iPhone Odds and Oddities

Seems the blogosphere's abuzz with the imminent release of the iPhone. The hands-down coolest thing I've seen on this is that one of the internet betting sites has published odds for a bunch of iPhone release possibilities. A few examples:

Consumers are reported camping out waiting for an iPhone—3/1
Initial iPhones get recalled—30/1
iPhone sells at least 12 Million units in 2008—5/6
Apple’s stock jumps at least 10% in value in regards to the price on 6/30/07—1/2
Consumers pay at least three times the original price ($1,500) on ebay—2/1
The screen breaks/cracks like Apple’s first-generation nano (iPod)—150/1
There are mass reports of the battery life being less than the promised 8 hours—10/1
Someone is trampled while trying to get an iPhone—20/1
iPhone spontaneously combusts—150/1

Mass reports of battery life issues occur with EVERYTHING THAT HAS A BATTERY, so I'd give this one more like 1/10 :-)

No odds on Steve Jobs saying "BOOM!" during the release event.

Gaming Blogs of the Fairer Sex

It may just be proportional to the growth of the blogosphere, but I've noted a fair number of gaming blogs by and for the fairer sex. These have certainly been around a while (I've been a reader of Jane's site for a while, for example), but there do seem to be more of them cropping up.

My list of feeds includes:
Feminist Gamers (along with the associated Cerise 'zine)
GameGirlz (go Canada!)
New Game Plus
Heroine Next Door
Guilded Lillies

Just to name a few examples.

Anyhow, a new one came to my attention, Girl in the Machine. And with reviews/editorials like this one of Super Princess Peach, and posts with titles like Lara Croft's Ten Year Mam Jam, I have a new favorite feminist gamer blog!

Farming Gold on a Pauper's Margins

An interesting article by Daniel Terdiman (via Alice), in which he interviews Brock Pierce, CEO of Affinity Media, who used to own IGE, the pioneer firm in the area of barter and trade of virtual items.

Business is down, it seems, as pressure from competition, mainly Chinese, willing to live of thinner margins. The money quote:

...as Chinese competitors get more and more sophisticated, they are also willing to accept less and less profit margin. And that means, "they're perfectly happy to accept $20,000 in profit on $2 million of revenue." That, for all you out there without a calculator, is a 1 percent profit margin...

While I'm not surprised that the margins are thin, and that the pioneer in the area is being squeezed out, I *am* surprised that the 'living of 1% margins' idea goes unquestioned (not just in Daniel's article, but in general), when it's a Chinese competitor in question.

Is it feasible? Perhaps, but it often seems to go unquestioned.

Let's take this example. If indeed companies are selling $2M worth of virtual items & currency at only 1% over what it cost them, what other possibilities might exist?

• These competitors may actually be vertically integrated. These might be gold farmers (organizationally, a gold farming factory/sweatshop) that are looking to cut out the middleman. That 1% profit might be over the 5% they had to give up to a middleman in the past.
• They may be living off the float. Not sure what the turn-around time is on cutting checks to sellers, but with enough capital coming through, they could put that money to work during the month it takes them to pay someone.
• Trade off currency exchange rates between China & US.

I don't know that any of these is the case, of course. But it stands to reason that if they are only making one point off of it, there's something else helping pay the bills, cheap overhead or not.

A clear sign that games are getting too big

...is that they are building in features so that you don't have to play them.

Whaaa? Huh? Come again?

Recently, I'be been playing Forza 2. Great racing sim. Best I've played in a while, hands-down. My only complaint is that it's TOO BIG. Working my way through the career progression was taking forever, but I wanted to do it (a) for acheivements/gamerscore, and more importantly (b) to unlock all the cars and tracks. I want to see how the AC 427 Cobra drives compared to the one I used to own, and I want to race places like Nuremburg (sp?).

So I was surprised to find that at the start of a race, one thing you can do is HIRE A DRIVER! That driver will then go race for you and generally, will win. So I've been playing the game, but before I sign off, I'll pick one more race and let my Xbox go play by itself for 20 minutes, up-leveling me a little bit.

Now today, I read over on buttonmashing that discusses EA's "Sim to complete" feature in NCAA 2008. You basically can fast-forward ahead during a game, having the AI play for you, and jump in at the tail end of the game.

It's interesting that in the effort to justify big budget games, 'hours of gameplay' has become this metric that's frequently used, but is not necesarily what ALL consumers want. Some, like me, want the quality without requiring the quantity. I loved that the last Tomb Raider took me like 10-12 hours to complete. I've put off playing Oblivion because I hear it's great but takes >50 hours to play.

