Connecting Through Online Gaming

Counter Strike, Warcraft, Jedi Outcast; we’ve heard these game titles before and we all know what they focus on… online gaming. A few years back we wouldn’t even thought that a service like this could be brought from the computer and placed within our regular gaming counsel. However, with the emergence of the X-Box, Playstation 3, X-Box 360 and soon to be the Playstation Portable, no more will people have to log onto a regular computer for these services anymore. These new systems have converged so much technology and media options within their systems now days. No longer are they just met for simple play at home gaming. They have gone to the next level and now we the gamers can connect to other people around the world.

This commercial for Mountain Dew’s Game Fuel is the perfect example of how much things have changed from the days of the simple Sega Genesis.

Even more so, these online games transformed into online communities forming around that game or subject. I have found that with my first online game NHL 08 for the PS3. Everyone forms or joins into a specific league, starts communicating on the PS Network, talks hockey or trash on head sets, battles for rankings; it’s really been new and different experience.

So what is next for the online gaming? I cannot say. Though it’s obvious the next advancement in online communications will be apart of it.

WikiLaws

I found this post on Boing Boing yesterday to be very relevant to our discussion last class concerning whether the rise of online communities who share collective intelligence could bring about new political power. The New Zealand police force has just launched a wiki that allows users to contribute to the writing of their new policing act. They believe that their old set of laws are out of date and that many of them are no longer relevant to policing people from today, but that the laws should not only be under the purview of their politicians, but rather created from the input of all their citizens. Not only that, but the wiki is open to input from anyone around the world, so people from other countries can input their own ideas on what makes good or bad laws.

It is a fascinating experiment, and I really can't wait to see what comes of it. I personally see it as an excellent way to inform people about the laws in their own country, and to gain public input on which ones are no longer relevant. Comedy shelves in bookstores in this country are full of silly and outdated laws that no one realizes still exist in this country - imagine what a boon it would be for the government if they enlisted the help of the public to sort through and get rid of outdated laws, rewording and updating the books for our modern era using modern technology.

Here is the link to the original article. Maybe wikis are the first step towards getting people directly involved in democracy again?

I'm addicted to Ted.

Talk about ironic homosexual innuendo in Blog Titles!

Another video along the lines of creativity, oddly enough this time juxtaposed with education and schooling.

As Mark Twain said, "I never let my schooling interfere with my education."

It's worth it. Plus he has an accent! Double the fun!

~J

iConverge

Although the iPhone is kind of old news, it is a great example of all popular modern technology converging. The iPhone is the beginning of an era where people can communicate, be entertained, be informed or do whatever they want to at all time with just their phone. It combines almost everything you can imagine.

Putting the internet in the phone adds hundreds of different ways to communicate. People can access their beloved facebook, myspace, twitter, flickr, and the list is endless. You no longer have to be at a computer to do all these things.

Then the iPhone adds maximum entertainment. Not only can you watch and listen to the 8 gigs of multimedia you own, you can conveniently press your YouTube button and watch days upon days of good, homemade entertainment. If that doesn't do it for you, you again have the internet, so you can browse endlessly for more entertainment. And then finally, if you want the "real" entertainment, you can just go to the local iTunes store, conveniently accessed by one tap of the screen, and buy almost everything you want, more and more every day.

This is only a piece of what the iPhone does, and if it isn't enough for you, you can hack into your iPhone (which Apple is trying to shut down).

But Apple has produced an extremely innovative device that will alter the path of technology, even if it's not where they want it to go. Throughout history, not even since the birth of the internet, people have been putting their heads together and coming up with ways to use new technologies to their benefit. The internet has seen tons of innovations, some brilliant, some illegal, but most useful to a large crowd of people.

Who would have thought ten years ago that people would be sharing millions of hilarious home videos on a device a fraction of the size of a book? In ten more years, convergence will bring extreme changes that we can't even imagine, but the iPhone will have affected it. To me, who needs to pay that much for an iPhone plus $60 a month ($720 a year!)? In the spirit of the internet, and with the internet's technology (of having almost everything freely available), I think technology will follow soon with a much cheaper option of doing all of this.

