Unique browsing experience.

…that's what the blurb says, at least.

Yeah, it's all black on white now, as opposed to the opposite: I'm toying with the new Dynamic Views templates on blogger, which are neat, if still kinda gimped by the lack of a 2-sidebars option and easily selectable trog-mode switch (or at least a light-on-dark scheme that doesn't require CSS voodoo).
Also some gadgets don't show in this template, but for the price I pay, it's hard to argue…

So, expect it to change again in the near future, I can't promise anything except it will remain free of blink, bling, longhand fonts and adverts if I can help it.
In the meantime, you can play with the corny display modes, just under the masthead.

***

Of DRM, cheap media and convenience.

[Prompted by this article from the always-worth-reading Sanya Weathers, but too long to be politely posted in her comments thread.]

I've been a gamer for the past three decades, an avid reader for five years more, and a father for the last 5 years. Nobody in my household is exactly averse to music, either. 

The total surface area of exposed books, CDs  and DVD (and the odd VHS/Beta/DAT shell) spines on my bookshelves could probably host a decent game of volleyball and yet: most of it has been amounting to not much more than wall insulation ever since HDD storage became cheaper (per gigabyte) than CD/DVD as a backup medium — so, circa 2002…

As for games, even before then, I'd become used to he practice of getting a crack or 'liberated' copy for any game that would expect me to keep a plastic pancake whirring and grinding at all times in my computer optical reader, and to do away with the CD/DVD entirely whenever HDD capacity allowed to dump the entire game on disk, thus saving on inconvenience: swapping disks, loading times, ear and media tear.

Once some game publishers got into the habit of dumping multi-gigabyte game data on HDD as a matter of installation, yet still kept demanding I re-heat waffles in my laptop for as long as I play, I stopped feeling clever for optimizing loading times and battery life, and started getting seriously puzzled at their rationale…

All moot now, as hinted above: every game, movie or music I buy on plastic media these days gets ripped to HDD before its inaugural run on my screen. I tote 1TB of kid animation and movies (roughly a thousand feature-length's worth) in my backpack at all times, neatly  arranged in a 2.5", under-a-pound, quick-loading package that can plug'n'play into anything, from my coffee-table laptop, to my son's old 12" G4 iBook, my wife's 10.1" tablet, the home projector, or the grandparent's big-screen TV (thus avoiding low-interest 'kids' TV programs — seriously, how often can you luck upon Ghibli/Pixar stuff on network TV ?). Obviously there's a second 2.5" drive packing goods for the grownups. 

…all of which weighs about the same as a 'compact' DVD album, and is half as bulky.

And yes, VLC ftw: watching a movie on an otherwise excellent 17" laptop is an experience soon ruined by the background hum'n'whirr of a DVD reader, not to mention the ridiculous cost in battery life. 

And then you have the FBI/RIAA/MPAA warnings, which are silly in the extreme and exemplary of what's wrong with the entire model.

Listen, Hollywood: if my copy is pirated, I obviously have little regards for the MPAA's hurt feelings, and if not, you're getting in the way of me enjoying the product I've paid for, while not adding any appreciable value to my experience: you're not helping your cause (or my being sympathetic to it) either way.

*

Books are a slightly different animal: I understand some people don't like reading book-length text on-screen, and would rather use the paper version. I don't mind it either way personally, but still was on the fence on the matter of convenience of use… until good tablets showed up. 

Especially if you enjoy behemoth-sized books, which are common in the SFF, history and science departments, adding a eleven-hundred pages brick you're already two-thirds through to your handbag can give you pause, hence going the ebook way has become something of a no-brainer for me in the past year or so.

But anyone who's been paying even marginal attention to the matter of ebooks knows publishing them isn't as simple as "Print to: pdf": it takes skilled work to convert a book layout and font work to read comfortably on a 10", not to mention 7" touchscreen, and things aren't entirely quirk-free on that front just yet, so I'm not sure buying a paperback should automatically entitle one to a complimentary ebook voucher.

Maybe dead-tree editions could include a coupon for a discount on the ebook, just like the ebook could include a similar-value coupon for paper or electronic copies you subsequently buy as presents (maybe it's just in my circles, but the people I know don't just give away or loan their own books, they also tend to buy several copies for the explicit purpose of  offering them to friends).

None of the current marketing/DRM schemes in the ebook business properly account for the cross-pollinisation between readerships of various genres/authors/supports, and the Babel-like format confusion doesn't help either. 

Whether a unified format (jQuery ftw ?) for ebooks will address the formats issue remains to be seen, but asking people to use a different set of proprietary reading glasses for every other book sure isn't helping sales, nor is it a smart allocation of resources and expenses on the production/publishing end of things.

