The iPhone's killer app

Adam keeps giving me a hard time about my lack of iPhone. I honestly don't want one that bad. Not sure I'd trade it for my given phone even if free. It's a great web browsing device, but there are things I don't like about it as a phone.

Now, on the other hand, I saw this yesterday.

Full Throttle on the iPhone might be worth suffering with a phone I don't like! :-)

EA needs to fire its Euro marketeers

At least those responsible for the campaign featuring topless models to promote Need for Speed.

They should be fired not because they didn't 'go through the proper approval process', but rather because they are lazy, uncreative, or more likely both.

We. Can. Do. Better.

(BTW, I almost typo'd the name of the game above to 'Need for Seed'. PAGING DR FREUD!)

Dialing the poop level to eleven...

...Donald Trump does 'Celebrity Apprentice'.

Saw this on MSN this morning and it caught my eye. I gave up on Trump's show after season two (Branson's show was way better, but out-marketed), but I have to admit I'm tempted to watch this train-wreck-in-the-making.

Gene Simmons is on!

Can I just predict the following exchange:

Trump: "Gene, YOU'RE FIRED!"
Simmons: "Yeah? Well, I'm sleeping with your wife. YOU'RE fired!"

Ooma OOBE, and Apple packaging perversion

A few months back, Vlad and I attended an entrepeneur event in Seattle. Michael Arrington was one of the speakers. He mentioned having a give-away token for a free Ooma, which he'd give to the first person that approached him for it after the session. Vlad was that person, and since he couldn't use it for some reason, he gave it to me.

Ooma is a one-time-purchase device that gives you VOIP phone service over your broadband with no monthly charges, no long distance charges in US, a broadband voicemail box, etc. Your regular household phone(s) plug into it, and then you use the phone as you would normally.

You could view it as a hardware device purchase, or you could view it as a lifetime subscription option to phone service. Spend a few hundred now, no phone bill later (or forever).

I filled out some online forms, and a couple months later, after I'd forgotten all about it, a big honkin box arrived in the mail.

I still haven't hooked it up (for reasons I'll get into later), but I did want to talk about the packaging.

The gizmos (the Ooma, and an an auxilliary 'scout' device) each arrived in a very attractive, very HEAVY, glossy cardboard box.

This is what the devices look like.

Anyhow. The box is super thick, with a cover that is five sides of a cube and slides off of another five sided cube to reveal a felt-covered plastic 'holder' for the OOMA, which conceals the AC adapter, cables, etc. There's a also a large glossy manual and quick-start guide.

The thing this made me think of is just how much everyone has been influenced by the Apple out-of-box experience ('OOBE'). I've heard (sorry, have never purchased an Apple product), the Apple OOBE described in near-fetishist, near-religious, fashion by those that have bought their products. It's clear that others are aspiring to capture the same type of feeling.

Ooma's not the only culprit. I've purchased a couple Zune's and they are definitely mimicking the same thing. Xbox360 as well to a lesser degree.

It does make me wonder about a couple things:

• How soon before this backfires with the environmental movement? Others have learned a lesson here (Barbie was an example featured in Fast Company recently).
• What's the cost of the packaging, and could the savings be passed on to the consumer?
• Again, borrowing from teh Barbie example, could the packaging be practical? Why not sell Zune's or Ipod's packaged in a leather or rubber protective case - an accessory people often buy anyway?

Food for thought.

As for the actual device - I'll let you know how it goes after I actually plug it in. :-)

For those that are curious, here's a shot of the ports on the back.

Space Giraffe Author Having a Cow

Just read this gamasutra piece about Jeff Minter's latest ranting about XBLA. Last time it was the "soul crushing" approval process (aka Minter learns what shipping on consoles is like), this time it's the threat to abandon game development because he's disappointed in the sales of Space Giraffe, especially that it was outperformed by Frogger.

I have mixed feelings about this.

One the one hand, yes, its disappointing that gamers don't "vote with their money" and reward indie development and original content. I too find it frustrating that Pac man or Frogger outperform some original fare.

On the other hand, its their right. Its also just the reality of how things are, so get over it. Same thing exists with movies, music and books.

I think he'd do well to also point a finger or two at himself. The game is good, but it's hard, it's far from accessible, and the point it tries to make isn't immediately apparent (if your game takes someone as bright as Jon to explain it, then you have a problem).

To borrow Jon's comparison, if you write Ulysses, don't be disappointed if it doesn't sell like Harry Potter.

One other thing that is an important point to note in today's try-n-buy world: People will try the game. So Jeff (or others for that matter) can blame Frogger or other games all they want, but at the end of the day, if you build a game that really is all that, then people will try it, and hopefully buy it. If the trial doesn't hook them, then that's not Frogger's fault, is it?

They don't call it 'priming the pump' for nothin'

There's been a lot of linking to Silicon Knights' Denis Dyack's comments (and subsequent clarification) about the Quebec government's subsidies of game development companies. The clarification was that by labelling them 'insane', he meant 'better than good'.

He still maintains, though, that the subsidies are not maintainable in the long term.

I think he's missing the point. The point was to prime the pump and jump start an industry hot-bed. They've absolutely done so. Now that they have, if the subsidies were to go away, it's not like Ubi and the others would just pack up and leave, would they? There's a local dev community, an infrastructure of schools producing new talent, etc.

I don't think they were ever meant to be sustainable.

There's an argument that they are sustainable (if the delta in growth, new jobs, the taxes those people pay, etc, are enough to fund the subsidies), but that's beside the point.

Sweet MAME table idea

I built a MAME cabinet about 13-14 years ago - long before you could buy them and before you could buy USB 'arcade quality' controllers (it may have been before USB itself for that matter!). I got rid of it when moving up to Seattle, as I didn't have room for all my arcade cabs in the house here.

I haven't thought about building another until I saw this link (via boingboing) for a cool 'hideaway' version. This was done on an IKEA dining room table, but I think it could be done similarly in a living room coffee table.

Hmm... I've been looking for a reason to buy that router attachment for my table saw...

On EA's numbers...

A number of people have linked to Gamasutra's look at EA's quarterly results. The eye-catching factoids causing the linkage are (1) the significance of GameStop as their largest retail customer, and (2) that the Xbox360 SKUs were responsible for the lion's share of their revenue (218M, or roughly half of their revenue, the closest other platform being the PS2 at 73M).

It's certainly good information to hear for Microsoft, but it still leaves questions unanswered for me. I'd be very curious to know what the same set of numbers looks like in terms of margin per platform. My guess would be that the DS would one of the top slots on the list. Also, I'm curious if this is indicative of a long-term trend, or if it was offset this particular quarter by any big software releases.

Peeking-inside blogs

Just about everyone has heard of the now-famous Post Secret blog, where people mail in secrets on postcards. It struck a nerve with people as it peek into the quirkiest, saddest and darkest secrets that people keep.

Today I came across another similar blog, Sasha Cagen's To-do list blog, which as you can guess, does the same thing, but for to-do lists. Seems to give a similar but slightly higher-level view into people's lives.

