To the tune of: Morecambe & Wise – Me And My Shadow

I wrote this: http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/why-you-must-keep-track-of-your-online-profile-709345

“You might not realise it yet, but you’re a brand. All this time you’ve been walking and talking and posting on the internet, thinking you were a person, when you’ve been a brand all along. Who’d have thought it? All of your activities have been contributing to the brand, building a profile for it and even advertising it.

Why is it important to think of yourself as a brand? Because as information about individuals becomes increasingly available online, you want [more...]]]>

His brand is clear

To the tune of: Morecambe & Wise – Me And My Shadow

I wrote this: http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/why-you-must-keep-track-of-your-online-profile-709345

“You might not realise it yet, but you’re a brand. All this time you’ve been walking and talking and posting on the internet, thinking you were a person, when you’ve been a brand all along. Who’d have thought it? All of your activities have been contributing to the brand, building a profile for it and even advertising it.

Why is it important to think of yourself as a brand? Because as information about individuals becomes increasingly available online, you want to make sure that information is not only accurate but also positive and succinct.”

Another interview that I felt guilty about woefully under-using in a feature. Still about making games for Apple Mac, but this time I was talking with Transgaming, who convert PC games to Mac for large publishers and developers, and with CCP, who’ve used Transgaming to transfer Eve: Online to Mac.

Gavriel State

(Which is an awesome name.)

What differences in tech are there between a Mac and a PC? From a hardware perspective, Macs and PCs are very similar these days – they share [more...]]]> To the tune of: Tim Curry – Sweet Transvestite

Another interview that I felt guilty about woefully under-using in a feature. Still about making games for Apple Mac, but this time I was talking with Transgaming, who convert PC games to Mac for large publishers and developers, and with CCP, who’ve used Transgaming to transfer Eve: Online to Mac.

Gavriel State

TRANSGAMING: CTO, GAVRIEL STATE.

(Which is an awesome name.)

What differences in tech are there between a Mac and a PC?
From a hardware perspective, Macs and PCs are very similar these days – they share elements like the CPUs, graphics cards, and memory. The biggest hardware difference is on the desktop side, where most PCs use add-in cards for graphics, while the iMac has the graphics chip built directly into the system. Only Mac Pros have upgradable graphics cards on the Mac side.

The real differences come in the software side, where the operating system and driver layers for the systems are radically different, as are the APIs used by applications.

What needs to be adapted to make games on it?
TransGaming’s Cider technology makes it very easy to bring PC based titles to the Mac, by bridging the API gap that is the most important thing separating the platforms. For example, Cider takes care of the work of adapting a games’s DirectX API usage for graphics and sound to OpenGL and CoreAudio. Beyond that, TransGaming’s work typically focuses on user experience areas – components such as launchers, patchers and the like need to be rewritten using Apple’s Cocoa APIs. In the case of EVE, we worked hard to ensure that components such as the in-game browser were built with Mac-based browser code, so that UI elements inside the browser on the Mac match what they look like outside the game.

Eve graphs make me happy.

Are simultaneous releases feasible?
They definitely are! Mac updates for EVE Online expansions and patches are released simultaneously with updates on the PC. A close working relationship between CCP and TransGaming, built on constant communication, has been paramount in ensuring that updates are prepped in advance for such dual-platform releases.

What disadvantages and advantages are there in developing for the Mac?
One nice advantage to developing for the Mac is that there are relatively few system configurations that must be supported compared to PCs. Most Mac gamers are quick to adopt the latest OS updates, especially compared to what happens with PCs.

On the flip side, because the Mac OS is so tightly integrated with hardware, Mac users only get new updates to video drivers as part of the OS. This is great for users, since they never have to think about whether they have the right driver version, or finding out where to get updates or what particular version of the driver to get. But for developers, it means that sometimes a fix for a game has to await Apple releasing that new OS update. It also means that its much harder to support older versions of the OS which are no longer receiving updates.

There are dangers in closed systems – do you know whether Apple will implement a system similar to the iPhone’s app store?
On the contrary – traditionally, closed systems have been much easier for game developers to deal with, since they tend to further reduce the complexity of having multiple configurations to deal with, whether on the software or hardware side. That said, while Apple may well at some point in the future introduce an app-store type system for the Mac, the Mac is by its nature an open platform where anyone can develop software. That’s something that will never change.

The old barriers to entry for Mac development were the alien processor architecture for PC developers, the limited RAM & the lack of DirectX. Are there any more barriers that still cause problems?
While some of the old barriers such as CPU differences are behind us now, there are still many significant impediments to developers who try to do traditional porting. Doing so can require massive changes to a game’s source code just to get the game to compile on the Mac, especially when complex middleware is being used. In some cases, developers don’t have source code access to their middleware, making a traditional port impossible. And all of that is still ignoring the need to write new graphics and audio paths in the game, which in some cases can require changes to the actual content data.