It is clear that the strong-arm negotiating style of Amazon and Apple aren't helping authors and editors, while most book publishers are fighting the same kind of rear-guard battle the RIAA is, trying to milk an extra gallon or three from this very dead cow before the stench becomes unbearable, but that's too big a topic for this present post. [Go there to read smarter people than I on the issue]

The takeaway is people will read books, and if the industry doesn't provide convenient, sensibly priced and unobtrusive means to get and read them, it will simply be passed by. Whether that is conducive to more good books or less/worse ones being released in the future is anyone's guess.

*

Generally speaking, the same question applies to the distribution of books, movies, games, and music: either do away with DRM, or make it sensible, transparent and beneficial to the customer, all of which is entirely possible, at least in those parts where you take people access to the net for granted — most of the time.

You can't beat your customers away from piracy and expect to win, all you can do is lure customers away from piracy by offering them better value and/or superior convenience.

Ideally, create an industry-wide virtual-assets account management system, that would give people convenient access to the entire catalog of their owned products, regardless of publisher. Allow the client-side software to act as a local server while offline (html5-style), and possibly enable sharing/trading on a LAN even while cut off the internet (caching events and changes to be synched up next time inet is available).

More importantly, if your products come with online verification attached, give people reasons to like it: offer coupons, rebates, special offers (director's cut early-releases, or extras) to returning customers, and do not stop people from playing their copy when they can't access the net, provided their copy has been validated once.

Similarly, do not attempt to stop people from transferring or giving away the stuff they bought from you (second-hand sales may be another issue, though, better tackled by embracing the rent/PPV model), and instead incentivize buying an extra copy (for cheaper) to give away instead, and extend and facilitate affiliate-like programs where customers gets points/vouchers for recommending products to their friends, etc.

A massive cross-publisher catalog could enable customers to build their own 'collections', mixed-tape style: buy "Marge Perkins' The 10 cookbooks to have and their matching soundtracks" and save 25$ !

*

Alternate funding and revenue models have emerged over the past couple years, mostly in book and music publishing so far, although indie games and movies are showing how even comparatively heavy-iron media don't necessarily have to depend on mega-corporations for their funding, marketing and revenue.

The apparent progress in emancipating creators from the often abusive relationship with ebil corporate publishers should however not hide the fact liberation is typically only gained through creators becoming their own publishers/marketeers/sales-and-business people, with the possible drawback that business acumen (as separate from artistic value) may weigh excessively in the selective process of who gets to make a living of their craft. The corollary being: while you're (more or less competently) updating your facebook page, handling accounting and planning for promo events, you're not doing whatever it is you're supposed to be good at — and paid for…

***

Can I see some ID, please ?

…besides your member card ?

[This post was prompted by one of the many trains of thought that left the station upon reading this at Peter Watts' blog, which I followed to where the fire started …and then spread.

There's a lot of food for thought in this jungle of internet rage, and a lot of noise, as should be expected, and I don't intend to cover every angle, although I will probably return to some of the issues raised in the future.

I commented on Peter's post, but in the process I started plowing a tangent furrow, and I'm not a fan of derailing threads so I had to stick it somewhere else, which is below.]

I 'get' feminism like I get black power, or gay pride, or self-diagnosed @spies wearing their quirks like badges of honor.

Not in the sociological sense, I don't, because I haven't gone all embedded journo in each and every one of those groups, but insofar as I can recognize the drive, it feels like I can relate.

It's frustrating when people think they know who you are, solely based on their preconceptions of what you are, say a gay black non-neurotypical female, and worse even when they tell you about your experience and your place in the world — as if they knew.

And yes, there's comfort in familiarity, support in recognition, and that's good enough reason to seek out kindred spirits, fellow members of an ingroup who've (had) to deal with the same crap, and won't try and mold you into their particular brand of 'normal'… at first.

Because that's the problem with self-identification in identity politics of any kind: you join in driven by a crave to be acknowledged for who you are, as a person, which includes what you are as a demographic, but it only starts there, and you end up peer-pressured into conforming to the group's idea of how and who you ought to be.  

*

Ingroups are attractive because they free one from the Sisyphean push back against prejudice, they promise (and deliver) a safe ecosystem within which one can exist and grow as a person, safe from the pressure to constantly defend and justify oneself which dominates outside the group.

Anyone who ever felt like an outcast, or felt they weren't accepted for who they are can somewhat relate to that urge, and that's about everyone who lived long enough to reach their teens in any society that regards individualism as something not entirely like a brain disease.

How it can go wrong is obvious, though, and trading one ill-fitting uniform for another can even be for the worse after rationalizations kick in: at least going against the consensus and 'normal' of a society that is imposed on you can be intuitive and almost self-evident, but it's much more difficult to justify any challenge to the groupthink of a club you self-selected into, without your own identity coming into question.

