Shame

I'm not going to do a lot of politics here anymore, but I needed to point to this.

If you haven't served in the military, you may not understand how deeply shameful this is, or how impossible it is that a bunch of reservists did this without direction from some kind of authority.

We need to have our noses rubbed in this, we need to accept that this wasn't a "few bad apples", but the result of policy set at the highest levels and committed in our name. I'm not sure what Cheney's greatest crime was, that he coordinated this, or that he is now doing his utmost to "normalize" it, declare that it was just a successful program to defend the country. On the one hand he says it was all justified, and on the other he states that actually looking at what was done under the banner of National Security will make us less safe.

It would probably make Dick Cheney a great deal less safe. But any physical safety gained at this moral price was an illusion.

This Is Cool

I can't explain it, just click this link and nose around for a bit. Reports of the death of Science Fiction, and the impossibility of "social media" to produce works of artistic or literary merit, are greatly exaggerated.

Poaching

Scott points to an f13 thread in progress about Cryptic recruiting for their upcoming Champions Online beta in the NCSoft-operated forums and mail service for City of Heroes/City of Villains (quick overview; the smoking gun is a PM via CoH/V's forum system from a Cryptic employee inviting the recipient to join the Champions Online beta).

What Scott didn't mention was that Mythic quite openly courted EQ1 guilds, doing so by contacting the first few via email from Mythic employees who knew them from the game, then spreading it by a "you get 5 beta codes to hand out, and on the next cycle each of those people will get 5 beta codes" method. Later we threw it open a bit more, giving codes to anyone who could fake a convincing guild website (and a few real ones that hadn't gotten caught in the earlier net). EQ1 had no mail system, no centralized forums, not even a centralized registry of the guild forums (closest we could get was the EQ Stratics and Vault community pages). We parasitized their community, we did it openly with the intent and result of bringing entire guilds out of EQ and into DAoC en masse, and the only distinction seems to be that we didn't use any in-game or Verant/SOE provided resources to do it.

The thing is, if those resources include in-game mail and centrally hosted forums, most people won't know the email address of their *own* guild leader, never mind those of others. You can't crack the wall and spread through the social networks without using your competitor's own services, because those social links are mostly through them. This is a particularly interesting case, because Cryptic can quite honestly feel they have a prior claim to that community, they built it to begin with (and the tone of the message implies that the sender feels an existing relationship is already in place).

Who owns the community? Is the problem here that Cryptic is using NCSoft's services to infiltrate the CoH/V community, or that NCSoft has such a lock on the infrastructure of that community that it's the only way they *can*?

As a practical matter, NCSoft is probably aggressively searching their forum PM's and closing down accounts that identify themselves as Cryptic employees. Of course, they may not have perfect aim and will probably wind up closing a few that are genuine player-to-player discussions and invitations. Even if they aim perfectly, what is the morality of the followup stages, when genuine players are extending invitations? If NCSoft starts closing down accounts of players for recruiting people into Champions Online, where will everyone's moral outrage be then?

UPDATE: Posted this to that thread.

I'm having a hard time understanding the outrage here. Cryptic is reaching out to the most concentrated nexus of their target market. NCSoft (in partnership with Cryptic) created the most target-rich environment *possible* for Champions Online to go after for beta buzz, every single current player of "Underwear Fetishists Online" games is on one site. And they aren't being sneaky about it, pretending to astroturf their way into extending these invitations, they're just doing it.

The only difference is that NCSoft operates the forums in question, and Cryptic doesn't (anymore). So nobody is ever allowed to try and poach WoW players using the exact same techniques they used against DAoC and EQ1 (and that Mythic used against EQ1 in their turn), because they've morally inoculated themselves against it by putting them all into one site and providing in-game mail (so few people have their guildmate's email addresses)?

