The madness of GameStop

Most experiences I’ve had at GameStops have been positive. The staff has been knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and helpful. But between the piles of used games, the warranties, and the endless tchotchkes everywhere, I’ve always felt like employees are tasked to upsell like their lives depended on it.

I had no idea. Jason Schreier over at Kotaku has written up a pretty nutso description of what GameStop employees are expected to do:

The program, called “Circle of Life,” gives each GameStop store different percentage quotas for 1) pre-orders; 2) reward card subscriptions; 3) used game sales; and 4) game trade-ins. Each of these quotas is based on the store’s total transactions. Pre-orders and reward cards subscriptions are based on the number of transactions, while used game sales and trade-ins are based on the total dollar value of transactions. If a store’s quota for used game sales is 30%, and the store sells $1,000 worth of merchandise, GameStop expects at least $300 of that merchandise to be pre-owned […]

The more new games an employee sells, the more used games they’ll have to sell to make up for it. In other words, according to salespeople speaking to Kotaku and elsewhere on the internet, GameStop is incentivizing employees to stop people from buying new games and hardware. GameStop staff say the company has threatened to fire people who don’t hit these quotas, which is leading to all sorts of scuzzy tactics.

“We are telling people we don’t have new systems in stock so we won’t take a $300 or $400 dollar hit on our pre-owned numbers,” one GameStop employee told me in an e-mail, requesting anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to press. “This is company wide and in discussions with my peers it is a common practice. We also tell customers we don’t have copies of new games in stock when they are on sale—for example, Watch Dogs 2 is currently $29.99 new and $54.99 pre-owned. We just tell them we don’t have the new one in stock and shuffle them out the door.”

I have a few friends at GameStop who confirm that these details are largely accurate. It’s a sad state of affairs and I hope the company puts a stop to this.

If a company structures its incentives incorrectly, sub-optimal behavior will always follow. For another example of this, see: that infamous Comcast phone call. Also, Wells Fargo.

How Grindr ruined one man’s life

At Wired, Andy Greenberg has the bizarre story of how one man’s Grindr account got spoofed, turning his life upside-down:

This is the months-long nightmare Herrick describes in a lawsuit he filed against Grindr last week in the Supreme Court of New York. He accuses Grindr of negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress, false advertising, and deceptive business practices for allowing him to be impersonated and turned into an unwitting beacon for stalkers and harassers. Herrick’s civil complaint against the company states that despite contacting Grindr more than 50 times, Grindr hasn’t offered a single response beyond auto-replies saying that it’s looking into the profiles he’s reported. Even after a judge signed an injunctive relief order Friday to force Grindr to stop the impersonating profiles, they persist: Herrick says that at least 24 men have come to his home and work since then. In total, he counts over 700 sex-soliciting men thrown into his daily life by the spoofed accounts since the ordeal began.

The “Han Shot First” phenomenon

Matt Singer has an interesting piece at ScreenCrush about how ‘Han Shot First’ changed the course of Star Wars:

Whatever the motivation, the Han Solo [Lucas] conceived would not have shot Greedo first. The Han Solo that appeared in 1977’s Star Wars, however, did shoot Greedo before Greedo shot him, or at least that’s how it appeared to millions of viewers for 20 years (and in the original screenplay, as best I can tell). Both sides of this debate, then, have the same basic argument: Han Solo, a fictional character, wouldn’t do what he appears to do onscreen. They just disagree about which behavior is questionable.

That’s what makes “Han Shot First” one of the most fascinating pop cultural phenomenons of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It seemed to become the test case for many subsequent battles over who should control a work of art — its creator or its audience. It’s ultimately not even about Han Solo. It’s about authorship.

Changing the film to have Greedo shoot first certainly undoes a lot of the characterization of Han that Lucas himself ostensibly established: that he was a carefree rogue who only gave a crap about himself, before discovering love and loyalty during the events of A New Hope. It’s a great arc and having Han simply reacting to Greedo somewhat undercuts it.

But beyond that, my problems with Greedo shooting first are far more basic. Like many of the other changes in the Star Wars Special Editions, it just looks awful. Just look at the original Special Edition:

It is totally unconvincing and has not aged well. The visual effects for this scene were made somewhat more palatable for the Blu-Ray by shortening the length of time between shots, but not really.

 

The coming culture war

Over at Autostraddle, Kieryn Darkwater has written about how her ultra-conservative upbringing prepared her to participate in a gradual takeover of the U.S. government:

Generation Joshua started in 2003, primarily catering to children homeschooled by extremely religious rightwing adults. Its purpose was to train us to fight in what the Christofascists have been calling the “Culture Wars.” It’s a loose and ambiguous term that basically means anything or anyone that doesn’t align with this very specific view of Christianity must not be allowed to continue.

How do you do that? Well, you overturn Roe v. Wade, Griswold v. Connecticut, Brown v. Board of Education and Bob Jones v. The United States. Each of these decisions currently protects reproductive rights or non-discrimination based on race. As retribution, you amend the Constitution to discriminate against queers, trans people, women and people of color. Then, you make laws legislating morality. The only way to do this is to infiltrate the government; so Generation Joshua, TeenPact and other organizations exist to indoctrinate and recruit homeschooled youth who have ample free time to participate in politics. The biggest resources for teaching civil discourse are the National Christian Forensics and Communications Association and Communicators for Christ (since renamed Institute for Cultural Communicators). Through these programs we learned how to argue effectively. As students, we were taught critical thinking skills but given only a narrow view of what was acceptable to argue for. We were, after all, being trained to take over the country for Christ, literally. We knew how to perform logical gymnastics about abortion, Christianity and any evangelical talking point you could throw at us.

The piece is a chilling and essential read. I was raised in a Christian household but our views were not nearly as hardline, radical, or far-reaching.

This piece illustrates that when it comes to the culture war, Christians (or “Christofascists”, as Darkwater refers to them) aren’t just winning; they are playing an entirely different game that liberals probably don’t even conceive of.

Ignorance is strength

Yesterday I re-blogged a couple pieces by Yonatan Zunger that make the case the Trump administration is systematically testing our government for weaknesses. But what if it just seems that way?

In a post on his blog, Tom Pepinsky makes the case that things often aren’t what they appear:

An essay by Yonatan Zunger entitled “Trial Balloon for a Coup?” is making the rounds. Such essays are frightening to many. And yet they must be read critically. I am equally taken by the argument that everything that Zunger identifies is evidence not of a deliberate planning by an aspiring authoritarian, but of the exact opposite: the weakness and incoherence of administration by a narcissist.

One of the many things that studying authoritarian politics has taught me is that from the perspective of the outsider, weak leaders often act like strong leaders, and strong leaders often act like they are indifferent. Weak leaders have every incentive to portray themselves as stronger than they are in order to get their way. They gamble on splashy policies. They escalate crises. This is just as true for democrats as for dictators.