This is an interesting bit of research, adding to the growing body of data trying to understand the positive or negative impacts of P2P downloading of films and the like. (The US General Accounting Office did a huge survey of the reseach in 2009 and were unable to conclude a positive nor negative effect either way.) This is from the abstract of the paper in question:
In this paper, I estimate the overall effect of piracy on movie industry revenues using a fixed-effects, two-stage least squares analysis of data on movie sales, admission prices, cable penetrations, and piracy rates of motion pictures, music, and business software in 20 countries over a 6 year period from 1999 to 2004. The results show that movie piracy has a positive effect on the increase of theater admissions.
This is a pretty amazing result – and goes counter to the pervialing wisdom in Hollywood who have been trying to close down P2P sites such as The Pirate Bay. What also struck me about this is that the method used to do this is via mathematical modeling;
In order to do this, we first developed a mathematical model by modifying Hui and Png’s model for music piracy. The mathematical model shows the relationship between the amount of piracy, the movie admission price, the quality differential between a theatrical movie and a pirated movie, and the copy cost of piracy … The data was regressed using ordinary least square, fixed-effects, and fixed-effects two-stage least square model analysis. Although each positive and negative impact of movie piracy on the theatrical movie industry was not estimated, the overall piracy effect resulting from the substitution between the negative and the positive impact of piracy was estimated. The results show that the overall impact of piracy is slightly positive. This implies the counterintuitive conclusion that theatrical movie sales have reaped at least slight benefits from movie piracy.
So why does this counterintuitive relationship exist? The authors suggest that it is because;
The positive impact of piracy on a theatrical movie can be intuitively understood by looking at the effect of what is called “word-of-mouth” communication. Because time is limited, people must make decisions about what movies they will spend time watching. In order to pick the movies that they will enjoy the most, people must use information gleaned from those who have already seen the movie they are considering watching. The people who have already seen the movie may have done so either legally or illegally. Either way, the information they pass on affects the decision of those who have not yet seen the movie. If the information obtained through word-of-mouth communication is positive, the piracy of movies can actually work to increase the sales of legitimate movies.
However the paper does have a few limitations, as freely noted by the authors. One important one is that the modeling is based on piracy estimates, and this type of data is notoriously unreliable. In addition the right data-set to feed into the modeling did not exist for several major movie consumor counties; notably the US, England and Japan. Without these, it’s hard to be able to draw conclusive definitions, however the data-set does model 20 countries, so neither can the finding be ignored.
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Sung Wook Ji (2007). Piracy Impact on the Theatrical Movie Industry Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, TBA, San Francisco, CA Online
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Hat-tip to Michel for the link. Also posted on P2P Foundation Blog.
The Great NGP Debate
Sony’s NGP – Next Generation Portable (aka PSP2) – it’s a powerful gaming machine with lots of means of interacting with it – front and back touch screen, tilt controls and more. Comparisions are being made as to the best device between this and the 3DS:
Here we have two very different gaming portables. Nintendo’s 3DS will provide the usual lower end graphics of the generation but is likely to capture the imaginations of many with some neatly innovative support and software. Let’s not forget the all-important glasses-free 3D visuals as well.
Sony’s NGP, on the other hand, is a real powerhouse. With an incredible amount of tech crammed into its shell, it’s thought to challenge the PS3 and Xbox 360 in terms of relative output and overall experience. It’s also had a fair few big names attached to its potential game catalogue come release.
But no longer is the handheld hardware battle in gaming a 2-axis debate. This is a post-iPad world where the rules of gaming hardware are being re-written by the mobile phone. How will it fare? Not everyone is convinced:
Sony’s upcoming PSP successor the Next Generation Portable will be unable to compete with Apple’s iPhone and its digital distribution portal the App Store, a leading casual games exec has warned. …
“I think they are hurt; I think they’re clearly hurt,” Ngmoco CEO Neil Young said of Sony in an interview with IndustryGamers. “I think PSP is done and the new NGP is dead on arrival.
“It’s really difficult to compete with an app store that has hundreds of thousands of applications and a wide range of options where the average price paid is around $1.20 and there are tens, if not hundreds of thousands of free applications that are really high quality.
“I just don’t think Sony’s going to be able to compete with that.”
I’m not sure I agree with all the points above. The aim of the NGP is to carve it’s own path and not just follow the iPad et al. However the issue of the shop and how you get content onto it is key. The PSPgo’s means of purchasing and transferring content next to the iPhone was not very good. Ease of purchase and install is key here. But also key to the NGP making it is content – if the games are great, people will buy. Sony can and does both make and attract great content. The types of games possible on the NGP will be much more powerful and in-depth than the iPhone. However they will also cost more to make and thus to buy.
At the moment I still think the NGP can make it…
PS. The Metal Gear Solid video for the NGP does look impressive…
Sony Opens PS3 Move for Hacking
Following from the success that Microsoft has had by opening up the Kinect system to people making interesting hacks, Sony has followed suit…
Sony has lifted the lid on the rumoured PlayStation Move server – a piece of software known as Move.Me, which allows limited use of the motion controller on PC in order to create new games and applications for it.