Am I saying one should pretend prejudices are a fiction, or worse, that race, gender, sexual orientation or any other 'deviation from the standard' don't really matter ? No.

I'm not about to deny anyone the option to weigh the defining elements of their identity by their own scales, yet I'll point that if you're about finding out who you are, and intrinsically define yourself (as opposed to merely satisfy a need to belong), then seeking validation by whomever is most likely to do it based on one or two traits you share with them isn't just the 'quick and easy way': it also carries the risk of the group defining your self for you.

Now, I'm a proverbial reasonably affluent middle-aged white man, and in the world of identity politics, that makes me statutorily incapable to even dream of relating to the ordeals of the oppressed of any kind.

Because I'm that sort of asshat, I also take extra care not to wear my possible deviations-from-standard on my sleeve, for fear of the variably well-meaning who could be tempted to coopt me in their gang, make excuses for me, or blame my skewed views on the parts of me that don't operate on specs.  

On the plus side, my assumed privilege and inability to empathize also afford me the luxury to treat people as equals, if and when I feel like it (or so goes the song).

The upside of that blatant iniquity is I can do something the self-identified oppressed can't possibly do, which is tell you about how it feels from the haughty heights I call home: pretty good, identity speaking.

*

My experience of privilege in this regard is: there's plenty of room between the cliffs of definition-of-self-by-group-affiliation and circumstances-denialism, and it's in those feisty-yet-naviguable waters where maybe not the nicest or comfortable, but the most constructive conversations tend to catch wind in their sails.

And while I'm not meaning to throw my privilege in your face, or tell you or anyone to 'get over it, already', because I know that's neither here nor there… I'm just asking: is that what you expect the ultimate spoils of victory for identity politics to be ?

Is the ability to converse on equal footing without the need (assumed or imposed) to constantly justify, excuse or defend oneself the holy grail of every minority ? …and if so, how and when can you tell any one set of "us vs then" rethorics (will) have jumped the shark and outlived their usefulness ?

Or is the issue one of payback, meaning no oppressed group can be vindicated and satisfied until they've in turn got the opportunity to stomp their former oppressor(s)… and then, what's the pecking order among the formerly-oppressed — can they share the driver's seat on the steamroller of justice, or are we going Round Robin about righteous fury ?  

***

[For a different perspective, an interesting and feminism-centric take on the issue can be found here.]

Mitigating ebils.

[Version courte pour les non-anglophones: l'est temps de se tirer de fessebouc, 

qui est sur le point de publier des photos de ta grand'mere en culotte au 20 heures, 

avec son adresse en prime.]

I've never been a huge fan of FB. I find it messy, noisy, and phishy in the ways it tricks ingenuous users (meaning most normal humans) into exposing more of themselves than they'd care to (if only they realized) to anyone willing to lurk.

The latest development, however, is seriously shifting gears, and kicking unsuspecting people right into Stalker Central, which itches me the wrong way, so I'm out.

Facebook acting rather callously about user privacy is nothing new, obviously, and it only worsened over time, yet Timeline is something else, and the way FB is going about deployment isn't pretty either — it's so creepy, the ever-upbeat WIRED can't wholly manage to spin it in a favorable light.

*

Is Google better, really ? Well, in a sense, yes they are.

For one, they're more about co-opting the internets and less about attempting to pull and AOL (which FB clearly is, and it stinks to high heavens), and also because the nature of each company is subtly different.

Mark Zuckerberg fancies himself the new Steve Jobs, and runs FB as a one-man-cult. As proven over time, it's often a very potent strategy to get stuff moving, and to deliver a daring product, as the vision suffers no interference but that of what is feasible. 

On the other hand, it only takes one guy losing his marbles to drive the whole train over the cliff, and when it comes to protecting your privacy, an overcompensating narcissist nerd shan't be thy first pick, imo.

Despite their motto of "Don't be evil", the other Church of Nerdery over at Mountain View is not staffed entirely with EFF angels, obviously, but the sheer scope of google's reach, and their 'try every path' approach to product development and marketing means they attract a lot of very bright, naive, hybrid-limo-libs, which are allowed and encouraged to somewhat think for themselves (within reason, ofc) and are more likely than not to either actively oppose, possibly blow the whistle, or at least passive sabotage stuff that stinks too heavily.

Without being a democracy, google sports some of the built-in sanity checks that come with a large headcount of educated and relatively free-willed denizens. That's a plus in their column.

*

The erosion of privacy in general terms probably files under regrettable inevitability, yet google has some incentive to protect the semblance of intimacy that comes from perceived protection of privacy, because they're not in the business of antagonizing their followers (which compound users and employees), when Zuckerberg has nobody to keep FB in check but his own sense of decency (and some would say The Law, but let's be serious here).

