Star Wars: Battle for Hoth Review
I was really pleased to read this in a review over at MSNBC…
However, I have one important hyphenated word for you: AT-ATs. Yes, 30 years later, AT-ATs are still effen cool. And in this game you’ll eventually have to try your best to take down the giant walkers.
So get your Snowspeeders ready and may The Force be with you.
So true. That’s what I wanted form the AT-ATs in the game. They do rule all.
Game Design & Sci-Fi Realism
There is a current crop of games (Crysis 2, Killzone 3, Vanquish etc) set within what I’m calling ‘Sci-Fi Realism‘ – as in an era that’s not current day but is not so far into the future that looses it’s route back to the technology and culture we know today. Sci-fi Realism offers a number of pros and cons as a setting.
The pros are that you can weave the familiar with the ultra new – so you take the player to a new place, while still keeping enough of understanding that they don’t get lost and thus retain a connection between them and this new setting. The connection is important because if the player does not really care about the setting, it’s harder to engage them to keep playing. Let me give you can example; most aliens in Star Trek are humanoid – a mix of the new and the familiar. This is partly because it’s cheaper for special effects and costumes but it also has the pro that the audience can engage with them; we can see ourselves as kin to the Bajoran. That’s a lot harder with Tribbles.
The cons are that we risk not exploring the fiction bit of science-fiction because we’re too busy making it science… if you see what I mean. Again, lets have an example – in Iain M Bank’s (great) novel The Algebraist – he creates a really alien race, the Dwellers. They inhabit gas giants, are male most of the time, turning female to have kids, which they then disown and even hunt. They are not at all humanoid, looking like a manta-ray sort of thing at one stage of their life and their lifespan is billions of years. In short they look and act alien; in the physical and the philosophical sense. It’s hard to identify with them – but you are very interested in them and what they do. This means we really feel we’re on a journey to a different place via the novel.
Which brings me to the Killzone world. I really enjoyed Killzone 2 – it’s a solid game with good controls and intense combat. As for it’s sci-fi realism – it has spaceships and very full-on sci-fi technology – but also lots of weapons that look not dissimilar to the kind of technology you’d find today. Indeed some of it feels like the kind of technology you would find in WWII.
A rifle from Killzone 2
This might lead you to ask, ‘if they can fly though space, why are the weapons they use not lasers?‘. But the best technology is the tried and tested sort; the tech that is robust, easy to manufacture and repair. Good old-fashioned bullet-based technology suits the neo-future of Killzone. It’s familiar to the gamer, so fun to play, yet we still get the spectacular space scenes while we fight WWII in space. It’s a great use of Sci-fi Realism. A tradition they seem to be growing for Killzone 3 – where we’ll get access to flying technology that is very sci-fi; yet still feels like a good old fashioned route to a solid fire fight. Should be fun!
The Network View of Evolution
Genetics and evolution are complex and inter-linked subjects. That’s not to say the lay-person can’t understand them – the basic principles under which they work are simple enough – it’s just that once you start to focus your view down into the details the complexity emerges. Let me give you an example. Eye colour.
The colour of our eyes as humans is clearly linked to our genes and is, in some respects, a hereditary trait. But to think of there being ‘a gene for blue eyes’ or ‘a gene for brown eyes’ is inaccurate. The link between the genotype (the genes) and the phenotype (what we can observe in the organism) is complex. There are a number of genes that seem to influence the colour of our eyes and in many respects the absence of a gene as well as it’s presence can determine the final colour we see.
Science blogger PZ Myers gives a good description of the complexities of mapping the phenotype from the genotype. He suggests that Evolution 101 is something like:
Evolution proceeds by mutation and selection. A novel mutation occurs in a gene that gives the individual inheriting it an advantage, and that person passes it on to their children who also gets the advantage and do better than their peers, and leave more offspring. Given time, the advantageous mutation spreads through the population so the entire species has it.
Then, as we make it more complex, Evolution 201 then starts to introduce us to the finer grain of detail and show us more of what is really going on:
First, [Evolution 101 is] not exactly wrong — it’s more like taking one good explanation of certain kinds of evolution and making it a sweeping claim that that is how all evolution works. By reducing it to this one scheme, though, it makes evolution far too plodding and linear, and reduces it all to a sort of personal narrative. It isn’t any of those things. What’s left out in the 101 story, and in creationist tales, is that: evolution is about populations, so many changes go on in parallel; selectable traits are usually the product of networks of genes, so there are rarely single alleles that can be categorized as the effector of change; and genes and gene networks are plastic or responsive to the environment. All of these complications make the actual story more complicated and interesting, and also, perhaps to your surprise, make evolutionary change faster and more powerful.
