Perhaps it’s because I grew up playing video games in the era of consoles, where you had no choice in anything, and didn’t play a game where you had a choice in anything until after grad school, but there’s been something happening in comment sections of games journalism sites lately that’s really bothered me. (No, not the whole Gamergate thing. That’s not even worth flippantly talking about.) The issue I’m talking about is that there seem to be a very vocal group of gamers who demand that developers be constantly open with their development processes, that they—the gamers—have full choice within games, and, before the games are made, have a voice in what the game is and what it becomes. Now, it also may be the fact that, primarily, when I think of narrative, the thing that pops into my head is the novel or short story. In that, it would be patently absurd for readers to make the same kinds of demands. (Granted, that doesn’t seem to stop some rabid fanbases like the A Song of Ice and Fire crowd from doing just that.) Why? Because novels and short stories are, ostensibly, one-way media. Setting aside the idea that you should be interacting with text, we’re left with the notion that games are the only true interactive art form. Thus, goes the thinking, shouldn’t gamers have more of a say in things?

It probably won’t surprise you to see that, no. I don’t think that’s the case at all.

Backing up, though, there are a few things that prompted this. The first being the comment section on a Polygon article inspired by our second thing, this post on Ask a Game Dev. As a summary, a game developer talked about developers’ practices of being tight-lipped on details about anticipated games, and what the gaming public’s reaction usually means for them. Third, posts and comment threads like this on the SWTOR subreddit. We’re getting super nerdy here, so a little description might be worthwhile: Bioware, maker of the game Star Wars: The Old Republic, are releasing a new expansion that, they say, will drastically change the way the game is played. Beyond that, and some hints about changes to the way your companions will be handled, the way in-game professions will be handled, and a few other things, they’ve not been forthcoming with information. The subreddit has been reacting exactly like you’d think they would: Stopping just short of calling BioWare fascists. The fourth is the Mass Effect 3 ending debacle which probably prompted BioWare to not share many details on things in the future. There are tons of thinkpieces about that floating around online, so feel free to do your research on that. I’d rather not revisit it in this space.

The running theme in all of this has been that the vocal gaming public has shouted for more knowledge of games that they want to play. They say, in a commonly-held idea, that they pay a lot for games, and so they should be entitled to more say than, for example, someone who goes to see a movie. (In my mind, this is an example of some pretty faulty logic. A movie is $12 and a game is $60 because of a lot of reasons, scale among them. Paying more money for media does not mean you get more say, otherwise Comcast would have millions of shareholders.)

Growing up when I did, and playing the games that I did, this strikes me as utterly insane. If developers want to bring the public into the creative process, then that’s fine, but they must have a much higher regard for the public than I do. I’ve tried to think of what Blizzard’s games would be like if the fans had any say in it, and all I can think of now is that World of Warcraft would oscillate wildly between the easiest thing in the world, and something you have to turn into a job where you put in doctor hours.

But at the heart of it all, I think there’s a simple misunderstanding: When people talk about “investing” in a game, they’re misunderstanding the metaphor. You are not investing money in a game. You are investing money in the chance to be entertained. You are paying for a product, and when you pay for a product, you get whatever the product is. Sure, you can change the way future products are made, but you have to open a sane dialog with the manufacturer, or boycott, or any number of post-purchase actions.

Investing in something, on the other hand, is very different. You give an organization a large amount of money beforehand with the expectation that a) you will see a return on that money and b) you may have the chance to steer the company—usually in the form of being involved in shareholders’ meetings or, if you have enough money, at the start of the company. I’m making an assumption here, but something tells me that gamers are not bankrolling BioWare or EA in order to fund wide releases.

The counter to all of this is Kickstarter, or Indiegogo, or a new thing called Fig. Fig seems to be a combination of Steam and Kickstarter, but with a little less communication between creator and backer. I don’t know what to think about that, mainly because the linked Polygon article is so gushing in tone that I come away deeply skeptical. However, the article does point out something important that should keep at bay the hordes of gamers shouting about gamer agency:

“The reason why they were coming in and providing that money was because they trusted so much the creative control brought by the developer. We love getting our community involved in these games, but it’s community-informed. I don’t think you want a community-designed game.”

A community-designed game, I think would be a deeply post-modern thing. A chimera so hideous that none would be able to look upon it without their faces melting a la Raiders of the Lost Ark, and that’s not just me being elitist. When you have an entire community designing something, it becomes a game of telephone, or one of those writing exercises where people write a sentence or a paragraph and pass it along. Occasionally, you might get a good plot, but by and large, it’s going to be absurdism without the art.

Who, then, owns the games? Well, the artist. The same answer as you find in novels or films. It’s their narrative, and while they may be willing to ask for input, they get the final say. Why? Because they’re doing the work in creating something. Compromises may be made along the way, and the finished product may be vastly different than what comes out at the end, but when it’s all said and done, it’s the artist who created the world and they get to say where it’s going to go from here.

