Book Review: The Ascent of Money

Naill Ferguson's The Ascent of Money is probably best summed as one part history, one part crash course in finance and economics, and one part treatise on the fallibility and hubris of mankind. Another way to describe it might be as a cross of The Big Short with To Engineer Is Human, stretched out over a window of two thousand years.

The book gives a crash course on the history of finance, looking in turn at the advent - and roles of - currency, credit, banking, the bond market, the stock market, insurance, housing, and of course the intersection between all of these in things like derivatives, mortgage backed securities and the like. Each is examined from birth through to current day, as well as looked at in a global context.

Through it all, Ferguson gives a history of bubbles, from the "first bubble" in which an enterprising Scot bankrupted all of France in the early 1700's, through to the mortgage-backed mess the USA finds itself in today. Here is where I found a similarity with To Engineer is Human, in that it is a story of how we inevitably fail to learn from History. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that when we do, time and greed inevitably erode the safeguards we put in place.

This is what the book's closing chapter discusses, is whether such cycles are inevitable, and whether we do as much damage as we protect against, when we mess with the cycle of creative destruction.

While finance in general can be a bit dry, Ferguson does a good job of making this entertaining. The history of finance has no shortage of colorful characters and he introduces the reader to many of them. Even if you are not that enthused about the topic, it nevertheless will give a good overview of it that will entertain. Also, it serves to remind that the "current state of things" (i.e. the last 20 years or so, further back from which people have a tendency to subscribe to different rules) is by no means the way things must remain.

Finally, I'll add that the final chapter's coverage of reasons why people tend to predict the future of financial markets properly applies equally well to the tech industry as well. There are lessons to take away here that have less to do with dollars and more to do with our tendency to believe that "this time is different". If history shows us anything, it's that we repeat it.

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

Book Review: Poke the Box

I've reviewed a few of Seth Godin's books in the past, and while I've given them mixed reviews (see here, here, and here), I guess I get enough value out of them as I keep coming back for more. So it was that I found myself reading Poke the Box.

Lately, I've found his books have become a bit fluffier, but that this is OK if you come to them with the right expectations. Whereas some of books like Meatball Sundae and Permission Marketing approach topics with some depth and structure, Poke the Box seems to follow the lines of some of his later books like The Dip, where he takes a single idea and just riffs on it in a seemingly random order. More importantly, the riffing seems to just flit about the surface of the topic without going into any real depth.

The short version of the idea presented is two-fold. First, that in order to get something done, you need to start something, and that the ability to take initiative is a valuable skill in and of itself. Secondly, question the status quo and poke at the edges of, well, everything.

He's right about both of these being a good approach in today's workplace, and he presents a couple really fun anecdotes on the way. If you approach the book in that light, you may enjoy it. just don't expect a lot of depth or structure.

Poke the Box

Book Review: Outrageous Fortunes

Did this one as an audio book. It's not bad, but has some flaws.

Outrageous Fortunes is a look at "Twelve Trends That Will Shape the Global Economy". They are mostly macro-economic and political trends that the author claims will shape the world in ways that most pundits aren't predicting.

Ideas covered range from predicting a stemming of China's growth curve, to theorizing about the potential collapse of the World Trade Organization and what might follow in its wake.

I'm not sure I believe all the theories presented in the book. I'm not versed enough in most of the subject matter to call the author out on any of them, but it does seem like he's as single-minded in some of his predictions as the pundits he's claiming are getting it wrong.

Regardless, I do like the contrarian thinking, and the gaming out he does in approaching some of these ideas. At the very least, it'll get you thinking about implications of some of these things.

Outrageous Fortunes: The Twelve Surprising Trends That Will Reshape the Global Economy

Implications of the Amazon-IGDA spat

In case you missed it, there's been some interesting goings-on in digital distribution land, in particular with Amazon's Android Appstore, and the dev community (via their proxy, the IGDA) taking issue with some of the terms in their distribution agreement.

The IGDA, in service of it's members, posted an advisory calling Amazon out on several of the points they viewed as egregious and called attention to the risks they believed developers were taking on in accepting such terms. You can read the IGDA's letter here.

On their developer blog, Amazon responded the following day, stating simply that the policy in question was from a dated text file, and that a PDF elsewhere on the site contained the correct terms.

The response seems fishy. The IGDA's letter states that they reached out to Amazon several times and that Amazon were unwilling to change terms. If it were simply a matter of referencing the wrong terms, surely they would have pointed that out. Secondly, Amazon's response doesn't actually address the concerns stated in the IGDA letter. Even taking Amazon's 'correction' into account, many of the IGDA's concerns still seem valid.

It will be interesting to watch how this plays out.

However, I wanted to call attention to a couple things I think are worth noting about this chain of events.

1) As Dan Cook pointed out in his excellent GDC presentation, platform owners and/or retailers may act in a way that is detrimental to developers, depending on their motivations, business interests and the stage of their life-cycle.

Amazon here is a retailer with far less interest in the success of the platform than they have success in capturing revenue/market share away from other android store fronts. This is a formula for a Tragedy of the Commons where it will be the developers upon whom the livestock graze.

So, this current Amazon/IGDA tete-a-tete serves to draw attention to the issue from that perspective. In a case like this, Amazon may be very different from Apple. For that matter, Amazon's Android Appstore may be very different than their Kindle Appstore.

2) Another way to think about this, is as a form of collective action. Not formal collective action such as a union might undertake; but rather collective in the sense that as the hive-mind of the developer community becomes educated about the implications of terms, they can jointly act.

3) As Dan also pointed out in his presentation, large companies generally don't like bad PR, especially when it presents them as Goliath to a game developer David. I think this is a great example of the kind of collective developer action we are going to see to try to shame platform owners into curbing one-sided practices. I'm surprised their weak response isn't developing more outrage.

We've seen previous efforts in this vein. e.g. When MS was proposing changes to the XBLA royalty structure, or when MS did a dashboard update that buried the indie games channel. In both cases, developer outcry caused at minimum a public response, if not a back-pedal on policy.

So what is the real implication?

Developers, and the indie community in particular, have always had a 'sneaker net' with which they supported each other with information about platform and distribution portal learnings. However, today with social media tools and groups like the IGDA, developers better armed than ever to take action when terms aren't in their favor

The question portals, distributors, and retailers should ask themselves is how they would feel about their terms coming under public scrutiny. Today this is about Amazon, but in reality it's about 'little guys' vs 'big guys'. The little guys are realizing they wield more power than they thought, and are starting to learn how to use it. One need only look to the past months' developments in the middle east to see examples of it in other contexts.

[Update - April 19: IGDA responds to Amazon's response]

Headtracking on iPad

This is a nifty trick:

Suwappu! Awesome augmented-reality toy concept

Back in January, one of the trends I called out for 2011 (see #5) was that we'd see more of gaming virtual and physical worlds meeting.

Latest thing to come across my radar (via BoingBoing) is Suwappu, a design concept by London design firms Berg and Dentsu (London office).

Some thoughts on the concept:

- I *LOVE* the idea of using AR to do/modify the facial expressions.

- The twitter feeds seem weak - especially the prius ads, ugh - though I'd like to see each Suwappu character have their own twitter feed, or a series of them depending on mood/context. Like networked tamagochi.

