What is the actual future of going to the movies? Anthony Lane asks, as "video on demand" begins to bully the poor besieged theater-owners of America. "Showmen like James Cameron, I suspect, will continue to haul us off our couches for the grand, marquee events, but smaller fare may be streamed to us direct, and new films whittled down into just another channel on TV"—and this is a bad thing, he thinks. His argument is unusual, and it's not one that has ever crossed my mind before.

Gabe Zichermann, the author of Game-Based Marketing and a startup advisor and one of those incredibly likeable connector-type people, likes to talk about what motivates people to do the sort of things that make people money. The best incentives aren't often cash, he thinks, unless the money is really good. His acronym for incentives is SAPS, which stands for status, access, power and stuff. Those are in order, by the way, of things that people say they like best. This is an idea that most every businessperson likes, for obvious reasons, including that giving away "status" and "power" can have no ongoing cost.

"Now we care about what [...]