The best example of this in non-games, I think, is Star Wars. Here’s a series that started off with three movies that were wildly different from their original inception, then expanded upon with three prequels that people over the age of 8 hated. The movies may completely ignore the language of film, storytelling, and any number of other, important things, but George Lucas stood by his creation, and you have to respect him for that.

So, what? What am I saying to people who are frustrated that they’re not receiving information about things at a steady enough pace for them to feel okay with the future of a game franchise?

Partially, I’m saying that these people should calm the hell down. We live in a time where, if you binge-watched an entire season of a scripted show a day, you would not be able to watch all of the new television shows in a year. And that’s just scripted TV! That’s not counting reality TV, talk shows, sports, or the news! Not to mention movies! Books! Magazines! Other games! We, in fact, live in a rough approximation of the world built in Huxley’s Brave New World, except for the fact that our government is not nearly as benign as theirs. My point being: If you want to do something other than rend your hair and grind your teeth in anticipation of not having a flawless gaming experience, you have other options. You have so many other options. You have, I think, too many other options, to the point where, if we, as a society, were smart, we’d say, “No. That is enough, thank you. I do not need any more; I’m just fine as it is.”

But we’re not. So we’ll keep making media, and in the case of games, you’ll continue to see baffling statistics like this: From May 12 to June 12, people who played Witcher 3 just on PC logged 1,770 years‘ worth of playtime. What that means is if you made that a real life block of time, and placed it chronologically in the continuum of human history, a very unfortunate strawman Witcher 3 would have started when a Roman Emperor named Philip (yeah, good luck finding people who knew about him without looking up the year 245 on Wikipedia) did… well, Imperial stuff, would have continued through the fall of Rome, onward through Charlemagne, the Inquisition, the Reformation, the colonization of the New World, the Enlightenment, the Napoleonic Wars, both World Wars, the Cold War, the Iraq wars, and then, stepping outside for a Doritos and Mountain Dew break, would have been sunburned immediately, as his skin would have become translucent and Gollum-like.

My point to gamers is this: You have other options. Calm down. If you’re dead set on playing games, then find something else until more information is released. Shouting about not being respected just makes people who aren’t you respect you less. You would, rather, probably be better off if you went and read a book.

I’m finally finishing How Music Works by David Byrne. It’s a great book – the time it took for me to almost be done with it has nothing to do with its quality, and everything to do with the fact that I’m afraid of book-commitment. Indeed, having How Music Works waiting there for me while I’m in the depths of some <immortanJoe>mediocre</immortanJoe> genre fiction book is a comfort that I’m sure I’ll soon miss. That said, I got to a point in it last night where I went, “Now you’ve done it, David Byrne. Now you’ve made me want to go and blog about this.”

The point, you’ll not be surprised to hear, came when Byrne was discussing classical music vs. pop music. Specifically, he was talking about the perception and function of high art vs art in pop culture. (Or, as the kids put it, “pop art.”) There’s a whole hell of a lot to say about that “debate,” and Byrne gives short shrift to it. Now, admittedly, it’s a book in and of itself, and Byrne doesn’t have the space to go into it in a book that’s ostensibly about the business of music, as well as how music itself functions as social glue and as a phenomena in our daily lives. And further, Byrne is very straightforward throughout his book about his biases toward pop music in general, and against classical or “high-art” music in general.

There are a couple of points that set me off in his chapter, “Amateurs.” The first one is that “The dead guys won’t write more symphonies” (p. 298) and the second is in reference to the arts funding that symphony halls and art houses receive but that pop music venues do not – “Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past?” (p. 282)

It’s almost a platitude to say that Beethoven is dead, so he won’t be writing more symphonies. Of course not – not until the glorious day that we can clone him, and install him as Minister of Kultur in my Iron Fist government, of course. However, as I’ve written about before, it’s not like you can’t get anything important out of a dead guy. The works that, in Byrne’s book’s examples, the Koch brothers and the capitalist vultures prop up as a means to assuage their egos, can mean a whole hell of a lot to people – and yes, symphony halls are costly as hell to maintain, but they’re also where symphonies sound best live. You can hear a pops concert in a park, but you miss a lot of the textures of the music.