The skinny of Google-over-FB being: more than a fraction of people at google are likely to care and feel guilt if/when BadThings™ happen to innocent, relatable human beings (kids, females, nice elderly/underage white males) as a result of google being lazy or callous about enabling users to protect themselves from stalkers and crazies. As a result they will be both proactive and reactive about mitigating such adverse side-effects inasmuch as they can — something that's obvious from the very design of G+ Circles.

*

On a more personal level, I can't be arsed to actively maintain a presence on more than one social network, so I'm going to grab my stuff and take a hike. For the foreseeable future, I'm going to stick to G+ and this bloggy thing here for the most part, and rely on some gadgets to leave crumbs behind on FB and Twitter.

…and no, I'm not moving to Diaspora just yet — don't ask.

*

You're in the ACME now !

Because telling stories is sometimes so much better than showing them.

Mitchell Zuckoff & Jon Stewart discuss the former's book: Lost in Shangri-La.

Seriously ?

OBL is dead, and obviously the world is a better place for it, right ?

That's what they say, at least:

"World stocks rise after death of Osama bin Laden"

Now, I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade, but a few things seem off with this:

• The end of OBL (if verified) isn't the end of the jihad/terror/civilization agit-prop/yni: 

He was a bogeyman of our own doing in more than one way, and notably because he wasn't as lionized anywhere as he was in the 'western world'.
Bin Laden was seen by many in the middle east as nothing more than a philanthropist of sorts, funding the worthy cause of ousting american imperialism and fighting the perceived judeo-christian hegemony, yet not so much as a warlord of strategic leader (which he indeed wasn't). OBL was just a rich heir with a grudge, and was first tolerated only because of the dough he brought to the table, but not taken seriously besides, and he eventually turned into a real propaganda asset after we made him the bugaboo.

At the end of the day, one of the post-facto leads in the cast of the 9/11 soap opera just got written out. That's not exactly a franchise-ender, though.

• Why would you summarily execute a PR golden goose ?

According to the official news, it seems OBL took a headshot during a close range engagement, which doesn't look like an accident.

Obviously there are many reasons why him dead is possibly better than him alive, starting with the fact he can't say anything embarrassing to the U.S of A anymore, can't be rescued nor escape, etc. Still, you'd think after all the effort put into hyping him, the U.S and Obama would want to milk this PR win for all it's worth, and that's better done if you can drag a defeated OBL in front of cameras — whenever convenient — for the weeks and months to come, while making a righteous circus of his trial in front of both U.S and international courts.

Is it only for fear of likely "release OBL or else" terrorist threats that terminating him was determined to be the best course of action, or was it really just one of the acceptable outcomes of an arrest attempt that didn't go as smoothly as it coulda/shoulda/woulda… I don't know, and probably never will for sure, but it still feels like a weak and anticlimactic end for the biggest PR game of this past decade.

• Why dispose of the body thusly ?

Killing the guy on the spot to take control of the narrative and avoid subsequent unintended developments, I get (even though I feel it's sub-optimal), but the whole 'Sorry, we already tossed the corpse at sea from a helo' charade is just ludicrous.

This is creating the impression of a fake hit, the kind of cheap, cookie-cutter twist you expect from a made-for-TV thriller: "Oh, he wasn't dead after all, he faked his own death to instigate a turf war among his rivals", or somesuch. 

Plainly put, if you kill a notable enemy with no witnesses, and hastily dispose of the body while still claiming the credit for the hit, it does look fake, and you'll be called out on it.

• So is OBL really dead ?

I wouldn't put money on it either way.

Occam razor dictates he most likely is, or at least the U.S intelligence is confident enough that he is to not expect he'll show up live on TV sometime later today to point and laugh at them.

My best bet: he died a few days/weeks ago of unrelated causes, and the U.S figured they'd better hurry to make it look like they did it before the word got out.

Hence no arrest, no fresh corpse to display, and what we're witnessing now is the best CIA and special forces could make of a bad situation on short notice and a ticking clock.

And ttfn: back to your regular programming.

Busy-ish.

Just for those keeping tabs on this place: I'm not quite dead yet, just busy woodworking and thinking about issues.

Think About It - Flight Of The Conchords

Some stuff literally hurts on sight.

Between Twilight and Harry Potter, it's a tough call which is working harder on grooming kids to Olympic levels of brat-ness.

On a related note, I saw New Moon about 4h ago, and my brain still aches… I fear permanent scarring.

Distraction.

While thinking hard about fiscal justice in a globalized-yet-uneven economical landscape…

Legal dress code.

