Gaming Classics

This week I decided to reacquaint myself with some of my old favorites. So I re-installed TIE Fighter and X-Wing Alliance.

Usually, nostalgia is a dangerous thing. We’ve all done it. You put on an old VHS tape of a show you loved as a kid, or played that game you loved on the Commodore 64…and by looking at it through more experienced eyes, you realize that our childhood favorite is a pile of crap.

We I was incredibly pleased to find that TIE Fighter is just as much fun today as when I first played it nearly 16 years ago.

Of course, the graphics are absolutely terrible by today’s standards, but once you’ve played for a few minutes and gotten used to that blocky 640 by 480 resolution, and complete and total lack of any whiz-bang effects…you forget about the graphics and just get on with playing the game.

TIE Fighter has always held a special place in my heart. It’s the first game that completely sucked me in. The first game I decided to play for ‘an hour’ at ten at night, and only stopped playing when I noticed the sun was coming up.

X-Wing Alliance was a different story. It’s still a good, solid game…but when played next to TIE Fighter, it just doesn’t have the same ‘magic’…and here’s why:

The first big selling point of TIE is that you played ‘yourself’. You put in you own name and what rank you made or awards you got were up to you.

It’s hard to explain, but unlike previous Star Wars games, were you were cast in the role of one of the heroes, TIE Fighter let you feel what it would be like to be a pilot in the Star Wars universe. Rather than be Luke Skywalker and match his achievements or fail…it was a game that let you fly with those characters.

Long story short, being put into the role of Darth Vader and attacking a Rebel force is one thing…but playing yourself and flying as one of Vader’s wingmen is a much deeper experience. It’s the difference between reenacting the things you’ve seen on screen, and seeing what a difference you could have made had you been there.

It might seem like a minor thing, but by forcing you into a ‘role’, Alliance loses a lot of its charm. Being referred by someone else’s name and being forced into a particular viewpoint takes something from the experience. Oh, and the droid you’re forced to listen to makes it feel like a kids game.

Basically, TIE Fighter is the original trilogy of Star Wars games…Alliance is the Episode 1 of Star Wars games…not bad in its own right, but just not up to scratch next to the original.

In TIE, there are ‘bonus’ mission objectives. You can try to excel or keep yourself safe…it’s up to you. It’s odd, but you can finish TIE as a mediocre pilot. (In fact, that’s one the things I loved most about this game, going to school on Monday mornings and comparing achievements with friends. Who outranked who, who got what medals, “I’m a Captain!” “Oh yeah? Well I’m a Commander and in the Inner Circle of the Emperor’s Secret Order!”

In Alliance, most of this is taken out of your hands. It still uses a similar system, but rather than extras being up to you, you’re forced to do the ‘family’ missions.

As well as the usual X-Wing/TIE Fighter campaigns, you’re also forced to take part in ‘family’ missions. Your character joined the Rebellion after the Empire seized their business with the help of a rival family, so one minute you’re attacking an Imperial Research post that’s creating advances star-fighters…and the next you’re suddenly forced into a crappy, slow, weak Correlian transport to steal a probe so your family can keep an eye on their business rivals.

It’s like, who cares?

You quickly learn to dread the family missions, because they take you out of the campaign you’re actually enjoying…and when you’ve just done a mission in an A-Wing, your Corellian transport ship seems painfully slow and under-powered.

Long story short, it’s like watching the movies, but with terrible added scenes.

Imagine the following. Obi-Wan has just said “You must learn the ways of the Force if you’re to become a Jedi Knight like your father!”…and then there’s a 30 minute sequence were Luke goes to a friends moisture farm and helps him ‘bullseye womprats’ because they’re chewing through power cables.

It’s like, sure, those womp-rats might wreck some dude’s equipment, but Vader’s in orbit…get your priorities straight.

It feels like Lucasarts tried to fix something that wasn’t broken. All Alliance needed was a graphical upgrade, not a new format. They gave us what they thought we should want, and not what we actually wanted.

Speaking of story, TIE also excelled in the way that it handled it’s story. Lucasarts could easily have gone in ‘pure evil’ direction where the missions were like “Let’s go blow shit up just for the sheer evilness of it”, which quite frankly isn’t all that interesting.

Instead (backed up by a short story in the manual), they made it a much deeper experience by showing how, through indoctrination and propaganda, it would be possible for a totally moral person to fight for the Empire and believe they were doing the right thing. In TIE Fighter, the Rebels aren’t painted as altruistic freedom-fighters, and the Empire evil oppressors…The Rebels are painted as terrorists and the Empire as a perfectly legal and rightful ruler. It showed the insidiousness of the Empire. They’d arrive at war torn system, put a stop to the conflict and say “Look everyone, we ended your war, everything’s better! Wouldn’t you like to join us and help create peace through the galaxy?”

Of course, they wouldn’t mention they’d bomb the place back to the stone-age if they refused…but hey, it’s the Empire.

The absolute worst thing in Alliance, gameplay wise, is that for some unknown reason, they made your fellow pilots far too chatty, and in lots of places, incompetent.

TIE Fighter has your wingmen professionally reporting important events…Alliance has your wingmen tell you everything they’re doing, congratulating themselves on every kill, and putting in smart-ass comments for no reason.

You tell a fellow TIE pilot to ignore your target and he says “Acknowledged (your callsign), ignoring designated target.”

You tell an Alliance pilot to ignore a target and they say “Hey! Are you trying to steal my kill? Don’t you believe in sharing?”

No you incompetent fuck! But we’re supposed to disable that ship and if you shoot it once more, we’re going to lose the mission!

Oh, and expect to hear “Imperial training seems a bit lax!” a few gajillion times per mission.

Something that got right on my nerves very quickly is the other pilots reactions to getting shot at. You see, as a capital ship opens up on you, you get a little warning light in your cockpit. Gameplay wise, this isn’t a huge deal. They start to shoot as soon as you come in range, but their chances of hitting you are minimal.

However, that doesn’t stop you getting about 10 panicked radio transmissions from your allies all screaming “I’m under heavy fire!” “Their turbolasers are targeting me!”

Oh, and the radio message from your wingman telling you that you’ve just been hit is really helpful. You get hit by a missile, there’s a huge explosion and your ship is rammed off course. As you’re spinning around, desperately trying to bring your ship back under control, your wingman says “Careful, you’re taking fire!”

No! Really?

My last big gripe about Alliance is that far too many missions depend on the competency of the AI pilots.

For example, to win a mission, you might have to disable a craft so shuttles can board it…but your craft doesn’t have any ion cannons, so you have to fly cover for the ships that do (Usually Y-Wings).

You do this, and do it well, but the Y-Wings just can’t get their shit straight. You’ve killed all the opposing fighters in record breaking time, you’ve even attacked the ship your trying to disable to draw some fire away from the Y-Wings…but they finally manage to disable the thing way to late, within the range of a station’s turbo lasers.

I’m not saying this didn’t happen in TIE Fighter, but it didn’t happen nearly as often.

TIE Fighter will stand the test of time. A perfect example of the way a game should be made. Alliance is a perfect example of how trying to fix something that isn’t broken can ruin it.

Alliance needed new graphics, new story and new missions. Instead we got that, plus an annoying talking droid, a past forced upon the player, annoyingly talkative and incompetent wingmen and ‘family’ missions that feel as though they were included just to annoy you.

If you’ve never experienced TIE Fighter, get on Ebay and find a copy. TIE Fighter 95 is the CD-ROM version that will run easily under XP (as long as you set it to win95 compatibility mode)…I guarantee you won’t be disappointed, and it’s a game that every PC gamer should own.

Alliance is a good game…it’s just not worthy to lick TIE Fighter’s flight boots.

Sony

I tried to hold my tongue on this one, but I just couldn’t.

I’m talking about Lair for the PS3.