Building in of these features is kind of recognition that to some gamers, less is definitely more.

Over-criminalizing copyright

I'm giving yet another link to the amazingly-verbose-yet-worth-reading Patry Copyright Blog. This one to a post entitled "over-criminalizing copyright".

Short version goes like this:

He, and an English judge and copyright scholar, agree on the following: Copyright infringement is being treated as a crime, and therefore prosecuted using taxpayer dollars. This is unnecesary, since adequate civil remedies exist. Criminal proceedings should be reserved for large commercial piracy enterprises and the like.

In short, if the RIAA wants to sue teens, they should do it on their dime. Just because it's rampant and difficult for them to sue them all doesn't mean their mom and dads should have to foot the bill for it with their tax dollars.

He closes citing NBC/Universal's general counsel on their efforts to lobby the gov't for stricter IP enforcement and prosecution as an example.

It's interesting that many of these straightforward arguments get lost in the rhetoric that the special interest groups and their lobbyists throw around.

And now, a word from our sponsors...

I'm selling out. I'm putting up ads.

Not that I really think I can sell out for an significant amount of coin, but I want to play around a bit with the consumer-side of adsense and some of it's competitors, so I'm trying a couple things for a few months and I'll see how they pan out. I'll share results (if any) here at that time.

The first thing is putting an ad block on my blog. I'm using text ad links and as you can see (at right, under 'sponsors') they have yet to populate the feed. We'll see whether anything comes of it. Proceeds from these ads, if any, will go to my yearly contribution to the EFF. Ads won't be a big part of the blog and the blog will continue to deliver the miniscule value that it does by entertaining readers via my pedantic banter about games, kids, and my cat, etc. It'll also serve as the yardstick for the other thing I'm doing.

The second thing I'm trying is a little more interesting, IMHO. Inspired by this Seth Godin post, I created another blog, with a very narrow focus. It'll get one post a day, and that's it. You can find it at www.gamebizvideo.com. Proceeds from the ads on this site (again, should there be any), will be used to market the blog itself. I want to see whether niche content + shoestring bootstrapping can work. Again, I'll share results here.

That is all, we now return you to regularly scheduled programming.

Can casual games industry draft behind poker?

Last month, I blogged about the Poker Players Alliance group that was trying to lobby for changes to gambling law to recognize games of skill as being just that, skill based, and therefore not under the umbrella of 'gambling'.

Today Kotaku points out that a resolution has been introduced into congress to tackle the subject.

The resolution can be found in full here.

Kotaku reads this as being relevant to MMO's, but it's clearly relevant to ALL games. The opening paragraphs of the bill reference Bridge and Mahjong, for example. Skill-gaming business models are currently a viable business model for casual games as well as core games like FPS games and the like. One of the reasons the model has been limited is that it's currently an 'arms length' business model, since many still see it as gambling.

Think about it. When you tell mom you are bringing home your new fiancee, and he/she is a professional poker player, what's mom's reaction? Now change that to professional chess player. You imagined a different reaction, no? Poker has come a long way in terms of public perception, though it still has some air of vice around it.

A societies laws reflect it's values, and vice versa, though generally the laws lag when the values change. If something like this were to become law, it merely reflects the fact that people are open to the idea of games of skill being something that can be an arena for fair competition.

I for one, look forward to watching ESPN's Celebrity Zuma Championship.

Don't get me started about henchmen

...has got to be my favorite line from Austin's book, Soon I Will Be Invincible, which I just finished yesterday. I really enjoyed it.

I'm not quite sure what to compare it with, but if you enjoyed the depth that something like Watchmen added to the comic superhero genre, then you'll enjoy the book, as it goes that much deeper.

The heroes and villains are richly portrayed, and I enjoyed the way many of them have disdain or envy of one another's powers or backgrounds (science-camp vs magic, born-with vs self-induced, etc).

I highly recommend!

Mocking Magritte

A threadless design I'd missed out on just got reprinted and I got mine in the mail today. Score!

Wacka Wacka Redux

Got around to playing Pac Man Championship Edition on Xbox Live Arcade tonight.

It's really quite good. Like most of the reviews are saying, it should have been called something else. Pac Man 2 perhaps. Anyhow, it's good. Check it out.

On Cathedrals, Copyright, and the Courts

Seems Sony's latest source of grief has been the Church of England getting miffed bout Manchester Cathedral being used as a locale in the PS3 title, Resistance.