Thus the determination of eye colour is a networked effect of genes. The evolution of life is a networked effect of the life-cycles of organisms. Both at the smaller and meta scale – are networked effects.
However, we humans always seek explanatory frameworks to help us understand what is going on – to provide us with metaphorical anchor points of understanding. The idea of the ‘selfish gene‘ is one such framework. Adding a feminist perspective to the biology is another:
Feminist perspectives, however, such as those postulated by the Harvard scientist Evelyn Fox Keller, offer the potential to open new possibilities for interpreting the principles of life and are able to offer different perspectives on the nature of the organism.
Keller sought to rebel against the growing notion, prevelant around the time of the sequencing of the human genome, that genes allegedly controlled all aspects of development. Her contention was in regards to the central dogma of the gene, and argued that the popular notion of a discreet unit of biological ‘code’ did not exist in the way it was described. Keller proposed that complex networks made the decisions about what parts of the genetic code were actually expressed, not the ‘genes’, since DNA is unable to copy itself on its own without the cooperation of other molecules, which are under alternative, even more complex modes of instruction. … Which protein should a gene make, and under what circumstance? And how does it choose? In fact, it doesn’t. Responsibility for this decision lies elsewhere, in the complex regulatory dynamics of the cell as a whole. It is from these regulatory dynamics, and not from the gene itself, that the signal (or signals) determining the specific pattern in which the final transcript is to be formed actually comes.
I’m not proposing in this post to full explore the issues raised in the above essay – interesting though it is – I’d agree that the sub-text of the essay – that life is a complex network of interactions are all levels and pushing the idea of the primacy of one view (e.g. ‘organisms are machines’ or ‘genes are the primary engine of life’) by it’s attempted reduction, destroys the complexity that really exists. While such frameworks do help us to understand and ‘trade in’ ideas, by the necessity of reducing them into a manageable chunk of transmittable data (a simple meme) – we cannot forget that underneath each simple framework lies a complex world:
Everything is fluid. Biology isn’t about fixed and rigidly invariant processes — it’s about squishy, dynamic, and interactive stuff making do.
Now do you see what’s wrong with the simplistic caricature of evolution at the top of this article? It’s superficial; it ignores the richness of real biology; it limits and constrains the potential of evolution unrealistically. The concept of evolution as a change in allele frequencies over time is one small part of the whole of evolutionary processes. You’ve got to include network theory and gene and environmental interactions to really understand the phenomena. And the cool thing is that all of these perspectives make evolution an even more powerful force.
(Also published on the p2p foundation blog.)
Making the Physical from the Digital
This was an amazing talk I was at, during the 2010 OKCon – about turning all this digital stuff into real world things. Great fun:
“I had been dabbling with book-binding and making for a little while up to that point and I wanted to attempt to make my blog into a hardback book, using a what is know as a Smythe sewn binding.”
“If you look a typical book, it has blank pages at the beginning and end. If you look at a typical document, like a PDF, then these blank pages are generally never in there! I need to add some blanks before I print it out, but how?”
“There is a toolset
psutilsthat has been included in linux distributions for a long while now and with very good reason – the tools make reformatting, ordering, sizing and otherwise manipulating postscript documents a real breeze. One of these tools is ‘psselect’. The magic incantation I used was:
psselect -p_,_,-,_,_ infile.ps outfile.psThe
-poption tells it to create the outfile.ps “with the following pages”. A_stands in for a blank page. The use of the-requires a little more explanation: it means “from the first page to the last” and the dash is really a page range, like ’1-20′ or ’40-64′, but if you don’t put in ranges,psselectunderstands it to mean the beginning and end respectively.I then hit another issue: to make a sewn binding, you need to fold together numbers of pages to make what are called signatures. What is tricky is that you want the pages to run in their correct order once the pages have been folded and sewn together… so the order you print them is a little special.
I’ll admit that I spent a hour working through some code to calculate the right print order until I used google and found another useful tool in the
psutilspackage –psbook– that does this reordering for you.”
psbook -s16 infile.ps outfile.ps“This command will reorder it into 16 page signatures, as illustrated. I printed it out and set to work, creating the signatures and then sewning them through the fold together, using a book awl to punch holes and a blunt bookbinding needle to lead the thread through the holes.”
“Having sewn the signatures together, I constructed a hardback cover for them. At the time, I had no cloth strips with which to bind the card together, so I used gaffer tape which actually worked really well in the end.”
Sony Adds User Feedback to Playstation Store
I notice that Sony have added a rating system to the Playstation Store:
Let everyone know what you think of the content that you’ve downloaded from PlayStation Store.
When you’re signed in to PlayStation Store on your PlayStation 3, you can rate any PS3 and PSP content that you’ve downloaded using a five star rating system, as long as your PS3 has system software version 3.40 or later installed.