- Facial expressions might be hard due to latency (faces drifting on bodies). Maybe has to wait for higher-power smartphones, or ship it with a little smartphone tripod (note: I wrote this before the video was finished playing, turns out they used one too) so it remains stationary. Work the fiction such that the tripod/phone is a "doorway" for kids.

It may be design concept now, but seems a natural fit for someone to pick up on. A very feasible leap from things like UBFunKeys (which I spoke about back in 2007).

Extra Credit: An open letter to EA marketing

A bit old, but right on the money. EA really should fire whoever greenlights all this shit.

Sunday Futurism - TL;DR

If you are someplace where the weather has you reading on the couch instead of enjoying the sunshine, here are a couple good though lengthy pieces I came across and now got around to reading.

1) BookTwo.Org -Seven Posts About the Future.

I've been following James Bridle's blog for a while. He's one of the more forward thinking people in the (book) publishing industry, and consistently links to really interesting pieces, adding a bonus of thought-provoking commentary.

The above is a list of seven more lengthy posts on his thoughts. The whole thing is a great read, but if you have time for nothing else, at least make time to read the 7th. It's a short story to tie together some of the ideas, and does so beautifully.

2) The New Yorker: The Information - How the Internet Gets Inside US

Good piece contrasting the different schools of thought (Utopian, Distopian, and Plus-ca-change) about how the Internet is affecting culture, thought, and thinking. Seemingly objective, and perhaps as a result of being so, it seems to side with the Plus-ca-change'rs. Regardless, it does a good job of taking a contrarian view to each point of view and as a result is a good read. Fave quote:

at any given moment, our most complicated machine will be taken as a model of human intelligence, and whatever media kids favor will be identified as the cause of our stupidity. When there were automatic looms, the mind was like an automatic loom; and, since young people in the loom period liked novels, it was the cheap novel that was degrading our minds. When there were telephone exchanges, the mind was like a telephone exchange, and, in the same period, since the nickelodeon reigned, moving pictures were making us dumb. When mainframe computers arrived and television was what kids liked, the mind was like a mainframe and television was the engine of our idiocy. Some machine is always showing us Mind; some entertainment derived from the machine is always showing us Non-Mind.

Great quote on underestimating uncertainty

I *loved* this quote that headed up one of the chapters in Susan Casey's The Wave, on the folly of underestimating uncertainty in what we do, and that we do exactly this as we get better at what we do.

Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to beleive in the unknowable.

But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking it's chops.

H.L. Mencken

Book Review: The Wave

Sometime last year I heard about Susan Casey's The Wave, when she was making the rounds on the talk show circuit hawking it. Having heard that it covered some of the hairy exploits of big-wave surfers, I ordered it, as I was pretty rivited by the awesome documentary Riding Giants.

The book arrived and I quickly scanned the contents and then sat it in the "to read" pile for a few months as i worked my way through a couple others.

Then the Japanese quake and tsunami happened, and I remembered that I had a book sitting on the shelf that I seemed to remember touching upon the theory that global warming both made our seas more violent and increased the probability of earthquakes and tsunamis, and I figured maybe it was a good time to go read it.

The book is a bit schizophrenic, playing both adventure and science cards, though it doesn't necessarily play them together. There are interviews with experts on climate change, storm prediction, wave dynamics, and other disciplines. In between these, the lab coat is traded in for a surfboard or a trip to ocean emergency rescue & salvage operations.

The latter of these make the book an exciting page turner. I won't go into the surfing parts in detail other than to say that the guys that voluntarily fly helicopters into storms to try and ride surfboards down the side of moving 7-story buildings are crazy, and that Laird Hamilton is either the craziest of them all, or is actually Poseidon himself.

One complaint is that the science-related portions of the book are a bit weak. Casey sought out experts to support her narrative, and didn't try to find the contrarian view to hear it out. Nevertheless, the combination is compelling. One gets the sense not just that the seas may be growing angrier, but the reader is given a palpable sense of just what that means, and of just how feeble we are to withstand mother nature when she decides to show us who's boss.

But then we've seen a lot of news footage over the past couple weeks that made that pretty obvious.

Still, the book is a good read. You'll learn a few things and be riding the edge of your seat while doing so.

The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean

Book Review: Best of Technology Writing 2010

The Best Technology Writing 2010 is a collection of essays republished from other publications.

The editor, Julian Dibbell, is a contributing editor at Wired, and that should give you an idea of both the type of content selected, one one of which could appear as a wired feature (or already has). This is either good or bad, depending on your perspective.

Some of the fare I found either not to my taste, or at the very least not worthy of the "best technology writing of 2010" title. (e.g. I found Evan Ratliff's 'Vanish' piece from Wired was more sensational than insightful, and Vanessa Grigoriadis's piece on Facebook and privacy/data ownership was passable but not nearly forward thinking enough.)

Still, there are more than a few good pieces in there that make the book a worthy read. My personal favorites were Clay Shirky's piece on the future of newspapers, David Carr's piece on media, and Anne Trubek's piece on the decline of handwriting. Also, while Joshua Bearman's piece on indie games has little to offer for those working in the industry and familiar with the space, it's a nice introductory piece to the indie movement for friends, family, or that clueless exec you are looking to enlighten.

Dan Cook's GDC 2011 Platform Power Session

As promised, Daniel Cook (who is beyond smart, and who's blog you should lap up every drop of) posted his GDC slides and speaker notes.

It's a REALLY good presentation. Talks about the issues with closed "walled garden" platforms in many ways that I've discussed here before, but Daniel formalizes the rules and stages in a fantastic way. Must read.

Here they are:

Gdc 2011 game of platform power

View more documents from Daniel Cook

The 40: Riffing on GapingVoid's 'The 20'

I mentioned in my review of Hugh Macleod's Evil Plans that I got a few good ideas out of the book, and that I wanted to do a post related to one of them.

Hugh has an idea in one chapter called "The 20". It's also discussed here, but the short version goes like this: In your space (professional or other), there are 20 people that matter. Make a list of them. Now ask yourself which of them read your stuff, know what your are doing, etc.

Not a bad idea, but I thought it might be improved in two ways.

First off, it's a little soft. Reading your blog might be a start, but which of the folks on your list would call you if they were looking to hire? Would call you if they needed an opinion on a difficult question? Would invite you to a dinner party of movers and shakers at some industry event? In short, how many of the folks on your list would put YOU on THEIRS?

Secondly, another part of the book contained the following (Canadian) quote-based comic :

So, putting two and two together, and allowing for some margin of error (50% fallout):

The 40:

• Make a list of the forty people you believe will be the most important people in your space in 3 to 5 years time. There are many relationships you want to cultivate, but these should be higher on you priority list.
• Start following them. I don't mean on twitter (though that's a start), but what they are doing, publishing, shipping, saying, etc. Play their games or read their books or whatever.
• Be of value. When you see the opportunity to contribute, do so. Doesn't matter if they know you or not, because if you are of value, they'll know you sooner or later.
• Revisit and rejigger the list from year to year.