This is where TransGaming’s Cider technology really shines, since developers can maintain their existing build systems, continue using the same middleware they’ve adopted, and fully use their existing graphics paths. At the same time, areas that touch on user interface can still be customized for the Mac, and other places that need attention require much less effort to deal with than a traditional port. Finally, some of the changes that TransGaming recommends developers undertake to improve the Mac version of a game are just as applicable for improving the Windows version, so the code ends up remaining the same for both platforms.

Spaceships, yesterday.

Are there middleware licensing issues porting to Mac?
While we can’t speak to specifics, it all depends on the middleware provider. Some have platform restrictions in their licenses while others don’t. Aside from middleware components from Microsoft, we have yet to experience a situation where a middleware issue made it impossible to bring a game to the Mac.

Are porting houses still necessary? What’s this Cider app we’ve heard all about?
The kind of porting house that used to be typical of the Mac gaming world is likely to have little place in its future. As the Mac becomes a bigger and bigger percentage of the overall PC market, more and more game developers and publishers are looking at getting into the platform directly, rather than trust their IP and profit margins to third parties. For more and more of these players, Cider is the technology they turn to when they want to go this route. By engaging with TransGaming and licensing Cider, game developers and publishers can bring their games to the Mac far more quickly than was ever possible before, and they can be directly in touch with their customers instead of going through a third party.

What’s more, the same technology behind TransGaming’s Cider is now being deployed on next generation TV set top boxes through a platform we call GameTree.tv. So developers who move to the Mac with TransGaming also have the opportunity to reach an even bigger audience in the future!

Gabe Mahoney

GABE MAHONEY, VP OF ENGINEERING AT CCP

Will CCP continue to develop all its games for the Mac?
As long as we have a strong contingent of players playing on the Mac, then absolutely yes. And there are no signs that are Mac subscriber numbers will do anything but continue to grow. We have more and players using the Mac client as time goes on as OSX gains market share and becomes more of a gaming platform.

Do you find any differences between Mac Gamers and PC Gamers?
To be honest, not so much anymore. While the Mac used to be more of a specialty OS for graphics designers, musicians and other creatives it is now gaining a lot of traction with business and general home users. This means that more people are using Macs as their general purpose computer and are expecting it to run games as well as their PCs. I think this trend will tend to create homogeneity between Mac and PC gamers and wise developers will embrace both platforms equally.

To the tune of: Belle and Sebastian – Funny Little Frog

The Frog Prince

Tell me about you. I worked in the mainstream games industry for 10 years (including stints at EA & Lionhead) but recently went indie. I have a game called Ancient Frog which is currently out for the iPhone and, in expanded form, iPad. Internally I [more...]]]> This is an interview I had left over from a feature, and it seems a shame to waste it. It’s with a Mac developer, James Brown, who is the entire staff of Ancient Workshop and it’s about Mac gaming.

To the tune of: Belle and Sebastian – Funny Little Frog

The Frog Prince

Tell me about you.
I worked in the mainstream games industry for 10 years (including stints at EA & Lionhead) but recently went indie. I have a game called Ancient Frog which is currently out for the iPhone and, in expanded form, iPad. Internally I also have versions running on OS X, Windows, Android and Palm Pre, each at a different stage along the release pipeline.

What differences in tech are there between developing for Mac and PC?
I develop simultaneously on Windows and Mac – they’re side by side on my desk like something from a Stevie Wonder song, and so far neither of them has managed to completely oust the other. I prefer OS X as a general development environment (it’s funny how the Mac ended up with a far better command line, given the history of the two platforms), but there’s still nothing to touch the Visual Studio debugger on Windows.

In terms of developing for them, they’re only as different as you allow them to be. Apple wants you to use Objective C, Microsoft wants you to use C# and DirectX, but in neither case is this enforced. If you develop in straight C++ targeting OpenGL, the differences are entirely superficial.

What needs to be adapted to make games on it?
Games are probably the easiest type of application to adapt from PC to Mac. Where you run into difficulty porting an application from one platform to another is in the user interface. If you’re making a traditional utility application, you have to either make something generic (which feels clumsy and wrong on every platform), or you have to bite the bullet and rewrite huge swathes of code for each version.

With a game, though, it’s different. A game pretty much is a user interface – it exists solely as something to be interacted with, and that interaction is something which shouldn’t be shoehorned in to the platform’s general look and feel. Imagine writing a puzzle game that conforms to the Mac OS human interface guidelines; it would just show you the completed puzzle – after all, users shouldn’t have to fiddle around solving problems that the computer can solve for them.