Sony have gotten into the habit of not only pissing off their customers, but responding to the backlash by metaphorically kicking themselves in the balls over and over. It appears that Sony have wholeheartedly embraced the ‘politican’ style of management. No matter what happens, blame outside influences, claim black is white, and it all else fails, put their fingers in their ears and go “LALALALALALALA CAN’T HEAR YOU! LALALA.”

They fail to grasp the simple truth of the situation. Their customers have eyes and ears. Sony can say that the PS3 is whatever they like, but they’re not convincing anyone.

Sony has become a prime example of ‘Big Business Syndrome’. They believed that the PS3 was going to be an absolute smash-hit success whatever they did. They didn’t count on the fact that gamers are an extremely fickly bunch.

In fact, that might be a little unfair. It’s not that gamers are especially fickle, but brand loyalty only goes so far. You can be as big a Sony fan-boy as you like, but when their competition offers something better, sooner and for less money, that’s what we’re going for.

For example, as a PC gamer, I’ve always liked AMD processors. Every PC I’ve built or owned since 1996 has been powered by an AMD processor. However, if I come to buy a chip, and Intel releases one that is faster for less than the equivalent AMD…I’m switching over to Intel.

Long story short, brand loyalty is all well and good, but people aren’t going to burn money for no reason. Sony should have learned a lesson from Sega. At one point, Sega was at the top of the food chain…today they’re producing crappy games for other people’s consoles.

Anyway, back to Lair, and how mishandled it was by Sony.

The simple fact with Lair is that the controls suck. They’re totally unresponsive, sluggish and get in the way of gameplay. So how did Sony respond to this? Consider it a learning experience and fix it in Lair 2 or a major update?

Nope, they said to the gaming world at large:

“You’re doing it wrong.”

They went so far as to release a ‘Reviewers Guide’ in an attempt to stop bad scores.

Nice work Sony, you release a game with broken controls, and then release a ‘guide’ to professional gamers explaining that they don’t know how to do their jobs.

Here’s the deal. If people who review Lair say the controls suck, the controls suck. If the people who play Lair say the controls suck, the controls suck. You can’t turn around and tell the gaming community at large that they’re playing it wrong.

It’s like designing a car where to go left, you have to steer right. Everyone is going to have problems with it, and it’s not our responsibility to re-learn what we already know to suit you. It’s your responsibility to fix the damn steering!

The straw they’re holding onto is that the game is played with a sixaxis controller. They’re saying that people aren’t used to it and need to learn to use it.

I call bullshit. Innovation should be intuitive.

Look at the Wii. That uses an innovative ‘motion control’, and when was the last time you heard anyone complain about that? Nintendo created a control system that would allow people who’ve never even touched a controller before to play. You did almost exactly the same thing with the sixaxis controller…so how you can say with a straight face that everyone is wrong is beyond me.

Basically, when the controls are “Tilt the controller left to go left”, if people have problems with that, it’s the game and the controller that are at fault…not the gamer.

At my previous job, I came across exactly the same thing.

It was pay-raise time, and the pay raise offered was way below inflation. We also hadn’t received a pay raise in over three years. Of course, we weren’t happy.

What management chose to do was to distribute literature and emails explaining (with the use of pie-charts and graphs), that the pay raise was actually really good and really generous. As I said to my boss at the time, you can show us all the graphs, charts and rationales you like, the only figures I need to look at it my paycheck. An extra two dollars a week is certainly not generous.

Sony, admit you made a mistake. All you’re doing is alienating your customers and pissing everyone off. When you’re fucking us in the ass, we don’t care about your press releases about how good it is for our colon, or if we just relax it won’t be an unpleasant experience…we’d rather just not get fucked.

Computer Geek Rules

I had a little downtime at work this afternoon and decided to browse the internet. During my absent-minded surfing, I ran across an article enumerating Ten Reasons It Doesn't Pay to be the Computer Guy. Anyone who has already been dubbed "computer guy" should read this for a little bit of commiseration and comic relief. If you're not a "computer guy" and come to me asking for help, you will be required to read this before I even consider answering your question. And after you read that, I will make you read another rant of mine. These articles will help you determine if it's still worth asking my advice. If, after reading these two items, you still want my help, fine. But there are some rules you will need to follow from this moment forward.

Back up your critical data. If you have a digital picture of Fido as a puppy that you can't possibly live without, back it up. A hard drive is a mechanical device, and mechanical devices fail. Your local computer geek would rather spend 20 to 30 minutes helping you prepare for the worst than spending countless hours trying to recover something that is most likely gone forever. If your computer geek gave you this sage advice and you didn't follow it because you were too cheap to spend the extra $100 on an extra hard drive, or because you kept killing your backup job so you could play solitaire online and the backup slowed this down, then you had better be prepared to pay -- with money, beer, soda or food -- and you'd better be psychologically prepared to hear "It's gone for good."

Get virus protection. If When your friendly computer geek tells you to get virus protection, GET IT! Believe it or not, this is for your own good. We do NOT get a percentage of the profits from the Anti-Virus companies and like the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Best case scenario, we can fix the problem in a half hour or so. Worst case, we have to erase everything on your hard drive -- including the aforementioned picture of Fido as a puppy. And if you ignore our advice about Anti-Virus, you had better be prepared to pay -- with money, beer, soda or food -- and you'd better be psychologically prepared to hear "It's gone for good." By the way, there are a few free Anti-Virus programs that are just as good as the big name brands. Any computer geek worth his salt will know of at least one.

If you come to us with a problem, be prepared to sit with us and watch what we're doing from start to finish. Don't expect that you can drop by, leave the broken machine in our laps and commence with your day. We may have questions for you along the way, we may want you to see just how complicated your problem is by making you hang out with us, or we may want to torture you by tying up your valuable time, just like you're using up ours. Or we may tell you to go away because we work faster alone. Either way, this is our choice, not yours. And if you mysteriously show up at our door, you had better be prepared to pay -- with money, beer, soda or food -- and you'd better be psychologically prepared to hear "It's gone for good." Sometimes erasing everything and starting over is the only fix.

Listen to our advice. If you don't then you had better be prepared to pay -- with money, beer, soda or food -- and you'd better be psychologically prepared to hear "It's gone for good."

If you keep coming to us with the same problem -- especially if it's something that you could have prevented by backing up your data or installing an Anti-Virus program, don't be surprised when our prices start mysteriously going up or if it starts taking longer and longer for your computer to be fixed. This is our way of telling you need to listen to us.

Believe it or not, we have lives beyond computers. Don't be offended if I politely decline the opportunity to work on your computer, regardless of how much you are prepared to pay, whether it's with money, beer, soda or food. I'd rather see my little girl's second grade dance recital than work on your computer. This goes doubly for co-workers, casual acquaintances and friends of friends.

If you tell me about a problem and I don't offer to help, this usually means that I'm not interested in assisting you. Giving you advice on how to do it yourself is NOT a roundabout way of offering to help. This is my subtle attempt to politely get you to go away (or at least stop talking about computers) as quickly yet tactfully as possible.

If you want free help, I recommend using the internet or talking to someone who is still learning about computers. For most of us, this has been our job for years. The last thing we want to do is go home, only to be bombarded by more work-type stuff.

If you do go for the free route, don't expect miracles. There's a reason these people work for free... they're young and inexperienced, and they'd rather trash your machine than their own. "You get what you pay for" isn't a totally meaningless phrase designed to get you to spend more money.

There is more than one type of computer nerd. Just like cars have different types of specialists (engine mechanics, transmission specialists, body shops and so forth), computers require specialization as well. Don't ask a programmer how to configure your home router, and don't get offended if a networking guy can't make your macro work. You don't ask a brain surgeon to fix your fillings, do you?

No matter how much you think we're worth, whether it's money, beer, soda or food, be prepared to double that amount, otherwise you're twice as likely to hear "It's gone for good." The amount of time and effort we're willing to spend is directly proportional to how well we're paid.