OK, now two caveats:

1) I'm not suggesting you do this opportunistically or disingenuously. I think you'll end up finding that these folks are the most interesting and engaging people to engage with anyway, and so in a sense I'm saying "spend more time on relationships with awesome people because they tend to do awesome stuff".

2) I haven't actually done the above, at least not in a structured fashion like I'm suggesting. Now that I've written it down I might. However in retrospect I think that I've been subconciously doing stuff like this for years, and have been fortunate to cultivate relationships with people who are awesome and who are now doing awesome stuff. For that I feel very lucky, and I'd like to make sure I do more of it.

Book Review: Evil Plans

I've been a fan of Hugh Macleod since I discovered his blog about five years ago. I also enjoyed his first book, Ignore Everybody. So, when he announced Evil Plans, I pre-ordered and waited for it to show up.

It's good material, but I can't recommend it as strongly as I did the first. Like IE, there's a lot of recycled material from his blog here, both in the writing and the comics. And that's ok. Even expected. Add to that that the book is very sparse (single paragraph pages in places, pages empty but for one comic, etc), and it's a very lightweight book. If you are a words-per-dollar person, this book isn't for you.

Now that said, many of his ideas are thought provoking; and what price can you put on a good idea. If the book gets you to think critically about ONE thing, that would be worth the price, no?

There were three such ideas in the book for me, and so I'm glad I bought it. One of those will be the subject of an upcoming post...

Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination

Book Review: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

I picked up the audio book to Al Franken's 2004 satirical political commentary while browsing at the library. I figured he's a funny and intelligent guy, so the book should be entertaining and might have a couple interesting points to make along the way.

On the plus side, it is entertaining, and somewhat educational. However, he undermines his own position by taking such a one-sided view, it's hard to trust completely. (I have no doubt that the well researched lies he exposes are accurate, but are we to believe there are none from the left? Doubtful.)

On the down side, the book is dated now (though the meta-level discussion still applies) and his style of humor wears thin after a while.

Ultimately though, his satirical indictment of the right fails for the same reason that Al Gore's The Assault On Reason may have. If you have to explain: You are losing. In today's attention-driven, sound byte culture, the average American can't be bothered to make time to look at all the facts and weigh arguments.

Book Review: The Undercover Economist

Another disappointment. Bought this one on a whim from a sale shelf at Powell's, figuring I'd found a Freakonomics-style lightweight tour through different businesses.

Instead The Undercover Economist was, IMHO, difficult to tolerate. There were some good explanations of basic economic theory. However I found the tone overconfident, and many of the examples poorly investigated, or at least lacking the backing material to support his cases. Thus, I can't recommend it.

Somebody at Bandai Namco is doing excellent design

I took my son Tom to Portland's excellent Ground Kontrol retro-arcade/pub for a little classic gaming.

They've done a bit of a remodel, the most significant piece of which greeted us upon entering:

Pac Man Battle Royale!!! And yeah, that's a big-ass cupholder in that cocktail cabinet. Welcome to America.

I played this back at E3, and it was my favorite game of the show. Picture a modern day treatment of Pacman (i.e. aesthetic of Pacman Championship edition), with the multiplayer head-to-head competition of Warlords, with a high level of emergent strategy that varies a lot depending on who your opponents are. Eat them? Bounce them into oncoming ghosts? Bait them into chasing you to a well-timed appearing powerup?

It's a superb new design on a classic game, and one that I pray they'll have the heart to ship on XBLA sometime soon, because going to play this at the arcade with 3 friends is easily a $50 evening at 2-quarters a game, per person. (Its also a superb redesign from the business standpoint, as there hasn't been a 4-player quarter eater like this Gauntlet, or maybe Daytona-USA, though the latter's cabinet price was steep).

Anyhow, my point is around it's superb design. I believe it's from the same team (at least same engine and look) that did Pacman Championship Edition, and Pacman Championship Edition DX for XBLA, both of which are awesome designs and very imaginitive twists on the original game.

I'm not sure if all three are from the brain of the same designer, but if so, they need to pay him/her more.

Anyone who thinks about game design should play all the classic pacman titles, but then spend some time with these three latest incarnations and think about what makes them so great. All very different, all still linked to the same core mechanic, and all great.

Book Review: How to Lie with Statistics

I Breezed through this book pretty quickly, but still consider it time poorly spent. I bought it on impulse from Amazon based on title alone and while the subject matter was what I expected, it was handled at too elementary a level, and with examples so dated that I can't even recommend it for beginners.

The book is an overview of the most elementary use of statistics and how they can be misused out of ignorance or malice. Mean vs median, graph doesn't start at zero, "four out of five dentists recommend...", I'd imagine that most of these are obvious to anyone over the age of fifteen. However the case examples and language are so dated (the book was originally written in the fifties), that I can't recommend it for someone under that age either.

In short, not recommended.

GDC 2011 Trends & Sessions

This year’s GDC was my 18th and I returned from it… spent. Unfortunately I also returned with the dreaded “GDC Lurgy”, the annual disease that spreads when 19,000 sleep-deprived immune-suppressed game developers get together and finger the same touchscreens, and so was knocked out sick for two days this week, thus the late report.

Trends:

It was an interesting GDC this year for one to try to infer industry direction from “sniffing the air” (especially since the olfactory peripheral guys were back this year!). On the one hand, there was a loud and visible emergence/amplification of mobile (iPhone in particular) and social (being almost synonymous with Facebook – which is short-sighted). On the other hand, you had a significant majority of the show (exhibits, sessions, etc) continuing quietly and steadily down the big-budget AAA path. That said, here’s what I took away as trends, as judged by show impressions and conversations.

1. Developers have MANY choices of platforms to target

One takeaway was that given the sheer number of devices playing games today, developers have more choices than ever before in where to focus their game-making efforts. The sheer pace of change, combined with secrecy about numbers from owners of closed platforms as well as successful developers, along with the confusing and/or obfuscated data about new business models (analysts are also having trouble parsing/sizing some of them) means that the choices are daunting, and yet there ARE choices, versus a more limited landscape in the past.

2. Social growth begets social gaming cred

Last year there was a huge amount of interest in Facebook as a game platform, much of that interest perked up by the money that games like Farmville making eye-raising amounts of money. There was also some envy with that, with much of the established industry saying “these weren’t real games” etc. Over the past year, many industry vets have shown up in leadership roles at social games companies, acknowledging that perhaps there’s a real vehicle for game experiences here. To the rest of their nay-saying counterparts, the sentiment was best captured by the yearly “Rant” session, entitled social-gamers rant back. For a poignant, synopisis, view Brenda Brathwaite’s 5 minute rant here.

Note that one of the themes she touched on was an influx of two types of developers into the social gaming scene, the designers looking to explore the medium’s potential, and what she called the “strip miners”, those looking to exploit existing models for maximum revenue and profit. This was also touched on by Scott Jon Siegel’s rant, a transcript of which can be found here.

3. The Mobile gold-rush continues, but with some sobering of expectations

There was of course a ton of interest in mobile, led by interest in Apple for iPhone & iPad games, and with Android being the only other platform of note. Window Mobile 7 is mentioned as a possible credible 3rd, but that’s it. There is trepidation about Android, as the exciting growth and size of the installed base is tempered by a fragmented platform landscape and less lucrative marketplace. That said, people are developing for it more than sitting on the sidelines. Sentiment seems to be that people are marching ahead but testing their footing as they proceed.

