The entertainment promise of sports

Chuck Klosterman ponders the purpose of sports we pay to watch in the light of David Stern fining the San Antonio Spurs $250,000 for resting four of its star players in a game against the Miami Heat.

I'll approach the question in light of the Miami Heat's loss to the Washington Wizards last night. I happened to flip to the game and watch a good chunk of it while tapping away on my computer, and you don't have to be a basketball expert to see that the Heat lost because they were indifferent on defense, definitely nowhere near exerting maximum effort to win (Dwayne Wade is a beloved Miami sports figure, but he coasts on defense so much he deserves to be called on it much more). The Heat knew they were far better than the Wizards, and if both teams had been exerting maximum effort, I'd venture the Heat would easily win 9 out of every 10 games, if not more.

The result of the mismatch was a close contest, which some would argue is what fans enjoy. But not all close contests are created equal. Watching two inept teams battle to a near draw is gruesome, and when a good team slacks off against a bad team, that's not fun to watch, either. The truth is, the majority of NBA regular seasons I attend feel overpriced and not that enjoyable. The same for Major League Baseball, though tickets are at least cheaper.

As with movies, though, all baseball and basketball games tend to be priced exactly the same. It's in the free market, for example on StubHub or Craigslist, where you can see how much fans really value a particular regular season game, and with the exception of matchups between two really great teams, especially nationally televised ones, when star players tend to bring their A-Game, a lot of sports contests in baseball and football are just poor entertainment products.

[The NFL is an exception because there are only 16 regular season games and so it's rare to have games that teams just plain concede.]

Both the NBA and MLB would benefit from shortening the season, but they'll never do it because of the additional revenue from the extra contests. The NBA has an additional problem in that talent in the draft is extremely top heavy, so if you're out of it, the best thing to do at the end of the season is to tank to try to get into the draft lottery. I don't care how much David Stern fines the Spurs, no NBA fan is fooled by the illusion of every NBA game being equal in entertainment value.

It's a reminder of another reason why Michael Jordan was such an anomaly. My mom used to get me tickets for my birthday to see Jordan play every year, and I'd venture to say that by the time I die, most of the NBA games I'll have ever watched in my life will have involved Jordan. I never once saw him concede a game, or not exert effort to win, even in trap games like the second game of a road and road back-to-back at the end of a long road trip, when teams tend to just mail it in due to fatigue and/or indifference. He was pathologically, unhealthily competitive, but you always got your money's worth when he was on the court, and he held his teammates to that absurd standard. The fact that the Bulls own the record for most wins in an 82-game season is testament to the fact that they were good that year, but it's also testament to the fact that they didn't take any nights off, and a lot of that was rooted in Jordan's ability to find competitive motivation in any situation, in any form of competition. In that ability to bring it night after night, we might consider MIchael Jordan a method athlete.

Preview, do, recap

An oft repeated maxim about presentations is "Tell the audience what you're going to say, say it; then tell them what you've said." Or its variant: "Tell them what you're going to tell them; tell them; then tell them what you told them." It sounds almost too rigid to be useful, but as we all know there's often something useful in the banal. 

Liam Neeson's character in the Taken movies takes this advice to heart. Genre movies are ones in which we know going on what will happen, broadly, and so you grant audience pleasure by fulfilling expectations, not by subverting them (like pop music). Taken and Taken 2 are nothing if not genre movies.

So it's very pleasing to have Liam Neeson's character state his thesis up front in each movie, as if giving a Toastmasters speech. Not surprisingly, the quotes are featured in the trailers for each movie. They succinctly and elegantly sum up for the viewer that their expectations will be fulfilled with great economy. These are not movies that will waste much time with character development or other high art duties that will slow the narrative pace.

In each movie, Neeson's character explains what is going to happen to his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace). But he is really speaking to the audience, letting them know that he knows what type of movie they should expect, that he is in on the joke with them. The audience already knows what will happen in each movie (these are genre movies, after all) and Neeson acknowledges that the movie will fulfill their expectations.

From Taken:

I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.