Was it immoral for people to talk up Camelot in EQ1 guildchat? Or AoC and WAR in WoW's chat? Or is it only immoral because these are employees of a competitor who openly identify themselves as such? What if it were members of their families? Close personal friends? Guildmates? People who met them once at a fanfest or other convention? How wide must the chinese wall between employee and shill be, before the moral taint no longer attaches?

Or are you just frightened that the community you belong to is about to fission, and this un-named dev gave you a convenient target to unleash teh haet on?

Let NCSoft defend themselves from this. Nobody "owns" the community, or the subscription revenue they provide. Or does Comcast have the right to decide what online games you're allowed to play, and charge the providers for using their pipes to do so? Why should you be allowed to play CoH, if they sign an exclusive with Cryptic?

Why The GOP Should Be Very Afraid

In 2004, 18-20 year olds voted for Kerry by a 3 to 1 margin. This was considered a blip or sampling error, the overall 18-29 demographic was only 5% in Kerry's favor, the youth vote had climbed but only a couple of percent as a proportion of the total voting population (from 14% to 16%). No big deal, right? The kids never vote more than a few points off from the rest of the population, usually they vote the way their parents did.

Except that it wasn't a blip, it was the leading edge of a tsunami, a generational rejection of "movement conservatism" by the kids who had grown up in the world it made. Tuesday, those kids, now 22-24 years old, repeated the process, along with their 18-21 year old contemporaries. Overall the 18-29 year old demographic voted two for one for Obama, and at 18% of the overall vote actually equaled in total number the traditional 800-pound gorilla of politics, the 65+ voters (19%). McCain lost 30-44 narrowly, won 45-64 narrowly, took 65+ by what would normally be considered a wide margin (11%), and got swamped by the kids.

Without the kids, my daughter's generation, Obama might still have won last night, narrowly. He wouldn't have won Ohio, or Virginia, and certainly not North Carolina or Indiana. His victory or loss would have been a repeat of the last 2 cycles, all coming down to a razor-thin margin in Colorado. 2 for 1 in a 18% chunk of the electorate is a 6% swing in the overall popular vote, which Obama took by 6.3% (as of now, according to the AP).

That's putting aside the fact that Obama's campaign was built on those kids. Not just the college-age volunteers that staffed his un-paralleled "ground game", but kids that lobbied their parents to vote for Obama. The narrow margins in 30-64 year olds hide the other demographic Obama did well with: Parents.

"Movement Conservatives" will try and recover from their loss, try to make excuses for it, paint one of their own factions as the source of it. But it's really simple: They lost the kids. They don't want any part of social conservatives telling them who to love, or how. They can see the writing on the wall on environmental issues. They distrust corporations and advertising, so they won't let the "conservative" label be peddled to them like a box of corn flakes. The kids are all right, and solidly rooted in the "reality based community". And that's the whole ball game, in the long run.

The Reagan era is over. The little children shall lead us into this Brave New World.

UPDATE: These guys get it. Keep an eye on that site, if the GOP has a future that isn't inextricably bound with riding the Theocon "social conservative" agenda into irrelevance, that's the kind of place where it will come from. That's a good thing, it won't be good for the Democrats or the country for them to try to encompass the entire political spectrum, as necessary as it may be while the GOP continues to decide whether it would rather be hopelessly corrupt, hopelessly insane, or just hopeless.

How sweet it is

The March Of The Wireheads

Past wireheads and narcotic smoke to the room of fire
No more chasing, no more death, I get so tired
Hieroglyphic girl, laughing eyes of dust
I'll read you with my fingers
You'll understand with needle lip

We'll float, we'll orbit, we'll become
We'll dance at rainbows end
Blue Fire by Darryl Kromm

© Squamish Music/Strange Songs

Welcome to the post-human future. Where science fiction isn't worth reading anymore, because we're soaking in it. The nihilistic dystopian visions of Cyberpunk looked pretty damned atractive to real punks in the 80's. I know, I was there strutting around downtown Seattle in a mowhawk almost a foot tall, purple and blue with (sterling) silver tips (and the required wrap-around mirror-shades). But although our trade was certainly criminal, and many of our tools (earwig tactical radios, ultralights, faraday cage shipping boxes) were high tech at the time, in the end we were just thugs with a technical edge, pursuing our own nihilistic course in a world we were sure would be annihilated. Why graduate High School, the Bomb is coming? Why worry about how many brain cells last night's party burned up, the Bomb is coming? Why worry about whether the condom broke, If AIDS kills you before the Bomb comes, it will be a better death.