After a couple trial runs at city level, Belgium is about to pass a law forbidding the public display of full-head veil in public spaces, and Frogland is next in line — according to the local ruling clique.

What strikes me as fairly dumb in both cases is the pretense under which such laws are pushed through, namely under the guise of protecting women and their humane dignity from oppressive traditions, when it's plain as day the real target here is militant Islam, perceived by some in both countries as a mounting peril for the local culture, and that rubs me the wrong way, as a matter of principle.

See, I'm a sucker for consistency, in game design or in public affairs, and despite my personal understanding of religion as a mental disorder, I can live with the fact constitutionally secular countries such as France or Belgium recognize freedom of faith, and even their endorsing religions to an extent, as long as it's under a principle of equal treatment.

And that's where I see some issues with the dress code laws…

• Not all Muslim women routinely wear a face-covering veil, but almost all women who wear those (and insist on not removing it in public places) happen to be Muslim. As such, these laws  effectively target and punish people on the basis of their religious affiliation, which both in Belgium and France should be impossible under their respective constitutions.
  
  
• The second argument is public safety, as in wearing a face-covering dress allows one to conceal his or her identity in public and therefore could be instrumental in the perpetration of criminal offenses, encouraged by the increased odds of getting away with it. This may have held at least shallow water, if not for the fact campaigning for those laws clearly revolved around the Muslim veil as topical item, so it's a serious case of 'too little, too late'.
   
• The third point, the one the French supporters of this bill plan to hammer on to get it passed into law is the preservation of 'humane dignity' on behalf of the poor, oppressed burqa-girls (although what you mostly — and seldom — see in France is simple niqāb), and this angle qualifies as Broken, For Real™.  This last one warrants a bit of elaborating…

The 'humanist' argument hinges on the assumption women don't choose to wear a niqāb and are — explicitely or implicitly — coerced in doing so by mysoginistic and machist traditions imposed upon them by men in their families and communities. Furthermore, it posits forbidding the cloth will liberate these women and allow them to connect in a 'normal' way with society and with their inner feminist self, thus sapping the foothold Islamic bigots have gained in our precious secular democracies.

Right. This is going to end well, I'm sure.

• If niqāb-wearing women are indeed victimized by their community and can't stand up to the pressure they're under to dress as told, they aren't guilty of anything and shouldn't be punished for it. Good luck finding a way to establish causality and fine the husband because of the wife's dress code — although this would probably be more effective and could be good fun. Fail.
  
  
• Regardless, helpless-by-definition women (in this context) won't grow a pair because the law says so, so they'll simply stay at home or pay the fines (less likely), with a direct result of alienating them further for lack of opportunity to connect with 'normal' society (which seems to be the purported end goal here). Re-fail.
   
• Conversely, if they actually are making a choice in how they dress and express their religious beliefs, then they aren't victimized, and thus there's no legal basis to oppose their behavior, (insofar as it doesn't cause explicit harm to others) unless one purposefully intents on persecuting Muslims, which — as pointed earlier — should prove unconstitutional in either France or Belgium. Triple fail.

Either the 'human rights' proponents of the niqāb ban are right, and these women really are hapless victims, or they're wrong, and the burqa is a matter of personal choice and religious expression… in any case the proposed bill is a non-sequitur.

My 2 eurocents ? Handle religions for what they are: a mental condition ranging from a harmless quirk of personality to a serious psychosis, depending on the severity of the delusional state, and treat it as such. 

Get the patients professional help, don't feed their neurosis by encouraging it, and when necessary, take the usual steps to protect them and society — starting with screening out overcompensating midgets lacking a super-ego *before* they get into presidential office.

For a different take, here's what the hive-mind has to say on the issue. 

My euro-tip: for consistency's sake, if we must harass and fine women to protect them from humiliating themselves as a result of peer pressure, can we outlaw boob enhancements first ? At least there is evidence of bodily harm, there.

*** 

Food for thought.

It just occurred to me that in the matter of credit attribution as to where we — as a species — are today, too much is given to our fabled neo-cortex, while way too little recognition goes to our palate and digestive tract's prowess.

So here it is: our gut smarts are underrated.

To clarify, I'm not about to go all redneck on you, and argue the case that guts know better than brains as a rule (even though it may happen sometimes), and I'll leave truthiness to whom it belongs: comedians, teabaggers and choking-on-pretzels ex-POTUS. 

Instead, I'll go out on a limb, as per standard protocol here, and tentatively argue: our guts play an under-appreciated yet decisive part in the historical making of our brains, both as a facilitating agent and enabling device.