So it’s a given that a game handles all of its UI in its own way. Everything else is, to a certain level of abstraction, identical. You have a C compiler, a file system, a graphics unit that will draw triangles with textures on them really quickly. The higher level stuff that each operating system can do for you doesn’t really come into it.

Are simultaneous releases tricky?
From a technical point of view they needn’t be tricky. The easiest way to handle multi platform development is to make sure you’re building on each platform right from the start. One of the reasons I’m constantly switching back and forth between the Mac and PC is that I catch any non-portable code immediately, while it’s still fresh in my mind and it hasn’t burrowed its way to the heart of the codebase. It’s a natural extension of this development approach that when the game is finished on the Mac it’s finished on the PC. (I also target iPhone, iPad, Android, Palm Pre and so on, but the tighter constraints on performance and resolution mean that they each need a bit of individual care and attention before they’re ready for release.)

Marketing is a bit trickier – a big publisher is able to reap the benefit of one big marketing blitz covering every platform. As a one man indie, I’m chipping away trying to get reviews within my particular niche, so I feel I’m better off releasing one version at a time.

There are dangers in closed systems and Apple love them – do you think Apple will ever implement a system similar to the iPhone’s app store for Mac? Or has Steam already taken that function?
I really can’t see them implementing an app store in the same form as the iPhone / iPad store, where it’s the only way to install applications – Microsoft failed to achieve that with Palladium, and I’d expect any attempt by Apple would suffer the same fate.

An app store in the Steam mold is another matter, and in fact I’m a little surprised they haven’t already done it. (I can’t see Steam itself being any barrier – they already have the iTunes infrastructure in place, and it’s not as if they’d have any difficulty attracting developers.)

The old barriers to entry for Mac development were the alien processor architecture for PC developers, the limited RAM & the lack of DirectX. Are any of them still problematic? Are there any more barriers that I’ve not mentioned?
Pre-OS X memory management was a pain, but endianness and the specifics of the graphics API were never the real difficulty. Or at least, they were only a difficulty when the Mac was an odd niche market that publishers didn’t look at until they’d finished the game and wondered if there was any more cash to be squeezed out of it.

If you develop with multi-platform in mind from the beginning, you just need a slim little abstraction layer and it’s all pretty straightforward. The real change that’s happened here is not so much the hardware as the general resurgence in Apple’s fortunes. It’s no longer a niche; it’s something you develop for as a matter of course.

Are there middleware licensing issues porting to Mac? Do you use any middleware?
The less middleware I use, the happier I am. My current engine has no external dependencies – if a platform has a C compiler and something resembling OpenGL, I can build my games on it.

Are porting houses necessary with these changes?
If you’re a Windows developer making Windows games, then a porting house will save you an awful lot of work. But you’re paying someone else to do what is really your business, and for your next game you have to get them in again to do pretty much exactly the same work.

I’m definitely a believer in controlling that side of things myself. If you have a codebase that builds on two platforms, you’re most of the way to having something that builds on absolutely anything. There are odd little devices popping up all over the place at the moment, and I like being in a position to take advantage of them.

That’s the case for games at any rate. As mentioned before, while a game UI is a game UI, a native application really needs a native UI. If your target platform isn’t also the computer you use every day, you’ll probably make something that feels all wonky and wrong to people who do use it every day. That’s where a porting house can shine.

Do you find any differences between Mac Gamers and PC Gamers?
Of course! Mac Gamers are smarter, wittier and more attractive. FACT.

Why is GSB going to be SO AWESOME on the Mac?
Well, GSB is indeed going to be SO AWESOME, but you’d have to ask Cliffski for the specifics.

The Mac version of Ancient Frog is going to be startlingly prettier than the iPhone version. I’ve re-shot the textures (some of the iPhone originals were captured using a little 5MP compact digital – the new ones are hot off the full-frame sensor of a Canon 5D mk II), so it really shines fullscreen on a hi res Cinema Display.

Thanks and stuff!

A Reputation-Destroying Chair

Whatever your experience of Stuart Campbell, owner of World of Stuart, everyone agrees he’s a tireless campaigner for accuracy, honesty and justice in journalism and blogging. About three days ago he started investigating a seemingly minor infringement, the too-glowing review of an expensive office chair by Olin Coles, executive Editor of Benchmark Reviews (270,000 monthly unique users being misled there.)

The issue was that the chair seemed to have been reviewed by lifting ad-copy from a second site Smart Furniture [more...]]]> To the tune of Paloma Faith – Do You Want The Truth Or Something Beautiful?