My parents talked about how "Duck and Cover" made them grow up in fear. Bullshit, it made them grow up angry, indoctrinated, ready to do whatever they needed to defeat the Red Menace. By my generation, they'd given up on Duck and Cover. They didn't tell us about survival postures, bomb shelters, or evacuation routes. They told us about MAD, and TAPPS, and they told us about the military bases all around our towns and cities. The people who disappeared in a flash would be the lucky ones, those half-cooked or just gene-scrambled for cancer would still be luckier that the survivors, slowly dying off in doomed attempts to keep Snowball Earth human-occupied. That wasn't SciFi, that was what our own government was telling us. Not If, but When, the Bomb falls, it's all over but the tears.

And people wonder why Generation X didn't seem to give a damn about anything. What sane person *would*? In the face of that, getting high until you couldn't tell one day from the next, listening to bands where you couldn't tell one song from the next, and having sex where you didn't know one partner from the next, was a *sane* adjustment. It was the poor fools who acted like they had a future worth building that were the deluded lunatics.

Of course, the lunatics won out.... In 1989, real sanity broke out all over the planet. No more USSR, China opening it's doors to trade, South Africa dropped Apartheid and *didn't* become a genocidal clusterfuck. The force of history was no longer with the forces of nihilism and self-negation. Whoops.

Well, in this post-human future, things are more complicated (for all that some of our political types want to make them simple in the old ways again). And one of those complications is that we're starting to figure out how the brain works. That's good, and it's also bad.

Because one of the easiest ways to figure out is apparently how to give someone an orgasm from electricity. Skip straight past the hook-up, no lubricated fiction or dirty talk required, insert the wire, apply the pulse, and make sure you're wearing your diapers because you're going to need them. Probably better lock the modulator in a time-safe, or check yourself into a nursing home where you can have the euphoric experience of being filled through the nose and drained through the colostomy for the rest of your very happy life.

Someday this technology is going to put every entertainment business out of work. Even the Better Than Life Box would have a hard time competing with the Orgasm Channel.

Not Speechless

Ted seems seems rather stunned over this demonstration of a new method of face animation. Although this certainly represents a significant advance, I'm not so impressed. It's a new method of MoCap for faces, and as such it's going to have the same limitations as traditional MoCap. Chief among them is that the output can only be as good as the input, which means we're going to have to start using professional actors as the basis for our in-game characters.

That's not neccessarily a bad thing, movie license games have been doing it for a while and AAA titles have been using professional voice acting for a while. But it has certain consequences, the biggest is that this is going to mean yet another layer of expense for AAA games, and it's going to mean one more iteration of trying to wow the customer with technology rather than making better games.

It also means that SAG and IATSE are going to insist on negotiating royalties and residuals.

Have you no decency, sir?

This is shameful. The only credential that means anything in this business is shipped titles. MMO developers get none of the traditional and legal rights of creation (nor do game developers in general). Our efforts are treated strictly as "work for hire", and the only place we are given any part of posterity is in the credits list. That credit, and the subsequent inclusion in MobyGames is the defining map of our professional path, and has a direct impact on our future employability.

It's bad enough that the typical resume is filled with cancelled or otherwise unshipped titles, but if it includes years of work on a title that was actually shipped but for which you got no credit, at the very least it means an awkward conversation with interviewers where you have to explain why. Trust me, that conversation can't go well when the explanation centers on trying to explain to a potential new boss why your ex-boss seems to hate you. And it's entirely possible that it simply gets your resume pitched in the sorting process before you even get that far.