The church threatening Sony with legal action, and Sony, staying true to the title's name, is resisting.

The subject seems frivolous at first glance, does it not? Games are art. The church is a building open to the public. Lighten up, folks in tall hats!

Now is the time you ask whether to take the blue pill, and keep on thinking that way; or take the red pill, and see just how far the entangled legal rabbit hole you want to go?

William Patry, who is Google's senior copyright counsel and maintains an awesome blog, has a great post on the subject.

Amongst the various facts at play here:

• Architecture is a creative work and therefore copied under copyright.
• Most copyright laws take this into account and allow for things like taking a picture in a public place where you might happen to get a building in the shot.
• The INSIDE of buildings is another story
• The laws are different in the UK and the US, and the game was made in the US but the 'source material' in this case is in the UK. The game is also sold there.
• When the building was built is also an issue, and while this church is quite old, it underwent some renovation more recently.

Crazy.

Anyhow, it's very relevant to anyone making games that may hope to include real-world environments. Go read it.

The pitter patter of little Twitters

Unless you've been on the moon, passed out in a Opium den, or otherwise incapacitated and off the grid, you've probably heard about Twitter, Jaiku, or a number of other similar start-up services.

Labelled 'micro-blogging' apps by some, 'group IM' or 'push messaging' by others, these apps let you build/join social networks and then post little tidbits of your life to them.

I'm torn. For things like conferences, where you may have a network of people sitting in conflicting sessions, trying to hook up for dinners/parties, etc, these seem like a killer app. For the rest of my life they seem like self-induced info-pollution.

Anyhow, if you are curious, this March post by Danah Boyd (inspired by use of Dodgeball and Twitter at SXSW) is a great piece on the topic, discussing pros & cons, and giving some fascinating perspective of the use of these apps (and social tech in general) by teens. A sampling:

"The biggest challenge with teens is that they do not have all-you-can-eat phone plans. Over and over, the topic of number of text messages in one’s plan comes up. And my favorite pissed off bullying act that teens do involves ganging up to collectively spam someone so that they’ll go over their limit and get into trouble with their parents"

One for the ladies?

Silverjet airlines in the UK is attempting to differentiate themselves by having at least one ladies-only restroom per plane. Nice differentiator.

This ad talking about it, while catchy, I think misses the mark of it's target audience.

At least I think so. I think I'll go watch it a few more times to decide...

Besting BestBuy, Outgeeking the Geek Squad

I have a personality flaw. Well, I'm sure many would argue more than one, but one in particular that is pertinent to this post. The flaw is that I, when dealing with people like sales clerks or customer service personal at technology companies or stores, am a snob. That is to say that I walk into an interaction with them, I come in with a prejudice that I know more than they do, and that if they were moderately competent, they'd have a better job. I know it's wrong, but I often feel this way.

It doesn't help that I am occasionally right. This is one of those instances.

A while ago, my wife's laptop started acting up. Slowing down, the fan spinning up into some high-power, high-heat state, becoming unresponsive, blue-screening. My first thought was a virus, my second was poor ventilation.

Virus scan showed nothing. Taking the laptop apart revealed a mountain of cat hair clogging up the heatsink/vents. That was easy enough to fix, but didn't help fix the problem. I figure a clean windows install is in order. However, the thing had degraded to the point of not even booting, so I can't get to where I can back up files (and we are looonng overdue for backup).

Needing to get some kind of bootable external drive going, I put the project on hold. Wife grows impatient, takes laptop to the geeksquad at Best buy.

They have it a week, I have to speak to them numerous times on the phone ("yes, I tried that. No, we don't want you to do that."). At the end of the week, they say they can't recover the data and can't help us. Thanks.

I go pick up the laptop, and the guy gives me back the wrong power supply for it. I tell him so, and he says he's sure it's the one my wife brought in.

It was. I realize she brought the wrong one in (for my laptop, also a toshiba). This means the geeksquad guys spent a max of 60 minutes on the machine, running it on battery until the battery died, and then gave up when they couldn't figure out why it wouldn't power up.

*sigh*

Long story short, I bought a hard drive, swapped it into the laptop, did a fresh Vista install, and bought an external USB drive enclosure for the old hard drive, plugged it in, backed up the needed files. All in all it cost me $140 and a few hours of my time, vs Bestbuy who would have charged me about $300 for the same work, but instead charged me a 1/2 hr labor.

I do think services like Geeksquad are a good idea. Dollar time, nickel job, and all that. Just don't expect them to do anything that even remotely veers from the well-beaten path.

