We Interrupt This Non-Broadcast…

Published on January 14, 2009 in Culture, Music, Politics and Visual. 2 Comments

Many moons ago I posted this video called Flying at Tree Level.

It’s a stunt/trick video showing some of the insane movement tactics in UT2004. The other day while checking my email I got a friendly message from the YouTube Police telling me that this video had been removed for violating copyright.

Now, as it turns out, YouTube hasn’t totally removed the video, they’ve simply muted the audio. Fine, at least they’re not totally annihilating volumes of original work just because they include something that may be copyrighted*.

*Although, the distinction must be made that these works themselves have copyright, what they don’t have is deep pockets and teams of lawyers to aggressively antagonize hundreds of millions of people.

So, anyway I went back and took a look at this so called copyright violation. Apparently the audio on this video was pulled because it contains a whole 40 seconds of the song “I Believe I Can Fly” by Space Jam. What a crock. Bitterly ironic that it gets pulled for containing only the main chorus of a song by a band who only ever made one popular song…

Update: Related Reddit thread.

Impulse Broken

Published on November 28, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Last weekend I actually found myself with some free time, shockingly enough. Simultaneously, I felt pretty bored with the usual gaming fare of FPS and RTS games. I wanted a fix but I didn’t know what of — So I decided to revisit Galactic Civilizations II.

Apparently, GalCivII has had not just one expansion pack, I knew about the first, but two expansion packs. It’s also had a total revamp dubbed “GalCiv 2.0,” although that only is available to those with the game already.

I was sorely tempted to buy the expansions then, but I wanted to see whether GalCivII had improved in the areas I needed it to improve in. Last time I played it I enjoyed it, but it had an unusual fatal flaw — The game was so simplified [over the ultimate 4x gaming experience, Master of Orion II] that I actually had a hard time comprehending what was going on. As it turns out, this wasn’t unusual. GalCiv II, at least at the time, had a barely-comprehensible way of handling an interstellar economy.

To explain as best I can remember: Population in GalCivII produces money based on your tax rate. You can build factories which produce Military and Social “production.” Military production builds your spacefaring fleet, Social production builds your planetary structures. You can also build research labs, which produce Research “production” for researching new technologies.

The inexplicable aspect is that, on a societal level, you assign spending to either Military, Social, or Research production. If you have a tax revenue of 1000 currency, and spend 100% of your revenue towards Military “production,” all of your planets combined will have 1000 currency of “fuel” to burn in their factories to produce ships. The problematic factor comes in when you have many colonies, most of them not dedicated to building ships, but either a balanced mix, or dedicated to Social or Research production — Continuing my example, if you have 2 colonies, one that is an industrial world filled with factories, and another world filled with universities but with a few factories on it (because you need factories to build other structures on the world anyways), your 1000 currency of Military spending will get split between the two worlds even though it is much more efficient for the factory world to get all or almost all of the spending. In short, there was a penalty on (a) expanding, (b) colonizing subpar planets, (c) building “balanced” rather than specialized planetary economies.

But I digress. I know that one of the patches that was promised when I still played GalCivII more regularly was intended to fix some of the backwardness of the economic system, at least to the extent of allowing you to partially determine what level of resources might be allocated on a colony towards particular types of production. I knew the GalCivII game fixed this one area of frustration I would have been sold on the expansion packs.

So I went looking for the latest GalCivII patch. Let me tell you, this was not easy.
I know at one point I had updated GalCivII before, and that was done through the www.galciv2.com website. But all indications from that website now point to this utility called Impulse. I know Stardock probably wants to encourage adoption of their Impulse system, but I don’t particularly care for installing a program that is going to sit as a resident on my computer just so I can install a patch. And I know in the past Stardock was pushing Stardock Central as a place to get patches, but it wasn’t required.