Like PostSecret, she's done a book. It seems to be getting better pick-up, perhaps because the lists are not quite as dark as some of the PostSecret ones. Perhaps her publisher is putting more effort into it? See the trailer below as an example:



I do wonder if there's a similar coffee table book to be made with a game angle to it. Designers' notes? Funny things found in code comments? Hmm...

Gaming and Worst Consumer Trends

So minutes after posting the Bronfman quote and saying we should take heed, this came across my desktop:

DRM, Fanboys, Region Encoding among PC World's "10 Worst Consumer Tech Trends".

Of the 10 sins cited, the games industry hits on the majority of them. Some of course, are an artifact of business and of other industries as well (e.g. licensing fees around GH tracks). However, a couple of them really resonated.

#7 Region coding: I know there are business reasons for it, and that there are sometimes technical reasons for it. That doesn't change the fact that it's a kick in the teeth to the consumer who just wants to play the game you didn't release in her region.

#1: DRM: Amen. I *really* don't know the solution here, but man, we need to figure it out. One look at the writeups for the PC version of Bioshock vs the Xbox360 version, and you know we have a problem.

Quote of the week

Edgar Bronfman, music mogul, speaking at a mobile conference in Macau:

"We used to fool ourselves,' he said. "We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won."

He things mobile operators should take heed:

"The sad truth is that most of what consumers are being offered today on the mobile platform is boring, banal and basic," he said. "People want a more interesting form of mobile music content. They want it to be easy to buy with a single click - yes, a single click, not a dozen. And they want access to it, quickly and easily, wherever they are. 24/7. Any player in the mobile value chain who thinks they can provide less than a great experience for consumers and remain competitive is fooling themselves."

Should the game industry also be paying attention? I think so.

Stolar stellar? Sorry seller!

GamesIndustry.biz has an interview up with Bernie Stolar, Google's 'Adsense for Games' (formerly Adscape), director and advisor.

Man, I hope he provides some value behind the scenes, because from how this interview reads, it only backs up what I thought after seeing his session at Casual Connect.

Google, you don't need rock-star names for spokespeople. You are supposed to be rock stars! Please dig a smart guy out of the back somewhere and have him be spokesperson.

"Not just lying.... lying through theatre"

Unbeleivable.

Rockin' Robin

...tweet, tweet.

Robin's got a rockin' review of EA's Rock Band with a bunch of shots of the character creation system. I hadn't heard much about that side of teh game, with most of the early write-ups focusing on either the song list, the peripheral pedantry, or the competition with Rock Band.

She really does make it sound fantastic. Now that I'm hitting my ceiling on GH-III (I aspire to 5-star medium, but alas, that's my limit), this may have to be the next purchase.

Lessig's TED Talk

...is just brilliant. He's such an awesome presenter and his talk is right on the money (pun intended). Go watch:

World of Datecraft: For when 'soloing molten core' has become a euphemism

via Kotaku, a dating website for WoW enthusiasts, World of Datecraft.

I know little about the game, but I do foresee a Hoarde/Alliance Romeo & Juliet in the making.

Surreal PS3 Euro Ad

While their whole hot-chix-on-toilets thing was just wacky and off the mark, I have to admit that I *love* this PS3 ad. I'm not sure it's enough to dig them out of their hole, but it's *so* much cooler than the whole "jump in" set of ads MS did.

Mind you, I think they are definitely following our lead, just doing something edgier.

Dvorak comic zine

While I've understood the (valid) arguments for using a Dvorak keyboard, I've never really been tempted to give it a try... until reading this awesome comic on the subject:

(via BoingBoing)

On Pakistan and Gaming

The current hullaballoo in Pakistan reminded me of one of my favorite Churchill quotes:

"Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers that they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry."

And while I think of it, there are plenty of companies in the game industry that would do well to take that quote to heart as well. I leave it to the reader to apply that to whomever they please.

Quote of the week

From Michael Eisner, former Disney CEO, about the current writer's strike and the realities of new media:

Writer's strike: "Insanity." "There's all of this rhetoric by the media companies about this 'great new digital business', which is a small, growing business that will one day be dominant (but it isn't, yet there's no money there yet." Because all of the entertainment folks are talking up digital, the writers assume there's a lot of money there. Take Prom Queen: "We made history, but we didn't make money. ... I'm doing it because I think it's fun; I think it's the future. ... For a writer to give up today's money for a piece in three years is stupid." The studios can't give in because there's nothing to give. "The studios deserve what they're getting, because they've been announcing how great it is." But it's only great in theory. "They made deals with Steve Jobs, who takes them to the cleaners. Who's making money? Apple." Entertainment executives can't admit that they're not making money. Writers should be striking in Cupertino. (Hard not to see this as a slam on Disney successor Bob Iger, who cut the first video deal with iTunes.)

(tip o the hat to paidcontent.org, commentary is theirs, but I agree with it!)

Evolution of MSN Games

A co-worker pointed me to this promo video for The Zone (known today as MSN Games) from a few years back. Amazing to see how far it's come. In those days we intermingled matchmaking for core PC CD games with online multiplayer casual, etc.

Reading into Radiohead's Results

There has been what looks like some rigorous analysis of the Radiohead move (which I blogged about here, here, and here) to make their album available online at a pick-your-price, no-DRM format. This comes to us from paidcontent.co.uk.

The results are astonishing. An estimated 1.2M copies of the album were downloaded, with 38% of downloaders chosing to pay, and of those, the average was $6 per copy paid (Americans paid a more generous average of $8).

Back of the envelope math says 1.2M * 38% *$6 = a little under $3M. I have no idea of the distribution arrangement, but lets say they give up 10 points for billing, bandwidth, etc, andanother 10 points to someone to manage all this for them. That still leaves $2.5M.

Now the article linked to above comments about the number of copies circulating via bit torrent, etc, but that's beside the point, isn't it? That'd be happening if they were on iTunes. The real question is how many copies they'd have to sell on $10 - $15 plastic where they are making, say, 10 points. (I have no idea what rev shares are in the music biz, so I'm really blowing smoke here). At that point, they'd have to move 2M copies in order to reach the same level.

That's totally doable, but not *certain*. Their first four albums went platinum in both UK and US, so at least 2M units per album, but their last couple albums were between 500k and 1.5M-ish each.

So in this case, they (a) hit at least the minimum threshold they'd have done via the traditional channels, (b) now have a direct relationship with their customers, and (c) created a marketing vehicle for the album and the band that money couldn't have bought.

Sounds like a win to me!

Not boob.

Not boob., originally uploaded by Rob Gruhl.

My friend Rob Gruhl had this awesome photo of his newborn Keston. It made number one pic on flickr (as it should have!)

BTW, The blog post title is his title for the photo. His words, not mine!

Mini-review: Guitar Hero 3 (360)

I picked up GH3 late last week. The title's been written up to death, so I'll give a very brief 'mini-review' of my impressions:

Good:

• Better track selection than the first, my guess is because of the increased attention and budget, plus the 'arms race' (perhaps neck-and-neck race would be a better metaphor) with Rock band.
• The highlighting/hinting of notes that can be hammer-ons or pull-offs is a nice bit of polish and for me anyway, really useful.
• The cutscenes are appropriately tongue-in-cheek.
• I like the wireless guitar. Some have reported problems with it, but I haven't seen any.