If we want more than you're willing to pay, whether it's with money, beer, soda or food, don't tell us "The Geek Squad can do it better (and/or for less money). If you really thought that was the case, why did you come to us in the first place? Remember, the Geek Squad's job is to crank through as many PCs as possible in the minimum amount of time. They work for a corporation whose primary purpose in life is to make money. If you think they can do a better job, then take it to them.

You may have noticed a recurring theme throughout these rules. If not, then read this post again... and again if necessary, until you catch what I'm trying to say. Believe it or not, your local computer geek is human. We have interests outside of computers, whether they be human interaction, money, beer, soda or food. Humans are reward-driven creatures... yes, even computer geeks. So if you want our assistance that's okay. But it's not okay to expect that we'll constantly fix your problems for free. You had better be prepared to pay, whether it's with money, beer, soda or food.

RCA Small Wonder EZ201 Digital Camcorder Review

I’ve been playing with the EZ 201 all day today, and I have to say that I’m very, very impressed.

I bought the EZ201 as a ‘GEFY’ (Good Enough For Youtube) camcorder. That’s precisely what I got, and a little bit more.

So what do you get for your money?

You get a digital camcorder less than the size of two packets of cigarettes, that is not only incredibly easy to use, but also has surprisingly good picture quality.

Let me start with the ease of use. Even the most dedicated technophobe will find the EZ201 a total breeze to use. The camcorder has the grand total of five buttons, not counting the on/off switch. A record start/stop, a play/pause, a delete button and a directional pad.

To use you simply turn it on, point it at what you want to shoot and press record. When you’re done you press the same button again. A tap of the play button lets you view the video you’ve just recorded and the directional pad lets you navigate through videos you’ve already recorded.

You can view the videos you’ve recorded by plugging the camera directly into the RCA inputs on your TV, but transferring the video to your computer is where the EZ201 really shines.

You just pop out the USB connector and plug it into your computer. From there, everything else is almost done for you. The software self-installs from the camera itself, and you simply click the thumbnails of the videos you want to download and it downloads them, creating a shortcut to the folder on your desktop.

This software also comes with a very basic editor package (allowing you to set the start and stop points of each separately captured video and save them on your computer as one complete file), as well as options to email your videos directly from the camera.

In fact, if you’re a total technophobe, and find even this beyond you (even though a child could do it), take the camera to a participating retailer, and they’ll download and burn your videos to a DVD for you.

Ok, by now you should have got the point that it’s pretty much impossible to make this camera any easier to use…but what about the quality?

Well, as standard, the EZ201 can store 30 minutes of video at high-quality (640 by 480), or an hour at half resolution. The good thing with this is that unlike competitors like ‘The Flip’, the EZ201 can take SD cards. Given how cheap SD cards are now (you can get a two gigabyte SD card on newegg.com for under twenty bucks), this is a serious advantage.

So how does the video look?

I can honestly say I was surprised. It surpassed my expectations. I plugged the camera directly into my TV and I’d say the video quality was on a par with a regular VHS video camera (when recorded in high-quality).

I have to say that obviously the picture quality isn’t as good as a full-sized mini-DV or DVD camcorder, but considering the camera is only about two inches bigger than a deck of cards, and costs around a hundred bucks, you’re obviously not interested in having the best quality picture and sound.

Long story short, if you accept this camera for what it is, something to slip into a pocket or purse and carry with you, or take a video of the next family barbecue, it’s better than what you’d actually need. While I definitely wouldn’t recommend it to capture high-quality movies to play on a 60 inch HD TV set, if like me you’re more interested in video for the web, it will more than satisfy your needs.

Even the battery life is impressive. If you use high-quality batteries (the EZ 201 takes two AA batteries), such as the energizer lithium cells, you can expect to get around seven and a half hours of recording.

Another positive note is even though this camera is small and really light, it feels solid, and not cheap and plasticy like I was expecting.

Unfortunately, there are a couple of downsides.

The first is the microphone. It’s just not very sensitive. While its not ridiculously quiet, I tried this out in the car, and had real difficulty making out the conversation over the engine. However, this isn’t a huge issue because the camera only has 2x digital zoom, meaning you won’t be shooting anyone from a distance anyway.

Secondly, the digital zoom isn’t great and results in noticeable pixilation when used.

The only other downside I noticed was baffling.

When viewing videos directly from that camera, the picture quality is absolutely awesome considering the size of the camera, with almost zero pixilation in good lighting conditions.

However, for some reason, when that same video is transferred to the computer, the picture quality suffers slightly. Whereas on my TV I saw zero pixilation and compression artifacts, there were a few more when the downloaded video was viewed on my PC. It’s not a drastic drop, but a drop nonetheless.

Anyway to close:

Good points:

Good picture quality.

Good battery life.

Amazing portability and ease of use.

Intuitive software

Bad Points:

Sound is a little too quiet.

Picture Quality suffers after transfer to PC.

In the end, I’d highly recommend this camera to anyone interested in web-video. It’s more than worth the money and is better than you’d expect for the price.

PLeasure-Negative Society

If there’s one thing that the ‘media circus’ surrounding video games has shown me is just how backwards our culture is about what it acceptable.

It appears that while shooting, vehicular homicide, drug use and drug dealing isn’t worth working up a sweat about, consensual sex between two consenting adults is enough to get congress involved. While it’s ok to simulate things that are horrific crimes, it’s somehow much worse for people a year over the age of consent to see something that’s a thousand times more tame than a lingerie commercial.

These are arguments that have been put forward a million times, so I won’t go over them again. However, what I do want to talk about is how we’ve become a ‘pleasure negative’ society. While hard work and self sacrifice are the corner stones of any well adjusted culture, we’re unusual in that any pure leisure activity, one that has no benefits other than being fun, are looked down on, and in many cases vilified.

It’s Not Good For You.

Any gamer out there has heard the arguments and accusations. Gaming is a ‘complete waste of time’, ‘unproductive’ and ‘lazy’.

To be completely honest, I can almost agree with all the above statements, but the point is that we’re talking about a leisure activity. The point of a leisure activity is to have fun and relax. Gaming is ‘unproductive’ because it’s meant to be. The objective is to have fun, not to ‘achieve’ anything.

The biggest problem for gamers is that nearly every other pastime has some sort of ‘loophole’. Playing sports is exercise, reading is ‘educational’. But if we actually consider these points, we see that they’re flawed.

First and foremost, plenty of people enjoy playing sports. However, if playing a sport offered no physical benefit whatsoever, how many people are going to quit? I’d say none, because people play sports for the fun of it, the exercise is just a positive side-effect.

It’s the same with reading. It only counts as educational if you’re reading something educational. Are you any more intelligent after reading a work of fiction? Are you any more equipped to deal with the world in general after reading Harry Potter?

The other big point I want to make is that these same ‘loopholes’ also apply to gaming, it’s just people refuse to see them.

Stuck In the 80’s

One of gaming’s biggest problems is that non-gamers assume that games are stuck in the 1980’s. A game of Space Invaders or Mario hardly encourages thinking deep thinking, but even games like these can be said to have benefits. Something like a side-scrolling platformer or shoot ‘em up is going to develop hand-eye coordination, maybe only a little, but then again, just how educational is reading a trashy romance novel?

Sure, the trashy romance novel may be at the bottom of the literary food-chain, but judging games by their most basic and simple incarnations is exactly the same as assuming Shakespeare is going to be crap because you read a Harlequin romance novel once and decided that ‘books where crap’.

You can’t judge all literature on the strength of one book, and you can’t judge all games based on “Space Invaders”.

Many games reward lateral thinking, problem solving and require a lot more brain power than just when to press the ‘shoot button’.

Take a roleplaying game for example. Each player class has different strengths and weaknesses; you have to think about the trade-off between developing this skill or that skill. Should you spend money on a particular potion, or run the risk of going into hostile territory to find the ingredients and make it yourself. You have to accomplish a particular task, so do you run in guns blazing, or try and hack that security console and slip in and out undetected?