After about an hour I still haven’t found anything about where the patch can be downloaded, so I cave in and install Impulse. Once I had installed Impulse, the real fun begins. I start up Impulse… Could not connect to the server. So I look online. Apparently this is a common problem, and they recommend a restart. I restart my computer, no dice. Impulse still doesn’t work. I go browsing on the support forums. Fast forward to about three hours later and I tried everything and still can’t get this Impulse program to connect to a server, much less get the patch I want. This is a serious problem — If I can’t connect to Impulse, I’m basically SOL when it comes to patches for Stardock games. And because they want people to actually use Impulse, they don’t seem to offer an http solution via impulsedriven.com.

It kind of saddens me, because I have only bought one other game this year. And I think I would like to buy the GalCivII expansion packs, if not merely for my own enjoyment but for the statement that makes about supporting Stardock’s pro-customer policies. But I really can’t justify spending that money if I’m going to be tied to a system that doesn’t work for me.

Eventually I did manage to get the patch, by searching on the internet and finding a GalCivII patch available for download from a FilePlanet-style site. (And, hey, the game did fix my issues — Too bad I can’t use Impulse to purchase the expansions!)

Mirror’s Edge

Published on November 17, 2008 in Culture and Games. 1 Comment

Awhile back I got exposed to Mirror’s Edge, a new game by Dice/EA. There’s been a fair bit of buzz about this game, because … Well, I’m not really sure why. Basically, it’s a first-person platformer, the goal seemingly being to get from point A to point B.

The game looks pretty slick, visually. The design style of the environments is realistic, but austere in a way that a lot of games haven’t been lately. Almost all game designers are pushing a more-is-more angle, but what we’ve seen of the game breaks away from that.

I have mentioned before that Michael Blowhard is one of my favorite culture critics (perhaps culture enthusiast is a better term?), but there’s one thing I’ve never quite seen eye-to-eye with him on. One of Michael’s themes is looking at modern advertising, and examining how so much of our current design sensibilities arise from the tools used to construct those design sensibilities. For example, People with metallic skin, words with incomprehensible (parenthetical or [bracketed]) emphasis are seen as byproducts of the techno-fetishization that goes on in a design world entirely run by computers. One design theme that seems to come up again and again is the idea that the human form is infinitely malleable — Which is not to say that advertisers have a fetish for portraying humans as unformed lumps of clay, but rather that designers go out of their way to display the human form used in physically implausible ways. One of the culprits he names in this is typically video-games, which by their very nature have abstracted the form from the function.

Personally, I disagree with the conclusion that this tabula rasa physicality comes from videogames. It’s certainly invested in videogames, a medium where every woman is capable of being just as fast, strong, smart, and charming as any superhuman male protagonist. But the bigger culprit to me is movies — Movies have latched on to the concept of elastic physicality far more than videogames have, if only because videogames are typically more abstract in their presentation (due to technical limitations). In a videogame you are in control of your character, so when your on-screen avatar who happens to be an attractive 100lb female grabs a 200lb burly security guard and tosses him into a wall, it’s less about the character doing this than about you doing this by mastering the game’s mechanics. On the other hand, once special effects in movies allowed it, we increasingly began to see 100lb females beating up 200lb males, overpowering them, often multiple opponents at a time. Because movies are a medium of presentation and not of interaction, the emphasis really becomes that of showing a woman performing spectacularly outlandish things.

What really struck me about Mirror’s Edge is how it seems to be less about the player interacting with the world and more about the presentation of your avatar (Faith) interacting with the world. This is a trend toward the cinematic over the interactive. Paradoxically, it is probably Mirror’s Edge’s greatest strength to think that in moving towards a cinematic valuation of presentation it also enhances interactivity (at least on some level) by providing a more immersive sensory experience than other first-person-games.