Bad:

• I *hate* the boss battles. I think they ruin the illusion of Guitar-god-fantasy, and in career mode they are so infrequent that it's difficult to ramp the difficulty in a meaningful way. As a result, the powerups seem random, and strategy is non-obvious.
• The go-go girls are unneeded and make what was previously a broaden-the-audience title and make it less so. I blogged about this before.

That's it. If you liked GH2, you'll like GH3 is I guess the super-short review :-)

Speaking of objects of desire...

The other day in the cafe at work, a friend of mine was sitting bemused at a table, a little star-wars-looking egg sitting on the table in front of her.

It was Sony's 'Rolly', a little music-driven robot bluetooth connected MP3 player thingy that... well hell, I have no idea what it does. I just know it was the coolest thing I'd seen since Aibo.





I want one to keep my Roomba company! Perhaps as a cheerleader!

Pac Gentleman

While I enjoy steampunk sci-fi as much as the next guy, I don't have the faux-steampunk-object fetish that some folks have.

However, this steampunk rendition of Pacman (via Wonderland) is the exception. It's so awesome, I've been ruminating all morning on what it would take to build a working version using the same technique as was used for the mechanical pong machine.

The truth will set itself free

At least that's the case in this day and age.

It seems that Rockstar, in releasing Manhunt 2, left some names off the credits.

Partway through development (from what we gather - 80% of the way through, the whole project was moved from Rockstar Vienna to Rockstar London. When the game was released, none of the names of the 55 people from RV that worked on the project were listed on the credits.

Like the game didn't have enough controversy already!

So, over on Intelligent Artifice, Jurie was miffed and posted their names for the Internetz to know all about it.

Way to go Jurie!

link.

Weighted com-pumpkin cube

IMAGE_085, originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

Spotted in front of a co-worker's desk this morning.

I understand this Portal game is quite the fun. Will have to play soon...

Scene It? Loved it!

I had my first go at 'Scene It? Lights, Camera, Action' yesterday. Some folks I work with were involved in its development so I'd seen bits and pieces in progress, but waited until the final product was done to take it home and play it.

If you haven't heard of or seen the game, here's a cheezy marketing trailer for it. Bear through the pitch, and you'll get an idea of what gameplay is like and what the controllers (it ships with 4) look like.



Its *really* good. Alisa and I played a game and had quite a good time (not quite as good a time as the people in the above video, but then we aren't super-hipster-20-somethings anymore). That Alisa enjoyed it is saying something since she hasn't enjoyed anything on the console since Zuma, and even that was deemed "fun but annoying".

The Big Button Pad support/integration does feel a bit kludgy, as it tries to reconcile the 'instant 4 player get into the action' with Xbox360's 'sign in with your gamertag'. Still, it wasn't too painful, and once past that it was all very well integrated.

Oh, I should also note that we'd played the SceneIt DVD game and didn't enjoy it much at all. This is a much better implementation of the game.

Kudos to all who worked on it!

More on the mainstreaming of games

If this isn't a great example of mainstream of games, then I don't know what is.

From the description on youtube:

Blizzard has teamed up with iCoke, Coca-Cola's name-brand presence in China to create a joint World of Warcraft and Coca-Cola televised commercial, featuring Chinese pop sensation SHE...

Bye bye Gran

Just found out that my grandma passed away at the ripe old age of 95. She'd been fading in health for a while now, so it was not unexpected. I hadn't seen her in a few years since she lived in the UK.

Sharp as a whip to the end, I'll remember her as seen below. Smile on her face and never saying no to a bit of dessert and a glass of red!


Bye Grandma, we love you!

The Onslaught of Toys-Featuring-Online-Games continues

I recently blogged about the wave of kids toys that are shipping with online games (in some cases multiplayer/mmo-ish games) as 'features' - a checklist item to help sell the game.

Well, here's another to add to the list:

Swypeout is a collectible card game that ships with a USB device with a bar code reader. Cards can be swiped through the reader, and then the car appears in an online racing game. Kids can then race their cars against others. Video trailer of gameplay below, and card example below that.

This is sort of Pod (dating myself) meets Motor City Online (dating myself again) meets Toon-town.

I include the Toon-town reference because like with that MMO, chat is via picking from canned phrases, and no path to lead to outside Internet, thus alleviating parents fears of card-swiping child molesters and the like.

This is an interesting one to keep an eye on for two reasons:

First off, it's more of a real-time 3D action game. The spend on the client (from screenshots & movies, I havent' downloaded it yet) looks to be bigger than that of UBFunkeys or the others.

Secondly, it skews older. The toy states "6 and up", but you look at the boys in the video on the site (whom I presume are representative of the target customer), and they look 10-13-ish. Now we are heading into the demographic that competes with (tongue firmly in cheek) 'real games'.

Playable instruments in Lord of the Rings MMO

Alice pointed out that Lord of the Rings Online has playable instruments, and that as a result, people are doing awesome ingame music (original, covers, multi-player jam sessions, etc).

Wow. Cool. Way to go Turbine.

Searching youtube for 'LOTRO music' yields plenty of good examples. Here's one.

Full Throttle Intro

Still remains one of my all time fave game intros. Kotaku linked to it today.

Youtube is awesome, as are the Kotaku-ites. Remember when Lucasarts wasawesome?

MMO Spam

An interesting piece of spam got through the mail filter today. Most of it was in Korean, but from what I could tell, it was for a dating service/site that runs *within* Ragnarok Online, the Korean MMO.

Not the worst idea I've heard of, I guess.

And hey, if they were running it within one of Shanda's MMO's, you might even be able to hook up with someone of the desired gender!

The $6B dollar casual game

What casual game is:

• a 'clone' of its predecessors (as opposed to 'original and innovative')?
• in its current incarnation, invented by Edwin Lowe, same guy that invented Yahtzee?
• in itself a $6B industry?

I am of course talking about Bingo!

Some time ago, I posted about a couple casual-game related documentaries I'd seen: Word Wars (about Scrabble and its enthusiast/pro communities) and Word Play (about the NY Times Crossword and about crossword puzzles in general).

This past weekend, I rented another similar doc called Bingo! The Documentary about, you guessed it, Bingo.

The film looks at the game's history, growth, culture, and the 'business' that has grown around it, from church basement games to 24-7 bingo halls to dedicated Bingo-specific carribean cruises. There are even (and you never thought you'd hear this combination of words) bingo-playing drag queens.

More than anything, it's a backhanded indictment of those that prey upon the poor and the weak, and a stark view of gambling addiction in many of its forms.

I found it to be quite sad at times, and not nearly as well put together as Word Wars, but still a good rent for those interested in gaming in all its forms.

Look ma, I dun got famuss!

I got a bunch of ribbing at work today because Jane put together a top-ten list of gaming blogs and put my name on it, and it got mailed around the office.