Sure, there are ‘mindless’ games out there, but many games reward thinking and punish lack of planning. A good real-time strategy can be compared to chess. I dare anyone to play ‘Civilization’ and say you don’t have to think to succeed.

Rationalization

So games can be just as educational or as mentally taxing as a good book or a game of chess, but is a game that requires little thought necessarily a bad thing?

The only time gaming is a bad thing is when people allow their lives to suffer because of it. Taking the day off work because they where up all night playing the latest ‘Zelda’, allowing their relationships to suffer because they’re playing games all the time instead of paying attention to your partner or kids.

While this is obviously a downside, this can also be applied to everything else. Instead of staying up all night with a control pad in their hands, people stay up all night because they just can’t put that novel down. Missing a birthday party to play golf; Missing work to go see a movie.

Basically, what’s true of gaming is true of everything else. In moderation it’s fine.

Guilt.

Unfortunately, as a society we have this pre-occupation with ‘being productive’. Unless there’s a tangible achievement at the end, we feel guilty.

However, we don’t play sports or read a lot because they’re beneficial. We do these things because we enjoy them. The difference between these activities and gaming is that we’ve managed to rationalize spending a lot of time reading or playing football because they have those benefits as side-products.

Long story short, we’re doing these things for the fun of them, but we’ve learned we can get rid of the guilt by telling ourselves we’re only doing them for their beneficial side-effects.

We’ve become a totally pleasure-negative society. Anything we do just for the fun of it is considered a bad thing and a waste of time. Unless we can feel we’re being productive in some way, we guilt the crap out of ourselves. My question is: Why?

If you’ve spent all day working, come home, spent some time with the kids and got them off to bed, don’t you deserve to do something just for the sheer fun of it? Haven’t you earned a break?

We all want to have fun. The problem is that we’ve conditioned ourselves to feel guilty by doing just that. As human beings we’re excellent at lying to ourselves. We’re not ‘wasting time’ by playing football because we’re getting good exercise. We’re not being ‘unproductive’ by spending a few hours with a good book, because reading is educational and good for us.

We feel so guilty for wasting time just having fun, that we find ways around it by convincing ourselves that the incidental side-effect of our leisure activity of choice is actually the main reason we’re doing it.

I think a good way to illustrate this is something I read online about MMORPG’s.

Someone made the point that someone could spend literally hundreds of gameplay hours getting their character to level 60, getting that rare epic armor and all other kinds of rare in-game items. The point was, they’ve gone through all that work and in the end, have absolutely nothing to show for it.

I disagree. What that person has to show for it is those hundreds of hours of fun and enjoyment. The point of a game isn’t really to ‘achieve’ anything, it’s to relax, have fun and spend your down-time in a way you enjoy.

We’re preconditioned to believe that any activity should have a goal at the end, the ‘achievement’ we’re heading towards. Because of this many people have a hard time with the idea that the activity itself is its own reward.

We work to earn money. We work-out to get fitter. We read to become better educated. It’s this ‘task leads to goal’ thinking that makes us feel guilty for taking part in a pure leisure activity. Playing a video game has nothing to show for it at the end other than the pleasure of completing a game and the hours of enjoyment you got from playing it.

It’s this this we have a problem with.

Wasting Time?

By looking at my save-games, I can tell you that I spent over 60 gameplay hours playing through “The Elder Scrolls IV : Oblivion”. That’s two and a half days total playing that game, spread over a couple of months.

The common reaction would be “What a waste of time!” That’s two and a half days of my life gone with ‘nothing to show for it’. I could have read a book and got more intelligent, I could have made something, I could have been outside getting more in shape.

As I stated above, I don’t agree with that idea. It’s two and a half days I spent having a lot of fun and getting involved in an excellent story.

The bigger question would be “What would I have done with that time if I wasn’t playing Oblivion?”

The answer is nothing, because I play games in my leisure time. If I hadn’t been playing a game, I’d have been reading, watching movies or surfing the web. If that was two and a half days spent when I should have been at work, or fixing the plumbing or working on a project, I’d agree. However, actually having fun in my leisure time is something I refuse to apologize or feel guilty about.

I understand the importance of being productive. However, being productive is work and for me is not a leisure activity…and as long as you don’t let your work life suffer, what’s wrong with a few hours of pure fun?

End of the Wii

Nintendo has an unfortunately spotty history when it comes to their games consoles. While they did extremely well with the original NES and Super Nintendo, ever since then they have a habit of releasing consoles with just a single, fatal flaw.

For example, the N64, while being a good console suffered from their decision to stick with the outdated cartridge format, while Sony released the Playstation with the superior and more versatile CD-ROM format.

Then, the Gamecube failed simply because gamers didn’t like the color or design of the console itself (Which was a huge shame. Games like Resident Evil 4 show that the Gamecube is just as graphically capable as its competition, the Playstation 2).

For me, the Gamecube will always be an excellent console that tanked simply because Nintendo decided to put great hardware in a lavender cube. Next to the sleek PS2 or the pure late 90’s ‘edgy’ design of the Xbox (apparently ‘X’ is a ‘cool’ letter), the poor Gamecube didn’t stand a chance.

Then, Nintendo released the Wii, which stupid name aside, was an absolute master-stroke, although it may turn out to be both a short-lived and short-sighted one.

In short, the ‘next-gen’ competition was a two horse race between the Xbox 360 and the PS3.

It could be assumed that Xbox owners were going to buy an Xbox 360 and the PS2 owners were going to buy a PS3. With the next-gen race being all about horsepower, the price points were inevitably going to be high. Who was going to take a risk on an outsider when they had the choice of two consoles with proven track records? When consoles were a hundred bucks a pop it wouldn’t be a problem, but at a price point of $500 or higher…not many people would be willing to take the risk.

If they tried to compete with Microsoft and Sony, chances are there were going to lose no matter how good their hardware was. Plus, there’s also the factor that the ‘Nintendo Generation’ has grown up, and Nintendo are notorious for favoring E-Rated games.

Basically, the majority of gamers are starting to prefer violent, gritty protagonists such as Sam Fisher, Solid Snake and Master Chief. With most people only being able to afford one console, very few gamers would be willing to give up their GTA’s and Splinter Cells for Mario. The most powerful gamer demographic now consists of mostly males aged 23 and up…and Nintendo’s games tend to be aimed at younger kids.

So, rather than go the way of Sega, Nintendo had an outstanding idea. They simply chose not to compete.

Rather than go for the fasted and best hardware, they took what is essentially upgraded Gamecube hardware and bundled it with a brand new peripheral…the Wii-mote.

Sure, it’s not as pretty as the PS3 and Xbox 360, but it offered gamers and whole new experience and as a side effect, they appealed to a whole new demographic that would normally not be interested in buying a game console.

Essentially, many non-gamers are intimidated or get easily frustrated with traditional controls. To the uninitiated, 10 buttons, two thumb sticks and a D-pad can be incredibly confusing and off-putting. Handing someone a remote that looks remarkably like a regular TV remote and showing them that to play tennis you swing the remote like a tennis racket, to play golf, you swing it like a golf club. It’s easy and intuitive and anyone can ‘get it’ in a very short time. They removed the ‘barrier to entry’.

Of course, it also appeals to the seasoned gamers through sheer novelty value.

So, rather than choose to compete in an already crowded market, Nintendo simply offered a whole new experience on proven, relatively inexpensive hardware. In short, Nintendo are offering something that you can’t get anywhere else for a significantly cheaper price than their competitors. Plus, their hardware is readily available, meaning they don’t have the supply and manufacturing problems of their competitors.

While many parents would balk at spending nearly a thousand dollars on a gaming console for their kids, especially with all the media furor about video game violence, they can buy a Wii for half the price, know their kids won’t see anything more violent that a cartoon plumber attempting to resuce a princess… and better yet, it gets the kids up off the couch and moving around.