4. AAA games get more ruthless

While there was much excitement about the new areas mentioned above, most established companies were clear about the size of these new markets and the fact that they pale in comparison to the established markets for AAA fare. For example, in Jobs keynote, he boasted of $2B paid out to developers in the almost 3 years since the appstore’s debut. In that same period, depending who’s estimates you listen to, the console business generated >$50B of SW revenue for that same time period (Never mind that the $2B is divided amonst 250,000 apps, giving a mean of maybe $4k/app/ and a median that is likely much, much lower. Aka, a brutal hit-curve fall-off).

However, given that console SW market is not expected to see any remarkable growth, this means that when the pond isn’t getting any larger, the fish start fighting one another for the food. The big fish get bigger, and the medium size fish starve. This means that the console title hit curve will become even steeper, as mega-blockbuster franchises focus on achieving numbers like those we’ve seen lately for CoD, Red Dead Redemption, and their ilk. As they manage their portfolios tightly, $50M titles will manage to get their many-multiple returns (e.g. Call of Duty’s latest incarnation is estimated to have taken in excess of $1B in retail sales). As these mega-blockbusters compete for share of mind and share of wallet, the place the money will come from is the “AA” titles. Those with significant budgets($10-$40M) but falling short in the awareness building, etc. If 2008-2010 saw the demise of the B title, we will start to see some of this same effect on AA titles, making the hit curve even steeper. (Note: here’s a good quote echoing that sentiment from Cliffy B).

5. Early prep for the next-generation of AAA games

Some folk were talking next-generation tech for the next generation of consoles, without being specific about when that might be. Epic Games had a theater presentation going with a demo of their next-generation tech, using a high end PC and triple-SLI high end discrete setup. I’ll leave the dissection of tech up to others (vid of demo here), but suffice it to say that it bolstered my confidence that the next generation of consoles WILL be able to deliver a visual experience that is demonstrably different than the current generation. Perhaps not the same degree of leap of, say, PS2->PS3, but still noticeably different. And as there is clearly a market for $50M+ titles, I’m confident there’s a market for next-gen consoles (and PCs). A rumor was circulating about a next-gen Nintendo console debuting at E3, but I’ve been unable to get any industry confirmation on this. Anyone know better? :-)

6. First warnings on Closed vs Open

Several sessions had industry veterans warning on the long term costs and risks of being subservient to closed platforms. Veteran Trip Hawkins had a ‘rant’ session on this, pointing to the browser as the path to salvation. An even more direct-to-the-point talk was one of my favorites of the conference, from Dan Cook of Spryfox, who’s talk was entitled “How to survive the inevitable enslavement of developers by Facebook”. (Dan promised to post his slides soon to his blog at: http://www.lostgarden.com/)

7. Indies are Hot

In a good way that is. The IGF (Independent Games Festival) was filled with a massive number of REALLY polished and innovative games. Many of these are falling into the category of what Chris Hecker called “AAA Indies”, or in other circles, “Perfect gems”. The idea being that rather than being an all-encompassing experience done on a shoestring budget, that they are games that take a single idea or game mechanic (the ‘gem’) and polish it to perfection.

On the plus side, everyone now considers indie fare as a must-have in their portfolio of titles for their platform, and so between that and the number of platforms, there is no shortage of ways that indies can get games to market. On the down side the level of polish expected means that by and large, indies are expected to develop multi-hundred-k titles on their own dime. Publishers and platform vendors alike are signing deals with these guys, but with mixed results, leading to the same risk aversion we see with AAA games. Budgets like they've normalized for console downloadables around a ceiling of $800k-$1M, and while titles like Spyparty and Limbo are likely sign-ons, titles like Dinner Date (my fave, and described as ‘You play as the subconsciousness of Julian L, waiting for his date to arrive. You listen in on his thoughts while tapping the table, looking at the clock and eventually reluctantly starting to eat...’ are far more risky to fund, but necessary for the medium of games to reach its potential.

8. The Last stand of the handhelds (or is it?)

Lots of talk about Sony and Nintendo’s bets on the NGP and 3DS respectively. While there was also theorizing about the console’s demise in the era of more multi-purpose platforms, there was a general sentiment that the place this battle will first come to a head is in handheld. It can be summarized as follows: “Can a dedicated-function device (3DS, NGP) built on a business model of $40 games, offer a sufficiently compelling experience to justify the cost over a general purpose device (iPod touch, iPhone) with $0.99 games”. To their credit, both Sony and Nintendo are taking this seriously and have very compelling offerings to bring to the table:

- Nintendo: 3D display, dual display, first to market with streaming 3D Netflix (trailers at first), exclusive deal with AT&T for 10,000 free wifi access spots in NA, amented reality games, and of course, a killer IP lineup including Mario and Zelda.

- Sony: High-end HW that should do a killer job on 3D tiles, playstation back-catalog content, a good IP catalog including Metal Gear, etc, also a focus on augmented reality, and a touchpad in back*.

(*Prediction: everyone is undercalling the touchpad on the back of the NGP. I predict this is going to prove to be the controller that finally cracks first-person shooters on handhelds. Every other attempt has sucked)

It certainly will be interesting to watch it play out. My personal hunch is that Nintendo is safe, despite a device inferior to the NGP, based mainly on their 1st party IP. Sony has a harder challenge. They’ll find a market, but I’m doubtful it’ll be large enough to keep the ecosystem aloft.

Favorite Sessions Attended

I managed to attend a dozen or so sessions. Here are my favorites:

I. Nintendo Keynote: Consisted of 3 sections, each of which was quite interesting:

Part 1: Nintendo background, growth of market, lessons learned

• Iwata gave an overview of his history at Nintendo and lessons learned. Among them that content is king (e.g. He gave the example of having programmed a technically superior game to his counterpart/rival Miyamoto, who’s game contained an Italian plumber named Mario – lesson learned)
• Nintendo has surveyed 5,000 users across all age groups/demos for the past 7 years. Probably an unparalleled insight into gamers. Great graphs showing gamings permeance into culture over time. Bottom line is that the population that isn’t gaming is shrinking and aging over time. Near future will be everyone(!), Google for any of the numerous liveblogs to see the charts.
• Industry quotes echoing some of the trends I mentioned above as to AAA games: e.g. "We’re all playing much bigger gambles, and that’s getting scary” – Mike Capps, Epic

Part 2: Reggie came out to do the infomercial section: 3DS: First to deliver streaming Stereo3D on Netflix (!), Record Stereo Video or take Stereo Pix, AT&T deal to provide 10,000 wifi hotspots for 3DS owners free of charge across US, at airports, malls, etc, Improved digital store, Mario & Zelda titles in the works <-- note how games was the LAST item discussed in the infomercial section.