Seriously though, some comments on her list:

• As I pointed out in the comment thread, I think the only must-read blogs that I think deserve to be on there that weren't are Raph Koster's (www.raphkoster.com) and Alice Taylors (http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/). I should have also added Jane's site, but she needs to get back to posting a little more often! (hint hint)
• Four of the Ten are Microsoft employees (myself, David Edery, Andre Vrignaud and Dan Cook). This is, I think, itself a statement about the forward-thinking, blogger-friendly culture at MS)
• None of the four are the more 'official' Gamerscore or Major Nelson blogs. Not that those are "fake" or anything, but I thought it worth noting.

There's no such thing as a free lunch

...is what dad used to say.

So if you read my last post, and did your homework, you should have thought of some instances in which games could be given away (maybe DRM free?) and developers/publishers could recoup in some other fashion.

Well, advertising of course is the first thing that springs to mind. It works for part of the music industry, it works for television, and already works for parts of the games industry.

I think another really interesting area of the market to watch is what's happening with kids toys these days is something the industry should watch closely. I've discussed this before, but let's take another look.

It started with Webkinz:

In which the online world is free with purchase of a plush doll.

And now you have UBFunkeys, a comparable model, but the dolls connect via usb.


And Barbiegirls, where it's more like an MMO, since you can actually communicate with other players and the like. The "doll" is also an MP3 player and connects via USB.


Next thought exercise is whether this same model could be extrapolated to 'give away' a big budget single player title or MMO with, say, the purchase of your Mercedes...

More on games learning from music

There were a couple comments and some follow-up posts regarding my comments about the music business. In a follow up email thread with Jane, I added:

One of my favorite comments on the most recent cracks in the music industry's foundations (those exemplified by recent moves by Radiohead, Madonna and others) was made by Seth Godin. In a post entitled "Radiohead and the mediocre middle", I think he really hits it on the head.

Godin makes the point that industries innovate from both ends. Small guys because they have nothing to lose and everything to win. Big guys because they have the bankroll and a fanbase that will follow them. The 'mediocre middle' sits and watches. They are unwilling to jump out of the frypan for fear of the fire. I think this applies to the game industry as well as it does the music industry.

Indies and small casual devs were the first to leap to the digital distribution channels, largely because they had no choice. You also have large developers like Valve (or in the casual space, Popcap), building distribution and other services - building relationships with customers.

As with the music business, I think the last to sense or react to any disruptive shift in the business will be the mid-sized developers who are dependent on the functions traditional publishers provide them, and the traditional publishers, who will be reluctant to abandon any business model that has been lucrative to date.

Jane asks in her post whether there's an equivalent to the "give the music away, make money off the concerts". There is. Can you guess what it is?

First the BNL and Radiohead, then Nine Inch Nails, now Madonna. Oasis and Jamiroquai too.

Seems ditching the labels in favor of direct-to-consumer (or in Madonna's case, signing a very different kind of disty deal) is all the rage the days.

Big labels are getting exactly what the deserve for putting up artificial barriers for too long, and bilking the customer for some time now (phasing out singles, forcing DRM, etc, etc). Sure would suck to be in their shoes, but I have to say I'm enjoying watching their towers crumble from the sidelines.

Game Industry folk: Should we be watching and learning? How long before the torch-n-pitchfork mob finds their next target?

More on the games as platform thing

...so, I picked on Dave, now Dave's rebutting. It's all in good fun, but let's see if we can sum up.

Dave says:

Flight Simulator may possibly be the least well-monetized of all Microsoft entertainment properties, in that it sells to a cult following that goes on to spend hundreds of hours and hundreds of dollars on after-market products not created by or associated with Microsoft. While commercial and volunteer after-market support is absolutely a good thing, there’s no law that says you can’t play a part in it! The entertainment industry has so much to learn about tapping niche markets…

Which I as Dave implying that (a) FS team (and yeah, we all work for MS, I get the irony here) did so out of ignorance (the "has so much to learn" bit) and/or bad decision making ( "no law that says you can't play a part").

I argued:

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.

And Dave retorts:

I hardly need reminding that 3rd party extensions, especially of the user-generated type, can be very good for business, (snip snip snip) You just need to be smart about it.

To which I'll reply: My point exactly. And I beleive that the Flight Sim team, with 10 years in the business and the lions share of the market for flight sims, has been extremely smart about it. I would hazard a guess that they looked long and hard at this and decided for good reasons to play it out they way they did, enabling a third-party market and allowing it to thrive.

To his point about co-opting innovation, they already do that (some of the features added one version to the next were ones that used to require an add-on). To the point about helping them advertise, they already do that as well. So Dave's only idea that isn't already being implemented by the team is a digital distribution channel. A good idea perhaps, but not feasible until recent history, and certain rife with it's own set of challenges.

Dave wraps by upping my dart of 'ignorant' with a retort of 'intellectually lazy'.

I'll wrap with a "ignorant, yet again dude!". He states "I’m not content to ignore an opportunity" (implying that the FS team was and did?), when I'd assert that they didn't ignore the opportunity at all but rather made a decision about how to approach it sensibly. He then throws out three ideas about how they could capitalize on it, two of which they already do. I suppose he could have found that out on the web but perhaps was too "intellectually lazy" to do so...

Disclaimer: David and I are good friends and have a great deal of respect for one another. We have these debates via our blogs to encourage healthy discussion and to shamelessly boost our traffic. Also, neither of us have discussed any of this with the Flight Sim team, who would deem us both ignorant, lazy and probably call us other words I can't put here, for even having the debate in the first place.

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.

Quote of the day

Yahoo Music's Ian Rogers to music industry execs, clearly stating what the industry as a whole has been feeling, and stating that he's not licensing any more DRM-protected music, period.

I'm here to tell you today that I for one am no longer going to fall into this trap. If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I'm not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I'll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won't let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don't have any more time to give and can't bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life's too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.

If, on the other hand, you've seen the light too, there's a very fun road ahead for us all. Lets get beyond talking about how you get the music and into building context: reasons and ways to experience the music. The opportunity is in the chasm between the way we experience the content and the incredible user-created context of the Web.

By way of illustration (and via exaggeration), in a manner of speaking iTunes is a spreadsheet that plays music. It's context-free. You just paid $10 for that album -- who plays drums? I dunno, WHY DON'T YOU GO TO THE WEB TO FIND OUT, BECAUSE THAT'S WHERE THE CONTEXT IS.

Beautiful!

link. (Gracias, BoingBoing)

Don't know much about History...

In researching some stuff for work, I ended up out in the weeds a bit and came across two fascinating (and unrelated) bits of history that I highly recommend reading.

If they share anything in common, it's an element of 'strange factors and events in history have had ramifications on the way things work today'.

First up:

This Q&A with the author of a book on the history of counterfeiting, which goes quite a bit into the history of currency and banking in this country. Really interesting.

And secondly:

This overview of the Berlin Airlift, a pivotal point early in the cold war, and a logistics effort that would spawn techniques and devices still used in modern manufacturing and shipping today. I can't beleive this was never made into a movie!

Better Chinese Brandnames

Related to my earlier post about Chinese knockoff cars, here's a link to knockoffs of two cars, the Smartcar and the Hummer.

The knockoff of the Hummer is called, and I kid you not, the Dongfeng Crazy Soldier.

Let me be the first to suggest that Hummer's course of action should not be to sue but to license the name.

