Archive for the 'Technology' Category

Epic Betrayals

Published on November 16, 2008 in Games and Technology. 0 Comments

As you might be aware at this point, Epic Games has released the newest iteration in their Halo-sequel game series, Gears of War. For me, Gears of War isn’t really interesting except insofar as it is a distillation of negative trends in the game industry: Poor storytelling, cinematic experience bereft of the benefits of an interactive medium, hypermasculinization and deintellectualization, and so on.

There’s also the angle in which we can look at Gears of War as a prime example of a PC-focused developer turning into a console-focused developer, and the implications of the two platforms. I am not one for the “console wars,” but I think that PC-gaming and console-gaming serve different markets, in much the same way that movies released to theaters serve a much different market than direct-to-home-video movies do.

For PC developers, the giant bugaboo-slash-boogeyman is “Piracy.” For console developers, piracy is significantly less of a problem, for both demographic and technical reasons. But console developers have their own boogeyman, and it is “Used game sales.” Here’s what Mike Capps, President of Epic Games, has to say:

“The secondary market is a huge issue in the United States. Our primary retailer makes the majority of its money off of secondary sales, and so you’re starting to see games taking proactive steps toward that by… if you buy the retail version you get the unlock code [for DownLoad-able Content, aka DLC],” he said.

While I think GameStop’s practices of buying used games for pennies on the dollar and reselling them at 1000% markup of what they paid are nigh-criminal, it is seriously wrongheaded to attack the used game market as a destructive force in gaming. My own general price guideline for a game is $50, which means that the vast majority of new console releases are outside of my price guideline. I may be willing to spend up to $50 on a game, but console games regularly retail for $60 and up. These prices can be even more punishing if you’re in a foreign country. My more regular price-point for games I am unsure about whether I will like is $30, and even for games that are a few years old it is unusual to find games at this price point.

The natural answer, I think, is to understand that gamers are not fountains of endless cash and that new games need to be competitive with the used game market (if that is what they are competing with) in order to remain a successful venture. Most people, myself included, would choose a new game over a used game if the differential was, say, $5.00. But once you move into the $10 and $20 differences in price…

So what does Capps think might be potential “final solutions” to the “used game problem”?

“I’ve talked to some developers who are saying ‘If you want to fight the final boss you go online and pay USD 20, but if you bought the retail version you got it for free’. We don’t make any money when someone rents it, and we don’t make any money when someone buys it used – way more than twice as many people played Gears than bought it.”

The animus behind this idea here is so… incredibly hateful towards fans who do anything other than pay full price, I literally don’t know what to say. I think it would be right and just for any company that contemplates creating a product that intentionally breaks if resold to be sued out of existence. This is nothing more than attempting to use technological means to make it impossible for someone to exercise their right to resell an item they own. If game developers think that existing copyright law is such a burden that sabotaging their products to eliminate the rights of their customers is valid, then perhaps it is also right for customers to simply ignore the copyrights of the developers themselves.

Flagellant

Published on October 30, 2008 in Culture and Technology. 0 Comments

I wrote a post yesterday about Shamus’ post revealing the scary-as-hell Electronic Arts / Big Brother plot to “integrate” all of your purchases from EA with your online accounts and make it so that any infraction (real or perceived) can cost you all of your games. (I have no doubt, by the way, that this is all part of a plot to try and convince courts that they aren’t selling a “game” they’re selling a “service” and that thus, their EULAs could actually be something more than trash not worth the bytes they’re printed on.)

I just saw this comment by Factoid though and wanted to respond to it:

My tinfoil hat alarm just went off. I’m now pretty much convinced that EA is deliberately killing off the PC platform. They hate the pirates so much, that they’re waging a war of attrition against them. Except it’s not normal attrition, where you try to grind the OTHER guy down until there’s nothing left….they’re grinding THEMSELVES down, and making the pirates look on in horror, A Clockwork Orange style.

This image reminds me of the scene in Fight Club where Edward Norton begins fighting himself inside of his boss’ office. And while his boss looks on in horror about the deranged man who is mutilating himself, he can’t speak out about it because if he does he’ll be pinned with the assault. It’s exactly the same, except Electronic Arts is both sending the boss to jail and accepting tons of bribe money.