Protocol is Law, Not Code

In response to Lawrence Lessig's "Code is Law", I wanted to point out, from a technical perspective, that it is literally the transfer, authentication, and verification protocols that define law on the Net. Yes, protocols consist of code, but so do web pages, but they don't dictate much of Net law.
TCP/IP protocols (redundant) were developed not by one person, but several, interested in a similar end goal, and common values. As Lessig points out, the most important value in today's age (at least in regards to technology, and the exchange of information) is the avoidance of control, and government by another, or even ourselves. This was most certainly at the core of the Internet's development.
With its positive contributions and drawbacks, I want to update Lessig's argument with a few modern examples for 2007. Lessig seems to think that any added protocol to TCP/IP will be dangerous to the inherit "1st Amendment Code" embedded into the Net. On the contrary, I believe this spirit of free exchange is still thriving, and even more abundant. This may be due to instances of forceful governance such as the one pointed out by a Sarah Wheeler, in her example regarding the patched in DRM of a popular video game. Users and non-users alike undoubtedly felt betrayed by this sort of imposing force on their own free exchange and will naturally lean towards systems that do not invade a person's right to information.
Regardless of the reason, today, many developers are working together in a completely democratic, open environment (the cliché is "Open Source") to create protocols that will standardize and protect user information, such as the identification dilemma presented by Lisseg. One such project has been called OpenID. While its technical aspects, conceptual approach, and history are beyond this post, it is truly a technology that resides in the hands of its users. Anyone with the know-how (perhaps a limitation that breaks the system) can contribute to the standardized web application login system. This standard attempts to allow users to have only one, centralized identity, that is username, password, and typical profile information such as age and geographical location. With this information, participating web applications can draw on this info to allow practically any Internet user to access their content and still retain the security associated with the typical user identification process. It's eliminating hassle, without the expense of lost security, just as Lessig described in 2000.
Of course, a system like this does have its disadvantages. While the data does not have to be stored in a central location (theoretically, any domain can), if a user's identity were to be stolen once, that user's information would be compromised across the Net. The OpenID protocol has security in place, but Lessig is right, it's only a matter of time before malicious code arrives on the scene.
Perhaps, even collaborative efforts like OpenID will become a product of self control, but the ungoverned system will account for itself, and new protocols will be developed to replace the abandoned.
As a developer, I'm not worried ... too much.

*If OpenID is interesting to you, also be sure to read up on OAuth, a standard protocol to secure API's for various web applicaitons.*

Media Blitz

You may have heard - Halo 3 releases tomorrow. September 25th, 2007 will no doubt go down in history as hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in a single day on a single video game. Nearly everyone knows this, even if they are not familiar with the Halo series of video games, have never played Halo 1 or 2, or don't even know that this "Halo thing" is a video game at all. Why? Because Microsoft has spent millions upon millions of dollars putting Master Chief's (the main character of the Halo games for those few of you who might be unfamiliar with the series) face on anything and everything that they can. Here is a quick photo I found (through flickr) of the limited edition Mountain Dew "Game Fuel" with Master Chief's sexy mug on the front.



From Mountain Dew to TV advertisements to action figures, Halo has been everywhere for the past few weeks. The launch tonight/tomorrow at 12:01 AM has generated an even larger hullabaloo, and everyone wants a part of it. Even Seven-Eleven stores have been taking preorders. The launch at the Times Square Best Buy in New York is the largest, including a Halo 3 branded Pontiac (picture courtesy of Kotaku.com) out front:


What does this mean in terms of digital media and convergence? It shows us a fantastic example of the recent convergence of more traditional advertising methods and new media. Normal advertising techniques of placing brand images on anything and everything (food, cars, etc) are being used to promote an upcoming video game, as well as many online, tv, and even radio ads. Microsoft also started a viral marketing campaign called "Iris" several months ago involving all kinds of interesting new marketing techniques. New media and old - new marketing and old - combine to create a media frenzy like none other to promote what will most likely become the largest media phenomenon ever (a title currently held, as far as I know, by Halo 2). I will be in line to pick up my copy at midnight tonight - will you?