But, the big question is this:

What happens when the novelty wears off? What happens when swinging the Wii-mote gets old?

Then we come to the Wii’s biggest problem. 3^rd party releases.

The problem is simple. When a developer releases a new game, it’s incredibly, incredibly rare for them to make a whole different game for each console. They develop for one, and the others receive a port of it.

In simplest terms, a developer will create a game for the 360, then tweak it to run on the PS3.

Have you spotted the problem yet?

The Wii simply doesn’t have the processing power to handle games that are designed to make the best out of the 360 or PS3’s software. Unfortunately, the Wii was released in the current console cycle, but it’s technically a ‘last-gen’ machine. You’d have a lot of difficult getting a PS3 game ported to the PS2, let alone the Wii.

We can already see the results of this. Spider-man 3 looked plain awful on the Wii. The textures looked terrible or would even be absent at long distances and architecture would simply disappear. Why? Because Spiderman 3 was written for the PS3, and the Wii simply can’t handle it.

Plus, these games are written with a traditional controller in mind, meaning it will be unlikely that they will take advantage of the Wii-mote and unfortunately, if you play a Wii game with normal controls, you might as well be playing the Gamecube.

The Wii’s only hope is that third party developers will start to create games exclusively for the Wii. However, if you put yourself in the developers’ shoes, you can see what a risky decision that would be. If you release a game for the 360 or PS3, you know that game is going to look great on both systems and you can exploit both markets. If you release a game optimized for the Wii, you’re excluding two third of your potential market. Basically, if you have a 360, you’re not going to want to play games that look like something from your old console.

Luckily for Nintendo, the Wii has been successful enough that releasing a Wii exclusive isn’t the business equivalent of throwing money down the drain.

Only time will tell if the Wii has the legs to survive until the next console cycle, but hopefully we’ll soon see some decent game releases other than 360 and PS3 ports.

Beat him at his own game?

I’ve been thinking.

Jack Thompson is a real thorn in gamers’ sides. If you’ve never seen it, I suggest you check out his page on Wikipedia.

We’re talking about a guy who would send an opponent a copy of his ID card with Batman’s picture pasted over his own to let his opponents “know who they where dealing with”. A guy who attempted to take a political opponent to court for battery because she placed her hand on his shoulder. A guy who posts insulting, ill-informed attacks in public forums, and then cries foul and attempts to sue for slander or ‘harassment’ when the people he attacks respond.

Luckily, the world at large has started to see that he’s just a big ball o’ crazy.

Basically, the gaming industry’s tactics so far in dealing with Thompson are to just ignore him. By attempting to fight or answer him we’d just be fueling the fire.

But then I had a different idea.

Thompson loves to sue for harassment and slander every time someone publicly expresses a viewpoint that opposes his. It’s fine for him to blame the VT shootings on gamers before the shooter was even identified…but if Gabe and Tycho donate the $10,000 to charity that Thompson promised to donate before reneging, he accuses them of being an ‘extortion factory’…now that’s harassment and slander.

I know this is likely never to happen, but how great would it be to beat him at his own game?

So far, Thompson has called gamers everything from idiots to drug addicts. In other words, he’s not shy about throwing around slander and libel of his own.

If we look at the average gamer, you’ll see that most are pretty much like me. We’ve played pretty much every ‘murder simulator’ that’s been released, but we have completely clean criminal records, college degrees, good jobs and aren’t on drugs.

I’ve ‘killed’ over 10,000 computer generated enemies on Battlefront 2 alone. I even own a gun…but I’ve never shot anyone and have absolutely no desire to…odd that, isn’t it? By Thompson’s reasoning, I should have mowed down everyone I know by now.

But, thanks to our good friend Jack Thompson, we’re represented in the media as murderers who don’t understand the difference between a joypad and a shotgun.

So, what I’d like to see is a class-action lawsuit. Gamers vs. Thompson.

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of being ‘harassed’ and ‘slandered’ thanks to Thompson. I’m tired of being told to ‘get a life’, being accused of being on drugs and above all being publicly accused of being an unbalanced psychopath who’s just itching to go shoot up a school.

You see, you can put all the facts you like in front of Thompson. The VT shooter didn’t have a single video-game in his dorm room. We could point out that most gamers are completely behind attempts to stop Little Timmy from playing GTA…we could also point out that if every fatal incident that has been tenuously linked to gaming was in fact, caused by gaming…that that would mean only about every one in two-million gamers have gone postal…which is a statistical abnormality, not grounds to claim a causal effect.

Well never shut him up or make him go away by being rational. You only have to see some of the things he’s written and said to see that:

"Honestly, are all of you gamers on drugs, or what?"

"Any letter from a video gamer like you would deepen his concern. Are you actually so confused that you think gamers have any influence on anyone. Gamers are considered by normal people to be cretins. Get used to it."

"I love the smell of burning gamers in the morning." (I love this one…we’re unbalanced and crazy?)

"With enemies like you Pixelantes and like Game Daily Biz, why, I don't need any friends. You honor me with your hatred. I serve the Lord Jesus Christ, and you hate me because the world first hated Him. I follow the Creator of the Universe, and He has taken me to the Gates of Hell, and I kind of like it in here."

"Ah, video gamer/pixelantes are the domestic version of radical Islamists as you continually threaten with violence those who simply disagree with you. How terribly revealing."

"Nobody gets to designate the charity except Paul Eibeler. Can you read? Are you on drugs? Have the games fried your frontal lobes so thoroughly that even a "Dead Kenny" has more grey matter than you? Jack Thompson"

"Nobody shoots anybody in the face unless you're a hit man or a video gamer."

Ok, that’s enough. The point I’m trying to make here is that pretty much all of these statements can be regarded as slander against you and me, the gamer. Thompson has stated that the only reason for anyone to shoot anyone is because they play video games.

We’re druggies, cretins, he ‘threatened’ us by saying he’s ‘love to smell us burning’ and we’re the equivalent of radical, car-bombing Islamists…and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

We’ll never shut him up with reason. How about being sued by 50,000 gamers for slander and defamation?

I won’t pretend to be a lawyer or understand the ins and outs of the legal system (Despite the fact I’ve played Phoenix Wright – Ace Attorney on the DS…again by JT’s ideas, I should be a qualified lawyer by now)…but this seems to be a lot more clear cut than the gaming industry taking on JT.

He’s publicly harassed us, slandered and defamed us.

What do you think?

Web Hosting Questions for Our Readers

My brother-in-law has asked me to help him design, maintain and moderate a web page for his business, and I'm looking for some recommendations. He's already purchased the domain names, but I don't know if he's already got a web host. He wants the web site(s) to be a forum layout, where industry professionals can share ideas. Here are my thoughts and questions.

-I'm very familiar with Microsoft's OS and security, so I will be using a Microsoft O.S.

-I'm a little familiar with IIS, (plus it's free) so I will probably use IIS.

-Can you recommend a good software package that will help me design and maintain a forum-style web site? I'm pretty good with computers and design software, but I'm not a code jockey. I don't want to write the code for the site, and I don't want to spend a fortune on software.

What am I overlooking? What software do you recommend?

Note: I don't usually do this, but I cross-posted today's entry on my personal blog site as well.

I Bet WE Get Blamed For This...

It's happened again.

Another psychopath decided to go on a shooting rampage, killing 32 people, including himself at Virginia tech.

It won't be long before they go to the gunman's house, find an Xbox and a copy of Halo or GTA, and the Jack Thompson's of the world will start blaming the shooting on video games. Of course, the fact that the majority of American households have some form of gaming console or computer won't factor into it. The politicians will use this to 'prove' one point. Games kill people. Then they'll ride the wave of moral panic to makes sure they get lots of votes and TV time.