It seems petty, and vindictive, and if the article didn't quote Mark himself I'd think it was some officious underling making the decision.

Immersion

GameCareerGuide has a very good article Immersion, focusing on how some very different things have been hung with the label. The site in general is an excellent design theory resource, but I wanted to note this one.

Google Accelerates The End Of VW's

So, everyone is going bug-eyed over Google entering into the Virtual World market with Lively, and how that means virtual worlds are mainstream and the meta-verse is right around the corner.

Nonsense. Call me the dog in the manger, but I've yet to have anyone explain to me how the web's utility is improved by turning it into 3D. What was orderly becomes cluttered, what was easy becomes difficult, what was obvious becomes obscure. There's a market for "Virtual LARPs", there's probably a role for a 3D equivalent of MySpace, and I can see some potential for 3D models of real-world locations and objects as part of a traditional web portal, where that gives an improved presentation (and where that it isn't already being done with Flash). But the "meta-verse" is stillborn if it doesn't actually improve on the presentation and connection of data possible with the 2D web, and in the vast majority of cases, it doesn't.

This isn't 2001. If there's anyone out there that hasn't already tried a VW environment, they probably aren't even theoretically interested. And Second Life's low retention rates would tend to indicate that even those who could be attracted in principle found little to hold them to the actuality.

So, I'm going to offer the exact opposite prediction as everyone else: Lively will not drag the Metaverse-Style VW into the mainstream, it will establish once and for all that it is a niche, of interest only to those who want to LARP Neil Stephenson and Bruce Sterling novels. Some budding amateur 3D modeler/artists will do some really cool things, but they'll use the reputation from that to make money doing something else.

Hi, my name is Dave, and I'm a Gamer

Brian Greene links to Brenda Brathwaite for a little angst about the term "gamer" to describe people who play games.

So what’s the problem with gamer? I guess it has somehow also picked up another demographic - everything bad about teenage boys. Mind you, they’re not actually the average gamer anymore. She is in her mid-thirties and is playing a whole lot of casual games. If we look on the console, he’s also in his mid-thirties, and probably showers.

Gamer feels like a dismissal of a serious pursuit, and our culture puts no weight on the necessity of human play. That omission, that lack of positive spin, bothers me, too.

So, the solution to people not taking games seriously because they're played by "gamers" is to call the players something else? Umm, they're games. People will take them seriously only if we can demonstrate they have social value, and we won't do that by playing with words that we use to discuss them. Nor will we do it by making game-like constructs that are no fun to play, aka "serious games". Trying results in things all too much like those amateur theatricals that gain an audience only of the friends and family of the cast and crew, but worse. Because although an amateur play may be very bad acting, at least it is still a play, while a game that tries to distance itself from "fun" becomes something else, something inherently less than a game.

A game without gamers is nothing, simply a list of rules and assets that sits on the metaphorical shelf. Gameplay, the process of playing, is the emergent result of gamers operating inside the rules of the game and exists in the mind of the gamer. Take the "gamers" out of the equation, and you have nothing. Renaming them is not just an excercise in futility, it is in and of itself destructive of the very things you are trying to elevate.

What is best in life?

For Funcom, not their retention rate or staying power. It's impossible to say exactly what the sales numbers were other than a 1M "sell-in" (shipped boxes) number, but whatever they were, they don't seem to be holding, XFire shows them off 50% on playing time from their peak, anecdotal evidence all leans towards "massively cool to start, but gets old". Apparently in their quest to turn their system up to 11 by going to level 80, they stretched 30 levels worth of content across 60, and it shows.

Funcom has had problems with their launches before, Anarchy Online came out the summer before DAoC, had absolutely awful technical issues (at one point, a bad patch deleted the Windows registry of the unfortunates who got caught by it). They extended their free time, extended it again, and didn't start actually charging customers until one week before Camelot launched. We were very thankful.