My big problem with Mirror’s Edge is that I find it totally implausible. It is implausible not only in the way the main character is presented interacting with the environment, but the entire premise of this near-future world which follows-our-rules-but-doesn’t. Even if we can accept the implausibility of our 100lb protagonist running around, jumping 30 foot gaps, sliding down 100 feet on steel cables, dodging bullets, and shrugging everything off with a roll, what is our rationale for accepting that our supermodel protagonist would even bother risking life and limb to deliver letters? Accepting these things is accepting the premises so frequently promoted through other media that the human form is something infinitely malleable– that being a 100lb waif-thin female doesn’t stop one from being a top-notch athlete who can do superhuman stunts that would cause most people to break a wrist, ankle, or worse; that being a supermodel-class female beauty doesn’t carry social cachet and expectations that would make this sort of life-risking behavior unnecessary and pointless.

I want to point this out, because I know this game has been praised and praised for its supposedly progressive visual design, but Faith is just another supermodel in a long line of supermodel protagonists. There is nothing new or refreshing or progressive in her visual design for anyone who has anything more than a politicized interest in videogames. A tank top and pants are nothing to go nuts over. Aside from her clothing, how is Faith any different from Paris Hilton?

Even though I am inclined to believe that movies, more than videogames, are pushing an ideology of physical mutability, I think it’s inevitable that games such as Mirror’s Edge are beginning to adopt this subtext wholesale as the entire medium moves towards emulating the cinema. It really isn’t unexpected, given that very few videogames (none which I know of) actually treat the physical representation of a character as inextricable from that character’s capabilities in the game world. That seems like a shame, since to the extent that videogames survive as non-mainstream media expressions, they …

… are pure products of the the engineer and nerd culture that is completely different from, say, the culture born of marketing, social sciences and various “critical studies” that currently dominates Hollywood and print media. (Link)

Alarmist? Perhaps. But I also think that Mirror’s Edge will just not be a very good game, and that this is not entirely unseparate from the tropes it adopts and the forces that it panders to.

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…

Girls Should Not Play Videogames

Published on September 12, 2008 in Culture and Games. 0 Comments

[Unless they legitimately enjoy them.]

I’m tired of the litany that [more] girls “should” play videogames.

Face it. Videogames, at least the videogames which are always meant by the term, are designed for boys. What are Counter Strike or Halo or Call of Duty? They’re the modern equivalent of going out to hunt or fight. It’s simulated fighting, or sports. And what do boys do? They compete with each other.

Are all games like this? Well, of course not. You’ve got your Myst, you’ve got Civilization, you’ve got a million other games that aren’t training simulators for boys to learn how to practice hand-eye coordination and fighting tactics.

Thing is, the focus on girls not playing videogames is always about this small subset of games which are, for obvious reasons, attractive to men and young boys. These are games which are acting out traditional male roles in fighting and competition, but in a safe and nondestructive way. They cultivate masculinity, why would most women be interested in that? Sure, you’ve got your outliers, but that’s pretty much the situation on the ground right now — Nerdy tomboy girls playing masculine shooters. The non-obvious twist is that women are actually a majority of videogame players once you look at things like Bejeweled, Literati, The Sims, and Facebook, they’re just not as interested in the masculine games.

I can’t count how many articles I’ve read with so much hand-wringing over these intuitive observations. These sorts of articles tend to like to profile female gamers. “Whenever I beat a guy, I like to shout over the mic, ‘You just got beaten by a girl!’” they’ll say. The point being, if you’re a girl and you play videogames, you must glorify your victories over men.

Not only is this a blow to their masculinity, but it denigrates a woman’s femininity. This is why playing videogames is a lose-lose proposition. Women don’t need to emulate masculine behaviors to have worth. It’s not even beneficial to be a “gamer girl” if you’re going to constantly compete against your boyfriend or husband and question his masculinity when you win. There are plenty of girls out there who like certain games, and who can show interest in their boyfriend or husband’s activities without making that next step to trying to become one of the guys.

United 93

Published on September 11, 2008 in Miscellaneous. 1 Comment

Seven years. I finally managed to work up the courage to watch this movie. I can’t say I regret it, but it wasn’t an enjoyable experience. Basically two hours of dread building up over the inevitable.

Worth watching, I think, especially with how little attention this receives nowadays.