Let’s talk about symphony halls for a moment, shall we? They’re stuffy, and if you go there and you’re 30 or below, you’ll be the youngest person there by at least 30 years. They’re not a little intimidating at first glance, and they’re not in any way like your local venue. They are, some would argue, relics of a long-gone past, and relics that should be swept away if they can’t hold their own as a business. (Not that Byrne says that, though he does come damn close to it.) However, symphony halls and opera houses are a certain style of architecture that you don’t see anymore: Ornate. They stand as a reminder of history and the human need to embellish, and as a counter to glass-faced condos, new-retro buildings, and whatever horrible styles the hipsters at architecture firms are coming up with next. I’d say that they’re visual art as much as they are a place to hear music, and yes, the arts need public funding – as well as whatever cash the ravenous hordes of capitalists or whoever want to throw at them. Why? Because we live in a society that doesn’t value its works, only profit and results. And yes, we’ve been that way for centuries, I know, but that doesn’t change the fact that, more than anything else, the arts keep us, as a society human. Whether or not the billionaire philanthropists are thinking about that or their egos, I don’t know, but I do think this is an example of shutting up and taking money when it’s offered.

As for stuffiness and intimidating, as someone who comes from a family of steel salesmen, restaurant servers, and, yes, lawyers, I think that wears off the second time you go into a building. Going to the symphony hall is like like going to a museum. If you’re not used to it, and you don’t know that, no, it’s not cool to touch a 300 year-old artwork, then you’ll be a bit weirded out by the security guards and the vastly different atmosphere. But once you’ve gone a few times, know how they work, they become a lot more welcoming. The empty space becomes room to wander around, to look at pieces from different perspectives. From personal experience, no one in my family aside from my brother was really into classical music, despite the fact that, somewhere along the line, one of the Simons was a concert violinist in Austin, Texas. My dad took me to art museums, and made them less intimidating by interacting with the art in the form of mocking the paintings in a Cockney accent. It drew weird looks, but it showed me that places of “high art” are not places to be feared.

Same with the symphony halls: Once you’re used to the rows of seating and the appearance that you’re in a cathedral from the year 1700, you realize that it’s just another venue. One that you probably shouldn’t form a circle pit in, but just another venue regardless. They are, I maintain, intimidating only if you let them be, and only if you buy into the common line that these places are only for the upper crust.

“But what about the dressing up?” some will ask. Well, yeah, you should probably dress up. That comes with the territory. It’s like dressing up for church or services. You show respect by not showing up dressing like an asshole. It may be a bit classist, but hey, nothing’s perfect.

Next, let’s look at the lazy “Dead guys won’t write more symphonies” line. Well, no. Of course they won’t. But guess what: John Lennon and BB King aren’t going to be writing any more songs, either. That’s what happens when you die: You stop working. It’s the ultimate retirement! But let’s not even get into the implication that “the dead guys” have works that aren’t important because they’re dead. Instead, let’s consider the fact that, yeah, at this very moment, there are composers coming out with new work. New work that doesn’t fit the mold of the Romantic composers! The classical scene isn’t dead by any means, it just works wildly differently.

As Byrne admits in the book, by quoting Alex Ross, who’s a much better source to learn about classical music from, symphony programmers are constantly trying to find ways to draw people into the halls – or bring events to the public. It’s a singular difficulty that they face, because most of the people they’re trying to court don’t know that they already know a great many Important Works. How do they know these Works? By being consumers of media, of course. You hear snatches of Gershwin, Wagner, Mahler, Beethoven, and Glass in everything ranging from airline commercials to the Lone Ranger theme to the Interstellar soundtrack. (That last example is more an example of being heavily influenced by Philip Glass, from the minimal background of the sonic backdrop to the repetitive tones going on through the piano to the percussion – best listened to at high volume and with stupid high quality headphones.) The best programmers know that the way they reach people is through pops concerts, held on lovely days in public parks. There, conductors have a bit of exposition about pieces before the orchestra plays them, and the audience learns something about what they’re going to hear.

And I think that’s at the crux of the matter. To not feel intimidated by classical music, you have to learn a bit about how it works. Whether that’s done through school education or by watching something like Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts doesn’t matter – but in order to really get what’s going on, you have to know the context – which Byrne also notes is important for pop music. I don’t think that’s oppressive, or exclusionary, or whatever. You just have to learn. Classical engages a different part of the body than pop music.Though there’s plenty of opportunity to dance to classical music (waltzes, anyone?), those dances are a bit different than you’ll experience if you go to the Goodfoot in Portland.

Byrne isn’t a classical music fan. He’s a pop guy, he’s a rock guy, he’s a funk guy. I won’t comment about pop or funk, because those are definitely not my purview. Byrne is, however, a really smart guy, and seeing him handwave away Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart because they’re dead and you can’t dance to them is disappointing to an extreme. The arguments he uses are lazy and they ignore a vast swath of compositions that are intense as hell simply because they’re – presumably – not as well known as Figaro, or Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, or Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. How Music Works is a fantastic book to learn about pop music, or rock, or even get a good idea about the way tech and buildings change the way music works, but it’s not a great place to expand your horizons about the vibrant realm of classical music.