Semi-related: Today I saw this article in which a Harvard lawyer points out the pitfalls in letting the [supposed] plaintiff decide who to prosecute, accept bribes for prosecuting or not prosecuting, and charge hundreds of thousands of times the value of the perceived infraction.

=)

Published on October 29, 2008 in Games and Technology. 0 Comments

So I just saw this post over at Shamus’ site… I don’t know what the heck to say except that I see this as the death knell of gaming.

What am I talking about? Well, here’s a little tidbit of information from an EA representative:

Your forum account will be directly tied to your Master EA Account, so if we ban you on the forums, you would be banned from the game as well since the login process is the same. And you’d actually be banned from your other EA games as well since its all tied to your account. So if you have SPORE and Red Alert 3 and you get yourself banned on our forums or in-game, well, your SPORE account would be banned to. It’s all one in the same, so I strongly reccommend people play nice and act mature…

Those banned will stay banned, but like most other internet services, its not that hard to create a new fake e-mail account. However, its a lot harder to get a new serial key =)

As Shamus says, “That smiley is the grin of someone that knows they have hundreds of dollars of your software they’re holding hostage.” Indeed. That’s a great smiley face for them, and a huge 500-pt bolded and italicized angry face for everyone else.

Just as a simple example of how this policy could very easily “go wrong” (not that there’s anything much “right” about it in the first place): When Unreal Tournament 3 was released, the game’s forums were literally flooded with complaints about the game’s [horrible] user interface. At some point, the forum’s moderators decided that complaints about the user interface were flooding the forums and disrupting the ability of other conversations, such as bugs and gameplay concerns, to exist. So what ended up happening was that all posts about the User Interface ended up getting removed. This confused or upset some people, so they posted again. Guess what happened then? They got banned.

With all of the controversy over Spore’s DRM, I’d be surprised if this hasn’t happened already. I know I personally would have loved to buy Spore, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to put up with the DRM they crippled the thing with. When I buy a game, I want to own the game, not cross my fingers and hope EA lets me play it. I know for a fact there are people who’ve bought this game, clicked through all the EULA agreements, and didn’t even know about the DRM of this game. So what happens if they go on EA’s forums and make a little post where they may be upset about the DRM — And let’s say, for the sake of argument, that EA’s moderators behave like Epic’s did and start removing complaints about a dead-horse issue (the user interface, or the digital rights management) and banning people who ignore that policy.

Well, getting banned from forums is nothing to scoff at if you’re the kind of person who likes to offer constructive criticism of a product you’ve paid for. But getting banned from forums is quite a different order of magnitude from getting banned from the games you’ve paid for. Totally unbelievable, and no doubt we are going to see every software company move towards this totalitarian integration and EULA in a few years. I’m really thinking about picking up another copy of GalCiv II right about now.

FireFox 3

Published on September 15, 2008 in Technology. 1 Comment

About last week I started getting these pop-up message prompting me to upgrade to FireFox 3. I’d heard some reports about people being annoyed with one particular new feature in FireFox 3 (some sort of upgrade to the address bar), but in general there didn’t seem to be any technical issues with the new version, so I went ahead and did it.

While for the most part FireFox 3 seems to use a lot less memory… I am just amazed at whoever thought this supposed upgrade to the address bar was a good idea. The only feature I want in an address bar is a basic auto-complete feature that will pick out the webpages I frequently visit from as few keystrokes as possible. FireFox 3 introduces this so-called “Awesome Bar” feature, which, from what I can tell, works exactly the opposite way. It seems to try to match the title of the webpage, which can lead to incredibly unintuitive behavior like typing in “t” to bring up Shamus’ site (”Twenty Sided”) instead of “sh” for www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/. Of course, it’s not even that good. I’ve typed in “t” and gotten results for sites with “The” in their name. Or worse, websites that don’t have a “T” anywhere in their name or address (Huh?!). The results are often totally inexplicable.

Some other comments from human beings who have been subjected to this torture:

I just downloaded the beta and started using version 3, and this new bar is the worst implementation imaginable of what might actually be a reasonable idea. (I would have to see a good implementation before I can decide on that last part.)

I type in “ne”, and it sorts “slashdot-NEws for NErds”, and “groklaw.NEt”, and a few other things, BEFORE “NEws.google.com”.

If I WANTED slashdot, I would have typed “sl”. If I WANTED groklaw, I would have typed “gr”.