The Perils of Buying Legitimate Software

I am posting the image above to emphasize a point concerning the abuse by companies of digital rights management software (DRM). Back in November 2006, I bought a copy of the game you see above: Neverwinter Nights 2. It was not a popular or highly anticipated game, but I had enjoyed the first one, and had high hopes for this game. Upon opening the box and installing it, however, I found the game to be unplayable. It had not been fully tested by the developers before being rushed to the shelves, so it was buggy, bloated, and missing many features that are standard on even the most basic video games today - not to mention the high-end, processor-intensive, "state-of-the-art" games that this one was claiming to be in the same league with.

Nonetheless, I pressed on. I had paid good money for this brand-new game, and I wanted to get the most out of it. So, I tweaked my computer settings, kept up with the forums, and diligently downloaded each patch and fix, though many of them caused the game to become more broken before it got better. After about six months, though, it was finally getting to the point where the game was playable, the graphics were decent, and it didn't bog down or crash my system every time I tried to play. Then, all of a sudden, I was blindsided by DRM.

Over six months AFTER the game was released, the developers decided that the game needed a patch that would surreptitiously add third-party DRM to the game in order to weed out all the pirated copies. Unfortunately, the company they chose was SecureROM, a company that places DRM on many computer games and that has some strange ideas about what types of other programs potential pirates would have running on their computer. After having this game for six months, I was suddenly told that I would not be allowed to play it because I had virtual drives installed on my computer and, get this, a third-party task manager! In order to be allowed to play a game that I had paid money for, in a store, I was told that I had to remove a legal open-source piece of software that had nothing to do with playing the game, or with being able to determine whether it was pirated or not.

The fiasco I had with Neverwinter Nights 2 was enough to make me want to pirate any computer game with DRM from now on. When a company puts out a crappy, half-finished game whose only real buyers would have been fans of the previous title, then chooses after six months of release to slap a broken DRM scheme onto it in a critical game patch, they are really doing nothing but hurting themselves by alienating their customers. And they are not the only ones. Bioshock, one of the most acclaimed games to come out this year, was tagged with a similar DRM scheme, and tons of people had the exact same problems - being forced to remove legitimate software from their computers because some company has tagged it as "piracy-enabling" software. And while Neverwinter Nights 2 may not have been able to recoup its costs unless it tried to thwart piracy, I am certain that the people who made Bioshock have done so several times over already.

So why do they do it? That's what I don't understand. Why do companies alienate their customers and treat them like criminals when all it does is push more and more people towards downloading the pirated versions that have all the copy-protection hoops stripped away? I don't know how these companies think, but I do know how people of my generation see them. Growing up in the era of Napster, You-Tube, and torrent sites made me realize that no one is entitled to make money off of their work. There is a good chance that if you have a product on the shelves, especially if it is a quality product, most people will buy it. I know I still will, and I believe that you deserve my money for providing me with quality entertainment. But I also know that attempting to force people to buy your stuff by making it harder to pirate, or by treating potential customers like criminals in an effort to net yourself a few more bucks, just makes people like me realize why so many people choose to pirate stuff in the first place. So what's it going to take for the big companies to realize this too?

What Price Free Culture?

In light of the video we watched/heard on Tuesday in class about free culture, I've been thinking a lot about free culture and how the ideas of freedom of culture extend far beyond copyrights and ISP laws and reach into the very constitutional realms of free speech and the (assumed) right to creativity. It sparks a very interesting debate especially when juxtaposed with the Tasering of the Florida student at a John Kerry speech. Was he outside his bounds of free speech? Was he outside his bounds in free creativity? What part of our culture restricts what he is able to do? What right do the police officers have for (not even tasering him) removing him from the podium for asking serious questions, if in an albeit "hammed up" manner?

And what does it say about the digital age when instantly his actions appear on YouTube? Do his questions/actions gain tenor and significance or do they lose the meaning he had originally intended?

Also related to Free Culture, randomly found This and was curious if anyone had heard of it or knew anything about it.