Book Review: The Future of the Internet, And How to Stop It

After having it on my to-read list for some time, I got around to reading The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It and am kicking myself for not getting to it earlier. It's great. It's well thought out and it's an *important* book.

I plan on writing something lengthier on my thoughts after reading it - It has spawned dozens of ideas for me - but here are some quick points.

In short, the book is about the trade off between Open and Closed systems - something I've written a fair amount about. He makes the point that Open and Closed lie on opposite ends of a spectrum. Open provides Affordance (the ability for systems to be used for purposes beyond their design) and Generativity (that they encourage or breed the innovation of these new uses). Closed systems provide Security, Ease of Use, and sometimes affordability (e.g. think razors/blades).

In many places in current day, the closed systems are winning because vendors and users don't take the long term view as to the cost to innovation.

The author goes on to show how this view of systems holds true for the internet at large as well as the endpoint devices. It then broadens into a larger discussion of everything from reputation systems to legislative solutions vs 'honor code' types of systems.

Is the book perfect? No. Many of the solutions, or at least solution directions, proposed are flawed (e.g. allowing programmability with security through VMs is not a solution so long as the owner of the VM platform or the platform under it are still closed). It doesn't matter though. If the book gets people even thinking and talking about this subject matter, then it's a worthwhile contribution.

Go read it. It's an important book. (also, a free PDF version is available here)

The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It

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

Player Created Content: Industry Created Glut

Man, things sure seem to be shaping up for a mighty crowded playfield on the user-generated-content (or the better 'player created content' name) landscape.

The basic premise of '99% of everything is crap, but in a long-tail world, there's enough content for some cream to float to the top' seems sound. However, creating content takes time, and one has to wonder what the intersection of sets looks like between gamers and would-be-creators, and then how big that pool is, vis a vis it's dilution across so many venues for content creation & sharing.

An incomplete inventory off the top of my head:

Games centered around UGC
- Spore
- Little Big Planet*
- others

Games with UGC as non-core feature
- Many many first person shooters (e.g. Unreal)
- Race games allowing for custom cars/tracks (e.g. Forza)
- etc

Virtual worlds with UGC-element
- Second Life
- Google's Lively
- Habbo and a thousand would-be Habbo's
- Sony Home

Game creation middleware/systems
- MS's XNA
- Torque

Hosted game creation services
- Playcrafter
- Raph's Metaplace (my personal fave)

The good news is that there's plenty of variety, and they run the gammut from writing cod to drag-n-drop.

I do worry, however, that many will fall by the wayside for lack of sufficient user-base to generate the content.

And yes, I realize I *totally* sound like one of those "there'll never be more than a million MMO players!" cronies of 7-8 year ago. I was one of them! :-)

* BTW, this may point to it being a smart idea Sony's hinted at, allowing users to sell their content, to provide additional incentive beyond the rest of the fray. I beleive Raph's system is going to allow such things as well.

When games are platforms

I've been meaning to post about this great Penny Arcade column about SquawkBox, a plug-in for MS Flight Sim letting virtual pilots connect to virtual air traffic controllers. It's a good read, though not as thorough as the article on virtual air networks & MS Flight Sim that was (IIRC) in Wired a couple years back. Can't find a link to it online, unfortunately.

Fact is, there are multiple virtual airlines and virtual simulations of air traffic control and the like, all built on top of Flight Sim & the Web. Their significance should not be overlooked. These are essentially community created MMO's, built on top of open platforms, and have been going on for years. Squawkbox was built in 97. ProController (air traffic radar sim program) was built shortly thereafter. People strapped these together and on top of the Internet built Satco, VATSIM and IVAO. Ten years later, every day thousands of pilots jump into their deskchairs and shuttle passenger jets from Paris to NY, if thats their asigned route that day.

David Edery, a friend & co-worker, posted this (sorry Dave) ignorant post on the subject, arguing that FS is under-monetized because we allow third parties to develop aftermarket content and products rather than doing it ourselves. Furthermore, it's phrased as though the FS team does this out of ignorance, citing it as a lost opportunity and stating that 'the entertainment industry has so much to learn about tapping niche markets'.

I'll argue quite the opposite. I think the FS team understands this very well, and has for a long time. This third party development didn't happen unbeknownst to MS. Quite the opposite. Taking a page out of the MS playbook, the FS team deliberately opened the product to extension/enhancement by developing an SDK and making it publicly available. In doing so, they turned a game into a platform. It can also be argued that this was a key part of them capturing such a large part of the flight sim market (a genre that was fairly saturated with competitors when I first got into this business).

Flight Sim has been extended with products that do weather simulation, air traffic control, communications, ground scenery, weather simulation, vegetation, even baggage cart simulation. You can get detailed versions of most airports in the world, most commercial aircraft both current day and historical (including everything from a space shuttle sim to a hot air balloon sim). even ones that modify flight physics dynamics.

Like with other closed vertical markets - not only would MS not have been able to develop this range of product extensions had they chosen to do it themselves, they most likely could not even have conceived of them all.

This is not unlike the position some have taken on FPS games, saying "why release an editor and the ability to make mods? That's stuff you could make yourself and charge for". The case has been made time and time again that this is a core part of what has made Id, Epic and Valve as successful as they've been.

At it's heart, MS is very much a platform company. We do a lot of other things, and we have our 'closed vertical' areas as well, but the company's DNA was forged with DOS and tempered with Windows, and both of those were successful as platforms first and foremost. Fligth Sim is very much of the same bloodline.

By the way, I probably should have included FlightSim as part of that forging, as it's MS's longest running product franchise, as it predates Windows itself by three years.

For giggles, comparative screenshots:

(1) from FS 1.0 (I shudder to think how many hours I spent in this virtual cockpit - taxiing across the brooklyn bridge so I could drive right up to the Empire State's doorstep)

(2) from FS 2004, from the Imagine add-on with offering an accurate version of LaGuardia Airport in NY.