That AWFULBAR is so unbelievably bad – this add on at least makes it look better; but the algorithm and arrogance of the developers made me revert back to FF2. I may dump Firefox altogether. I know that some people will like the new bar, but totally outrageous to stick it on everyone. There will be MANY MANY people who would otherwise use FF that will swear off it now – there will be many embarassing moments as this algorithm BOLDLY displays unexpected results/history in public/group presentations, family situations, etc. Mark my words – this new feature will be the single most important event in the downfall of Firefox/Mozilla.

I am really boggled by who thought this was a good idea. Even when I adjust FireFox 3 in about:config so that browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped is true, I still get these boggling results. I’ve at least installed the oldbar plugin and reduced the number of results I get to a reasonable number, so it’s under control. Still, this gives me a lot more impetus to check out Chrome…

Steamed

Published on August 27, 2008 in Games, Personal and Technology. 0 Comments

For those of you who don’t know, last weekend was a “free demo” of Team Fortress 2 for people who don’t already own it. I know a couple of people who wanted to try it out, so we coordinated a little get-together to play together so I could show them some of the ropes.

Now — I expected it to be extremely busy. And it was. What I didn’t expect was that Steam would not even let me start a program on my own computer. The message I got was along the lines of “Our servers are too busy to allow you to start this program.” Come again?

This is the stupidity of schemes like this. I can’t even start a program that’s on my own computer. And it’s not like this game is like World of Warcraft or any other game where you’re constantly connected to a game developer hosted server. Once you’re in the game you’ve got your local client and a server hosted somewhere else, there’s no step involved where communicating with Valve is required at all, so it’s just a matter of copy protection schemes getting in the way of me playing the game.

Ubisoft Patch by Pirates

Published on July 22, 2008 in Games and Technology. 0 Comments

I was linked to the following news article by a friend who was plagued by issues with his Direct2Drive installation of Rainbow 6: Vegas 2.

The setup: A patch to the game added DRM which forced a CD check on installations of the game. This is obviously a problem for people who bought the game through services like Direct2Drive that provide downloads but not physical discs. So what happened?

Apparently a Ubisoft employee found, and made publicly available, a patch for the game executable that allowed it to be run without the CD, fixing the error and allowing paying customers to enjoy the product that they paid for. As a minor side note, the patch was a game crack released by the release group “Reloaded.”

From the Ars article:

The game broke, and the easiest way to fix it was to turn to the very pirates that the PC gaming industry vilifies at every opportunity. The uneasy truth is that DRM is an elaborate way to say something is being done to combat piracy, and the publishers have long relied on the piracy groups to “fix” their games that ship infected with these often-invasive programs. Anyone with even a passing interest in technology knows that technological measures do little to stop hacking by determined users: new PSP firmware is cracked in hours, games are cracked and leaked before the retail versions hit the shelves, and anyone who reads Apple blogs knows how to jailbreak their iPhones. The harder companies try to lock their products down, the more likely they are to test the limits of legitimate customers who look on enviously as the pirates enjoy a superior user experience.

Kind of funny how the synergy works out here.

Who watches the watchmen?

Legolas Skynyrd – Freebird

Published on July 4, 2008 in Games and Technology. 0 Comments

For quite awhile I’ve been hoping that, one day, there would be a game that would allow people to write their own music. I mean, after all, modern computers have sound cards, and can generally run complex music synthesizing software. Sending a string of MIDI signals across the internet is not any more outlandish than sending real-time physics data for fifty or so people and potentially hundreds of projectiles (see: almost any multiplayer First Person Shooter).

So recently I came across this video from Lord of the Rings Online:

Very cool! Although it does bring up the obvious flaw that I never thought of – What happens when people use this music-synthesizing utility to break in-game character. I mean, from my impression, this sort of thing is purely a roleplay / fluff feature (no tie-in to mechanics), so the fact that something that’s intended primarily to improve immersion is seemingly used almost exclusively to break it is problematic.

Windows into Mac, part 2

Published on June 21, 2008 in Technology. 0 Comments

Continued from part 1.

There are a plethora of reasons why Window Management is easier on Windows than on Mac OS, but I want to home in on one aspect in particular: The Windows Taskbar and the Mac OS X Dock.

I remember when the Dock debuted in OS X, hearing that it was a human interface disaster. And, a few years later I started using it. The Dock is one of those features that looks really great on display, but when you sit down to actually use the thing you quickly realize its limitations.