The software is designed for “hobbyists and academics”, claimed Sony senior engineer John McCutchan on the PlayStation Blog, and grants access to “the exact the same data that licensed developers have.”
He claimed that “Even before PlayStation Move was publicly available to all of you, we were talking about the device’s potential implications for academics and researchers. Move.Me… is an opportunity for PlayStation to inspire new, revolutionary applications in other fields beyond gaming.”
Rather than running directly on PC, Move.Me involves running special server software on a PS3, which then communicates Move data to a nearby computer via LAN.
This is welcome news and the more opening up of APIs and systems to people to create cool stuff, the more cool things will be made, the more demand for the hardware will exist. I also hope there will be more looking to such systems to create hacks that are non-game but using the game technology to help in other areas. Overall it’s still a little too controlled, but a good start…
Guardian SXSW Hacks & Games
I was really intrigued at the Guardian’s idea of getting people together to look at how best to cover the event SXSW. So yes there are journalists and the like there, but also games developers too (Media Molecule)!
There was something more than a bit special about last weekend’s Guardian Hacks SXSW event. Not only did we have an an impressive European mix of newspapers and developers, but many of the teams were made up of people who’d never met before the weekend, and whose ideas took shape only after some in-depth conversations about what is possible, and what needs to be fixed.
Exhausting, certainly. Exciting, definitely. Productive – absolutely. The best part of the weekend was seeing developers and journalists with very different skills, expertise and experience talking through problems and challenges and coming up with some truly inspired hacks. Particularly after seeing the amount of effort that went into all of these, judging the projects was like choosing between children.
And MM’s people won the Best Use of Data award for Sound Thing! Nice one!
Cthulhu Thursday: Coding Cthulhu
This is fun and very, very geeky. Being a fan of the Cthulhu Mythos is quite geeky (until the Hollywood film comes out). Being a programmer is geeky. So writing a coding manual using Lovecart’s ideas, well it’s so geeky there is a danger of an implosion:
I had heard tales of the… thing that C.A.R. Hoare had summoned up in ’62– dark hints of choosing one element from an array, and partitioning the rest into lesser and greater sets, and hellishly recursing until the data were twisted into a sorted list– but nothing I could have imagined would be in any way comparable to the daemoniac, blasphemous reality that I saw.
And yet I saw them in a limitless stream– flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating– sorting themselves inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. Their croaking, baying voices called out in the hideous language of the Old Ones:
void Rlyeh (int mene[], int wgah, int nagl) { int Ia, fhtagn; if (wgah>=nagl) return; swap (mene,wgah,(wgah+nagl)/2); fhtagn = wgah; for (Ia=wgah+1; Ia<=nagl; Ia++) if (mene[Ia]<mene[wgah]) swap (mene,++fhtagn,Ia); swap (mene,wgah,fhtagn); Rlyeh (mene,wgah,fhtagn-1); Rlyeh (mene,fhtagn+1,nagl); } // PH'NGLUI MGLW'NAFH CTHULHURecursion may provide no salvation of storage, nor of human souls; somewhere, a stack of the values being processed must be maintained. But recursive code is more compact, perhaps more easily understood– and more evil and hideous than the darkest nightmares the human brain can endure.
(Hat-tip to Boing Boing.)
(Cthulhu Thursday is a dose of mythos to brighten darken your week. More on the idea can be found here and a list of posts thus far, here. Enjoy!)
Insect Media, The 6 Legged Book
I’ve recently got my copy of Jussi Parikka‘s Insect Media. Here’s some more about the book…
In terms of social media culture, the notions of swarms, hive minds and collective intelligence in distributed networks have been harnessed as part of the business discourse of the 21st century. Even if originating as part of the 1990s cyberenthusiasm for the Internet, they gained another chance during the recent years of Web 2.0 when finally the amateur spirit at the core of the Internet project was discoverd as a possible revenue stream. As analyzed by many network theorists including Terranova, the harnessing of free labour as part of the Web 2.0 logic was part and parcel of this neobiologism of networks. Web 2.0 rediscovered sociability; the chattering, relating, friend-seeking, affective and non-rational but emotional human being who shared, talked, commented and contributed. Suddenly such bad subjects of 20th century as anarchism and communism were part of the web 2.0 capitalism discourse.
I’m only in the early stages of the book, but so far it is great. It is a discussion about the idea of non-human media, of the technologies employed by insects to communicate. It is about swarm intelligence and post-human ideas of data flow:
The nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of media was already filled with such “hidden themes” of alternative media. within the majoritarian joining of technology-state-human being we find cracks and varia: the early modern media sphere incorporated in its phases of emergence a panorama of ideas and view of media and technology (even though, one should note, the term media is much younger in its present usage) in which processes of transmission, calculation and storage were not restricted to technical media that we would normally understand by the term (twentieth-century mass media from cinema to radio to television and network media such as the Internet). Parikka 2010: xvii
The biomedia aspects of the book are great and I will need to read more to account for the ideas into my PhD work. I’m glad that it seems Parikka’s ideas mesh with my own (which means less rewriting, or should I say re-wiring of my work!) But this is not the first of his books I’ve come across. So far I’ve read one other of his past books in my PhD work, Digital Contagions, which looked at idea of the virus within the digital. It’s a good book and helped me a lot. It’s also, like Insect Media, back in the realms of biomedia – a subject of immense interest to me, given my PhD is about evolution and media…
High Demand for 3DS at Japanese Launch
Nintendo’s next handheld, the 3DS, is now on sale in Japan following its weekend launch.