A Reputation-Destroying Chair

Whatever your experience of Stuart Campbell, owner of World of Stuart, everyone agrees he’s a tireless campaigner for accuracy, honesty and justice in journalism and blogging. About three days ago he started investigating a seemingly minor infringement, the too-glowing review of an expensive office chair by Olin Coles, executive Editor of Benchmark Reviews (270,000 monthly unique users being misled there.)

The issue was that the chair seemed to have been reviewed by lifting ad-copy from a second site Smart Furniture and elements from the PR brochure of Herman Miller, the manufacturer. It was quite clearly a case of corporate shilling, giving a glowing review in return for unspecified benefits, which Olin Cole has admitted doing in the past;

“I used to take anything that manufacturers would offer, back when BmR was starving for donated products.  These days, we work more closely with proven manufacturers to help launch their upcoming products“.

The problem is that the staff don’t seem to be able to stop lying, admit they made a mistake, and restart their careers as honest, albeit damaged, journalists.  Once challenged the editor altered the article to properly attribute the paragraphs that plagiarised the press release and then denied Stuart’s claims, despite Google Cache showing him to be a liar. He’s also deleted any comments on the article criticising it, deleted similar forum posts, and generally behaved like a bad egg. So far, so scummy.

However, thanks to the DMCA, Benchmark reviews has now enforced a takedown notice on Stuart’s blog, claiming he’s reproduced copyrighted material. Of course, the copyright-infringement isn’t their primary concern as much of the material is copyright of Smart Furniture, so if they took it to court there would be problems – but I’m not aware of a parody defence against the DMCA and some of the material is copyrighted, so Stu doesn’t really have a leg to stand on can only rely on the news reporting defence.

Personally, as a PR and one-time journalist I find this despicable; there is no point paying for coverage like this. Morally, it’s disgusting and practically, the media always end up getting caught out – whether it was PC Zone’s appalling Kingpin debacle or OPM’s Driv3r review, you get caught. Doing it in this manner, stealing other people’s copy, is lazy and stupid; not admitting your guilt and going on a vendetta against a well-respected, well-connected and avowedly honest journalist is even more stupid. EAVB_IUMHYIXDFT

Buy a PC Gamer-approved product every day this week and you get reward points. You’ve levelled up, now you’re a PCG Ambassador, so you get a PCG fan kit. Meanwhile, your health insurance is incentivising you to walk as it’s worried about your heart rate, and a tobacco firm is incentivising you not to read The Guardian because of its coverage of cancer risk. You get an achievement from the local council for not giving money to a tramp, and your eyetracking device is giving you bonus points for reading every line of an advert (but not the small print). It’s a nightmare [more...]]]> To the tune of: Money, Money – Cabaret

The Money Farm

Buy a PC Gamer-approved product every day this week and you get reward points. You’ve levelled up, now you’re a PCG Ambassador, so you get a PCG fan kit. Meanwhile, your health insurance is incentivising you to walk as it’s worried about your heart rate, and a tobacco firm is incentivising you not to read The Guardian because of its coverage of cancer risk. You get an achievement from the local council for not giving money to a tramp, and your eyetracking device is giving you bonus points for reading every line of an advert (but not the small print). It’s a nightmare and it’s coming.

What no one is mentioning is a crash, a bubble bursting. There’s a risk that social gaming could collapse overnight. Yet this is unlikely, because the place where it’s based, Facebook, is now so central to our lives. Instead, social gaming is spilling out virally into the world, and its effectiveness in altering our behaviour means it’s soon going to be affecting you in ways you may not even notice.

This is a new music-shooter from the chap who made Rez, Tetsuya Mizuguchi – it’s operated through Microsoft’s new Kinect motion-detection system and is meant to convey the sound-colour linkage of synesthesia. Sadly, as it’s colour-oriented, I’m aware that I’m probably never going to be able to enjoy this, in the way I couldn’t enjoy Space Giraffe.

I sincerely hope that this is all in-game footage – mainly because I can’t believe that it could all be rendered and because I’ve been hoping for something that’s a graphical leap forward, not in terms of quality necessarily, but in [more...]]]>

This is a new music-shooter from the chap who made Rez, Tetsuya Mizuguchi – it’s operated through Microsoft’s new Kinect motion-detection system and is meant to convey the sound-colour linkage of synesthesia. Sadly, as it’s colour-oriented, I’m aware that I’m probably never going to be able to enjoy this, in the way I couldn’t enjoy Space Giraffe.

I sincerely hope that this is all in-game footage – mainly because I can’t believe that it could all be rendered and because I’ve been hoping for something that’s a graphical leap forward, not in terms of quality necessarily, but in terms of smooth integration of divergent thematic elements.