I've never wanted to own a hummer, but damn if I wouldn't be a target customer for it if it was called the Dongfeng Crazy Soldier!

Riding 'Co'-tales

Yesterday I saw a container truck on the highway and was struck by the company name: Haulmark.

I can't help but think that the brand's name was designed to be a homophone of Hallmark.

If so, was this a good idea?

On the pro side, it certainly works. I'm writing this post, am I not? The name is memorable for this reason.

On the con side, this brand may have been picked at the expense of a better, less clever one. Haulmark doesn't convey what they do, stand for, etc. Also, it's got to be confusing when explaining over the phone ("ok, you can find us on the web at haulmark.com. No, no, H-A-U..."

Knock-offs best of both worlds?

BoingBoing has this post about "MFC" a chinese fast-food chain that is a rip-off and mash-up of both McDonalds and KFC, combining look, feel and menus of both American chains.

It reminded me of this post about the Chinese car manufacturer making a mashup/knockoff of both a Mercedes, and a Chrysler (with a BMW-inspired logo to boot).

It struck me that people discussing these things,and I include myself here, are either struck by the scale of these things ("sure, knock off a Rolex, but a Mercedes?!"), or suprised by the mashup model being applied to something other than media or online businesses.

But why should either of these surprise us?

The scale of the operation to do a Mercedes knockoff should not surprise us when coming from the same folks that built the Three Gorges dam and capped off the Yangtze.

And with regard to the mashup model, well, why should that suprise us either? It's not exactly new here either.I'm sure at some point, someone said "How about we apply Ford's assembly line to Acme's widget manufacturing!".

So I guess what we are finding surprising is the combination of these, the blatant disregard for IP, the unabashed lack of originality, and the speed of progress. Either way it's fun to watch

Author offers free Excel e-book, experiments with biz model

To my post the other day about experimenting with business models, Bill Jelen is offering his e-book on using Excel 2007 for free at a good-enough-for-montor-but-not-for-print resolution. Why?

My goal is to get this version in the hands of 5 million people. You can help by downloading the book and passing it on to your co-workers, etc. Some percentage of people who get the book will buy a print copy or will buy a printable e-book, so I believe that the counter-intuitive strategy of giving the whole book away in one download will work fine.

Kudos. Seems like a cool idea. I hope it works out well.

Thought exercise: Again, what would the game equivalent be? This is different than a trial or demo. This is the full thing, but at low res. If you had a game with high replayability, would this just be the non-HD, low-fi-shaders version?

Friends, "friends", and friends of friends

Facebook announced (by announced, I mean that it popped up on the company blog as a feature in development and the internets pounced on it) this week that they are going to allow grouping of friends. This has been a much-requested feature from people experiencing a little-too-close-for-comfort malaise about the fact that their work and personal lives are intermingling a little too closely.

I have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, it's a good idea. I know of a few people that have told me they've stayed away from Facebook, or use it in a far more limited way, because of this issue. The short version being "I don't need some buddy from high school posting pix of me hurling up a keg of beer on the same page that my clients watch".

On the other hand, I see two major problems with this:

I wonder whether segregation of communities will place a damper on the viral nature of what has made FB such a great application platform. (In some eyes, this may be a good thing).

More significantly, I think they are missing the mark. I think that filtering what feeds go to which friends is sort of a hack for what people really are asking for - in a "that's what I asked for but it's not what I meant I wanted" kind of way...

I think what people really want is the ability to have multiple personas for their single facebook identity. The digital equivalent of "they way I behave at work is not the same as when I am with family nor the same as when I am out at the game with my buddies".

Until someone embraces the personas idea, the rest is just a hack.

When life hands you lemons...

The past few years have seen much boohooing by the music industry as a whole. Meanwhile, a few brave souls are trying their own experiments in the brave new world.

A while back, Barenaked Ladies announced they were selling their latest album at concerts on a USB thumbdrive, with all the tracks unprotected, and asking users to mash them up at will.

This week, Radiohead announced that their latest album would be available for download at whatever price the customer saw fit to pay.

They are brave souls. Sure, the fact that they are already somewhat successful makes the experiments a little less painful should they fail, but it also makes the downside of failure that much larger. Anyhow, I tip my hat to them.

It's interesting that in many ways this is comparable to some early shareware/donationware models for software, including games.

So can we in the games business learn from their lessons, or have we already learned something they aren't aware of?

Long night...

Not one, not two, but all three kids have come down with some kind of bug. All three have been vomiting on and off for the past few hours. Have changed many sheets, have done much laundry, have not done much off my to-do list this evening.

*sigh*. Parenthood.

The most macabre thing I've heard this year...

We have a friend staying with us for a few days who is attending an orthopedic surgeon's conference. We were chatting last night about the layperson's knowledge of medical procedures and anatomy, and how it has improved due to things like the Internet, Wikipedia, etc. He agreed.

I cited the 'Bodies' exhibit as another example. Alisa and I went to see it a number of months back. He said he had ethical issues with the exhibit and I asked why.

"Well, did you notice anything that all the subjects had in common?"

I thought about it, but my wife beat me to the conclusion.

"They're all Chinese"

Oh my. So I checked wikipedia and of course there's a great deal of controversy about the questionable origin of the cadavers used in these exhibits. Here's the money shot right here:

The cadavers were donated for research by the Chinese government, because all the bodies at the time of death allegedly had no close next of kin or immediate families to claim the bodies.

And

Due to the fact that the cadavers featured in the exhibition are Chinese in origin, critics suspect that some or all of the bodies may be those of Chinese political prisoners or Falun Gong practitioners, who may have been subject to arrest and execution without due process, in order to be sold as cadavers

Makes me regret giving them my money, as well as being so ignorant about the issue in the first place.

Metaplace elevator pitch video

There's been a video posted of Raph doing this short version of the metaplace pitch. If you haven't heard about it yet, well, you will.

Cutting through Music Biz BS

This recent Freakonomics Quorum on the Freakonomics blog is the best read I've had on the music business so far this year. Nothing like the lense of economics to dispell the bull that the RIAA and others spew out.

Five people from very different walks of life are asked their opinion on the subject, some of which aren't so good, but a couple are really quite thorough and insightful. Here's the money quote right here:

From Koleman Strumpf (a business economics prof who's written extensively on the subject):


(from a list of other factors contributing to the industry's decline): recorded music has had trouble competing against other products that vie for consumers’ entertainment spending. Consider home video products like the DVD. It does not seem implausible that a good chunk of the $11 billion rise in spending on home video products since 1999 represents foregone CD sales. (Music industry revenues only fell $2 billion over this period.) Entertainment spending was also likely channeled into cell phones and video games, both of which experienced large sales growth and have been particularly popular with the key teen demographic.


From Peter Rojas (founder of Engadget):

The emergence of Napster (the original one) was the wake-up call, but the record industry would be in trouble now even if no one had invented peer-to-peer file sharing.

The fact of the matter is that the majors thrived in an era of inefficiency, when there was value in physically producing and distributing music. There isn’t any value in that any more (or at least, it’s very quickly declining), and there’s no good way for labels to compete given that the cost structure of the business was designed around physical releases

Those being said, it's amazing to see how some of the other opinions come from heads firmly stuck in the sand. Amazing.