Part 3: Iwata came back out, talked about Industry concerns. This was a two part thing: ( A) Large games mean increasing specialization; harder to develop talent that sees “whole picture”. Those that do are aging. (B) and this was uncharacteristic of Nintendo: A direct attack on Apple and to a lesser degree, Facebook. Short version goes like this: Closed systems have hundreds of titles, “big app sites” have many tens of thousands – not enough for everyone to make money. Those systems not designed FOR games specifically care more about harvesting the ecosystem than nurturing it. Nintendo cares about protecting value for devs, and value in games (i.e. 0.99c games will lead to low quality fare). It was definitely a defensive attack, but not without an element of truth

II. NG Moco’s Neil Young on why Japan is a leading indicator of the worldwide mobile market

This was a great session for 3 reasons: (1) Half of it was really a back story on how the startup got off the ground up until it’s acquisition, (2) Great insight on the future of mobile, (3) Neil is a great presenter and presented almost half of his talk while impersonating his VCs, one of whom he swears is a shoe-in for Michael Myers “Fat B**tard” character.

Interesting conclusions they reached before re-vectoring the company: Being a mobile games publisher was unsustainable. Back of envelope math: Would need to have 3 titles in top 10 – every day, all year, to be a $20M company – Almost impossible to do. Note that market bigger now, but regardless, decided this was the wrong path to being a multi-billion dollar company. Re-vectored around F2P games, and targeted an acquisition/partnership that would let them broaden the service across platforms and geographies.

Great quote: “In a world where there are more apps than appetite, customer relationship is the real valuable IP”

Hope he posts slides, there was some great info on growth of japanese mobile market as indicator of future.

III. Game Design Challenge: 3 designers face of in designing a game around a given, difficult-to-design-for theme. This year was “bigger than Jesus” a design challenge around designing a game that could serve as a religion. Entertaining, thought provoking. My favorite (and not the winner) was Jenova Chen (of That Game Company) who’s religion was centered on the propagation of ideas, and who designed a meta-game on top of the TED website. Cool concept, and I'm betting he'll get a TED invitation out of it!

IV. Epic Legal Battles: A panel of games-specializing lawyers and legal profs each gave a mini-presentation on areas of pending increased legal activity over the near future. I agree on all counts:

• Collision between Games and Gambling. To the degree that players can get any real-world value out of the game, or get anything of perceived value, you stray close to gambling laws that are deliberately vague. Ticking timebomb? [KP: Yet another reason that the industry needs to continue to lobby for games as art deserving of free speech protection and respect as an artform. Gaming’s esteem by the general populous will determine how it withstands coming under the eye of scrutiny, which it inevitably will]
• Antitrust: Finger pointed directly at Apple and Facebook, but this could apply to any closed platform. Good quote on the idea of filing suit against Apple “you could. It’s like lying down across barbed wire so your friends can then walk over your body”
• Destroying Worlds: When a game is a service, and you find it no longer is profitably, and you want to take it down, you violate a contract you have with the remaining players. Despite whether or not the fine print says you can do so or not, their hearts are in it, and they may want revenge.
• Privacy: We’ve only scratched the surface. The more people put online, the more they’ll care. Also, laws are coming up to speed with the issue and as new laws go into effect, games industry will need to deal with it. Example given of ‘cookie law’ going into effect in EU in May.

V. Social Game Developers Rant. The rant session is always one of the better ones of GDC. See trends II and VI in the trends section above for links to a couple of the better ones.

VI. Moriarty's 'An Apology to Roger Ebert': I’m not sure this was labeled the closing keynote, but it may as well have been. It was a brilliant speech about games, art, culture, and a provocative close to the conference that kicked off hundred email/twitter threads about its ideas. The full transcript is online here:

The Reasons For Making It

I read a quote that I think bears paraphrasing and applying to games:

"A game is only as good as the reasons for making it"

I think it beautifully captures the reasons why games succeed or fail, as well as why a well crafted indie game like Braid, Portal, or World of Goo take take their place in the pantheon of great games alongside Red Dead Redemption, Half-Life2 or other AAA productions.

A game made for reasons of love and conviction can - if carried through to its maximum potential - trump any game made for want of commercial success.

Book Review: the Master Switch

Tim Wu's The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires is one of my favorite books of the past several years. It is a deeply insightful and ultimately important work, and should be on everyone's reading list, especially those in any part of the computing, communications or entertainment industry.

More on why I feel so strongly about it in a second, but first, since a picture is worth a thousand words:

I can't think of a book I've dog-eared this much since I was in school. There were a ton of points I wanted to mark and reference in future talks or articles.

In The Master Switch, Wu takes a look at the history of the telephone, film, radio, broadcast television, and cable television industries, to show how all of them exemplify The Cycle. The Cycle being that between an open period following the invention of a new information medium, and the closed period that follows as a few economic giants gain control over that medium. His presentation of these histories is as entertaining as it is educational, and I found myself glued to the page.

This is not strictly a historical text though. All of these case histories serve both to define the rules by which the cycle occurs, and also to warn of its costs to societies, and to innovation.

He then goes on to look at the last great information empire battle: The battle for the Internet. As Wu puts asks it, "Which is mightier: the radicalism of the Internet, or the inevitability of The Cycle?"

Those of us raised in recent times, and on the openness of the Internet and in the era of Google, Microsoft and Amazon, may take it for granted that the open horizontal platforms inevitably win. However, as Wu shows in the cycle, the vertically integrated conglomerates and the owners of infrastructure are remarkably resilient in their ability to tame those that would rock their boat. Also, he shows us that often enough, those that free prisoners from one market are soon tempted to forge chains of their own. Apple of course being a great example here.

If anything, the first line of defense this book offers us is education. An ability to recognize the elements of the cycle at work should be important for all of us. Secondly, Wu offers a prescription for a "constitutional solution". This is meant not in the sense that he'd have us modify the US constitution, but rather that a balance of powers could be struck between members, with sufficient but not over-reaching regulation from bodies such as the DOJ and FCC.

If there's one downside to the book - and it's a small one in an otherwise masterful work - its that the work is extremely US-centric. Some reference is made to Europe, and there is the occasional mention of PRC, but that's it. I would have thought it worth a lengthy discussion about how, for example, the entertainment industries are using international copyright treaties to entrench their favorite policies in foreign countries' laws, and then in turn to use that as precedent to influence US law.

This minor complaint aside, this is a must read work for our day and age.

DICE 2011 in short

I'm back from DICE 2011 and recovering from intense brain-filling and long nights of inebriated schmoozing. As always, it's a high-caliber attendee list, so the quality of sessions and conversations is generally pretty good, and this year was no exception.

I'll post some longer thoughts when I get the time, but some quick notes to start:

Favorite Sessions:

• Mark Cerny's talk: Summarized here, but that summary leaves out many of the astute observations Mark made. I had a converstation that evening with him about his comment on genre diversity ("genre diversity is the canary in the coalmine as to a segments health"), as I thought he was going to point to the heavy focus on shooters today, but instead he feels we are very healthy. Myself, I'm still not sure. Anyhow, when/if they post this session, it's a must view.
• Bing Gordon's talk: I twittered that it was "a big bumbling disjointed spew of savvy insights." In other words, classic Bing, and well worth watching. Summary here.
• Richard Garriott's talk: Little to do with games, but very compelling story about his trip into space. That guy is hardcore!
• Jane McGonigal's talk: Same ideas as in her book, which I'm partway through reading, but still compelling. her talk is also on slideshare.

