gamut from artists, to academic researchers, to students, to emerging development studios striving to make the next big indie hit. They can be one person or a large team. They may be internally funded, funded by grants or private investors, or not funded at all! The key is that they create games based on their own unique vision.
- We were invited to curate this exhibition in order to showcase and promote innovation in the game industry. We also help to expose publishers to new independent voices. We work closely with the ESA, the IGDA and other organizations interested in supporting the cause of independent game creation. We share the goal of these organizations to showcase the present and future of video games as a culturally significant form of expression.
- The showcase was curated by IndieCade co-chairs Celia Pearce and Sam Roberts and Creative Media Collaborative CEO Stephanie Barish. The games were primarily drawn from the 2009 Submissions to IndieCade and we included a few successful games from last year's selection that are otherwise not possible to see. The criteria for this showcase was to put together a diverse array of games that would showcase innovation for the mainstream game industry and game press, represent a wide array of independent game developers, and highlight works to come later this year.
- The developers represented here include individuals, small teams, independently owned studios, universities and their faculty and students. Developers come from around the world including the US, Belgium, Spain, Austria, Great Britain and others.
- Last year a number of games shown by IndieCade were picked up by major publishers such as Nintendo, Xbox, and Sony, as well as multiple digital distribution platforms. Other games were selected for Museum installations and other artistic venues. So, don't be surprised to see some of the titles at our showcases and festival as commercial games in next year's E3.
Hands-On Demos
And Yet It Moves* And Yet It Moves Team *(2007/2008 Official IndieCade Selection, Coming to Nintendo Wii Soon!) Blueberry Garden* Erik Svedäng/Sweden *(2008 Official IndieCade Selection, 2009 IGF Awardee) Closure Tyler Glaiel & Jon Schubbe/United States Cogs Lazy 8 Studios/United States Dear Esther thechineseroom/United Kingdom Flywrench* & Cowboyana Messhof, Mark Essen/United States *(2008 Official IndieCade Selection, Currently on display at New Museum, New York) Global Conflicts: Latin America Serious Games Initiative/Denmark Octopounce Auntie Pixelante/United States Papermint Avaloop/Austria Snapshot RetroAffect/United States Winds of Orbis: An Active-Adventure Deep End Interactive/United States Zephyr: Tides of War Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy/United StatesAlternate Reality, Live Games, and Installations
The Deep Sleep Initiative ARx/United States Mightier Lucas Pope & Keiko Ishizaka/United States Pluff Diana Hughes/United States Prototype161: Agents Wanted Prototype 161/United StatesMobile
AquariYum! Teatime Games/United States Bobobua Tripod Games/China Guru Meditation Ian Bogost/United States Ruben & Lullaby Erik Loyer/United StatesGames on Video
Fabulous/Fabuleux Lynn Hughes & Heather Kelley/Canada Gray Mike Boxleiter & Greg Wohlwend/USA Posemania Anthony Whitehead, Hannah Johnston, Kaitlyn Fox, Nick Crampton, Joe Tuen/Canada Phorm Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab/United States & Singapore When The Bomb Goes Off Tom Sennett/United StatesArt Exhibition
For this year's E3, IndieCade selected games from past years to present high-resolution prints of screenshots. Below is a list of art on display and the artwork being showcased. Braid* Jon Blow & David Helman/United States *(2007 IndieCade Offiial Selection, Xbox Live Arcade) Blueberry Garden* Erik Svedang/Sweden *(2008 IndieCade Official Selection, 2009 IGF Awardee) The Endless Forest - ABIOGENESIS Tale of Tales/Belgium Freedom Fighter '56 Lauer Learning/United States ioq3aPaint Julian Oliver*/Spain *(2008 IndieCade Awardee, Technical Innovation) Machinarium* Amanita Design/Czech Republic (2008 IndieCade Awardee, Aesthetics, 2009 IGF Design Awardee) The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom* The Odd Gentlemen/United States (2008 IndieCade Awardee, World/Story, Distribution to be announced Shortly) The Night Journey* Bill Viola Studio and USC/United States *(2008 IndieCade Awardee, Sublime) Nobi Nobi Boy Collage Keita Takahashi*/Japan *(IndieCade Board of Advisors) Passage* Jason Rohrer/United States *(2008 IndieCade Awardee, Jury Selection) Rooms* Hand Made Games/Korea *(2007 Official Selection, Available on Big Fish Games) Ruckenblende* Die Gute Fabrik (the good factory)/Denmark *(2008 IndieCade Awardee, Gamemaker's Choice) The Unfinished Swan Ian Dallas/United States Where is My Heart? Bernhard Schulenburg/GermanyIndieCade Sponsors, Supporters, and Partners