I'm extrememly curious to see how the industry fares with iTunes, Walmart and Amazon all offering DRM-free music downloads. If it has a positive effect on the market, maybe the games industry can learn a lesson or two from the music industry and rid ourselves of DRM, as it seems to be one of the factors that is hurting the PC platform in particular.

It's like they put the chocolate RIGHT IN the peanut butter!

When your favorite game reviewer reviews your favorite casual game!

The Escapist's Zero Punctuation reviews Popcap's Peggle:

Casual Science

I was lucky enough to have a visit from Annakaisa Kultima yesterday. She's a game researcher with the University of Tempere in Finland. We'd exchanged some email about her presentation at the Nordic Games conference, where I was surprised to find there were researchers looking specifically at the casual space.

Anyhow, she's got some great ideas, and I'd encourage folks to keep an eye on her work going forward.

Playing Columbine

Danny Ledonne, developer of Super Columbine Massacre RPG, about which there was some controversy last year, has released an extended trailer of his upcoming documentary film 'Playing Columbine'.

He's released it on the anniversary of the school shooting that took place last year at Dawson College in Montreal (where I went to school).

It's *really* good. Pretty good cast of interviewees as well (Jason Della Rocca, Ian Bogost, Greg Costikyan, etc).

Halo 3 Hulabaloo

Yesterday was the craziness around here, what with getting ready for the Halo3 launch around the country at midnight.

We had a launch party for all of the games division with prizes, green beer, cake (Master Chief loves his cake, I guess), army field rations (wtf?), and a free collectors edition of the game (woot!).

I have to admit, I have mixed feelings about the "biggest entertainment launch in history".

On the one hand, I'm all for the hype it brings the platform and the game. Casual gaming be damned, this is our flagship and so by all means, beat the drum. Also, I think the ad campaign with the 'historical' perspective is brilliant.

On the other hand, I just have a hard time beleiving that it's the optimal level of spend. I have to think that with the quality of game being put out, simply putting it on a store shelf quietly would sell two to three million units. A moderate level of marketing would probably get it to four or five. So does another (guessing) $100M justify another 2M units beyond that? I guess so, but its still a little hard to grok. Maybe because I work in a part of the business where teh numbers are usually a little smaller than that :-)

Anyhow, I got my free copy. I then came home and continued my game of Call of Duty 2 :-). Have to finish what I started before I move on to the new stuff!

Oh, and Guy Kawasaki has pix up of the Silicon Valley launch party.

Intolerant buffoons: Shanda bans cross-gender play

OK, this just takes the cake.

(via Kotaku), Shanda has announced that one of their MMOs, King of the World, has chose to disallow, and frozen accounts of men who chose to play female characters in-game. Emphasis below is mine:

Shanda (Nasdaq: SNDA) subsidiary Aurora Technology has frozen game accounts of male players who chose to play female in-game characters in its in-house developed MMORPG King of the World, reports 17173. Aurora stipulates that only female gamers can play female characters in the game, and it requires gamers who chose female characters to prove their biological sex with a webcam, according to the report.

Yeah, this isn't going to be a problem, right? Not to mention that meatspace cross-dressing in order to enable in-game cross-dressing is kind of funny too.
Crazy.

First Amendment Rights... but *who's*?

As discussed over on GamePolitics, the ESA has recently been stepping up it's lobbying efforts, under the leadership of it's new head, Mike Gallagher.

 

Among the issues on which they are lobbying:

 

anti-piracy, Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), P2P file sharing, First sale, Technology Mandates, anti-circumvention (i.e., mod chips), media violence, First Amendment protection, entertainment industry ratings systems, parental control technology, content/video game sale regulation, retailer enforcement of ratings systems, Internet privacy, Internet gambling , a variety of trade issues, Virtual property taxation

 

The ESA like any other lobby group is representing the interests of those that supply their funding. In some cases this is in the interest of the customer (e.g. virtual property taxation), in other cases arguably not (DMCA, anti-piracy, etc).

 

I worry more about those that sound noble but are in fact self serving. Case in point being "First Amendment Protection". I'm guessing this translates far more to "don't ban our AO game from being sold", and not so much to "first amendment rights of users in virtual worlds", for example.

 

So if the ESA's looking out for the game industry, who's looking out for the game consumer? Hmm...

WOOT! Customer Service!

I agree with Marc Andreesen. This is the best customer service letter EVAR!

[Cut and pasted from the WOOT website]

I have received more than three emails from Zune buyers who are upset about Woot dropping the price of the Zune by $20 one month after it went on sale the first time. After reading every one of these emails, or at least scanning their subject lines, I have some observations and conclusions.

First, I need to make a better effort to hide my email address.

Second, I am sure that we are making the correct decision to lower the price of the 30GB Zune from $149.99 to $129.99. This confidence is based on more than the holy doctrine of corporate infallibility. The Zune is a breakthrough product, and we have the chance to “ride the lightning” and “shoot the curl” this holiday season, not to mention “kill the messenger” and “rock the vote”, further enabling us to “pay the rent” and “keep the lights on”. It benefits both Woot and every Zune user (but especially Woot) to drag as many new victims as possible into the Zune “dungeon”. We strongly believe that misery loves company this holiday season.

Third, being in technology for 1+ years, give or take a year, I can attest to the fact that the technology road is bumpy. There is always some idiot changing lanes without signaling, and the potholes never seem to get fixed. If you always wait for the next price cut or to buy the new improved model, you’ll never buy any technology product. I mean, why should you? Truth is, you don’t really need any of this junk. We’re afraid you’ll catch on to that fact and overpaid frauds like me will have to go back into fields like telemarketing and burrito construction. Fortunately, most of you continue to languish in a consumerist stupor, wallets spread wide for us to plunder as we please. The bad news for us is that if you buy products from companies that support them well, you will receive years of useful and satisfying service. But we’re hoping you’ll buy from Woot instead.

Third-and-a-half, even though we are making the right decision to lower the price of the Zune, and even though the technology road is, like, this total Deathrace 2000-type scene, we need to do a better job taking care of our early Zune customers, at least until we find a private security firm we can afford. For some reason, our early customers trusted us. We must live up to that trust with our actions in moments like these, lest you turn off the money spigot that maintains our decadent lifestyles. These peacock-egg omelets and mink-lined Jacuzzis don’t pay for themselves, you know.

Therefore, we have decided to offer every Woot customer who purchased a Zune from us on August 22, 2007... a $10 Woot credit towards any Woot order of $40 or more... We make this decision with every confidence that most of you will never want any of the crap we sell anyway.

We want to convincingly pretend to do the right thing for our valued Zune customers. We’d apologize for disappointing some of you, but we long ago lost the capacity for sincere remorse. We will continue to do our best to trick you into having high expectations of Woot.

Areae Opens the Kimono

Of course, after the cryptic note in my last post, sure enough Areae has spilled the beans.

That's the 'Level 3' gaming platform I alluded to. I've seen it in action and it is going to *significantly* shake up the landscape.