One might be tempted to say this is very ‘iTunes’ as the ratings on an iPhone game are often really important to whether or not other users take a chance on a new title. However such user feedback mechanisms are the life-blood of any true networked media system. If the traffic is all one-way (especially top-down) then, IMHO, it will make users more isolated and less willing to experiment with unknown titles. We’ve known this for a looong time – and it’s great to see it being added to the store. (And, ego-trip, I note that Savage Moon has a couple of thousand ratings and is currently just over 4 star! woo!).
But the networking of the Playstation Network does not end there:
Firmware update 3.41 will add recommendations for games and videos on PlayStation Store. When you’re browsing through the details of a particular title, you’ll see a new “You May Like” section on the right-hand side. This section lists additional items based on the purchases of other PlayStation Network members who have purchased the item you’re currently looking at.
Again, adding another staple of a networked feedback system – seeing what others who like what you, like. This is also important as finding something you might like is often hard; even more so when you are faced with loads of choice. As a key-note speaker said at the Open Knowledge Foundation event – it’s getting noticed above the crowd that will become our main problem…
New Model Army – The P2P Army
I’ve just finished reading an interesting book called ‘New Model Army‘ (NMA) – for those not into their British history, there is a play on words, as the New Model Army were also the name given to the radical reorganisation of the Parliamentary forces under Oliver Cromwell during the English Civil War of 1642-1651. It’s an apt title for a novel that also explores a radical reorganisation of armed struggle.
The novel imagines that in the near future a new force will emerge – the NMAs – these are peer-organised armies that are essentially mercenary forces – but ones organised an a radically different line to the current hierarchical method of military structure. Interestingly it takes place against a backdrop of a newly independent Scotland going to war with England, lacking an army and so using P2P methods to do this.
In the book the NMA is:
- Composed of volunteers – they they are paid for service; thus it is not organised on national lines, but an ad-hoc construction.
- Constructed of those who volunteer at the time they are needed, thus the composition changes from battle to battle.
- Disband as soon as the action is over.
- The whole NMA is paid from contracts to supply an army (in the novel Scotland is at war with England but as the smaller Scotland has no standing army it hires an NMA to fight in it’s stead.
- The NMAs funds are then used to pay volunteers for service, pay medical costs if wounded and soldiers can claim equipment costs from the pool of funds.
- There are no officers – all the troops are equal and a combination of secure wikis and VOP systems are used for organisation – linked to an eBay-like reputation system. This goes for all levels of organisation from the smaller ad-hoc squads, coordinating the squad-level actions and to the totality of NMA policy.
- The NMA also makes cash by taking prisoners and ransoming them back to the mother army from whom they were captured.
It’s a radical vision that is at once democratic almost socialist and yet a pure market-driven army that takes the privatisation of war to it’s seemingly logical ends of supply and demand. In the novel the narrating character states this is the first truly democratic army – one solider=one vote (I should point out that Anarchist forces in the Spanish Civil War were run on democratic lines with elected officers and the like) and he often talks of conventional armies with derision referring to them as akin to bonded slaves, and thus less motivated than the NMA because even if they are fighting for a democracy, the men and women of the NMA are fighting in a democracy. However the narrator is both haunted and confronted by the less-then-democratic way that the NMAs own conflicts impact on civilians. In short the ideas are interesting stuff, and the ideas are something that P2P theorists need to engage with.
R-Type Comes to iPhone
Instabuy! One of my favourite games of all time and a solid-gold classic, R-Type, is coming to iPhone:
It was last November when we first heard that DotEmu was at work porting Irem’s classic 1987 arcade shmup R-Type to iPhone. Yesterday, EA Mobile made it official: it’ll be publishing the game on the App Store “this summer,” but couldn’t get more specific due to the unpredictable nature of Apple’s app approval process.
We had a chance to get our hands on the game at EA yesterday and we’ve got to say, the port has turned out great, with three control schemes (touch to move and shoot, tilt to move / touch to shoot or an overlaid d-pad and buttons) plus options such as autofire and the ability to switch between full-screen and the original coin-op aspect ratio. Cleverly, DotEmu has created separate on-screen buttons for charged shots and launching the “Force” pod away from the player’s R9 fighter.
R-Type on iPhone
I’m glad they are looking again at the controls. I purchased the iPhone version of Golden Axe the other day and though I could complete this on Master System without loosing a single life (but when I was a yoof) I struggled with the controls on the iPhone version 😦
(Or is it just that I’m getting old and my reaction time has slipped???)
