The rising price of free stuff

TINY TOWER, available now for iOS devices, is undeniably charming — right up to the point where the game punishes you for playing it.

Complaining about free stuff is almost un-American, but neglecting an opportunity to complain about something is just as bad, so I’m at a crossroads.

I’ve developed a tricky relationship with free and subscription-based entertainment. Between Netflix, Hulu and Spotify (the music service that allows members to listen to nearly all of recorded creation at any moment), I’ve spent a lot of time putting as much financial distance as possible between myself and the things I enjoy.

The convenience and affordability are great, but they’ve distorted my ability to appreciate art. In the old days, when I actually bought stuff, I could trick myself into believing I was creating a sort of one-to-one partnership with creative people. Buying a movie or a comedy album or a boxed TV-on-DVD set meant I was kicking a few shekels directly to the artists, right? In my own small way, I was connecting with Scorsese and Bamford and Sorkin and the rest of my heroes. That felt good.

But today, rather than buy things, I subscribe. Through Netflix, I purchase access to a library of streaming video, picking at scraps of movies and TV shows made available by media executives and license holders. Spotify does much the same thing for audio, though its catalog is vastly more comprehensive. Free and á la carte services like Hulu and Amazon Instant Video are mercy-killing the TV-on-DVD and TV-on-Blu-ray markets, and they’ve pushed me and other consumers away from cable.

Only podcasters, public radio hosts and public TV personalities still have the gall to ask that we contribute to them directly, and when they do make their quarterly appeals for financial support, part of me (the worst part) wonders where they get the nerve. I mean, really, how dare these people solicit compensation for their hard work? I’m from York County, and I deserve amusement. I demand it!

I expect to pay for things using money — it’s kind of a time-tested method — but as soon as you start dangling free or buffet-style entertainment in front of people, the whole system falls apart. People get used to free, and people like abundance.

Consider the iTunes App Store, where economies of scale have empowered developers to sell really great games for chump change. So many of the $1-, $2- and $3-dollar titles on the App Store would (and do) go for $10 or more on competing services, but because of the outrageous popularity of Apple’s iOS devices, these figures are just good business.

On the one hand, this trend liberates us from the tyrannical $60 price point imposed by most console publishers at retail. On the other, it teaches us profound stinginess. Anything that costs more than a dollar — heck, anything that costs, period — suddenly has a lot to prove. For all the hours of fun I extracted from “Tilt to Live” at $3, I should expect at least 20 times as much from this summer’s “Shadows of the Damned” ($60), right? I don’t know! I hate those questions. I’m not an accountant.

It’s even worse with the freebies — your FarmVilles and such. These are trifling distractions for people who can’t be bothered to pay anything at all, though many FARMVILLE players eventually toss developer Zynga a few bucks to make that game marginally less irritating. For instance, you can use real-life money to purchase enough in-game currency to buy a make-believe tractor, which raises your plowing speed considerably.

(Note that these insights are the result of exhaustive research and testimonials. I have never played FARMVILLE. I never will play FARMVILLE.)

For Nimblebit’s TINY TOWER, available now on the App Store, you pay nothing up front and, if you’re sufficiently masochistic, nothing at all. Ever. The game casts you as the owner and operator of mixed-use skyscraper. You build apartments, retail space, restaurants and the like, and you can opt to give people a ride from the ground floor to their destination via elevator. These processes are punishingly slow, but they can be upgraded or sped along using Tower Bux, which you accrue at a trickle by simply playing the game.

Of course, you could buy Tower Bux with real bucks. This is grisly business, but it’s the only way to support Nimblebit for making TINY TOWER, which is, at its core, a fun little thing. So I bought 100 Tower Bux at a real-life cost of $5. Didn’t feel good about it, but I got myself a faster elevator and a handful of other perks, so there’s that.

These low-cost, always-on buffets come at the expense of something important. The money we spend on discrete pieces of entertainment doesn’t always end up in the pockets of the people who deserve it most, but the expense at least teaches us to be selective. When I bought my Blu-ray copy of the Coens’ “True Grit” remake, I knew I was underwriting something special — literally investing in it. That was months ago, and I still haven’t watched the movie since I saw it in theaters, but I’m happy to have earmarked a few bucks specifically for this item.

It’s like donating to UNICEF with the knowledge that your money is going directly to that orphan you’re sponsoring, or giving money to the SPCA specifically for that wide-eyed German Shepherd with the weird limp.

Exactly like that.