With just 400,000 units available on the system’s first day of release (according to the Nikkei) and queues reportedly stretching to 750 people long, the first shipment of consoles sold out quickly. Many of the units were already tied up in pre-orders.
However, a second shipment became available on Sunday, with AndriaSang observing that the queuing situation had by that point apparently resolved itself.
Including the 400,000 already known about, a total of 1.5 million units are expected in Japan by the month’s end – with Nintendo predicting 4 million shipments worldwide within the same period.
Monday Morning Gamification: Gamifying the News
Here’s an interesting article about Gamification:
One of the biggest emerging conversations over the past year in Silicon Valley is around “gamification.” Simply put, this is the idea of applying game mechanics, particularly those found in videogames, to all sorts of non-game experiences.
After following this conversation for many months, I’ve come to believe that over the next decade gamification will profoundly reshape the way we experience the web, to the same degree that social media and networks redefined the web last decade. To that end, I’ve been thinking in the broadest terms what that could and should mean for how we can reinvent digital news.
To carry this thinking forward, I’m announcing the launch of a new project: NewstopiaVille. The goal is to explore how game mechanics can be applied to reinvent the way we produce, consume and interact with news. My hope is that by thinking as ambitiously as possible about this idea, I can accomplish two things.
First, I want to get the concept of gamification on the radar on every news organization so that it becomes a central part of their discussions as they continue to push into digital media.
Second, I want to build a prototype of a fully gamified news experience. There won’t be a single solution that makes sense for every news organization. But I’m hoping to demonstrate the possibilities to inspire others to pursue their own concepts in this area.
Technology and Game Zeitgeist in Libya and Beyond
It can’t really have escaped many people’s attention that there is an uprising going on in Libya. The Guardian has been doing a great job of covering it and while I’m working I often have one of their live-blogs open (e.g. here) to keep one browser-eye on events. I was also interested in their recent article around the technologies that were catalysts for change – in Tunisia it was Facebook, in Egypt it was Twitter, in Libya – we don’t really know yet. (But in all cases its brave people taking to the streets to demand democracy that really makes the change!)
Instead, that defining image is this: a young woman or a young man with a smartphone. She’s in the Medina in Tunis with a BlackBerry held aloft, taking a picture of a demonstration outside the prime minister’s house. He is an angry Egyptian doctor in an aid station stooping to capture the image of a man with a head injury from missiles thrown by Mubarak’s supporters. Or it is a Libyan in Benghazi running with his phone switched to a jerky video mode, surprised when the youth in front of him is shot through the head.
All of them are images that have found their way on to the internet through social media sites. And it’s not just images. In Tahrir Square I sat one morning next to a 60-year-old surgeon cheerfully tweeting his involvement in the protest. The barricades today do not bristle with bayonets and rifles, but with phones.
You can see the Twitter Zeitgeist in this image of a protest sign – its nothing more than the Twitter hashtags you’d need to follow and join the discussion. What is interesting about this sign is that it assumes knowledge and assumes connectivity – it’s not saying listen to the protestors point of view – it’s saying, “get involved”;
Protest Hastags
This is another image that struck me. This time its a games one. It shows how gaming is now a mainstream idea, something so universal that it can be used to communicate another universal idea – freedom.
Pacman Protest Sign
(These images come from this great article on Buzzfeed.)
LittleBigEducation
Apparently you can get LittleBigPlanet2 for a special price if you work in education. I think this is a great tool for creating all sorts of content and playing with ideas. Well worth checking out.
If you are reading this and thinking ‘what is LittleBigPlanet?’ Here’s the info:
Since its release two years ago, LittleBIGPlanet has sold over 4 million copies, received widespread critical acclaim and numerous awards including the BAFTA Children’s Award in 2009. It won in 8 categories out of 10 nominations at the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences (AIAS) including Outstanding Innovation in Gaming and was judged Family Game of the Year, Console Game of the Year and Overall Game of the Year. LittleBigPlanet was also given the Award for Artistic Achievement at the 5th British Academy Video Games Awards and was given the awards for Best New Debut, Best Game Design, Best Technology, and the Innovation Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards.
The sequel, LittleBIGPlanet 2 (LBP2), boasts 40 new story levels across six themes which can be played alone or with friends either offline or online. It promises to add bundles of new content, as well as backwards compatibility with DLC and millions of free custom-made levels from the original.
Oh, and the link has some great examples of LBP in action being used for education…
(Hat-tip to Ariel for the link!)
A Great Becoming... 