04.27.05
Posted in forum archive at 11:17 am by
EA, in conjunction with the film school at USC, is sponsoring a film short contest for people who make movies with the game Sims 2. Sure, the pros are already using the Sims to make shows, but the prizes here are pretty good for us amateurs:
The competition offers prizes for the best movie made with the simulation game’s built-in video creation tools. The grand prize winner will receive either $5,000 or a four-week internship with Maxis Studios at EA’s headquarters in Redwood City, Calif.
Neat stuff. I really expect this kind of storytelling (called machinima by geeks) to take off. No need for actors, expensive sets, restrictive lighting, etc. All the tools are on your PC just waiting to be put together. Now about that time thing… 
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Posted in forum archive at 11:07 am by
Wow, I can’t even work up a decent head of sarcastic surprise on this one: a major label forced promoters to doctor invoices so that the label could overcharge their artists for services.
“I’m sure (rapper) Nelly is not going to be too happy that they were taking money out of his promotion budget to pay for promotions for other artists — money that he had to pay back from his royalties,” Cohen said.
The lawsuit said that when National and Majestic refused to submit fraudulent invoices, Universal fired them and told radio stations not to do business with the promoters.
“They bullied these promoters into submitting false bills,” Cohen said. The suit accuses UMG of racketeering, fraud, trade libel and breach of contract.
When backed into a corner about P2P the record industry always cries “Think of the artists!” The fact is the labels only care about money; they’d sooner cheat their artists out of royalties than sign them to a decent contract.
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04.25.05
Posted in forum archive at 12:44 am by
There will be a facinating book hitting the shelves in the coming months called Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Pop Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter. It goes against all the ‘common sense’ arguments we’ve been hearing for years now – I love it.
But the idea for the book did really start with games, and so as a way of launching the book on the blog, I thought I’d quote from one of my favorite (and one of the oldest) riffs in the book. It’s a little thought experiment that comes near the beginning, trying to get around the traditional prejudice that assumes that reading is invariably “good for you” and that games are mostly a waste of time.
“Imagine an alternate world identical to ours save one techno-historical change: videogames were invented and popularized before books. In this parallel universe, kids have been playing games for centuries—and then these page-bound texts come along and suddenly theyÂ’re all the rage. What would the teachers, and the parents, and the cultural authorities have to say about this frenzy of reading? I suspect it would sound something like this:
Reading books chronically under-stimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying—which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements—books are simply a barren string of words on the page. Only a small portion of the brain devoted to processing written language is activated during reading, while games engage the full range of the sensory and motor cortices.
Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. These new ‘libraries’ that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading activities are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and socially interactive, sitting alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers.
Many children enjoy reading books, of course, and no doubt some of the flights of fancy conveyed by reading have their escapist merits. But for a sizable percentage of the population, books are downright discriminatory. The reading craze of recent years cruelly taunts the 10 million Americans who suffer from dyslexia—a condition didn’t even exist as a condition until printed text came along to stigmatize its sufferers.
But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion—you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. For those of us raised on interactive narratives, this property may seem astonishing. Why would anyone want to embark on an adventure utterly choreographed by another person? But todayÂ’s generation embarks on such adventures millions of times a day. This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though theyÂ’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; itÂ’s a submissive one. The book readers of the younger generation are learning to ‘follow the plot’ instead of learning to lead.”
Good stuff – you can pre-order from Amazon.
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Posted in miscellaneous at 12:38 am by
Everyone seems to be blogging now: even Darth Vader.
Did you ever have one of those days?
It can be challenging to maintain your dignity as a dark tyrannical overlord when the circuitry in your left leg constantly misfires, threatening to send you off on a mad pirouette without notice. It requires a serious effort of will to maintain my poise, the tendrils of my connection to the Force reaching deep into space to feel out my distant quarry and at the same time wrapped around the mechanisms of my own body to keep them working.
I am stretched too thin.
Good stuff. I just hope the writer doesn’t get tired of this stroke of genius. Could this be the advent of blog-as-ongoing-fictional-narrative?