Other highlights:

• Fave Jay Moore comment fron the IAAwards: "Activision, every title you guys put out makes more money than anything from anyone else and STILL no one wants to work with you!"
• Fave moment from a talk: Garriott's showing of a video of Carmack's latest rocket, taking off, going up 2 miles, hovering, descending, and landing less than 10 cm from where it took off. Clip:

• Bing Gordon's lifetime achievement award acceptance speech, delivered as a poem. It formed an excellent 20+year follow on to the "Can a Computer Make You Cry?" ad copy (<-- read that ad copy first if you've never seen it). I hope the video is posted somewhere, but in the meantime, here's the poem in it's entirety:

The Golden Age of Gaming
Can a computer make you cry?
How many cool things can you ship before you die?
How many best friends have been made on your development teams?
Is anything better than creating a new “language of dreams”.

If it’s in the game, it’s in the game;
So what’s in your personal hall of fame?
Are you like Daisycutter, a fire-balling wizard?
Will Disneyworld ever again be as much fun as Blizzard?

Where’d that truck come from? We transformed John Madden
Into football fanatics’ equivalent of Tinkerbell plus Aladdin.
Now that Mario and Cityville have proven to be bigger than Titanic,
Which is your game of the year, what’s your golden mechanic?

We remember the 80’s, when games were geeky, uncool.
We were the high potential kids bored with teachers, and lectures and school.
We turned Dr J into a software artist, ended “Dinkety Dink Dink,”
And when the going got tough, we took the Bard out for a drink.

25 years later, we’re an overnight success;
Boys tout their COD scores to girls, and impress.
Guild management skills get you promoted to VP,
And Phorthor pays you to play his account, if you’re at UBC.
Virtual goods and freemium have become investable, magic words
We remember when Bill Budge was the only game-making non-nerd.
Pogo-type badges are imitated these days in enterprise,
Xbox Live achievements are used in online universities, Best Buys.

FIFA camera angles are adopted in televised sports,
And Gameface avatars are showing up in all sorts
Of websites. Sims relationship ratings are the new arithmetic teachers,
Gamification is on the Fortune 500’s must-have features.

We have innovated with more ethics than those damn Wall Street banks:
With Diablo skill trees, Ocarinas of Time, C&C stealth tanks,
Battlefield commanders, Kart bananas, and Hedgehog’s gold rings.
These are a few of my favorite things.

Hey, maybe Night Trap was just a little too smarmy,
And some people were offended by America’s Army.
But we are teaching productivity, how to commit to a mission,
And the high art of Tolkien has been surpassed by Cataclysm.

You have created the new literature, a Moveable Feast,
As rich as Moby Dick, more relevant than War and Peace.
You’ve made plastic cool again, with Nerf guns and guitars;
And taught a generation of speed freaks how to outrun cop cars.

We were all once young prodigies, in need of feedback and interaction,
Now we are self-taught pre-ship marketing and revenue traction.
We’ve grown up with the business, become our own mothers and fathers,
But we still share the initial dream that “We See Farther.”

Today, our mutual industry is undergoing a bit of re-framing,
But recognize this: we’re in the golden age of gaming.
It’s because of Sid Meier, Will Wright, Brian Reynolds, Mark Skaggs, Neil Young, Miyamoto, too,
That our nieces and nephews no longer have to get a “Clue.”

We have more power than Mubarak, so we shouldn’t abuse it.
Our goal is to “make software worthy of the minds that use it.”
Keep inventing cool! There are so many creative challenges still unmet.
And, as this Lifetime Achievement dude protests, “We’re not dead yet.”

Ps Thanks for the honor, now I’d better get off,
Because there’s an after-party with Dean Takahashi dressed as Lara Croft.

Book Review: 1776

Maybe all you Americans learn this stuff in school while we Canadians are learning about fur trappers and maple syrup production, but I wasn't familiar with a lot of the details of the American Revolution. Certainly not the details of the tumultuous year of 1776, portrayed in nail-biting detail in David McCullough's book.

Not being familiar with the details of Washington's first year of the revolution, I had no idea just how precariously close the American's came to losing. The fact that they survived the year to go on fighting the British was a combination of several strokes of brilliant strategy, blind luck, and severe underestimation on the part of their enemy.

There are many lessons about leadership (good and bad) to be taken from both sides, but the main thing you'll get out of the book is a vivid sense of just how difficult the logistics must have been and how hard the conditions under which they fought. (e.g. To think that ten thousand men, stationed only a few hundred yards from their enemy, could in the course of one night pack up and sneak off without detection, boggles the mind)

If you like military history and stories of epic struggle, 1776 definitely meets the bill.

Predictions for 2011

At almost three weeks into the new year, I suppose its getting on the late side for "2011 predictions" posts. That said, I'd made some notes to author such a post, and the recent CES trip I did helped crystallize this thinking.

I think these types of posts are healthy to do for two reasons. The first is humility. I'll surely be wrong on a number of these and so when I look back on them in early 2012, I can be reminded of just how off base I was (and thus generally am!). Secondly these assertions can start conversations. Ones in which I hope you, esteemed reader, will partake.

Lets first dispense with the usual stuff you are hearing around the internet: There will be lots of smartphones (duh), tablets will take over everything (they won't, but they'll be a big category), TVs will get thinner (would they get thicker?), etc. A lot of these things you can take for granted as true or false, either believing vendor claims or not. The more interesting things come in thinking about implications and general trends that result thereof.

So that said, here are a few that come to mind.

1. "Bespoke Design" and "Devices of Emotional Attachment"

For years now, the PC industry has wondered why it is that its machines can't hold a candle to Apple's when it comes to design. I think that the consumer electronics industry as a whole has come to terms with this. In the past few years they have been copying Apple (e.g. remember when everything went "white plastic"?), but this isn't the answer. The answer is in designing things that people care about. Either because they embody something they stand for, allow them to state their place in a tribe, or recall an era for which they have affection. Examples include Google's Chrome laptop (logo-free minimalist bespoke look), Fuji's retro looking camera, or similar examples from Leica or Olympus. Combine this with things like falling manufacturing costs and a premium that people will pay for this kind of design, and there's opportunity for many small hardware niches (e.g. laptop vendor that does build-to-order chassis based on custom materials).