As an MMO reviewer, I’ve felt both privileged (at occupying a niche few are equipped to explore) and also terrified (at a reviewer’s complete inability to perceive the whole game). As Quintin Smith found last week, and Ed Zitron found previously, reviewers, no matter how professional, can’t just hop back into an MMO when it’s been updated and hope to review it. Especially not, as those two found, when the audience they think they’re talking to isn’t the audience that actually reads and responds to the article. Here’s a putative structure [more...]]]> To the tune of: Nina Nastasia – Our Discussion

As an MMO reviewer, I’ve felt both privileged (at occupying a niche few are equipped to explore) and also terrified (at a reviewer’s complete inability to perceive the whole game). As Quintin Smith found last week, and Ed Zitron found previously, reviewers, no matter how professional, can’t just hop back into an MMO when it’s been updated and hope to review it. Especially not, as those two found, when the audience they think they’re talking to isn’t the audience that actually reads and responds to the article. Here’s a putative structure for reviewing MMOs that deals with the problems caused by trying to employ time-poor professional reviewers.

Cpl Smith, M.I.A.

Problems

1. Must experience enough of content in proper way to do review.
2. Different experience types for player types – solo, casual, hardcore, obsessive.
3. Need for humour, quality writing.
4. Cost of review process must be kept down.
5. Content alters substantially over game’s lifetime.

Many professional reviewers provide 3, can attempt 2 but usually fail, don’t keep playing so can’t do 5, and to provide 1 would be to disregard 4.

Solutions

1. Multiple reviewers
2. Multiple reviewers
3. Mediated by co-ordinator
4. Co-ordinator is paid writer-editor – incentivised to find free reviewers and collate & polish their opinion.
5. Reconvene with original panel at regular intervals.

It's all about getting a good team together.

This system as a narrative. Un-paid enthusiasts are given early access and review title in return for thought-access. Primary writer becomes interviewer, co-ordinating impressions from many different groups. Individual, subjective experience is not of primary relevance, but collation of views is. Common problems can be identified, and the game rated on these – whilst problems specific to groups acknowledged, represented. Panel reconvenes to alter score when game has altered substantially from previous score. (This also provides you with an evaluation structure for up-and-coming writers, as you can test their analysis, reliability and writing ability  through these panels.)

Here’s a question I don’t know the answer to – is this process applicable to reviews other than MMOs? Should all reviews be done this way?

Proportionally Delightful

Minority parties get more seats. Small parties don’t necessarily get a larger share of seats – some systems, like the “mixed member” system of Germany, put minimum limits on the share of the vote (as high as 5%), that exclude smaller parties. Parties will be weakened PR can give more power to parties. A purely proportional system normally allows parties to control the selection of candidates completely, leading to politicians with much stronger party loyalty. Some systems work against this, especially ones with constituencies, but [more...]]]> To the tune of: Malcolm X – No Taxation Without Representation

1. 

   Proportionally Delightful

   Minority parties get more seats.
   Small parties don’t necessarily get a larger share of seats – some systems, like the “mixed member” system of Germany, put minimum limits on the share of the vote (as high as 5%), that exclude smaller parties.

2. Parties will be weakened
   PR can give more power to parties. A purely proportional system normally allows parties to control the selection of candidates completely, leading to politicians with much stronger party loyalty. Some systems work against this, especially ones with constituencies, but there’s almost always a party-selection element.
3. There will be no independents
   Independents can still stand, especially in systems that have constituencies that are then topped-up  - they do especially well if they have a national profile though.
4. You still have to choose one party
   It doesn’t mean you just have to choose one party – a preferential system allows you to list parties/candidates in order of preference or leave them out completely.
5. It’s too complicated for Britain
   It does work with Britain – we already use it in the European elections, and Scotland and Wales. And it’s less complicated than guessing the intentions of your fellow constituents to vote tactically on the basis of poorly-biased voting-intention polls.

It’s 2010 and my jaw is hanging like it’s been wired open. I can’t believe what I’m watching on screen. The wise-talking pensive scientist / special operative who’s been fighting robots and aliens and stuff at my side, is… singing. And, in the deep darkness of the far future, in the lab of my one-of-a-kind spaceship in uber science-fiction action-game Mass Effect 2 what he’s singing is… Gilbert & Sullivan? Particularly a parody of a Modern Major General.