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Posted in forum archive at 12:33 am by
Is a MMOG ever going to take off in the US like it has in South Korea (where game subscriptions measure in the tens of millions as opposed to the hundreds of thousands here)? An eye opening interveiw with one of the developers of Ascheron’s Call explains why it won’t (free registration required):
These are the three general markets in online gaming, as they apply to MMOGs. There are several points to understand about the groups:
* The “Mass Market” is both time and price sensitive. They don’t want to spend a lot of time or money playing online games. These are the folks play online card, puzzle games and The Sims. Right now, they comprise about 75% of the market, but only 5% of the income;
* The “Moderate” gamer is generally not price-sensitive but is time-sensitive; he doesn’t want to be required to spend 20 hours per week just to keep up. These can be typified by the folks playing Counter-Strike and Unreal online. These players are about 15% of both the player base and revenue;
* The “Hardcore” is the group most often playing MMOGs today. They are neither price nor time sensitive; they’ll whatever time and money is necessary to get the game experience they want. They are only about 10% of the total player base, but they are providing about 80% of our income right now;
* Gamers have a hard time justifying climbing up the pyramid to the next level because of their sensitivity to either price or time commitment. That is a prime component in making them separate markets.
To answer the question, then: If you want the “Mass Market” to play more MMOGs, you have to build games to specifically address their needs. To date, no one has done that very well, but it is just a matter of time.
Me? After reading this I would definately say I’m a moderate gamer. I have no problem paying $10-$15 a month for unlimited entertainment. I am, however, very time sensitive (especially now that I’m a dad). I want to be able to jump into a game, spend 30-60 mintues having fun, not being penalized because I can’t make a lengthy commitment (i.e. being a low level character because I don’t have the time to power level), etc.
I’ve got a lot of hope that Guild Wars might be that kind of game. They are going a lot of neat stuff to reward skill and not time played. Time will tell if that will be the first game to truly go big.
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Posted in miscellaneous at 12:25 am by
Couple of great articles came across my blog aggregator this weekend that put the copyright debate into some stark light. The first is an editorial piece:
Since only about 4 per cent of copyrighted works more than 20 years old are commercially available, this locks up 96 per cent of 20th century culture to benefit 4 per cent. The harm to the public is huge, the benefit to authors, tiny. In any other field, the officials responsible would be fired. Not here.
It is as if we had signed an international stupidity pact, one that required us to ignore the evidence, to hand out new rights without asking for the simplest assessment of need. If the stakes were trivial, no one would care. But intellectual property (IP) is important. These are the ground rules of the information society. Mistakes hurt us. They have costs to free speech, competition, innovation, and science. Why are we making them?
To some the answer is obvious: corporate capture of the decision making process. This is a nicely cynical conclusion. But wait. There are economic interests on both sides. The film and music industries are tiny compared the consumer electronics industry. Yet copyright law dances to the tune played by the former, not the latter. Open source software is big business. But the international IP bureaucracies seem to view it as godless communism.
Excellent point – sure there are some works that probably do need to be protected because they are timeless classics who’s value can be derived for a long time. However, there is a vast majority of work that is locked in a legalized amber, frozen by the opt-out copyrighting process and thus off limits.
The second piece, from the excellent Douglas Rushkof, attempts to explain why we’re having this problem now:
Currently, we innovate for patents, and create for copyrights. These are the only ways we have come up with so far to reward innovation. And it eventually requires that some form of artificial protection be enforced. ThatÂ’s because we have an economic reality based on scarcity rather than abundance.
The problem is that we look at books and music the same way we look at oil and food. They are very different, and require different economic models.
Unfortunately he doesn’t go into what those economic models might be. But he has an excellent point – physical goods follow economic models of supply nad demand – if something is scarce but in demand it will cost more than something that either has excess volume and/or no demand. With fast broadband access and P2P applications distribution costs have gone to zero. The backcatalog is (virtually) limitless and always available. There is no scarcity.
So what’s the business model when everyone has access to everything?
I’ll take a shot here: the filtering mechanism.
There is real value in being able to take a vast sea of information and whittling it down to a perfect set for an individual’s taste. The amount of information available online is mind-boggling but Google does a wonderful job at returning a smaller manageable sub-section to help you find what you are looking for.
