Social Commentary, or Just a Dog's Opinion?
By TOM ZELLER Jr.
Published: December 19, 2005
THE Entertainment Software Association's publication "Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry" for 2005 opens with this assertion from Sheldon Brown, a visual arts professor and director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts at the University of California, San Diego:
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Christina Monaco
"Whether we like it or not, this is the medium of our moment. It is a medium that is telling our cultural story, and the fact that it is a primary tool of youth and adolescents means it will have a tremendous impact on how the next generation or two plays itself out."
If that's true, the music industry - another purveyor of digital goods - could not have been very happy when bloggers last week began sharing screen grabs from a popular new Nintendo game, which includes, among its many characters, a guitar-toting puppy who seems to extol the virtues of file-sharing.
"Those industry fat cats try to put a price on my music, but it wants to be free," the canine bard says in a dialogue bubble at the bottom of the screen, after performing and giving away "copies" of a tune.
The character is K.K. Slider, an insouciant inhabitant of the sprawling universe that is "Animal Crossing: Wild World," a deeply layered community-building game released two weeks ago for the Nintendo DS, the hand-held gaming console introduced last year.
In an e-mail message, Nintendo's vice president for marketing and corporate affairs, Perrin Kaplan, said that "no real social commentary was intended."
"People can read a lot into a little," Ms. Kaplan said, "but musician K.K. Slider - a guitar-playing cartoon dog - is saying only that he's a free spirit who cannot be bought and sold for any amount of money."
Ms. Kaplan also said that K.K. wanted his music to be free in the sense of being "freed from his guitar, free from any constraints." She added, "as a dog, it's understandable that he would not want to deal with any 'fat cats.' "
Well, yes, but not just any fat cats. It's the price-setting-industry variety of fat cat that K.K. finds a drag, right?
"Animal Crossing promotes piracy," declared xandertheblue at a LiveJournal site, directly above an image captured from the game in midplay (snipurl.com/xandertheblue).
At Cheesegod.com, the exegesis was a bit more nuanced, but the general sentiment was the same: "The folks at Nintendo have included a jab at the record industry in 'Animal Crossing: Wild World' for the DS," wrote Jonathan Monaco, a 25-year-old multiplex manager from Hicksville, N.Y., who runs Cheesegod. "It amused me, anyway."
"That was totally awesome!" Jaryd2006 said in response.
"I'm going to buy 'Animal Crossing' just for this," added an anonymous poster. And someone calling herself "Spooky Girl who like ice cream" volunteered: "Ah, ah excellent. A good point for the Big N," presumably referring to Nintendo.
A user called Yams also added "Yams yams yams yams yams."
That last insight and its implications for the young people in Professor Brown's vision of the future notwithstanding, it's a bit disorienting to find an "information wants to be free" message embedded in a video game - particularly one aimed at young children and teenagers.
After all, video game industry representatives, along with their brethren in the music, film and computer software industries, have long complained that this is precisely the kind of thinking that is eating away at their business models - and maybe civilization itself.
And entertainment companies are always eager to publicize the losses they say they suffer as a result of piracy: $3 billion lost in the video game industry in 2004, according to the Entertainment Software Association ($860 million lost by Nintendo alone), and $4.2 billion in annual losses in the recording industry.
All of which makes K.K. an interesting cultural tick, and perhaps an indication that content providers aren't always singing from the same songbook.
To some, the character's commentary is evidence that the entertainment industry's great wall of arguments favoring aggressive (and protracted) copyrights simply collapses when honest, real-world voices from within their own organizations (a video game programmer with a sense of humor, for instance) slip through the rhetorical cracks.
Game developers, after all, said Cory Doctorow, the co-editor of the BoingBoing.net Web log and a spokesman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group in San Francisco, have "a better understanding of what copyright does and doesn't work for in the 21st century than a recording industry executive who is lobbying to have his copyrights extended from 95 to 120 years."
By contrast, in both the earlier iteration of the game and the new hand-held version of "Animal Crossing" - which, it would appear from a cursory survey of Internet chat boards and colleagues with offspring, appeals to a demographic range from elementary school to upwards of 20 years - K.K. promiscuously offers live performances on a whim and distributes free bootleg "copies" of his songs so listeners can play them later at their virtual "Animal Crossing" homes.
And in that sense, says Jenny Toomey, the executive director of the Future of Music Coalition, a collaborative union of music, technology, intellectual property and public policy interests based in Washington, K.K. is a fine role model.
"If he's giving copies of his own music away, it's O.K.," Ms. Toomey said, pointing out that artists from Billy Bragg to the band Wilco have asserted the same right. "It's completely legitimate."
It's also just good marketing, and K.K. is, after all, the offspring of a huge gaming juggernaut, developed behind layers of boardrooms and P.R. machines and demographic analyses. The initials "K.K." themselves are the equivalent of "Inc." or "Corp." in Japan, where Nintendo is based, which suggests that the company may have wryly co-opted the digital age's equivalent of the "Steal This Book" mantra, repackaged it as a puppy and inserted it into a happy video game village.
The company did not confirm that this was the genesis of the name, however.
While the joke may buzz a bit high over the heads of the game's 8-year-old fans, 14-year-olds have heard enough antipiracy messages in their schools, seen them on their CD's, encountered them online and chattered about file-sharing among friends to know that K.K. is expressing a subversive idea - that he is speaking their language.
He's winking at them. He's cool. He's hip.
No doubt there's a calculus in that, to keep young customers paying for more Nintendo games.
If not paying for music.
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