2. "Appstore Fatigue" and the coming competition over connected commerce

(This is a big one on which I'll do a lengthier post in the coming weeks)

In a quick - by no means comprehensive - survey of products at CES, I counted no less than twenty "appstores" across a variety of phones, tablets, PCs, Netbooks, TVs and settop boxes. With the improved capabilities that apps bring to devices, and of course the revenue stream it brings to the vendors, it's not surprising that so many device vendors are doing just this. However, I believe it's unsustainable at current rate/scale. It will have fallout in a number of ways:

• “AppStore Fatigue”: Consumers are not likely to trust (or want to bother) maintaining an ongoing commercial relationship with every device they own, though it appears that every device is going to ask for one. Consumers are going to forgo some in favor of others. Those appstores that fail to resonate with users are going to become ghost towns of sorts. Users being assaulted with yet-another-appstore will suffer ‘AppStore Fatigue’, not wanting to fire up yet another appstore credit-card entry. Those launching appstores will have to think about how to incite that customer in the door. I’d imagine we’ll see lots of “Comes bundled with $50 worth of AppStoreBux” types of offers. Similarly, developers will be faced with a huge choice of channels. Even with lightweight click-to-accept agreements, most will not have the bandwidth to launch on every service and customize for services/devices. This is playing out exactly as the PC Download Casual market did in 05-06 when I worked at MS. As it did then, it will lead to lowest-common-denominator development, a rise of distributor/aggregators, and developer focus on the 1-2 leading platforms leaving others to wither.
• "Competition over Connected Commerce". Again, I'll address this in longer post, but the short version is this: A large part of determining who will win here will be dependant on which vendor walks the line best between (a) giving developers tools to innovate in commerce (light up new business models, create new pricing models, develop external direct commercial relationships with customers) and (b) presenting the end user with something that they can still understand, navigate, and trust. Consider that developers on the AppStore are lighting up new hybrid business models daily or weekly, while Xbox took several *YEARS* to light up a F2P/item-sales model in ONE game. This is going to be the front on which the most exciting innovation is going to take place.

3. Stereo 3D will reach a point of "undeniable lack of success"

Fall 2010 didn't see the furious adoption of Stereo3D that the more bullish were predicting. At CES this year, plenty of vendors were still hawking it, but (a) with less enthusiasm, and (b) as only one of several things they were showing, not the main attraction. My belief is that by end of year, it will be evident that Stereo3D is a niche at best, and likely a small one at that. Vendors will blame the glasses, but this is a red herring. The real issues are more fundamental, and I beleive insurmountable:

• There are fundamental physiological issues with Stereo3D at close distances that make it fatiguing at close distances. This isn't an issue in the cinema where the focal and convergence points are near-identical but becomes and issue at close range. Headmounted displays are extremely uncomfortable. TVs and PCs for extended periods, YMMV.
• Authoring 3D Content costs money. The model Hollyowod is pushing is predicated on a long-term-sustained premium over the whole content waterfall. While theater goers are paying the premium for ticket prices, it's not at the level they'd like and it's not clear that cable, blue- ray, etc, will be able to command a premium at the same level.

The two things that Stereo3D has in its corner are home-theater enthusiasts and sports (gaming enthusiasts are mice nuts in comparison) . I'm not in the camp that beleives these two niches are enough to evade a collapse, but who knows.

4. 3D printing, on the other hand, is about to take off

Several sub-$2k printers, several startup services allowing printing of your own designs (Ponoko, Shapeways, Figureprints) or offer boutique products for sale. Feels on the cusp of something big, though what exactly I'm not sure. Print your own board game pieces? design your own jewelery? Maybe Alice will figure it out for us! There's certainly some overlap with #5:

5. Gaming's Virtual & physical worlds meet

There were a number of toy manufacturers around CES this year, and some of them are doing interesting work in melding physical toys/games with the virtual. There was of course a first step in this direction with toys like WebKinz, BarbieGirls, and BuildABear, but this was only a commercial link, using physical toy as proxy/token for the games cost of entry. What we are seeing now are things like Mattel’s Rock’em Sock’em robots having a complimentary augmented reality game, SphereO a remote controlled robot ball that you drive via smartphone; and ARDrone, a remote controlled helicopter that you pilot with your iphone while simultaneously playing augmented reality games (e.g. 2 real-world copters, but the ‘bullets’ and ‘rockets’ are in virtual space). Also, I got a chance to play Sifteo, a tactile game platform made up of physical cubes that react to how to you move/tilt/connect them. I think all of these are indications of an interesting trend melding the virtual and real worlds. The uber-smart Frank Lantz once said “we think of games as something you put into computers, but this is wrong. Computers are something we put into games”. I think this captures the essense of this trend – that we’re finding ways for technology to pervade and enhance all aspects of play, on and off the screen (which includes things like Nike+, etc)

6. Apple has a gaming platform.

Well, they have two of course. The iPad and the iPhone. What I mean though, is that this posturing (part BS'ing, part wishful thinking) from game console manufacturers about iPhone not really competing with the DS/PSP (it does) and iPad not competing with high-end consoles (they do for share of wallet) is no longer going to fly. Market data will emerge that proves that Apple's platforms are taking gamer money out of the pocket of traditional game platform manufacturers.

7. The Post-PC-Era will officially arrive.

Classify it how you will; Smartphone & tablet growth outpacing PCs, or more people connecting to the Internet on non-PC devices, or any other metric, it will be clear that it's no longer a PC world. This will have all kinds of implications for people developing games content. HTML5 (and

related tech that often is thrown into that bucket) will become increasingly important, cross-platform services will become attractive for gamers, and we'll see the emergence of #8

8. Brands-as-Memes.

This proliferation of app-enabled platforms will lead, I think, to another interesting phenomena. It will be hard and expensive for large-budget games, outside of their core market, to get onto enough platforms to rise above the noise of the collective conciousness. On the other hand, smaller titles, being able to appear across iPhone, iPad, Facebook, consoles and PC, will - when they 'hit' - spread across the cultural landscape like wildfire. Red Dead Redemption made tons of cash, but its got to be a little bit frustrating to work on a $100M AAA blockbuster thats supposed to be the biggest thing in gaming, only to turn on the TV and see that everything from SNL skits to Jay Leno monologues are talking about Farmville and Angry Birds. When Angry Birds gets this level of virality, its no longer just a brand, it's a meme.

9. E-reader apps & services will see an explosion of innovation

The first wave of e-reader devices, apps and services have been too focused (a) on improving their supply chain and costs, and (b) too focused on emulating paper, not on surpassing it. The device war is going to be waged on a number of fronts (Kindle will stick e-ink, but they'd better add a touch interface), but for 2011 its going to be Kindle loyalists and the iPad juggernaut, with some niche-serving tablets in peleton further back. On the software front though, there is room for a ton of innovation. Trying win customers over, people will build social networks or latch onto existing ones, and then layer on features for book clubs, shared annotations, circle-of-trust recommendations, book lending/sharing, gifting, treasure-hunt games, and of course acheivement systems. Lots of magazines and newspapers trying their hand at different interpretations of what their content should look and function like on digital platforms. HTML5 will make it easier and cheaper to produce high quality typography and layout and to make it portable. There's also a ton of work to do to make text more readable on screens.

It took us a few thousand years to get paper to where it is today. YOu didn't think we were done with e-readers upon reaching the iPad, did you?

Some people to watch in this space: Craig Mod, James Bridle, Bill Hill, Copia (who have the right idea, and whose feature set will likely be copied by Amazon and/or Apple)

10. Cracks in gaming's walled gardens.

Consoles are walled gardens. Platforms like Apple's are as well, but less so. As I wrote about a while back, as consoles are tempted - or demanded by their partners or customers - to reach out into the broader Internet to leverage the benefits of other services and platforms, they'll start to lose some degree of control on their platforms. The recent Steam/PS3 headline is a prime example.

And now, FIVE more bonus predictions!

11. HTML5 begets real apps: Real, viable competitors to Office, Visio, Photoshop, etc, etc.

12. Android consolidation. Such a mess right now there has to be some consolidation in device UI and form and application distribution or the app landscape will be bleak.