When I started using OS X many years ago, Mac computers were still using standard-size monitors. Lately, however, all Macs come with these widescreen monitors. I’m still not quite sure what the supposed benefit of a widescreen monitor is supposed to be over a standard screen. Is having less vertical space but more horizontal space really all that useful? I seem to notice that vertical space is a lot more useful than horizontal space, particularly if you do a lot of reading. But I digress. So every new Mac comes with a 16:9 monitor, and at the top of the screen we have a 50px high menubar, and at the bottom of the screen we have a 300px high Dock, immediately taking up a sizeable amount of vertical real estate on our display.

Here’s a picture of the Dock in a standard install configuration. You can pretty much envision the usable screen area as consisting of 75% of the area between the menubar and the dock. The sides also need some wiggle room since you need to be able to stack windows and use the scrollbars.

Starting OSX Desktop

Yes, the Dock can be moved to the side. Yes, the Dock can be shrunk in size. Even at the smallest size and shoved off to the side your Dock will still take up ~5% of your screen. If you shove the Dock over on the right side of your screen you’ll get the added benefit of having it constantly overlapping your window scrollbars, so the left side is pretty much the only realistic option.

So what exactly is the Dock useful for anyway? Well, it does two main things: It stores icons for commonly used Applications, and it stores windows that you’ve minimized.

The first of these, storing icons for commonly used applications is typically what ends up taking up 80-90% of the Dock space. Your default Mac configuration will have the Finder, iTunes, iPhoto, iMail, iMovie, and so on and so forth. Probably a good 15 items to start with. Some of them you can’t ever really get rid of — The icon for the Finder is pretty much always going to be in the Dock, since the Dock shows running applications and the Finder is (almost) always running. If my own experience is any guide, a user’s Dock gets more and more cluttered as he accumulates more programs he needs to use.

The problem with this is that the Dock can only realistically accommodate so many icons. Probably about 50 along the vertical at the smallest icon size. 50 icons would be pretty acceptable, if the only icons shown were those in use. But the Dock isn’t designed to only show programs in use, it’s meant as a quick-access tool for starting programs, and it’s really easy to accumulate another 20-25 programs you use and turn the Dock from this snazzy-looking thing into a muddle of indistinguishable program icons.

Windows also has a tool for displaying programs for quick and easy access. It’s called the Start Menu, and it takes up about 1/10th the space the Dock does, and can display hundreds of items instead of fifty or so before becoming too cluttered to use. The Start menu utilizes this magical invention called a “Menu” that can pull out when in use and retract when not in use. It’s pretty cool. At one point, if you were really in the mood, you could do something like this with the Dock by making a folder and putting a bunch of program aliases in the folder, but Apple has apparently decided that using menus is verboten on a computer, and so now if you do this you will get, in essence, a much larger Dock pop-up over your whole screen. Wonderful.

The second thing the Dock is useful for is storing “hidden” windows and tracking what programs are open. The latter is a bit of a corollary to the first, since generally speaking, a program that’s open is also going to have a window open.

It’s been something like a decade since I used an OS9 computer, but I do recall that the Applications menu handled the tracking of open programs in a much more elegant and utilitarian way. While the Dock insists on displaying the icon of every program that is open, in a string along the Dock, OS9 had a single icon which represented the program that currently had window “focus,” which also served as a drop down menu for switching to other open applications. It’s too bad this feature seems to be gone, as it was space-conscious and faster than the Dock.

A new problem has also been introduced in the Leopard version of OSX…

Leopard Stars

Previous versions of OSX indicated “open” applications via a black arrow next to the application icon. Leopard has switched to a new icon which is best described as a “glowing orb of indistinguishableness.” As small a thing as it may be, it’s quite irritating that Apple has chosen [yet again] style over substance. Not only is the new “active application” icon (the circle) harder to see than the black arrows, but it’s easily confused for a background element, particularly when using the default desktop image of a nebula and stars.

As for Windows, it really isn’t that much better in this area. Windows does do a fair job of presenting most applications that are open to you up-front, but some applications, for unknown reasons, go in different parts of the Taskbar, and it seems quite random why some go in some places while others don’t. The inconsistency here is the main problem, as there’s no real visibility issues or excessive focus on visual flair over usability.