*

Consider this: we humans come omnivores as a standard issue, and tend to embrace it unless constrained to a less diverse diet imposed by circumstances or personal/cultural biases. At face value, our gut would deserve praise if only for its ability to use almost anything we stumble upon for fuel — on the omnivore's radar, anything that is or was alive once could be dinner.
We partly owe to our guts to have survived and thrived in a variety of environments that non omnivorous species can only dream of, but I'd wage that's only half of it…

Opposable thumbs are cool, for sure, but they're of limited relevance if all you do is twiddle them: how and to what end you put those to work is what's key.
Our brains are a spectacular learning machine, a difference and inference engine that can find patterns in a chaotic wealth of information, derive meaning and build narratives or concepts to organize the universe, with us as its focal point. 

As it seems obvious a direct relation exists, between the diversity of experiences and stimuli we're exposed to and the opportunities we get to make new and smarter inferences, anything that helps us survive and explore new horizons is increasing our odds to have a eureka! moment, or its intuitive, less conceptual equivalent.

And just like our opposable thumbs, our guts enable us to explore and experience more, not only by keeping us fueled and clanking beyond the point where the Duracell rabbit would finally stop, but by providing us with the means to experience more. Non-omnivorous animals don't get the chance to try much of the gastronomical aspects of pleasure and discomfort, simply eat whatever limited selection of food they trust to process without falling sick, and won't even think about ordering off the menu, even when it sucks — ask any panda how they feel about their last meal(s) for a very fucked up perspective on this.

*

Long story short, being able to process diverse foods extends our biotopical reach and our ability to move around, yet also broadens our mental horizons and sense of aesthetics. Diversity of tastes, textures, shapes and colors all give our brain those little jolts that once in a while may spark a new and interesting connection, even though we may not always realize it at the time, and the same goes for those different landscapes, climates and environments we would never have dreamed of, had our omnivorous bowels not kept us alive through there.

Thus, I suggest you make today (which is whenever you happen to read these lines) your personal Gut Recognition Day and celebrate GRD by thinking hard about how much we owe our intestines for coping with our whims as they do, be thankful for that, and vow never to deny your guts their rightful part by ensuring you don't eat the same grub every day from now on, if you can afford it.

Your neo-corticoïdal bowels thank you in advance.

***

They love cake, and they're not afraid to sing it.

Seconded, heartily.

CloudGaming

Cloud computing moves the computation and rendering entirely server side, albeit in some high-level, abstract fashion, where the server-side capacity is managed as an utility rather than as a finite asset.
This leaves the client with a fairly dumb terminal shaped like a smartphone, HDTV set or pretty much anything that can display a video feed received through a broadband connection (wired or air), and send out standard user input (key commands, motion sensor data, possibly voice and video in some applications) back to the cloud.

In a nutshell, it lifts most of hardware and software requirements currently associated with 3D gaming from the user end, thus enabling a myriad of cheap, everyday devices to perform suitably as HD gaming platforms.

On the server side, the high-concept tends to favor decoupling server ownership from operation and usage, and to move computing and rendering power towards a model akin to that of bandwidth brokering. Game operators are expected to rent both processing and rendering power by the metric ton just as they would rent bandwidth to serve the resulting video feeds to the end users' client devices.

Contrary to the console platforms, which by nature are subject to vendor lock-in, cloud-based gaming should allow developers to code for whichever suitable software environment they choose, as the server software is meant to be loaded seamlessly, on demand, onto the rented hardware.

On the business side of things, this is obviously an attractive proposition. Game operators will be able to serve a nearly limitless user base with a single core product version: cross-developing for different platforms will no longer be useful, and only minor resources will be devoted to maintaining compatibility, mostly on the interface side of things, to accommodate the variety of typical gaming devices (display layouts, standard inputs and such).

From a game developer standpoint this is a wet dream, with all the benefits of console development (well-known, controlled hardware/software environment) but none of the drawbacks (no vendor lock-in, unlimited processing and rendering power scaling gracefully on the fly), provided suitable business models are found to share the burden and the revenue associated with the server architecture.

***

Applied to R-POWs, cloud computing promises even more goodness by tackling, or at least mitigating, the infamous reverse-economies of scale that currently apply to customer support.

The more sophisticated and popular the game, the more diverse and complex the overall hardware and software client base becomes, and the more likely users will run third party 'helper' software alongside the game client. As a result, technical support gets proportionally costlier as the user base grows and as time goes by and the variety of more-or-less recent configurations to support increases.

A despotic control over the gaming platform, insulated from user interference, translates in enormous savings on technical support and a proportional increase in customer satisfaction — by way of less dissatisfaction.

***

Here be other entries tagged with CloudGaming.

• Head in the cloud, and beyond. Of the visual and simulationist goodness potentially unleashed in the cloud.