The Culver Hotel The City of Bellevue, Washington The City of Redmond, Washington Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (EEDAR) The Entertainment Software Association (The ESA) GameCity, Nottingham Gregg Fleishmann Gallery The International Game Developers Association (IDGA) Gaming Angels IDG World Expo Imago imaging Jon Burgerman Open Satellite Gallery M Café de Chaya Mary Margaret Network Royal-T Rush Street Signtist SIGGRAPH The Wonderful World of Animation Gallery
Big, corporate America may be over. As Anderson puts it:
Huge vertically integrated conglomerates were created to minimize what economist Ronald Coase called transaction costs between teams and up and down the supply chain. Now distributed-information networks would do the same outside the walls of a single company. The Web would be globalization taken to the extreme. Projects would be open to the best of breed anywhere, creating virtual flash firms of suppliers and workers that would come together for one product and then re-form for another. "Small pieces, loosely joined" was the mantra.But out in the reality of the world's great industries, the opposite seemed to happen. Corporations just kept getting bigger. On Wall Street, Goldman Sachs was pulling in almost $90 billion a year, tripling annual revenue in less than a decade. The pharmaceutical industry consolidated through hundreds of mergers and acquisitions. The Fortune 10, which today includes Wal-Mart and General Electric, more than tripled in size since 1990. And AT&T, far from breaking up into 300,000 different companies, became even bigger than before and, once again--at least for iPhone users--a monopoly.
And then last September it all came toppling down. Those big financial firms turned out to have been inflated by debt at levels never before seen (and hopefully never repeated). The big car companies crashed head-on into skyrocketing oil prices and plummeting consumer demand. Big Pharma ran out of blockbusters. Wal-Mart kept closing stores, while GE tried to sell off divisions. (OK, AT&T is still an iPhone monopoly, but give it time!)
So now, in the graveyard of giants, it's worth asking: Was Malone right? Was his age of nimble mammals simply delayed by the final march of corporate dinosaurs into the tar pits?
This crisis is not just the trough of a cycle but the end of an era. We will come out not just wiser but different.
What we have discovered over the past nine months are growing diseconomies of scale. Bigger firms are harder to run on cash flow alone, so they need more debt (oops!). Bigger companies have to place bigger bets but have less and less control over distribution and competition in an increasingly diverse marketplace. Those bets get riskier and the payoffs lower. And as Wall Street firms are learning, bigger companies are going to get more regulated, limiting their flexibility. The stars of finance are fleeing for smaller firms; it's the only place they can imagine getting anything interesting done.
As venture capitalist Paul Graham put it, "It turns out the rule 'large and disciplined organizations win' needs to have a qualification appended: 'at games that change slowly.' No one knew till change reached a sufficient speed."
The result is that the next new economy, the one rising from the ashes of this latest meltdown, will favor the small.
It's worth noting that "Small Pieces, Loosely Joined" is also the title of a great 2002 book by David Weinberger, on - surprise, surprise - the nature of the Internet.
I write these words with some trepidation, and I'll admit that this is one of those essays I'm writing more to get my own thoughts in order rather than in an attempt to convey some grandiose, sweeping idea to anyone reading this. I write this because I've seen firsthand both the glory and the terror of the post-corporate landscape. When I graduated from Kenyon in 2000, I spent several years working for a large corporation and enjoyed the benefits of such. Literally. I wasn't making a lot of money, but I did enjoy health insurance and subsidized transportation. It didn't take long for me to start doing consulting work on the side in order to make ends meet - and for a while there, things were going pretty well. Then, however, I suffered a pretty big personal fallout around 2002-2003, and within the space of a couple of months I was unexpectedly and heartbreakingly single and working for myself as a full-time consultant. The two were only partly related, but that was still one of the blackest points in my personal history.