Now they've got a problem where they tied the combat system to animation lengths (which looks really cool), but female characters have slower animations while doing the same damage. So starting a female character is effectively a 20% melee penalty, and they are saying it will take weeks to fix because the client controls combat timing.

I can't come up with a neat summation of how many different kinds of mistake they made there without pouring salt in a wound that no doubt already hurts Funcom plenty. All I can say is that these wounds are inarguably self-inflicted.

h/t to Tobold for the link to Classy Gamer

Why I Won't Be Buying Spore

Because SecureROM still sucks big donkey balls.

I'm not rootkitting my own computer with an application that messes up my DVD-R, firewall, anti-virus, etc. The creature creator is cool and all, and Spore is exactly my kind of game, but I refuse to have any part of this.

Will Wright, you're a genuis, one of the few people who can truly claim the title of "Designer God". So why are you letting these mental midgets screw over your fans?

Somebody Had To Do It

Well, it looks like we finally have the first case of a crime spree inarguably inspired by GTA. Some teenaged idiots in Long Island ran around hitting people with sticks, bats, and crowbars, apparently knocking out someone's teeth in the process. They were going to carjack an old lady, but unlike the game, scared motorists lock their doors when you start yelling at them

UPDATE: Later reports indicate that the boys involved did not in fact makes these claims, that the police generated this theory and some of the boys did not deny it. So this is just more of the same old hysteria.

For Sale: One Lifestyle, All Inclusive

There's this guy in Australia who is selling his life on eBay. Not a chance to kill him, but a chance to step into his shoes and take over his life. You get:

LIFESTYLE
Perth, Western Australia
Hobbies
HOUSE
VEHICLES
Car
Motorbike
Jet Ski
Bicycle
OTHER GOOD STUFF
The Spa
Home Entertainment System
TV, DVD Players, DVDs and CDs
Computer Equipment
Cameras
Sofa and Rug
BBQ, Outdoor Setting, Hammock and Outdoor Equipment
HOUSE CONTENTS
FRIENDS
JOB

How much is this really different from what happens when you buy a character in an MMO?

Hyperpolitics

Mark Pesce (one of the inventors of VRML) blogs quite regularly about the social implications of the way we're all connected. He's got an entry up about how "hyperconnectivity" is changing politics:

For the first time, we have a political campaign embracing hyperconnectivity. As is always the case with political campaigns, it is a means to an end. The Obama campaign has built a nationwide social network (using lovely, old-fashioned, human techniques), then activated it to compete in the primaries, dominate in the caucuses, and secure the Democratic nomination. That network is being activated again to win the general election.

Then what? Three months ago, I put this question directly to an Obama field organizer. He paused, as if he’d never given the question any thought, before answering, “I don’t know. I don’t believe anyone’s thought that far ahead.” There are now some statements from candidate Obama about what he’d like to see this network become. They are, of course, noble sentiments. They matter not at all. The mob, now mobilized, will do as it pleases. Obama can lead by example, can encourage or scold as occasion warrants, but he can not control. Not with all the King’s horses and all the King’s men.

I've been thinking for quite a while now that Obama is not so much leading a movement, as he is marching in front of one. One of the big questions is if he can lead it somewhere it won't go on its own.

The verdict appears to be "No". Obama has, for strategic political reasons, chosen to embrace the "Telecom Immunity" of the recent FISA law. The reaction from the "Netroots" has been something other than revolt, but definitely not compliance. They're still going to back him fully for President, but simulataneously they are raising money to extract retribution on the architects of the law and some representative examples of the congressmen who voted for it. Last I checked, they were closing on $500K just for that purpose.

The movement is the people. Obama, or any other candidate, is just its tool, not the embodiment.