Congrats to Raph, John, and the rest of the gang there. Now get to beta!

Internet Software Platforms Explained

This lengthy but well thought out explanation of 'Internet Platforms' by Marc Andreesen is a must-read. I mean it. If you are only going to read one thing all week, well, stop reading this post and go read his. It does a great job of explaining the present and future of application development for the Internet, as well as explaining just what all the hullabaloo regarding the Facebook platform. The latter being what he calls 'The first level 2 platform' of the 3 levels he describes.

 

Really smart and thought provoking stuff. Profound.

 

Here's the short version as I summarize it (I still recommend reading it, this is partly a summarization exercise for my own benefit):

 

Level 1: Applications can call an API from a web service, get data and use it in their apps. (e.g. An app at 'mygeopixwidget.com' pulls map data from Google Maps and pix from flickr, mashes them up and serves them up on their web page). Got it? Data goes FROM the service TO the app.

 

Level 2: Applications can plug themselves INTO a platform. (e.g. an app at mygeopixwidget.com pulls the same data as above, but then the app is accessed and appears within the platform's UI, such as getting served up on someone's Facebook page). The data may likely go from the service to the app, as above, app does some operation on it, but then the result goes BACK INTO the service and gets served up there.

 

Limiting factor in level 2 is that the operation on that data occurs on compute cycles that the app developer runs. If they can't scale or their servers go down or whatever, then the app breaks, and the negative result looks like the fault of the platform provider. (Great example here being all the "oops we're choking"-esque messages I get on Scrabulous as of late).

 

Level 3: You've probably guessed level 3 by now, right? The compute occurs on the platforms cycles, and the app developer just uploads their code to their servers.

 

Level 3 is a huge undertaking for the platform provider (allowing for others to upload code that you haven't vetted to run on your mips and storage), but the result is that the dev cost for providers drops to near-zero. Just as Level 2 apps are an order of magnitude cheaper to write than level 1, Level 3 apps will be an order of magnitude cheaper than level 2.

 

Marc's post goes into a great deal of detail about examples of Level 3 platforms in the making. He names Second Life as an example, but I think he's mistaken. I don't beleive 3rd party apps can call into and retreive the data from their apps, can they? I don't know that much about the SL 'dev environment'). He misses one example I know of (but am under NDA and thus can't speak of)... and it's a game platform :-)

Will the casual games business get 'Coked out'?

Last year, I got some grief for comparing Casual Games to fruit flies.

 

Meanwhile, King Ludic compares the casual games industry to the cocaine industry.

 

It's not a bad analogy, actually. At least as far as his point about the developer, like the poor coca farmer, making a minority of the take as the bulk of money is divvied up amongst those that comprise the distribution chain that brings the product to the customer.

 

This line, as well, was particularly astute:

...the gold rush mentality of casual games will collapse as the market stops growing as fast as the influx of commodified games

 

Where he falls down however, is in his prediction about the market at some point getting 'coked out' and petering out as a result.

 

Last I checked, the cocaine industry was still clocking along.

 

I leave it to the reader to draw their own conclusions :-)

Zero Punctuation sets sights on Lara

The latest Zero Punctuation goes after Tomb Raider Anniversary. Funny stuff.

Braid for XBLA Announced - YAY!

I've had to keep tight-lipped about this for a while, but Braid got announced for XBLA.

The post about it on GameSetWatch has a good comment thread by Jon (the developer) and Simon (of GameDev mag and IGF) on some of the issues around indie games and the IGF.

I'm really excited to play the final version. Braid is one of the few games that I've played in a long time that has REALLY made my brain hurt!

Shame on me!

I was digitally spanked by many friends for my post on not attending Richard Garriot's charity benefit while at Austin GDC.

Having read Warren Spector's summary of the evening, I really regret it. Am now donning hair-shirt and smacking myself in the head Monty-Python-style.

Bad Kim! Bad!

Calling out the Copyright Alliance

I've linked to the Patry Copyright blog before, the blog of Google's chief copyright counsel. It's amazingly verbose and dense, but there is some fantastic insight to be found fairly regularly.

Anyhow, I *loved* this post entitled "Copyright is always government intervention", in which he cuts through the thick rhetoric of the Copyright Alliance, a lobbying organization funded by the RIAA, MPAA, and long list of others.

The whole post is a good read, but here's a couple choice pieces if you want the short version:

If one has been around long enough, one has seen a great many such groups as well as efforts to equate “respect” for copyright with a high level of rights. The copyright to which one asked to respect is of a special kind, though. It is limited to strong enforcement of content owners’ rights as well as agreement with content owners’ expansive interpretations of those provisions. And, it includes a promise to “prevent diminishment” of rights, as the Copyright Alliance put it. Respect for copyright is thus narrowly regarded and unidirectional: ever expanding rights and greater penalties.

and on a quote from the CA's head, Patrick Ross (in which Ross was lobbying AGAINST government intervention to allow consumer electronics devices to work well together, per a lobbying effort from the CEA):

Mr. Ross qualified his dislike of government intervention to “this case,” but it is hard to believe that even he believes what he said, namely that it is government intervention that is the source of the faults he sees. Content owners, after all have been the biggest advocates of government intervention against consumers: When the RIAA wanted government dictated standards for DAT tapes, it got them in the 1992 AHRA. When content owners en masse wanted them for the Internet, they got them big-time in the DMCA. When the RIAA wanted immunity for trashing your hard-drive in searching for P2P downloads, it didn’t hesitate to call in the feds. When MPAA wanted to give theater owners immunity from state law prosecution for hunting out and seizing camcorders from theater viewers, it got a federal law passed. The MPAA, as I recently noted, wants the federal government to pay for Customs Service dogs to sniff your luggage and car for DVD. If these are not acts of government intervention, I don’t know what is.

And finally:

Digital Freedom’s proposals, for example, are principally for amendment to the highly interventionist DMCA provisions: how can amendments to interventionist provisions be objected to as interventionist? Lets skip the flatulent rhetoric about government intervention and get down to the real issue: finding the policy that does the most good for the most people; and when we do we’ll be thankful to have the government intervene.

Amen!

Re-jiggin' your brain

Two unrelated, brain-related articles popped in my feed over the past couple days:

Andre points us to an article highlighting some research that says that Liberal and Conservative brains are wired differently. (Ok, hold that thought)

Meanwhile, I was pointed to this article about a gentleman by the name of Tony Gelf who recently broke the record for sleep deprivation by staying awake for 11 consecutive days and nights. He's a researcher on the subject and did it to promote his book about his theory that involves a meat-free diet and more interestingly, a technique of alternating between left- and right-brain-focused activities. He claims that when one side of the brain is engaged, the other can recharge itself, much as it does when sleeping.

Some thoughts that occurred to me after reading both:

• Does this mean that Liberals and Conservatives would fare differently in sleep-deprived scenarios? I can't imagine that being president allows for a consistent eight hours per night. We should take this into account when voting!
• While I've actually being trying to get MORE sleep (I consistently used to get less than 5 hrs, but have been trying to force myself to get more lately), could the whole alternate-between-left-and-right-brain-activities thing still be beneficial if true? Good way to recharge batteries maybe?