From Taken 2:

Liam Neeson: Listen to me carefully, Kim. Your mother; is going to be taken. And people are gonna come for you to. 

Kim: What are you gonna do? 

Liam Neeson: What I do best. 

If nothing else, these moments make the life of the person cutting the trailer a lot easier. Incidentally, Taken 2 was not very good. Even if the audience knows what's coming, it still matters how you give them what they want.

Miscellaneous

The re-integration of the computing value chain. For years in the computer world, the leaders were specialists and most companies focused on one or two pieces of the value chain, outsourcing everything else. But in the mobile world, everyone is following Apple's lead and trying to own the entire value chain, buying up component manufacturers, owning their own retail distribution and the entire software stack.

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The net-price myth for college tuition: we can't count on financial aid volume keeping up with tuition increases, and the increased spending per student on the part of colleges is producing dubious incremental value.

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Why famous and/or important people often come off as inconsiderate and inauthentic: I'm replacing "high-status actor" with "famous and/or important people" to try to improve the readability of this economic paper a bit. I find many very famous people know the causes here and can flip them on their head, reversing expectations and thus coming off as surprisingly humble and considerate, even if they are no more so than the average person.

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Why do people vote if it's so unlikely that their vote will make a difference? To take it even further, why don't we teach our children to be free riders since it's economically beneficial to them to do so? Here's one explanation that makes some sense. There's the germ of something here to form an argument against piracy, I think. I don't always love media company business models, but I am against piracy. Megan McArdle sums up the flaws of the anti-piracy argument quite well here. People come up with all sorts of reasons to justify why they pirate things, but at the end of the day, they work so hard precisely because I think they know, deep down, they're doing something ethically questionable. At least with people who try to justify their efforts I can engage in a debate and try to flip them. It's those who don't even try to justify it at all that are beyond hope.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe

I am only about 50 pages into Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe, and already I love it so much. It involves time travel, but it is not literally about time travel, the way my favorite science fiction novels are not about the future as much as they are about humanity.

I recommend it, but only for some people. If you're a huge sci-fi novel fan, this actually may not be the novel for you, as it's much more introspective and much less plot-driven than the most popular sci-fi novels. Read the Publishers Weekly pan on the Amazon detail page. It will turn off most people, and some of you will find it intriguing. Those are the ones who should probably buy it.

[Related: Almost none of my favorite books have a 5-star average review on Amazon. In fact, most books I've picked up with an average of 5-star reviews on Amazon are disappointing, especially if reviewed in heavy volume. My theory: anything sufficiently bold and interesting will cause some readers discomfort, and anything that's reviewed so universally positively by so many people is probably either too bland to be of interest to me or too partisan to merit reviews from those with opposing viewpoints.]

Modernizing found footage

I'm excited for Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim, the 2013 sci-fi film featuring giant robots fighting giant monsters. I watched a lot of that stuff as a kid, it's all nostalgic fun. So I should be more excited by this viral teaser trailer of found footage.

But in this age in which so man people walk around carrying iPhones or digital cameras that shoot HD video, I no longer have patience for the type of super shaky handheld footage that is used in movies built around found footage, especially when it's used as a tactic to avoid having to more clearly render a digital monster. It's a crutch that no longer feels credible.

In a city like San Francisco, the tech capitol of the world, if a monster destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge, YouTube would be hosting high-def footage from dozens of citizens in no-time, and with the iPhone's video stabilization and HD quality, it would be very sharp and watchable, albeit perhaps shrouded in some bizarre nostalgia filter or obscured by the occasional finger in one corner.

This is just a viral video, so they may be rigging this to maintain suspense, but in this day and age it stands out. It reminds me of another movie crutch, the use of the old school answering machines so that the audience can hear a voicemail being left or played back. It's usually a way to transmit information to the audience but keep information from a character (because they're one of the few people who still doesn't carry a cell phone in 2012). Given the lousy cell phone coverage today, I far prefer calls that can't be completed because of poor cell coverage. That's at least plausible.

By the time Pacific Rim comes out, I expect some viral videos will feature footage from a GoPro suction-cupped to the head of one of the monsters.