It’s 2007 and I’m munching on a buffet at Bioware’s offices [more...]]]> To the tune of: The Element’s Song by Tom Lehrer

It’s 2010 and my jaw is hanging like it’s been wired open. I can’t believe what I’m watching on screen. The wise-talking pensive scientist / special operative who’s been fighting robots and aliens and stuff at my side, is… singing. And, in the deep darkness of the far future, in the lab of my one-of-a-kind spaceship in uber science-fiction action-game Mass Effect 2 what he’s singing is… Gilbert & Sullivan? Particularly a parody of a Modern Major General.

It’s 2007 and I’m munching on a buffet at Bioware’s offices in Edmonton, Alberta. Their headquarters are a great solid block of a building, enclosing a wide covered plaza, and along one side of it are tables and a buffet. Opposite me, chewing lugubriously, is Drew Karpyshyn, chief writer for Bioware, and author of numerous pulp sci-fi novels and script. Like the rest of the guys here, he’s something of a shtarker – if, as I naively imagine must happen all the time in Canada, the whole building gets routinely buried under a mile of snow, these guys would survive on built-up buffet-generated body-fat for weeks before they had to start eating the QA team.

I look around at these guys and, while they seem smart, I’m, as always, a little disappointed with the atmosphere. Like all their compadres I’ve visited, the location of this group of North American developers is clinical and dull – 3D Realms had a bunker that was tedious cubicles inside, Blizzard’s base could have been in a Reading business park, Monolith and 2K are buried in silent office blocks in the suburbs… only EA (the campus in San Fran, or their recently-abandoned UK riverside headquarters) seem to have had a sense of the grand scale of what they’re building; these are the people building the future of the mind and they’re doing it from cubicle farms and bedrooms, enlivened only by merchandised cartoon dolls on their desks and the same sort of pop-culture posters on their walls their grandfathers would have stuck up during the war. Drew seems pleasant and bright, but not the image of wild-eyed writer I’d have expected.

Yet Drew, or one of his colleagues, wrote that scene. Someone in that company is aware of 19th Century British comic opera, well enough to write a parody of it (even including references to “patter” and the traditional updating of the song to current cultural events). That same person is also confident enough of their audience, confident enough of their own abilities and has enough confidence from their team, that they’ll put it into a wildly-inappropriate genre video game, but in a perfectly appropriate context. The moment doesn’t just work in the context of the character as an arbitrary grab at giving him depth – it works within the internal history of the game, with the character’s development from a simple doctor to something halfway between Mengeles and Einstein, and within the character’s motivations and especially his dark secret. It’s up there with Andrew Ryan’s Teetime and Modern Warfare’s helicopter crash – but better executed, less po-faced and completely tangential to the plot.

Internet culture talks often about the moment some piece of media “jumped the shark”; I’d say that Mordin moment, is the inversion of this, the moment when games stepped up from being puerile, simplistic and arbitrary constructs of a moment’s pleasure, to fully-fledged self-sustaining, confident and internally coherent worlds of their own.

Dr Greg Slaps Me Awake

First Dream (Nightmare): Mass Effect 2 interactable highlight encapsulating a plastic dinner tub, endlessly tesselating and overlapping.

I gone and done wrote something, hic:

I’m Big Daddy Delta, terror of Rapture, splitter of splicers, defender of the weak, diving suit fetishist extraordinaire. I’m stuck on one side of a door, there’s a broken window and a yellow glowing switch a few feet away. I have a clever hacking dart gun, which requires my simply pressing a button when a needle on its meter passes through a certain colour. I shoot, I score… and get a mild electric shock. I repeat. Again and [more...]]]> To the tune of Red Right Hand by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

I gone and done wrote something, hic:

I’m Big Daddy Delta, terror of Rapture, splitter of splicers, defender of the weak, diving suit fetishist extraordinaire. I’m stuck on one side of a door, there’s a broken window and a yellow glowing switch a few feet away. I have a clever hacking dart gun, which requires my simply pressing a button when a needle on its meter passes through a certain colour. I shoot, I score… and get a mild electric shock. I repeat. Again and again. There’s an endless supply of darts so I keep shooting until I die of Electron Overdose and respawn, humiliated, at a Vitachamber. Yet again, someone on the art team has thoughtlessly swallowed the Manichean standard that red is bad and green is good, and decided he should use a primary palette to distinguish between these opposites -which means poor old colour-blind me gets killed.

You can read the rest over at RPS

The Other Reader is determined to make an Economist of me at the moment and was very annoyed when last night I couldn’t answer the nonsense question, “Why is the housing population ageing?” I have determined therefore to attempt an answer herewith, fol de rol, and so and so, what what?