And then I got a severe ear infection. Without health insurance.
I went to a quack doctor doing business in a double-wide trailer off the side of the freeway outside DC because I had no health insurance of my own and this was the best that my COBRA coverage (which was excruciatingly expensive) would pay for. She took a look at it, told me to take Tylenol and it would clear up. It didn't. Instead, it worsened, building up pressure until my eardrum blew out from the inside. I still have some hearing loss from that joyful experience. In fact, that ranks right up there with the time I spent with a broken wisdom tooth - also due to a periodic lack of health insurance - as good times.
It still wasn't enough to completely deter me from the joy of the self-employed lifestyle, and I stayed self-employed until I came here to start graduate work at MIT in 2005. I don't regret it at all, because that time was, I thoroughly believe, what qualified me to come to MIT - I spent an obscene amount of time studying, building, writing and learning, the kinds of things that are not inherently supported by major corporations, but are necessary to survive in the kind of nimble "future of work" advocated by Anderson, Pink and a whole host of other futurists that have been prophesying these shifts for decades. If this change happens the way they say it will, I'm ready. What's spooky is that America isn't ready - not only will this kind of change be downright terrifying for the majority of American workers in places like my own hometown, but America as a government isn't ready to support such a shift. Which is interesting, because in ways, this future America looks a lot like past America.
People talk about how in this future America, job security is a thing of the past. I think this is inherently false - job security will be much greater, if only because it's really damned hard to fire yourself. I suspect that the future will have a much greater number of Mom-and-Pop shops, only catering to either a global market, a hyperlocal market, or some wonderful combination of the two. In short, survival will require a much stronger sense of entrepreneurialism. If big corporations go bye-bye, they'll need to be replaced with smaller ones - and this isn't just smaller white-collar, blue-collar, green-collar or no-collar gigs, it's also the support staff for such industries. The "search for enough" may become the new crucial element, with a broader number of individuals finding that it costs less to thrive in a smaller environment than it does to compete with supercompanies, and the smaller companies thus prove to be more healthy. In a certain sense, the collapse of GM is a real "wizard behind the curtain" moment, showing that many corporations are sacrificing profitability (and sustainability) for the sake of appearances, for the sake of staying big - and that may not be what future America is all about. Future America may be about smaller scales, more intimate scales, the hyperlocal - while still catering to worldwide markets through the advent of the web. This is old Kool-Aid but still definitely drinkable; it's possible that this new depression is less of a depression and, as some have already suggested, a painful correction into the new business model that we've all seen coming for a while now.
Will a storefront in Wooster, Ohio house a company that makes specialty garden equipment and ships it to China? It's possible. Small, nimble, located outside of a major city where the cost of living is shot past all hope of sustainability... What frightens me, however, is that the health care and education components aren't there yet. I could totally go back to my consulting days, being nimble, quick and continually learning, except for two major fears: the abso-fucking-lutely ludicrous cost of health care in this country and the almost equally terrifying cost of putting one or more children through college. If Obama and the Democrats can step up to the plate and shore up the architecture needed to supply quality health care to every American (and not the quack doctor on the side of the freeway) as well as helping to get the cost of education back under control, then the collapse of GM and other similar companies may not be wholly a bad thing. Use whatever trite metaphor you want - phoenixes and ashes, eggs and omelettes - but what we're seeing here is a massive sea change, and it's one that we've absolutely seen coming - but the challenge is how to meet the challenges of infrastructure that will be needed to get this new, greener, more hyperlocal, and flat-out better America up and running as quickly as possible - and how we ourselves as individual Americans can realign our thinking to capitalize on the amazing opportunities that are riddled throughout this entire situation.
Smaller might be scarier, but it might also be happier - and it might also be a lot more sustainable. The key is in figuring out how to make that happen.