Co-Optimus

I was talking about coop-centric gamedesign (and specifically AI) yesterday, and I forgot to link to this interesting topical website — linked by Chris M. Park's blog, also very much worth reading, for that and more.

Merry '10, people, this will be an interesting year, in the Chinese and any other sense, I reckon.

Coop vs AI

An emerging trend in the world of strategy/tactical games of late is the focus on coop multiplayer vs AI, as opposed to the more traditional use of AI as a stand-in for an absentee 'real' opponent.

While not entirely new, this is an interesting development, and one of the many subtle ways in which the wargames (as a broad category/genre) are finally getting payback from the adventure/action/RPGs that have shamelessly 'borrowed' from strategy games forever, without giving back much love until recently.

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While other genres have evolved spectacularly over time, thanks to genre fusion/bending and cross-pollination, strategy games have known few significant changes since the emergence of RTS:

at core, most strategy games tend to fall in either of two categories: computerized renditions of boardgame-styled designs, or mildly brainy action games sitting in a fancy simulated environment, with eyecandy added to taste.

The reason for that is simple: strategy and wargames are traditionally and by nature thought of as 'versus' games, yet current AI do thoroughly suck at emulating a 'real player' opponent.

Thus the tried and true solutions to make the AI look good boil down to either very solid game mechanics that even a seriously retarded bot can't screw up, or relatively simple game design (that an AI can handle, with cheats if needed) fleshed out by a rich enough simulated environment to overload the cognitive capacity of the human player and create the illusion of lifelikeness.

As a result, designing for single or multi player(s) has often been perceived as an either/or choice: a good single-player campaign usually will hinge on RPG-like scripting, crafty level design, extensive playtesting, with some storytelling and cutscenes thrown in to thicken the sauce, while the multiplayer PvP mode requires solid boardgame-like game mechanics to work — it's really tricky to do both at once and well enough in a single game.

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Luckily, other game genres bring a comparatively lateral-thinking answer to this dilemma: cooperative multiplayer.

As hinted above, this is a counter-intuitive option for strategy and wargames, and although coop mode has been present in the multiplayer options of many a RTS in he past, it generally has been there for the sole sake of exhaustiveness, and rarely if ever been a defining feature of any srs bzs strategy game until recently…

Just to be clear, I'm talking about coop vs computer here, not team-based PvP, which is indeed cooperative too and can spice PvP quite a bit, but is still PvP at core and is not an essentially different play mode from FFA PvP, mechanics-wise.

Coop vs AI (CVA) comes from CRPGs (notably MMOGs) and action-adventure genres, which have been struggling for a long time to reconcile their single-player heritage with the commonly accepted wisdom (and now built-in expectation) that multiplayer adds value to a game. In those genres, Coop gameplay is a fairly obvious way to go about bringing more than one player on the same boat, and is also a welcome answer to the seemingly insurmountable problem of Artificial Stupidity of henchmen and other computer-driven teammates in RPGs and action-adventure titles.

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Applied to strategy games, the eureka moment of going CVA involves putting the genre on its head: the common ancestors of all wargames are about two guys sitting on chairs across a table and duking it out over a board and tokens — at face value, making it about two guys helping each other to beat the crap out of a machine is more of a leap than a stretch — but in hindsight, CVA looks just as elegant and obvious applied to strategy games as to CRPG.

CVA works best when freed from the preconception that the AI's there to substitute an absentee human opponent, which AIs are notoriously bad at.

Dropping the Turing-test idiot ball and instead embracing a PvE-centric design approach allows to build a game that can be equally interesting in solo and multiplayer mode, as the game mechanics no longer need to cover for Artificial Stupidity. It's certainly extra work over just bolting more seats on a single-player game, but it's definitely the easier path (compared to faking human intelligence with scripts) to get something worth playing.

Coop doesn't mean the challenge, tension and sense of accomplishment have to be diminished, either : the human factor and drama fuel can be just as strong when players try to work together rather than intently butt heads, and a CVA design can still be spiced up with multiple coops competing against both the AI and each other, as long as the AI is clearly defined as the primary threat/target.

The brilliant (despite disputable looks) 2009 poster child for that approach is probably AI War — go check it out now if you haven't yet.

…and if you want to know more about the AI in this particular design, here's a good and thorough writeup series.

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Entropy

I used to be precocious, and now I'm old and retarding…
— things even out that way.

Head in the cloud, and beyond.

There's a lot going on vis a vis cloud computing these days, and it has been occupying a good share of my time lately, especially considering what it can do for the future of R-POW gaming…

I was so busy trying to wrap my mind around its potential from an infrastructure and business standpoint, how it could inform game design practices and tie with other pink unicorns like augmented reality and AI/AGI, I missed the obvious… frickin' gorgeous games.