A Weird House, Golder's Green

There are three interpretations of what she could possibly mean with this nonsense:

Why? Let’s look at Russia. [more...]]]> (This is a response to Rob Fahey’s Special Editions piece on Gamesindustry.biz)

A 1C Shop in Moscow

Why? Let’s look at Russia. Russia was the scourge of legal games until very recently, but 1C have (almost single-handedly) managed to turn that around. They did this through two methods. Firstly, they persuaded the government to deal with high-street game piracy – where normal shops preferred to sell copied games because the unit cost was better and the packaging was nearly as good. The government cracked down on both consumers and vendors.

MMOs sell more special editions than other genres.

What’ll happen next? I think Digital Editions from large publishers might start coming with the option to buy the physical edition at a much reduced cost. If that seems like it might encourage cost sharing, so that one friend buys the game online and gives his physical copy to another, which obviously would reduce developer profit then I think Special Editions will be turned into Collector’s Sets – no actual copy of the game, but all the accoutrements of a Special Edition.

I have a problem with tech – I’m morally incontinent (stop your giggling at the back, Jenkins!), in that my mind is slightly spoiled so it strongly seeks pleasure, even when I know that the good thing is something else. Plato called it ‘akrasia’, and it implies a lack of moral control.

This has been a problem since my university days, when I couldn’t be dragged away from my computer, by hell or high water. It used to sit on, in my room, 24 hours a day, normally with the door [more...]]]> To the tune of: Akrasia by James Falzone

I have a problem with tech – I’m morally incontinent (stop your giggling at the back, Jenkins!), in that my mind is slightly spoiled so it strongly seeks pleasure, even when I know that the good thing is something else. Plato called it ‘akrasia’, and it implies a lack of moral control.

This has been a problem since my university days, when I couldn’t be dragged away from my computer, by hell or high water. It used to sit on, in my room, 24 hours a day, normally with the door open so anyone who wanted to use it could come in. When it came to exam time, I would ceremoniously take the power cables and give them to a trustworthy friend (normally Philomena Keet) who hid them, sometimes for a week, sometimes for an entire three months (as during my final exams). That’s the only reason I passed my exams, a perverse strength in my recognition of my weakness.

Persuasively dissuading.

To counteract my enervated tendencies, which continue to this day, I’ve started using an application on Chrome called StayFocusd. It allows you a maximum of ten minutes a day across all the sites you flag as time-wasters, at which point it blocks you from accessing them for the rest of the day *and* flashes up a screen-wide question: “Shouldn’t you be working?” Simple, but highly effective – especially if you absentmindely wander to sites you shouldn’t when your computer has a ‘thinking moment’.

That’s not all that’s wonderful about it. It also prevents you altering it’s settings during your allocated time, by popping up several dialogues if you try and increase your allocation. Then, when time has expired completely, you can’t remove the blocked sites from the list, or access the options at all.

It’s only flaw – as a Chrome extension, it’s too easy to switch off entirely.

You are browsing the second-hand books in a small town’s famous covered market, waiting for the other reader to finish whatever the other reader is finishing, when you happen across a book. It is amongst the Books You Normally Read and The Books You Like The Cover Of, a most fortuitous placing, and it is a Book You Always Wanted To Read as well as a Book You’re Ashamed You’ve Never Read, and possibly a Book You Pretend You’ve Read.

It is Lolita, a book you are so [more...]]]> To the tune of: April March – Poor Lola

You are browsing the second-hand books in a small town’s famous covered market, waiting for the other reader to finish whatever the other reader is finishing, when you happen across a book. It is amongst the Books You Normally Read and The Books You Like The Cover Of, a most fortuitous placing, and it is a Book You Always Wanted To Read as well as a Book You’re Ashamed You’ve Never Read, and possibly a Book You Pretend You’ve Read.

It is Lolita, a book you are so familar with that you can trip the first three syllables of the book off your tongue, Lo-lee-ta, in a self-pleasing parody of the book’s first line which, again, you’ve never read. You’re excited, because you’re a fan of Nabokov, and you’ve never found this in a second-hand bookshop – whether through the prurience of proprieters or the retention of readers, you don’t know.

However, and there’s always a however in your Calvino mental life, there’s a reason you’ve not gone out of your way to buy this book in the past, though you’ve always been interested in buying it. That’s because, even though this is a classic work of literature by the greatest writer of the 20th Century, since the pornographers degraded the name Lolita and since the advent of a frothing, scare-mongered disgust in your country regarding the book’s subject, you wouldn’t want to be seen with the book in public. Especially if you’re a funny-looking person relative to the people around you, you wouldn’t want to be tarred with the Humbert brush.

But, here, the book has practically fallen into your hands. And you know it’s a great book, and he’s a great author, and you know your own reticence is silly and irrational. It’s just a book, with a plain cover and small text. You’re treating it like Mein Kampf. You’ll just wander over to the bookseller’s office, buy it quickly, and be done with this overthinking. Or perhaps you should pick up another book or two, to hide it?