Politics as RTS

Scott pointed to this analysis of the presidential elections this cycle as if they were a game of Dawn of War. Although political insiders have long been fond of using sports or poker metaphors for politics, this analysis is a far more accurate reflection of what has actually happened, if you're a gamer. Anyone who has played an RTS but doesn't follow politics is going to understand far more about what happened this year because of this analogical breakdown of the season than they would if any other metaphor were used.

Politics is a complicated game, but it is far more game-like than many other things we've long been comfortable using game metaphors to discuss (business, marketing, careers, etc.).

Oh yes, John McCain. Forgot all about him did you? That’s the story of a three-player FFA. Two opponents go at it for the whole game, only to be run over by the unmolested player. But it’s not such a slam dunk just yet. McCain has spent nearly the entire game without a single serious fight. But he hasn’t expanded aggressively, nor built up troops. In fact, I can’t tell you what exactly he did, but when Obama is making a push for vehicles, and STILL has resource and troop advantages after taking out one of the most formidable RTS players, you did something wrong. I mean, McCain is BARELY getting vehicle out now. That’s unacceptable.

In a gaming metaphor, McCain's been trying to turtle, consolidate his base, but not very effectively. He keeps changing his mind about the layout, and blowing up bits of it at random. Now is when he should be arriving with a horde of units to sweep Obama from the board, but although he's building energy units (raising money) like crazy, his unit count sucks and he's left too many open resource points for Obama to grab. Now, he could be working on a devastating superweapon in a secret location (preparing to "Swift Boat" Obama, or an October Surprise like invading Iran), but if he doesn't start contesting for map control soon, he's going to have a hell of a lot of ground to conquer.

Cloning vs. Stealing

"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery." In the games industry, we're always copying each other's art styles, game mechanics, plots, etc. Especially in the MMO world, where 99% of every game is a grab bag mixture of ideas from other places. All's fair, if we had to tip-toe around trying to avoid using ideas that have been used before, we'd have to wait 17 years for the patents to expire to use them (licensing them for a hit-driven business would not work at all). Games would become a non-viable medium. This effect has been seen in other industries, for example the auto industry refused to put air bags in cars until after the patent ran out, because if they had become a standard, required safety feature, they would have been at the mercy of the patent holder.

But at Richard Cobbett's site I got clued in on something much more blatant. Tere's a game called "Limbo of the Lost", and in this game they solved the content problem by using DirectX Spy utilities to copy every last poly and texture from other games, right down to the last detail. Lots from Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, but also WoW, Unreal Tournement, and others. They shuffled them around, created a completely plotless adventure game in this world of stolen polys, and released it in Europe. As a game, it's pretty bad. But even if it was good, this goes far beyond the "play-alike" efforts to recreate old games like Ultima Lazarus, or the Spring Engine recreation of Total Annihilation.

The difference here is that the company that put it out has a publisher, and both they and the publisher have lawyers. Where a fan-driven rebuild of an abandonware game usually has to fold at the first hint of legal action, these outfits seem to be prepared to go the distance.

On the other hand, this does bolster an argument I've been making for a while: As we approach the plateau of semi-realism, it becomes more and more feasible to re-use art assets. I was thinking creatures and outdoor objects, not entire buildings, and doing it with explicit permission, though.

UPDATE: Richard tells me that the game backgrounds are strictly 2D, screenshots taken from these other games. Although sucking the models and textures out of DirectX is possible, nobody has done that yet.

Jack Thompson Is Still a Poo-Poo Head

Jack Thompson Finally wore out his welcome. Doubtless Thompson will try to flout or push the limits of this action, but for all practical purposes, Thompson is no longer a lawyer (at least for the next 10 years).

Pursuing Political Trivia

This is more a game about politics than politics as a game, but MoveOn has created the Bush/McCain Challenge, the goal of which is to make the player realize how hard it is to tell the difference between Bush and McCain's positions, and further the "McCain would be a third Bush term" meme (and therefore tie McCain to the least popular president ever).

I'm comparatively a political junkie, and I got exactly one right. And that one was almost a gimme, as it featured one of McCain's more well-known quotes.