Minesweeper on Windows™

R-POW, in their various MMO* incarnations to date have been plagued with the general curse of blandness at best, ugliness at worst, with a few notable exceptions such as EVE online and World of Warcraft, which have managed to make for reasonably good looking games by banking either on a hardcore g4m3rZ userbase with matching rigs, or on insane talent and production value, respectively.

Cloud-based gaming, by moving the computing power out of the end-user field, not only brings hardware requirements down (all you need is a decent display hooked up to broadband — read any HDTV-capable appliance), it opens the possibility to code games with previously unreel hardware reqs that would have reduced the potential market to the niche of very special nerds operating liquid-nitrogen-cooled gaming clusters, purpose-built for one title.

Incidentally, such systems exist, they're called military-grade training simulator platforms, and for some reason it's an approach that never made it big in the consumer market — I blame the terrible dress-code and hairdos, personally.

Moving on…

Cloud computing doesn't just hold the potential to bring down development and operating costs of R-POW, to let studios finally make a buck by steering clear off parasitic publishers & retailers, or to open the way for easy licensing and high-quality indie games by allowing costs to scale up gracefully with user base growth. The biggest change may yet come from the fact games will no longer be defined by the limitations of the end-user hardware. People (and designers) will be able to make decisions based on what they need/want, rather than what the target PC or console can handle.

No longer forced to design and code within the confines of 5 years old consoles or $600 office/family PC, game makers will be able to trust the platform to glitchlessly churn out the latest in rendering algorithms, and may even gain access to on-the-fly throttling to beef up the simulation engine to meet the demands of a climactic scene.

Minesweeper in the cloud.

Movie-level visuals, plus solid simulation engine, massively multiplayer, always on, from your smartphone to your wide-screen TV… now we're getting somewhere.

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Apple in bed with BigPharma™ companies ?

Here, get a tinfoil hat so I can talk to you safely, and hang on, you're in for a treat…

Apple has figured a new way not to honor AppleCare warranties on their very expensive hardware — preexisting conditions.

If your machine has been taken out of its original shipping box, or at any time since purchase otherwise ventured outside of a clean room and into contaminated environment, a.k.a RealWorld™, Apple will not service it under AppleCare,  because frankly, you brought it on yourself by daring to, you know, use the computer, instead of setting it on display in your personal gallery's sealed, bulletproof shrine, with Colorsync-matched gentle UV-free lighting.

Apple computer used as intended.

This should only come as a mild surprise, considering the high standards of customer service Apple is known for, and how Apple service reps are encouraged to deny warranty claims on the slightest pretext (one Apple service center employee explained me how he's been briefed on the not-so-subtle art of tripping 'submersion sensors' to turn warranty-covered faults into revenue-generating after-sale servicing).

The recent stories about second-hand smoke as a warranty-voiding 'clause' however, show Apple reaching to a new level of creative callousness that warrants notice. 

Here's the reasoning: Apple is not refusing to service the machines that show (?) signs of having been exposed to tobacco smoke out of a misplaced sense of anti-smoking righteousness or — perish the thought — as a flimsy excuse to save costs at the expense of the customer, oh no… it's doing so because it can't in good conscience expose its employees and service reps to bio-hazards…

What would you want Apple to do ? Knowingly poison techs by feeding them your toxic waste, you monster !?

I wish I was making this up, but no: apparently it is part of the standard service procedure that Applecare techs are required to lick every part of your machine chassis to clean it up thoroughly before re-assembling it — which also implies part of the training for Applecare servicing certification centers on learning how to lick one's way around the aforementioned moisture sensors.

Leveraging imaginary health-hazards to shift the blame on the customer for its ailments and therefore deny coverage, while painting ghastly pictures of alternative protection systems faintly reminds me of something in recent US news, but I can't quite put my finger on it right now… nevermind, it'll come back.

Not to be insensitive to the ordeal of career Steve worshipers with an oral fetish for delicious machined aluminum alloys, but I'm starting to wonder if Apple seriously means to end the hackintosh excursion, or if they're just pretending to, for the sake of maintaining their image of batshit-insane control freaks, while really plotting to push their users into switching to cheap knockoffs ?

If your machine must be disposable — by virtue of being more expensive to maintain than replace — do you really want to shell the extra 30% Apple-brand tax on it ?

I didn't think so.

Best of luck.

Believe it or not…

…these two are soon getting married.

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[Here be the photo gallery, and go there for a nice behind-the-scene look at Big Daddy's inception.]

Story of my life.

Either I'm getting complacent and easier to please (which would be subtly ironic, given the link below), or I'm on a roll for finding stuff worth reading, lately.

In this case, and for my sake, worth re-reading at least once a week until it sinks in.