The feature that most distinguishes the Dock from the Taskbar is the handling of “hidden” (or otherwise) windows. You see, the Dock only stores hidden windows. The Taskbar will store windows, hidden (aka minimized) or not. This seems like a subtle distinction, but in practice it has major implications.

Lets assume one has two programs open. For example: Photoshop and Firefox. Both of these programs typically run in a full-size window or full-screen, so in a single-monitor setup you have to decide which program will be at the forefront at any one time. On a Mac, if you are working in Photoshop and want to switch to Firefox, you must make the Photoshop window smaller, move it out of the way, find the Firefox window, then click the Firefox window to bring it to the forefront. In Windows, if you are working in Photoshop and want to switch to Firefox, you must click the Firefox window in the Taskbar.

The difference being, because your Firefox window was “open” and not “hidden” the Dock did absolutely nothing for helping you to manage the open windows. In other words, unless you’re in the habit of minimizing every window you ever shift focus from, the Dock isn’t going to assist you. You must manually take charge in OSX by managing the size and placement of open windows. And this isn’t generally a huge hassle, but having to do it all is rather inconvenient when I shouldn’t have to.

Now, again, presumably the Expose feature added in some other version of OSX allows you to do this – But a keystroke is definitely not as intuitive as building it into the graphical user interface. That is what most Apple fans rave about, anyway, and here it is, doing something that’s critical to day-to-day usage less well than Windows.

I can always cross my fingers that Apple will consider trying to match Windows’ functionality in this area, but I’m skeptical that’s even possible using the Dock model. After all, the Dock’s ideal place is on the left side of the screen, which makes it a less-than-ideal place to display text. And even assuming Apple decided to make the commitment to improving their GUI by having the Dock hold all windows, hidden or not, you’d need identifiers to distinguish between open windows (aka “text”) quickly and easily. The Dock is really poor at displaying text, and since it’s such a space hog it’s icons, especially for windows, are frequently so tiny they’re indistinguishable.

Windows into Mac, part 1

Published on June 5, 2008 in Technology. 1 Comment

Lately at work I’ve been forced to juggle both Macs and PCs. I have several years’ experience using Macs, but I’ve been working exclusively on XP-based PCs for the past couple of years, so it was a little bit of an adjustment going back. What’s been interesting to me is getting a fresh perspective about what works and what doesn’t work about the Mac or PC. Also of note is that the last version of OSX that I used was 10.3 and some of the newer machines have 10.5 installed, and there are some differences there.

Fair warning – I’m an “advanced” user and so if you only use your computer for checking email and browsing the web, chances are you may not notice or encounter the same issues as me.

What’s interesting to me about going back to Mac OS after an extended period of time using Windows is that Windows ought to be called something like “Microsoft OS” Mac OS really ought to be called “Windows.” Because, while Windows has the eponymous windows, windows are actually a lot more integral to the Mac OS than vice versa.

What do I mean by that? Well, if tomorrow Microsoft came out with a universally downloaded virus patch that would affect all Windows computers in the world and caused every window to run full-screen … As long as the Taskbar remained intact I don’t think it would hugely upset things. On the other hand, if Steve Jobs decided tomorrow that windows were passe and that he was moving Mac OS to an all-full-screen window mode, except for the file menu and the dock … Your typical Mac user would be in deep, deep trouble.

So, to me, it’s pretty obvious that Macs are a lot more integrated with this user interface philosophy of “windows.” Which I’ve noticed, since I have been using them regularly again, makes it kind of troublesome to use the Mac since as a graphical user interface (GUI) it’s frankly just inferior to Windows for managing windows. And, I mean, I enjoy using Mac OS since I can open up a shell and do everything I need to pretty easily. But it’s ironic because everyone always talks about the Mac OS GUI, and that’s the weakest link in my opinion.

Why? Well, here’s the big one. Window management. This is something that I’ve come to notice myself doing quite a bit of in OS X. And this is something I remember doing quite a bit of in OS X. And after some observation, it’s something I’ve come to notice myself not doing in Windows XP. Even understanding that my XP machines are “worn-in,” so to speak, while the Mac machines I’m using may not be, I’ve noticed that there are some reasons why window management is always part of the stock Mac OS experience, and why it’s not for Windows XP. I’m going to try and explore this in a bit more detail later.