[Edit - I just looked through Digg. Jack Thompson has already blamed the shootings on video games. Isn't it amazing that he knows games are responsible despite the gunman's identity hasn't even been released yet? That shmuck must scour the news every day just hoping for a shooting]

This is an argument that's been voiced over and over, so I'll try to keep it brief.

Let's just say that is actually was a violent video-game that set this guy off. Does that prove video games are a direct cause of violence?

No. It doesn't. What this proves is that this guy was obviously mentally disturbed, and if it wasn't a video game that set him off, a movie or a book or someone looking at him the wrong way would have done the same thing.

It's time for some sledgehammer math.

GTA : San Andreas has sold well over 14 million copies. In US history there have been around 13 cases of extreme (read - lethal) violence in the USA that have been linked to video games. (Just to be clear, by 'linked' we mean the perpetrator owned a gaming console...not actual solid evidence).

So despite all the media furor over GTA, the figures show that fewer than one in a million gamers, that's one thousandth of one percent, have played GTA and gone on to commit a violent act...and this is one game!

So, if we forget about GTA for a second, and divide the number of violent incidents (around 13) by the total number of violent games sold(millions and millions), we see that there is absolutely no causal effect between violence and violent video games.

Long story short, when you make a judgment based on evidence rather than by listening to some idiot trying to get on TV by making outlandish and unproven comments, the chances of a video game making someone go on a shooting rampage is literally a one in a billion chance.

In other words, blaming games for a shooting is as statistically plausible as blaming cheese for reckless driving...after all, a huge percentage of people who have been arrested for reckless driving had also eaten cheese at some point in their life. See, direct correlation! Let's ban cheese!

It's absurd. The fact that someone who went on a shooting rampage also owned a games console is not evidence. Why not look at their movie collection? The fact they also collected stamps? Made aircraft models? Liked photography?

All these shootings prove is that there is a tiny percentage of psychotic individuals in the USA, who through emotional or mental problems will go on a rampage for no good reason. There's no major moral panic or causal factor that people can blame, other than the fact that some people just aren't right in the head.

The funniest thing about all this is that history constantly repeats itself.

In the 1930's Jazz music was going to be the downfall of society. In the 40's it was pulp comic books. In the 50's and 60's it was rock and roll. In the 70's it was Acid house and rave music. 80's it was home video and the 90's Hip-hop and rap. In the 2000's, it's video games.

In conclusion, let me tell you a quick story.

A few years ago, in the UK, there was a storyline on a popular soap opera (Coronation Street, to be exact), where Gail Tinsley's boyfriend locked her and her children in a car, locked the doors and tried to drive the car into a river.

Less than a week later, the Mirror newspaper ran a story about a guy who tried to do exactly the same thing to his girlfriend and her kids.

The funniest thing? Absolutely no-one made a connection. Why? Because Coronation Street does not fall into so-called 'Youth Culture'. Yet when someone shoots up a school or college, it seems the fact that he may have played a video game at some point in the past automatically counts as solid proof that video games are responsible.

Video games are simply the latest moral scapegoat. It's far easier to blame an absolute tragedy like the Virginia Tech shootings on gaming than to ask some questions and maybe accept personal responsibility.

A teenager shoots up a school and the world blames gaming. They don't ask the more difficult questions like "How did a kid get his hands on a pair of pistols?" "Why didn't his parents notice something?"

Yep, it's far easier to say "Video Games turned my child into a killer." Than. "I absolutely suck as a parent and was far too busy watching TV to notice my kid had some major emotional problems."

If you think video games are evil, don't play them. Stop your kids from playing them, or at least make sure they only play games that are age appropriate. It is not the gaming industry's responsibility to raise your kids. That's your job. So accept responsibility for it.

Passwords : What You Need To Know

One of the things that constantly amazes me is people’s lack of care with their passwords.

The problem is, people just aren’t really all that concerned with their own security. Why bother with a strong password? If someone wants to get a kick out of reading my email, let them! There’s nothing super-secret in there!

Well, unfortunately, that’s a very short sighted and dangerous view.

Most people tend to use the same password (or small number of passwords) for pretty much anything. So let’s say I have the same password on my webmail as I do on my internet banking. Sure, my bank’s webpage will lock you out after three failed attempts…but my webmail doesn’t. A hacker takes his time, gets into my email, and then tries that same password to get into my bank, my paypal account, anything I have behind a password. In a few short steps we go from ‘worthless’ emails to major financial and identity theft.

Starting to look a little more serious now, isn’t it?

Secondly, you have to be aware of social engineering, and the fact that most hackers looking for passwords get them by collecting very small, seemingly unimportant pieces of information that when put together lead to the more important stuff.

Social engineering is a little out of the scope for this post, so I’ll just keep it simple. Most people tend to use things like their spouses name, date of birth etc as passwords. So, even if you use separate passwords for you bank and webmail, if I can crack a weak email password…I can get information about you from your emails that can give me a clue to your bank password. People tend to use things like a spouses name, or their date of birth etc…all easily gleaned from a few choice emails.

Choosing a Secure Password

There are a list of passwords hackers always try first. Your date of birth, your date of birth backwards, ‘Password’, ‘letmein’, ‘God’, ‘qwerty’ etc. Sadly, a lot of the time, passwords from this relatively short list are usually the correct ones….good bye bank balance.

So what should you do, and what makes a secure, strong password?

Well, first of all, avoid any from the above list…even spelled backwards. If you think a hacker isn’t willing to sit in front of a PC for a few hours trying passwords, you’re kidding yourself.

Secondly, avoid anything obvious or personal. When I was in college, there was a classmate who got his user account hacked on an almost daily basis. (Luckily, it was by his friends as a practical joke). But what made his passwords so easy to crack?

Well, he started with the name of his favorite football team. Then he changed it to the team manager’s name, then their home stadium, then went through a list of the players…you get the idea. He gave the ‘hackers’ a very small sample of passwords to try. If I want to crack your password, I’m going to try everything from your husband or wife’s name, to your pet’s name, to the title of your favorite song.

The trick is to pick something totally and completely random, preferably not even a dictionary word. I’ll explain why in the next section.

The thing is people want passwords that are ‘easy to remember’, and a basic rule of thumb is the easier it is for you to remember, the easier it is for anyone with a little bit if knowledge about you to crack. However, memorizing isn’t all that hard. You remembered your phone number easily enough, right? And that’s just a random grouping of numbers!

If you want to be secure, remembering a random password is easy enough.

Beyond Guessing

Remember how I said to even avoid dictionary words? Well, that’s because they are easily cracked by ‘dictionary cracker’ software. A program on the hacker’s computer simply enters word after word, hoping it will stumble upon the correct one.

Bearing in mind that a dictionary cracker can try hundreds of words per second, it could crack a dictionary word password in just a few seconds.

Next comes something that surprised me. I prided myself on the fact that my passwords were all completely random 10-digit numbers. Absolutely impossible to guess, and nothing you’d find in a dictionary hacker.

Then I experimented and found a piece of software that managed to crack my passwords in under three seconds.

How did it do this? I’ll tell you.

Another common hacker tool is a plain brute-force cracker. It just repeatedly tries to crack your password by trying random groupings of letters or numbers. So, my ten digit password wasn’t difficult to crack at all. It simply counted up from 0000000000 to 9999999999 in sequence until it got the right combination. (a feat that took it less than three seconds). It’s the equivalent of trying to break into one of those three digit briefcase locks by just trying every combination until you get to the one that works. Despite the fact that a ten digit number has 10000000000 possible combinations, we’re also using a computer than can try hundreds of thousand of combinations a second…it doesn’t take long at all.

So how do you beat this?

Well, the truth is you can’t. Not really. All passwords can be broken, but the aim of the game is to have a password that will simply take too long to crack. A committed hacker might leave a cracker running for a few days or a week or two…but if your password is strong to the point where it will take hundreds or thousands of years to crack…you can safely assume you’re secure.