You look up. The nearest Mac-wearing bookseller has already noticed your hesitation and she is a she, and is pursing her lips at you curiously, while you been stood there lost in thought. If you’d actually been browsing the book that wouldn’t have been a problem, but you’ve been standing, lost in thought,  and partially blocking the isle with your bags (I neglected to mention how weighed down you are with the accoutrements of two people, so that your every move is a collecting-heaving-shuffling-dropping motion). Now she’s caught your eye and smiles welcoming. In a moment she’s going to ask you if you need any help.

The moment is at hand. Before she can speak you collect and heave and shuffle and drop so you’re next to her, book in hand, asking politely for this one please. She smiles, glances at the book’s title, and changes her expression as she asks for the money. The smile’s still there, but you can’t tell if there’s confusion or disgust behind it, for the moment, as you hand over a note. By the time she has shuffled into the small office, found your change and extended her arm through the door, her smile has gone completely to be replaced with a intense stare with the bowed eyebrows you think are associated with curiosity. You leave, rapidly, and wait elsewhere for the other reader.

It has been three months. You’ve still not opened the book.

Today, he announces to much fanfare, is the 65th anniversary of the creation of the briefs,those underpants of the first order. They were first sold by Coopers Inc of Chicago (now Jockey International) on January 19th 1935, designed by apparel engineer Arthur Kniebler as a replacement for the jockstrap, hence their name of jock-brief. (Briefs are known as jockeys to Americans, presumably because it reduced a man’s wotsits until they were midget-sized.) In England the traditional design meant they came be to be called Y-fronts [more...]]]> (To The Tune of: Fortinbras, King of Techno by Songs To Wear Pants To)

Today, he announces to much fanfare, is the 65th anniversary of the creation of the briefs,those underpants of the first order. They were first sold by Coopers Inc of Chicago (now Jockey International) on January 19th 1935, designed by apparel engineer Arthur Kniebler as a replacement for the jockstrap, hence their name of jock-brief. (Briefs are known as jockeys to Americans, presumably because it reduced a man’s wotsits until they were midget-sized.) In England the traditional design meant they came be to be called Y-fronts – due to the unusual apeture at the front for extracting the wotsit.

With this flimsy justification, here’s a brief history of the undergarment:

The Lioncloth

The Lioncloth
At the dawn of history, Man’s rapacious shame nearly made the fig tree extinct, so an alternate form of genital coverage had to be found. Enter the lioncloth, as modelled by Conan, Jesus and other fictitious barbarians! Early hunters decapitated entire species to turn them into fetching puce or leopard-skin print pants. As the various large cats became extinct and the pun became too egregious, the early freedom experienced by the hunter-gatherer society faded, and they moved into the middle ages.

The Boxer Rebellion

Braies Yourself
In the Middle Ages, people still hadn’t really conceived of underwear as a good idea – they just wore the same clothes all the time, or until codpiece fashion changed. Braies were halfway between commando jodphurs and man-nappies – large folds of cloth wearers stepped into. The codpiece was actually a pocket in the braies to allow urination (in this instance cod meaning scrotum, rather than edible fish), which gradually became larger because Henry VIII thought his willy should be bigger than everyone else’s (or possibly because he filled it with syphillis-medication – true fact!) In Scotland, this shifted into the Sporran, as an ideal place for haggis storage.

Long John Silver's Silver Long Johns

The Boxer Rebellion
As the century moved on, braies got replaced by hose or drawers. Industrialisation meant that cotton fabrics became widely available, and people no longer had to make their own pants out of firehoses or dresser drawers. In the late 19th Century, some New York chappy created the Union Suit, a one piece suit with an ‘access hatch’ or ‘fireman’s flap’ at the back. This was the precursor of the Peak Pant, the Long Johns, a favourite of tramps and boxers everywhere, which became the male world’s preferred undergarment.

War is Pants
Despite the deaths of most of Britain’s men, those who returned from the front were equipped with army issue shorts – much like modern boxers and a sea-change in pant design. Those with the limbs left to wear them, rapidly adopted this modern convenience. Then 1935 saw the advent of the brief, shorts with the legs removed, and the 1980s saw a further refinement, in the advent of the G-string, which removed the back, and crotchless pants, that removed the bottom.

The Future
With the trend of the last hundred years being a gradual retreat from the apex of the pant, the Long John, we can see that soon there will be no pants left at all in the wild, and will only be kept alive in special museums, or old people’s homes. Everyone else will be going commando, which will keep military recruiters very happy indeed.