13. Games market analysts will struggle to segment an amorphous landscape. They used to segment handheld differently than phones, differently than console, retail vs digital, etc. Things like iPad blur all those lines. It'll be hard to make sense of the market.

14. No 'official' Kinect for PC. Some are predicting it. I just don't see it happening. It was so hard to bring Live to the PC, and not particularly successful, that I can't see them overcoming all the calibration/usage issues, nor the high demand for it materializing.

15. Tablets as producer platform: People are framing tablets as 'consumption-only' devices because largely today they are. However, people will innovate on the platform and turn them into production/editing platforms, and we'll see them take off for real in many niches as PC replacements, not compliments.

That's it! Let loose the commentary on this broad-reaching food for thought!

Book Review: We, Robot

A while back, I reviewed Mark Stephen Meadow's book Tea Time with Terrorists. Since that time, I got to spend a couple days hanging out with him in Mexico, and he sent me a copy of his latest work, We, Robot to check out.

Needless to say, they are pretty different books in terms of subject matter. If there's a common thread though, its that when the author sets out to understand something, he goes out and finds people who know, where ever they might be.

We, Robot is a rather unique look at our progress in robotics. The book looks at a number of famous Sci-fi robots, from The Jetson's Rosie to the Terminator T-1000 to Avatar's avatars. He then compares them to progress of different projects in the robotics world, asking how close we've come to the original sci-fi vision, and of what differs, why.

It's a fun tour of some of the field's better poster-bot/children, and the interviews with some of their creators are quite interesting.

The real gold for me though, was in some of the conjecture and philosophizing that Meadows does in considering implications of robotics near future. This is especially true when looking at the borders between hardware and software which he sees little distinction. I'm of the same school of thought, but it's surprising how many people deem them completely different.

For example, when considering the implications of privacy and giving one's personal information up to 'trusted' parties, he asks us to consider whether we'd accept a "Rosie"-like robot from Google, provided for free, if in exchange we understood that it would mill about the house in spare time, learning about our personal habits and behavior and such. Is this really so different than G-mail? Really, it's not, when you think about it.

There are a lot of great nuggets of food for thought along these lines. I found myself dog-earing the corners of a lot of pages with the intent of going back to think about more deeply.

At this year's CES, I saw a surprising number of toys and gadgets blurring the lines between digital and physical worlds. Robots will be one of the conduits between those spaces sooner than we think. This book is a good tour of both the state of the art, as well as a tour of some of the unanswered questions.

We, Robot: Skywalker's Hand, Blade Runners, Iron Man, Slutbots, and How Fiction Became Fact

Professional Whuffie anyone?

Yesterday I posted a review of Super Sad True Love Story, the social network sci-fi setting of which includes people real-time ranking one another in a process called "FAC'ing".

Then today Techcrunch posted about CubeDuel. Think of it as the bastard child of LinkedIn and HotOrNot. Social ranking of your professional network based on who would like to work with whom.

Don't tell me you aren't heading there right now...

Oh sure, it's all fun and games right now, but how long before employers are looking and saying "how'd this guy rank among former peers and coworkers?"

They say truth is stranger than fiction, in this case it's just neck and neck.

Book Review: Super Sad True Love Story

Seeing as how it is mid-January, it's probably too early to call my fave book of 2011, but Super Sad True Love Story is certainly going to rank high on the list.

The book is a romantic tragedy, set amid near-future distopian sci-fi which it uses as heavy satire about current-day American decline and materialism. 'Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" + "Little Brother" + later Adrian Mole volumes, perhaps. It is to Facebook & Amazon what Halting State was to MMOs and Virtual Worlds.

The love story at it's heart is, as the name implies, sad. However, what I really loved about this book was the commentary on social networking & whuffie, materialism, information control and willful ignorance. One of those pictures of the future close enough to be plausible, and thus disturbing and frightening.

Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel

Book Review: The Assault on Reason

We started the audiobook version of the 2008 Al Gore book, The Assault on Reason, on the way back from our recent ski trip. I finished it up on the work commute.

At a high level, the book is about the threat to democracy that comes from an ill-informed citizenry, making the point that we are currently under such a threat. The book covers a number of topics at length, including the growing influence of television vs print over the past few decades, misinformation about global warming, and the implications of the fight over net neutrality.

The bulk of the text is spent on a lengthy and detailed skewering of the Bush-Cheney administration and their many transgressions. These Gore goes into at lengthy and with many detailed fact-based accusations.

Though they are no longer in office, many of their policies are still in place and thus the book is still applicable. As well, the book goes into much detail about the delicate balance between our three branches of government. For me as a non-native, this was educational.

While a little dated, the ideas in the book are still very relevant and applicable.

The Assault on Reason

Great overview of the 'Gamification' landscape

Pawned. Gamification and Its Discontents

View more presentations from Sebastian Deterding.

Twitter-abstinence experiment over

A couple years ago, when all the intertubers got all hot and bothered over the next wave of technical hullaballoo, namely Twitter, I decided to try an experiment and sit out one round of technology.

Well, it's been long enough and here I am: @kimpall.

Did I learn anything from the experiment?

• It's not the end of the world to be off the grid, or at least off the latest medium/tech. In fact, plenty of young, tech-savvy, innovative people are not on Twitter or Facebook, and yet they manage to thrive. Imagine that, twittees!
• Twitter, like Facebook, can be a serious timewaster and ADD magnet, if you let it (at least it seems that way)
• On the other hand, it seems a killer app at conferences
• While I don't need to be abreast of every meme to the very minute, it does seem like there's a lack of reliability of the more relevant memes leaping off of Twitter and onto the less ephemeral blogosphere. Some do, some don't.

So, I'm on it, but I will aim to have some goals while using it. I'll try to keep time-wasters to a medium (try...)

Privy among ghosts

photo.JPG, originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

My Intrapreneurship talk from 2010 IGDA Leadership Forum

2010 in Books

Having sync'd my book reviews from my trip, here's a summary of what I read this year. I hit my goal of 30 books, up from 25 last year (though 8 were audiobooks if you count those differently). I'm hoping my new iPad will help me get up to a more ambitious 36 for 2011 (Half-way done two already).

Taking a cue from Jason, I'm grouping by topic area. Links are to my review posts, which in turn have links to the Amazon pages. One asterisk for recommended books, two for highly recommended. YMMV.

Business

• Starbucked
• Free (*)
• The Big Lie (*)
• Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators (**)
• Secrets of the Moneylab (**)
• The Black Swan
• Intrapreneurship in Action
• The Big Short (**)

Politics/History

• Invention of Air (**)
• Audacity of Hope
• Nickel and Dimed
• Tea Time with Terrorists (**)

Culture

• Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential (*)
• The Art Detective (*)
• Don't Get Too Comfortable

Technology

• Dot Font
• EPub Straight to the Point
• Fundamentals of Typography (**)
• HTML5: designing rich internet apps
• Dive into HTML5 (*)
• Screen Future (*)

Science

• Universe in a nutshell
• Our Days Are Numbered

Fiction

• Makers (**)
• For The Win (*)
• The White Tiger
• Boneshaker

Self Improvement

• Body For Life

Graphic Novels

• Media Meltdown (** - for kids)
• Fables Vol 1