The same will apply not just to music but to movies in this age of home video production. We have access to terrabytes of information – some of it not worth watching, other stuff not our style, etc. We don’t have time to wade through it to find what we like. The value-add is the filter that allows us to find new and exciting material in a minum amount of clicks.
That’s the economic model. Or is it? Thoughts? Comments?
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04.20.05
Posted in forum archive at 10:50 am by
For the longest time Sony Online (Star Wars Online, Everquest, Planetside, etc) was firmly against the trading of virutal assets – picking up a +5 Sword of Kickass off eBay was a big no-no. In the commentary I’ve been reading this morning the comparison of Sony Online to the RIAA seems apt. They wish to ban online transfer until they can make money on it themselves. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Station Exchange. The Ivory Tower debates just what this means for the soul of man:
This is a bad move for gamers because it breaks the social contract inherent in competition. It may be a good short-term move for SOE in that it will rationalize and decriminalize the problem of virtual property distribution, but there’s strong potential for the cure to be worse than the disease. A gross-level analogy by way of example: Thor and Biff meet on the PvP field of battle. Both are skilled players and both have the same amount of knowledge. Thor, however, in real life is a 50-year old dentist who makes $85,000 a year. Biff is an undergraduate at Generic State U. with $12,000 and counting in student loans. Thor thus has the +5 Sword of Noggin-nocking, while Biff has the +1 Sword of Thrift. Thor wins. Biff quits, and so do others like him. Thor winds up fighting other Thors, losing his advantage and wondering why he forked out the cash. Eventually, the game stratifies by real-world disposable income rather than by talent or interest.
To which comes the reply:
is there really “a” social contract binding MMOs? I’ve always had the impression that there are several, some in direct contradiction with others, and that this is what makes these games more socially complex than, say, sports. The Thor v. Biff example is a case in point, and a classic one. OK, so hapless undergrad Biff adheres to the social contract that says the game is all about leveling to the top by the sweat of your brow (though I have my doubts about that, or why would he quit after a few demoralizing encounters with uber dentists, rather than spending his summer vacation leveling while Thor cleans people’s teeth, and then having the last laugh by selling Thor his +7 Cudgel of Blunt Head Injury for $650?) But maybe Thor adheres to a different contract altogether — the one that says the game is all about high-level PvPing with your guildies, and never mind how you got to the high levels. For that matter, maybe Thor, Biff, and their immediate pals are the only people in the game who feel it’s about any sort of direct competition at all, while everybody else is off merrily crafting, PvMing, and role-playing. Why, then, of all the various social contracts in effect here, do we single out Biff’s as the legitimate one?
Good heady stuff.
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Posted in forum archive at 10:12 am by
Entrepreneurs. Gotta love ‘em. The sure, there are some that are charming, charasmatic risk takers who are the Robin Hood robber barons of the boardroom. And then there are those that are unethical, greedy weasels who do anything to make a buck.
Three San Diego entrepreneurs plan to start a cut-rate outsourcing plant for software development three miles off the coast of Los Angeles aboard a used cruise ship moored in international waters.
Wired with a fat T3 pipe fed by microwave, SeaCode would employ 600 developers – the bulk of them non-U.S. citizens – who could crank out code around the clock at a lower cost and higher rate of efficiency than their American counterparts.
The beauty part (at least according to the proponents) is that business would be booming, the headquarters could change sail wherever business took it, and RnR would be just a half-hour water-taxi ride away. In your neighborhood.
Yikes. Reminds me a little of the climatic battle in Snow Crash. 
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04.19.05
Posted in forum archive at 12:50 pm by
Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails (or Captain Dreamy, as I like to call him) has gone and made his first single available for remixing. It’s a straight ahead port of ‘The Hand That Feeds’ who’s only restriction is that people don’t use it for commercial purposes. It’s getting quite a bit of kudos from people around the blog-sphere, including Boing Boing:
For quite some time I’ve been interested in the idea of allowing you the ability to tinker around with my tracks – to create remixes, experiment, embellish or destroy what’s there. I tried a few years ago to do this in shockwave with very limited results. After spending some quality time sitting in hotel rooms on a press tour, it dawned on me that the technology now exists and is already in the hands of some of you. I got to work experimenting and came up with something I think you’ll enjoy. What I’m giving you in this file is the actual multi-track audio session for “the hand that feeds” in GarageBand format. This is the entire thing bounced over from the actual Pro Tools session we recorded it into. I imported and converted the tracks into AppleLoop format so the size would be reasonable and the tempo flexible.