Ok, to understand how to beat these crackers, you have to understand how they work.

It will start by simply running through the alphabet and trying each letter it comes across as a password. (Just in case you’re dumb enough to have the letter ‘A’ as your password). If that doesn’t work, it’ll try two letters, going through the entire alphabet in every possible combination. If that doesn’t work, it’ll move up to three letters and so on and so on. Then it will do the same with numbers. Then it will try with mixtures of letters and numbers.

So what does this tell us so far?

It tells us that the strongest password will be a mixture of letters and numbers, and the longer your password, the harder it is to crack. Like we’ve already seen, it can crack a ten digit number in seconds, the same with any length of word…but by mixing numbers and letters together, it suddenly makes the job a whole lot harder.

However, the longer your password, the harder it is to crack. I can’t stress this enough. Going from a 5 character password to a 10 character password makes an almost unbelievable difference in how difficult it is to crack…I’ll explain this in detail later.

So, it’s simple enough to see that by mixing letters and numbers, the cracker has to try every single combination of the numbers 1-9 and the letters A-Z mixed together in a long sequence of characters. By adding more digits, we’re multiplying the possible number of possibilities exponentially.

However, there’s still more you can do.

Passwords tend to be case-sensitive, so mixing capitals with lower-case letters also exponentially increases the number of possibilities. Inserting special characters, such as !,@,#,$, or % ramps up the number of possibilities as well. (By using a mixture of upper and lower case letters, we’re doubling the amount of alphabetical letters the cracker has to deal with…even more so with special characters).

If this seems like a lot of trouble, here’s the difference it makes:

A five character password using only numbers and letters would take about two and a half hours to crack, but only twelve seconds if you only use lower case letters.

A seven character password using only numbers and letters would take about two and a half years to crack, but only about two hours and forty-five minutes using only lower-case letters.

A ten character password would take over four and half years to crack, but (and this is the big point of all this), 1,900,000 years to crack using a mixture of upper and lower case.

So by now you see my point, even a supposedly ‘strong’ five character password can be cracked in a couple of hours, even using upper and lower case letters. By moving to seven characters we’re at a much more strong 2.5 years, and once we get to 10 characters you’re changing the amount of time it will take to crack from two and a half hours to almost two million years.

Summing Up

DO NOT : Use common words or phrases.

DO NOT : Use short passwords.

DO NOT : Use anything ‘guessable’ by someone who knows a little about you.

DO : Use random strings of letters, numbers and special characters.

DO : Use a different password for each account you have.

Lastly, the best tip I can give you:

It doesn’t matter how strong your password is if you write it down and leave it lying around for someone to find. That’s about as secure as writing your PIN number on the back of your cash-card.

A Little Bit About Internet Hoaxes

Please read this article about internet hoaxes. It describes what exactly a hoax is (complete with examples) and gives you a couple of links to web sites (such as snopes, which is my personal favorite) that are devoted to debunking hoaxes and urban legends.

Send this link to everyone you know within 30 seconds, or your computer will be destroyed by the Travelocity Roaming Gnome.

Augmented Reality

“Augmented Reality” is definitely on its way into our daily lives.

So, what exactly is Augmented Reality? The easiest way to explain AR is by using the fighter-pilot’s heads-up display as an example. In simplest terms it’s an ‘overlay’ on real life.

Of course, this has literally hundreds of applications. HUD displays in your car that warn you of threats and let you check your GPS without taking your eyes off the road. Spectacle-mounted displays for tourism that point out interesting sights or give you more information on what you’re looking at…and of course tactical overlays for the military. The same display that a fighter pilot gets on his aircraft in a helmet mounted display for the foot soldier.

Of course, this is Geekology, so I want to talk about the applications for gaming.

To do this, we have to go back in time.

Virtual Reality was an excellent idea. If you offered any gamer a pair of glasses that they plugged into their PC or console, so they could look around in an FPS just by moving their head, while using a separate gun peripheral to actually shoot, you’d struggle to keep up with demand.

It’s one of the things Nintendo’s Wii has proven. One of the main reasons more people don’t play games is because of the learning curve of the controls. If you sit an non-gamer in front of a FPS, chances are they’ll lose patience before getting the hang of it. On the other hand, an intuitive, natural peripheral removes (or at least lessens) that early learning curve.

Unfortunately, VR was introduced way ahead of its time. People simply didn’t want to have to wear an overly heavy headset to play a terrible looking game running at around 5 frames per second. The other big hardware limitation is the motion sensors took a while to catch up. Move your head too quickly, and your viewpoint would shift after your head had moved.

Long story short, you where asking a late-80’s computer to render a 3D world (twice, because each eye had a slightly different viewpoint to give the stereoscopic 3D effect), while tracking multiple motion sensors.

Unfortunately, VR went down in history as a failed experiment. A good few VR gaming centers popped up around the world, and they all went out of business. No one wants to spend money on something that was such a spectacular failure…especially when ‘traditional’ gaming is doing so well.

So despite the fact that the Wii has proven that motion sensors in a peripheral can work extremely well, and that we can now build VR headsets that aren’t much bigger or heavier than a regular set of glasses…it’s doubtful we’ll see VR in our homes any time soon…despite the average desktop PC or games console are more than powerful enough to support them.

However, this is why I see AR as being one of the ‘next big things’. AR for gaming uses similar technology to VR, but is different enough to convince the people with the money to invest in it.

So how would AR work with gaming?

I’ve described AR as an ‘overlay on real life’. So consider some of the possibilities of this.

The easiest one to imagine is a form of AR ‘paintball’. Paintball is great fun, but it has a few drawbacks. You need a fairly large group of people to actually play, it’s messy, it hurts when you get hit…and you’re stuck using a paintball gun.

So let’s look at the AR equivalent.

You can use normal, physical environments, or have obstacles and cover supplied by the AR system. You can play against other people or AR opponents…and the most exciting thing from a gamer’s point of view is that you can use a whole supply of real world or sci-fi weapons.

So, despite the fact you’re holding a generic looking plastic rifle, what you’re seeing in your hands is a full-on assault rifle, a star-wars blaster or a star-trek phaser rifle. When you fire it, you get the realistic sound played through headphones, and see the muzzle-flash, tracer rounds or ‘phaser beam’ coming from the end of your weapon.

With the use of special gloves you can pull a virtual grenade from your virtual belt and throw it at your enemy.

One thing you can’t do with traditional paintball is shoulder a rocket launcher and fire it at an on-coming tank and see a spectacular explosion. AR allows you a much more realistic experience, with the only chance of injury being a twisted ankle or falling over. While paintballs are definitely non-lethal…get hit in the eye (or the nuts) and you’re in a world of hurt. Getting hit with a virtual weapon, you’re literally getting hit with nothing, and that’s incredibly hard to get hurt with.

You may see a grenade land at your feet before going off with an ear-splitting explosion…but that only exists in the game.

In other words, what we’re looking at is the most realistic game in the world. If you see an enemy (virtual or otherwise) shoot at you or throw a grenade, you actually have to run like hell for cover. When you shoot someone, your AR display shows the hit, and informs you they’re out of the game.

Think about it. This is something you could play in any open area…or an elaborate set up in a theme-park style ‘AR center’ where only the weapons and special effects are AR.

Of course, there are some downsides. In order for AR to work in a given area, it has to know the layout of that area and be able to track you in it. In a purely open area, this isn’t a problem, all the kit would have to do is track your direction and speed of movement…but in a more built up area, you’d have enemies running through walls and shooting you through real world cover. I’m also sure that something so realistic (even if you’re using non-real world weapons), would have people like Jack Thompson foaming at the mouth about these new ‘murder simulators’.

On the upside, the technology is already there. It will be a while before anything like this will be available as a consumer product, but it shouldn’t be too long before something like this is available in places like commercial laser-tag arenas.