Metal Mouth

Oh yeah, I got braces today too.

I look something like this (only with lips):

How My Closet Metrosexual Killed My Inner Geek

I have a few things to blog about Austin GDC, but in the meantime, here's a short one.

The evening I arrived at AGDC, I got a call from a friend inviting me to the a charity benefit happening that evening.

She said that it was being held at Richard Garriot's house, which has some big geek appeal. She also said that others already at the event had reported that it was being held outdoors, and that because of recent rains, it was a mudpit.

Inner Geek: "OMG! Brittania Manor!

Closet Metrosexual: "I dunno. These leather shoes I'm wearing are new."

IG: "It's an immitation English castle!"

CM: "These are real Italian leather."

Anyhow, I didn't end up going, so I guess you can figure out who won.

She swallowed the spider to catch the HDMI...

...or 'the latest on my consumer electronics binge'.

I'm a little behind on blogging as I was at Austin GDC all week, but right before leaving I had a little consumer electronics binge, which I fear may lead to more binging.

Last weekend, before leaving for AGDC, the fifteen(!) year old projector that came with my house, died. Woohoo! I'd been awaiting it's death to justify the upgrade to HD, but couldn't justify it when there was a working old school projector still in place.

Anyhow, it died, and the next day I was off to buy a replacement. I ended up buying the very affordable Optoma HD70. There are a ton of specs I could list off, but the most relevant vs the old projector is it's weight: 5.6 pounds, vs the 115 pounds of it's predecessor. Here they are for comparison:

Let me tell you, that was not easy to take down off the ceiling!

Anyhow, this has lead to a series of tasks, upgrades, and other projects:

• Projector was $900
• Spider Mount: $100
• Solder, connectors, wire to build adapter for 12v relay to lower projectors screen: $15
• $300 for the 22" LCD that Alisa saw at Circuit City and wanted for the bedroom

Still to do:

• VGA, HDMI, S-Video cables from receiver to projector (right now it's component only, I want all the cables working).
• Fish cables through walls & ceiling
• putty & paint ceiling (projector had to mount a couple feet back from where the old one was)
• Current receiver supports component out, but doesn't upscale. New receiver?

Sigh... what a tangled web we weave when we upgrade to HD...

On the positive side, My Xbox360 is finally looking it's best. Bunch of games that I considered unplayable at SD are now on the to-do list (Dead Rising, Wik, Oblivion...)

Tidbits from around the blogosphere...

Pressed for time (long weekend or no!), here are a few things that caught my eye this week:

• Google Earth has a flight sim easter egg. Like many, I thought "Steve.... what are you up to?", but he claims "nuffin!". (My first thought is that this is just like any other Christensen effect thing - Those that sell flight sims (like MS) just have to stay far enough ahead of free to justify the money.
• This story of the boorish behavior of one exec director of the "video game expo" at PAX (VGE seems to want to compete with them and was attending to poach talent and gather intel) is very funny. Good luck with your event there buddy.
• Ubisoft seems to be dipping their toe in the water with free, ad-supported full PC games. A few of the casual folks have been trying their hand at this, but this is the first I've seen it for full retail titles like Far Cry. Curious to see how it turns out (i.e. if you see more games showing up --> it went well!)
• There's been some fallout about the ESRB changing the rating on Manhunt 2 (from AO to M) and their not wanting to disclose what changed in the game or the rating of it. Sounds like the ESRB is rapidly turning into the MPAA. Now more than ever, I want to see this film.
• The 'shrimponomics' post on Freakonomics is required reading. First, read this one. Now answer the question, and only then (spoiler) read this one. The exercise, now that you've completed shrimponomics, is to think about how this applies to your company (i.e. in my case, game-o-nomics, console-o-nomics, and Redmond-o-nomics :-)
• Maven and her friends: The state of AI on a host of classic games (connect-4, Scrabble...)

Passed on Pax (again)

Another Pax goes by, and I didn't make it down again. Shame on me! It's in my back yard, too.

Anyhow, while I didn't make it, I sure am glad for the folks it brings to town. Drinks with folks a couple nights ago, and then today I got a note that Clint was in town to demo his game at Pax, so I hooked up with him and Chris Butcher for drinks and more interesting conversation.

Talking big-budget games certainly is a different conversation from the indie-related conversation of the other night. I can't really go into what was discussed, but it's just interesting how many different "spheres of perspective" there can be in this industry of ours.

Anyhow, on Pax, next year I'll attend! Promise!

Zero Punctuation reviews Psychonauts

Bravo! Even better than the last one, and it's bitter and profane WHILE being a *good* review!

Yeah, and for those of you that still haven't bought and played it, shame on you! Go do it now. You can get it cheap and the Xbox version is backward compatible on 360.

Link

The Wii and The Unhandy Valley

With Pax in town, I went into the city last night and hooked up with Jane, Casey, Andre and some other folks for good ol' geeky conversation.

A particularly entertaining piece of the evening for me was watching (sometimes facilitating, sometimes instigating) an argument between Casey and a guy (forget his name) from Nintendo, about the Wii and more specifically about it's controller.

Casey was expressing a complaint about the Wii controller that he was having trouble articulating. His point was that while it may sense motion, and that may be useful, he was dissatisfied with it because it didn't do what it *promised*.

As of late, I've been finding myself often, in discussions with coworkers, developers, other industry folk, coming back to this point about what it is that you promise the customer. It's a kind of very high-standard, high-level litmus test that you can apply to any product offering you are working on and see if it passes a straight-face test.

Anyhoo.

Casey's point was that Nintendo was directly or indirectly promising something with the Wii controller that ultimately it didn't deliver. That users expect it to sense position AND motion, but because it's only the latter, then have to get 'trained' on the device. Wii tennis, while fun, has that moment for everyone where they say "oh, I get it, it's not really like a racquet".

Further underlining the point, I added that in Wii sports baseball, it expects motion, not position, and thus bunting isn't an option. I can't just hold up the bat in the right place and let the ball hit IT.

The Nintendo guy couldn't quite grok why this was an issue, which is when I made what I think is a clever analogy:

Similarly to how there is an "uncanny valley" that refers to how, as artificial representations of humans illicit an aversive response as the approach - but don't reach - realism; I beleive there is an "unhandy valley" that occurs as methods of input to a simulation approach their real-life equivalents - but don't quite reach it.

Anyone who's tried any of the VR simulations of the past decade can attest to this, only most of those are disconnected enough that they don't approach the valley. I think the Wii controller gets near enough (or to Casey's point, sets the expectation that it gets near enough) that people have this disconnect on their first try with it.

Now, don't get me wrong, the Wii and Wii sports is good ol' fun. But there is that training step, and within it, a little bit of disappointment that it wasn't really magic after all.

I do wonder, as these types of controllers improve (position + motion, lower latency, higher precision, etc, etc), will consumers grow more enthralled with them... or will we find that the valley runs deep and wide?

ZOMG! Best game review EVAR!

Thanks to Ozymandias for the link to the Escapist new video feature, Zero Punctuation. This episode's review is of the Heavenly Sword PS3 demo, and it is the funniest thing I've seen in ages. Must see.