I wish it was something a little more accessable, like a zip file of individual tracks as wavs or mp3, but it’s still a great and exciting step toward remix culture.
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Posted in forum archive at 12:17 pm by
There were a number of fantastic announcements last week regarding video and I’m only just now beginning to wrap my head around it. I’ll throw out some links here, rapid fire, to get things going.
First off, forget about Al Gore’s new cable channel, Current. It’s supposed to be a network devoted to the young and technically hip. What the article points out is just how cluess the former VP really is. His goal is to have kids all over the country send in clips shot with their cameraphones, portable DV recorders, etc have have people vote on what they want to see. This is the exact opposite of what culture is currently becoming. ‘Pop Culture’ is disinegrating. There will be fewer blockbuster albums and films. Less and less will we find common water cooler discussion topics over television. Entertainment is becoming on demand and personalized. Chances are I’ve got a list of things that really grab me and that its different from your list. I know where to get them when I want them and my free time is probably different than yours. Al Gore wants to take all the niche stuff people are creating and attempt to find the bits that appeal to everybody. What will result is content that is dumbed down, pointless, and devoid of offense to anybody. Just look at network television now. Pick a niche and run with it vice-president.
Second was the Downhill battle announcement of a video publishing and view platform. That, by itself, is nothing new. However, the intent of the parent org, the Participatory Culture Foundation is much more.
We are building a free and open-source desktop television application tentatively known as DTV. Subscribe to a channel and video will download in the background (Channels are RSS feeds, so there’s already dozens of compatible channels out there). When a new video arrives, DTV will let you know. It’s that simple.
And it goes further: you can turn off auto-download for channels that you want to browse– pick things that look interesting and they’ll go into the download queue. To keep disk space under control, TiVO-like caching will expire videos after you’ve watched them to make room for new stuff. Keep anything you like and build a video library. Integrated donating via PayPal lets you support creators directly.
It also provides a nice publishing channel:
RSS and Bittorrent create the opportunity for anyone to make a television channel with full-screen video that can be watched by thousands or millions of people, with no broadcasting costs. Finally, real competition in television and truly independent television becoming the mainstream.
We’re building a video broadcasting tool for your website called ‘Broadcast Machine’. This free web software is built on top of our open-source project Blog Torrent. It makes video publishing with BitTorrent (or http) as simple as attaching a file to an email. You can choose to add extensive metadata. And the channels it creates are RSS feeds, so the standard is open to anyone.
Fantastic stuff and I really wish these guys well. They have proven themselves to be extremely tenatious and excellent organizers. They get the vision of a remix culture. I just worry how their publishing efforts will fare against Google’s newly announced video service.
Google has announced that they will host videos free of charge. With that the whole BitTorrent/reduce bandwidth angle of the Downhill Battle Guys goes out the window. Plus, a submitted video will now be part of the Google ’search-sphere’, an area admittantly bigger than the Downhill Battle field-of-effect. What’s also neat is that they’re using the closed captioning from major network television to index the clips. This is a brilliant ‘hack’ to provide tons of rich information about otherwise problematic video content. How exactly non-closed captioned video will fit with this is still up in the air.
Another bit of brilliance that Google has worked up is allowing for content owners to charge a microfee for the clip to be watched. Not only are the videos indexed but they provide the content makers a chance to make some change. If I was a network head I would be ALL OVER THIS. A network, like NBC, could make their entire catalog of material available and collect cash for the entire bit. Was there a scandalous bit on last night’s Conan O’Brian? Now NBC could collect a fee for all the blog readers who flock to google to try and find video. Last year’s Crossfire Smack Down would have made a fantastic sum for the owner. Single handedly Google has provided the networks another revenue stream that works for the web – one that is sliced and diced to the user’s preferences that they can view in their own time and commercial free.
I just hope they are listening.
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