What's a startup cost these days?

Blogosphere abuzz with Guy Kawasaki's breakdown of his "Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalist, Long Tail, Social Media site" startup.

Total cost: $12,107.09

Go read, discuss amongst your friends...

(I never asked my dad how much he and his cohorts spent on their little post-retirement web startup).

Winds of change

Is it just me, or is this whole "when will games get credit for being an artform?" thing starting to get some traction as of late:

• An article on the subject here includes tidbits like the fact that South Korea drops mandatory military service for those that work in the games industry (because they are contributing to one of Korea's key cultural exports (IGDA site via Raph)
• CNN's got 'Presidential Pong' right there on the homepage. The games equivalent of the editorial cartoon.
• NYT beat them to the same thing a week or two earlier with Food Import Folly, a game about the pressure the FDA is under to try and protect the food supply with an ever growing percentage of imported food and no growth in the manpower to keep it safe.

Strangely, Jack Thompson is silent on the whole thing. And I think that's an accomplishment on it's own! :-)

Its a small world after all...

Adam, a former coworker at Intel, has a great post up about some of his recent work related travels.

We all hear plenty about the shrinking planet, how we're all more interconnected than ever, etc. This drove it home in a really palpable way. A snippet (as background, it's worth pointing out that Adam spent some time in the past working at Los Alamos):

"I had lunch with the local manager. i was thinking about it last night, the fact that in the past 2 years i have spend a significant amount of time in countries previously considered hostile (read: communist). both the last two places my parents would think their kids would never spend time. think about this for a minute: as soon as 1998, we were afraid of having bombs dropped on us from these people. now, i am having lunch in a country peopel used used to get shot at if they left, and now i am having lunch in a building in that country. i spent time building technology to help defend my country from these people.

It comes out during the discussion that the man across the table from me used to work at sarov. sarov is the los alamos of russia. so here we were, literally trying to kill each other 10 years ago (or protect our country from the killing machines of the other place), talking as if it never happened. i think about this again when discussing the mathematics of snowflake generation and modelling the collection on tree leaves when it reaches a critical threshold and falls off, startled when i hear the engineer say 'this is quite beautiful'."

Go read the rest.

Better pray, better not be gay

This says SO much about what is wrong with this country.

The moment I get citizenship, I'm voting for the first gay black atheist woman who enters the race, regardless of party affiliation or platform!

(via Freakonomics blog)

...but then you have to close

When I lived on the east coast, I never got acquainted with pressure washers. Then I moved to the Pacific Northwest and learned that the hundred-plus days of consecutive wet that we call winter (eat your heart out Noah) tends to make lots of things moldy/mildewy/mossy and so a pressure washer becomes standard household equipment.

I went out and bought one this weekend, and now the deck around the pool looks shiny clean.

When shopping for pressure washers, you quickly learn that there are two variables at play, and that they scale more or less linearly: Price, and Pressure (as in output water pressure ) rated in PSI. There's also a gas vs electric question, but I have a hunch that this is a non issue. Small ones are electric, big ones are gas, and that's that.

It only takes a couple minutes using one to figure out that more pressure means that you can hold the diverging spray further away from the work surface, and that this in turn means the spray is wider and you can cover a larger area in less time. Given that more powerful units cost more, there's a pretty clear time-is-money trade-off the buyer is making.

I don't think most people figure this out before buying one. Thus I was pleased when shopping for one this weekend and saw that Loews has all their displays with a uniformly presented rating translation. Something akin to "this pressure washer can clean a _25_ square foot area in 5 minutes.

I have a hunch, however, that they are leaving a bunch of sales on the table. What they should have done was connected the dots for buyers. Determine the size of the average deck or driveway, and then said "This unit will clean the average driveway in 4 hrs".

Customers would have a clear choice then of what their money bought them. "Hmm.... do I want to spend an extra $100 to save 2 hrs every time I do the driveway?"

Never hurts to make the value proposition crystal clear to the customer.

World of LastResortCraft?

Ok, I'm not a WoW player, so I don't understand teh mechanics of how all this stuff works.

However, I was surprised to hear (via Raph) that Blizzard is suing a company doing in-game spamming of their gold-farming services.

Normally, going the legal route is a last resort. It would seem that in an in-game scenario, for a game for which (a) Blizzard write the policies & terms of use, and (b) Blizzard and their partners administer the servers, there'd just be an easier and more effective way.

Resorting to the courts, especially in this case where (as Raph points out) the defendant is a company based in China, seems like a real last-resort type of effort.