The main reason I see this technology eventually becoming commonplace is that it has a multitude of applications other than entertainment. It would be a great training aid for the Army, navigation aid for cars etc.

Basically, flight simulators started out as a military training application, and today we have flight simulators on our computers that are just as technically accurate as the air force has (minus the full-size cockpit and huge panoramic screens of course).

AR is in our future, and personally, I can’t wait.

Cranky Geek #1

Remember when the internet was made up of smart people?

Ok, I don’t want to come across as an elitist snob here, but back in the day if you wanted to get online, you actually had to understand how a computer worked. Today, you call the cable guy and everything is set up for you.

On the one hand, this is a good thing. On the other, it means the internet is slowly filling up with dumb people.

The ‘barrier to entry’ has been completely taken away. Back when I started my first website, I was given some free webspace and a user name and password to an FTP site. If you wanted a website, you needed to at least have a basic grasp of HTML. Today, you can get yourself a blog or a myspace page with a simple username and password.

So what’s the big deal? Why is this a problem?

Well, a few things started me thinking about this.

The first was a story I read recently. Some guy started a business website and simply hotlinked a bunch of images from someone else’s site. The guy who actually owned and hosted the images removed them from his own site, thereby ‘breaking’ the links the leecher had on his site.

Can you guess what happened next?

The leecher fired off an angry email demanding the guy put these images back up because ‘it was hurting his business, and unless he put the images back up, he’d sue.’

That’s right, this guy was using someone else’s copyrighted work without permission, was using up someone else’s bandwidth by not even hosting them himself…and believes he can sue the legal owner of these images for not letting him steal his work and bandwidth.

That’s like someone stealing my car every day to go to work, using the gas I put in the car…then threatening to call the police because I bought a new car, which his stolen key won’t work with.

The second thing is forums…and I mean any forum.

Back in the day, if I was having computer problems I could go to a forum, post a request for help and in a few hours receive a few highly useful and grammatically correct answers. That’s what forums used to be for. Communal help, debate and discussion. Suprisingly, back in the day, if you disagreed with someone on a forum, they’d rationally and calmly put forward their viewpoint and why they believed they where right…not call you a fag and tell you your mother is really good at sucking dick.

Don’t get me wrong, there have always been a few assholes…but they never used to be the majority.

A few weeks ago, my combo drive wouldn’t read DVD’s. I posted a request for help on a tech-support forum, asking if anyone had had similar issues with the same drive and if they came up with a fix. I got the following replies:

“Lolz! Ur drive SUX! LITE-ON is ASS! Buy a new one!”

“Just bin it.”

“Liteon RULEZ, go suk a dick, Sony whore!”

Etc, etc, etc.

After a few days I got a reply from someone telling me that combo drives use two different laser systems, so it’s possible for a combo drive to read CDs but not DVDs…but not before my thread was hijacked by people arguing whether my particular type of drive sucked or not…including a good few messages where the forum trolls called each other ‘fagz’ and explained in detail what they’d do to each other’s mothers.

Oh, and for some reason this has given rise to the phenomenon where people believe the length of time they’ve belonged to a particular forum is directly proportional to how much they know. It doesn’t matter if the new guy cut his teeth on a Sinclair ZX, has built more computers than he can count and works as a professional systems analyst. The 14 year old whose only experience with computers is fitting an extra half gig of memory in his mom’s computer (on the third try because he bought the wrong type the first two times) obviously knows more because he signed up for the forum 6 months before the other guy.

Then we come to the people who really should know better. This story had me shaking my head:

I read a story written by a web designer who was approached by a fairly major company wanting a new website. They said they wanted a video on the first page of their site in DVD quality, but didn’t want it to stream and the load time must be zero. When the web designer pointed out that it was just plain impossible to do that he was told “Well, if you and your team are too incompetent to make it happen, we’ll take our business elsewhere!”

This is exactly what I’m talking about. If you can’t grasp the fact that it’s not possible to get a 500mb movie file to completely download and start playing on a computer with zero load time…you have no business running a website. That’s like me going to Boeing and saying “I want you to design a plane for me. it must carry at least 5000 passengers, break mach 2, but it must use no fuel whatsoever and be absolutely indestructible. You will do this for $17.50 cents, and if you’re too stupid to make this happen, I’ll take my business elsewhere!”

In other words “I have absolutely no idea how any of this works, so I’m just going to demand certain things from you, and call you stupid if you can’t make it happen, even if you’d need to break the laws of physics to make it work.”

Sigh…

We’ve moved directly from people who know their stuff to people who think downloading illegal music from Bittorrent makes them a hacker, setting up a plug and play wireless router makes them a hardware god, that they can demand a site be taken down because they find it offensive…and who for some reason believe that talking in ‘1337 5P34K’ is actually impressive.

Newsflash, people…the ability to swap letters for numbers and other letters that look like the original letters does not make you a 133T H4XX0R…it makes you a tool. You’re like the ex-private schoolboy living in a subdivision who thinks wearing really baggy pants and listening saying ‘dawg’ a lot makes them ‘Gangsta’.

However, I think the worst hit part of the online world is the online gaming community.

Back when I got into gaming, only geeks played games. If you wanted a Doom deathmatch or a round of Duke Nukem 3D, it wasn’t plug and play. You had to set up a host, swap IP addresses, configure baud rates etc. It wasn’t as simple as signing up with EA online and putting in a username and password. People played the game to play the game, not to see how many people they could annoy.

Today, for example, I decided to give Battlefield 2142 a spin.

I logged in, joined a server, and the very first thing I see is someone firing rockets at their own team, interspersed with the odd “LOLZ ur a FAG!” thrown in for good measure. Then, I got called a ‘noob camper’ for protecting a control point. Then I got accused of being a ‘hacker’ because…you know, I actually shot someone.

Yep, stand out in the open, silhouetted against the sky while firing wildly in all directions, giving away your position to anyone within a few miles…and then you’re actually surprised that you’re dead because someone actually aimed and shot you from cover…that guy must be a hacker, right? After all, you’ve had 10 minutes of online gaming experience and you’re a Gaming God among ants.

To use a better analogy, we’ve gone from a fun board game with friends, to playing with people who tip the board over and run away laughing, scream ‘cheater’ every time someone else rolls a six and cries foul despite the fact they don’t actually know the rules.

I remember playing online shooters when the only time someone shot a member of their own team was by accident, For example I remember playing an online shooter in 1996 (Dark Forces 2 I think), and I accidentally shot a member of my own team. The conversation went like this:

“Shit, my bad, sorry.”

“np, my fault, I ran into your line of fire…damn lag.”

That was it. In a similar situation today, you’d get:

“U fucken n00b! Stop TKing u fag!”

“STFU Fag!”

“U STFU!”

“Tell ur mom she was shit when I was fuckin her last nite!”

“Fuck u, asshole, ur mom’s sucked my dick!”

…and so on and so on.

Again, there where always assholes on online games…but they weren’t the majority.

For example (From Wikipedia about Dark Forces 2):

“When a player dies online, his weapons and ammunition are stored in a "pack" which appears where died. Many players insisted on leaving these packs so that respawned players could immediately reload and be fully ready to compete. The focus, then, was not on which player could luckily pick up the biggest gun. Instead, the JK community stripped its combat of meaningless advantages. Players allowed each other to load before combat started, and similarly between each kill. Games to small numbers of points (e.g. 5 or 10) could last upward of an hour, while constantly progressing at a furious pace.”

What? Sportsmanship and trying to extract the maximum enjoyment out of a game? Nothing like today when getting the most kills through fair means or foul is usually the primary focus. Who cares if you’re using an anti-tank weapon on a single enemy taking out half of your own team in the process…a kill’s a kill!

I know I sound like a typical cranky geek, and there are some big benefits for computers, the internet and gaming finding themselves firmly in the mainstream. I suppose I just miss the days of intelligent people on the internet…back when the barrier to entry was more than just a checkbook and a phone call to the local ISP.