Trying to Make DRM More Social-RM
DRM or Digital Rights Management is a tricky area. It’s a means of imposing control such as you find in real world objects onto digital world objects. The problem is that the digital world has a totally different set of ‘physics’ to the real world – you can make perfect copies for no cost. From the user-end DRM is a restriction – moral or not – it places a degree of control over how you can use the digital copy of whatever it was you purchased. From the business end DRM is a way to try and keep selling copies of media artefacts as if they were real world objects. It’s a bind. Creators want to get paid yet DRM makes the object less attractive to the customer. (This was shown in the fact that iTunes charged less for song with DRM then without.) Lots of people have been looking at how to adapt to this new physics of free.
Here’s another one – a social version of DRM:
“Imagine how complicated it would be to build an electronic system that could interpret copyright laws, jurisdictional boundaries, end-user license agreements, and the variety of possible human behaviors, and then restrict people’s behavior so as to violate neither content-owner rights nor consumer rights, and without offending either side.
“It’s not only really hard, it’s completely impossible. Wherever human and legal judgements are involved, full automation is inappropriate.
“Now imagine how much simpler the system would be if it didn’t need to pre-impose restrictions, but rather depended on the natural social consequences of our product usage to preserve a balance between the rights of suppliers and consumers.”
It works like this:
Purchase a movie, song, book, game, etc. from an online vendor.
Download the encrypted content and store copies wherever you wish.
Send one of two (moveable but uncopiable) playkeys from the vendor to an online playkey bank of your choosing.
Download your other playkey into your TV, mobile phone, computer, or other device.
Now any player device, belonging to anyone, can play the content if:
You give it a copy of the encrypted content, and
You share the location and name of either playkey.
With P1817, product ownership is perpetual, and the tethers are severed that connect your purchases to their vendors. No one can restrict how you privately use or share them. However, because they are copyrighted, rightsholders retain the legal right to control public dissemination of their works.
Just as a printed book can be lost if you share it publicly (i.e., with strangers), you must be careful to share only privately (i.e., with those you trust.) That’s because anyone who shares either of your playkeys can take both of them and move them to his own device and his own online playkey bank! The availability and mobility of playkeys lets you electronically share, lend, borrow, give, take, donate, and resell digital property, just as you do with your physical possessions. And since playkeys remain singular, unique, and protected from counterfeiting, copyright holders know that your sharing will remain a private, non-public matter.
“Imagine how complicated it would be to build an electronic system that could interpret copyright laws, jurisdictional boundaries, end-user license agreements, and the variety of possible human behaviors, and then restrict people’s behavior so as to violate neither content-owner rights nor consumer rights, and without offending either side. It’s not only really hard, it’s completely impossible. Wherever human and legal judgements are involved, full automation is inappropriate.
Now imagine how much simpler the system would be if it didn’t need to pre-impose restrictions, but rather depended on the natural social consequences of our product usage to preserve a balance between the rights of suppliers and consumers.
It’s an interesting idea – but still has the problem that all forms of DRM have – it that the pirated version – with no resrictions at all – is not only easier to use, it’s free. It is also still trying to model a digital world on a real-word premise.
Not that I have a solution…still there is something in this I like…
Google Gets into the Wind Game
This is fascinating – Google – formerly in the information business, is now in the wind energy business.
Google is officially in the green energy business. The search giant announced on Tuesday that its Google Energy subsidiary signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with NextEra Energy. Google will begin buying 114 megawatts of electricity from an Iowa wind farm on July 30.
Google, of course, cannot directly use the clean green energy generated by the wind farm; that power goes into the local grid. So Google Energy will sell the power on the regional spot market, where utilities and electricity retailers go to buy power when demand spikes and they have a shortfall. Google will use the revenue from spot market sales to buy renewable energy certificates (RECs) which will offset its greenhouse gas emissions.
Many companies buy RECs in an attempt to be carbon neutral, obtaining them from third-party brokers. But by purchasing RECs directly tied to the renewable energy it is also buying, Google is getting a bigger bang for its buck.
“By contracting to purchase so much energy for so long, we’re giving the developer of the wind farm financial certainty to build additional clean energy projects,” Urs Hoelzle, Google’s senior vice president for operations, wrote on a blog post Tuesday.
In general (and IMHO) it’s often a mistake to drift away from the core of what you do. When you do you can dilute what makes you, you. But this kind of makes sense – Google is a huge energy user – it’s server farms are huge and given the projected path of oil usage it’s hard to see energy prices doing anything but go up. So a bit of vertical integration here might pay dividends in the long run – and also help build the green energy sector. It will be interesting to see how this pans out…
A Bit of Happy
This is a great little video – 5 ways to happiness – simple advice to being a bit more happy and it not some airy-fairy stuff – no no – it’s backed by cold hard logic.
Cold hard logic backed happiness.
Question: What can people do each day to be happier? Tal Ben-Shahar.
Happy (from WinBlog)
A Great Becoming... 