06.28.07
Posted in music, politics at 6:05 pm by Rob Fahey
Today is the first day since I moved to England that Tony Blair has not been Prime Minister. He’s the only ruler of this country I’ve ever known during the time I lived here (so it’s just as well I have the guiding hand of history to inform me that not all prime ministers are duty bound to be self-aggrandising, lying, murderous, treacherous bastards, then).
Today, also, the Spice Girls have announced that they are to reform and embark on a world tour.
If this is what the country is going to be like under Gordon Brown’s leadership, I want no part of it.
Technorati Tags: politics
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06.26.07
Posted in games, work at 3:28 pm by Rob Fahey
A quick post about a couple of things I’ve been meaning to blog about for ages. Either I’ve been tremendously lazy, or the last couple of weeks have been very busy; I leave it to the imagination of the reader to determine the truth.
Firstly, dead trees. I should definitely have mentioned this earlier, since I’m not sure what the shelf life of magazines is these days, but I wrote a couple of things for the most recent SFX Special. It hit the news-stands earlier this month, and I’m responsible for stuff including the main cover feature about the new Ghost In The Shell movie. I’m not entirely happy with how that feature turned out – there’s a lengthy and twisted saga behind the whole thing, and the feature I actually wrote is quite some distance from the feature I wanted to write. Nonetheless, most other people seem to like it, so I shouldn’t moan. Hopefully SFX liked it enough to ask me to do more for them in future, too. The Special as a whole is a really good read, too, and definitely worth picking up if you’re remotely into anime stuff.
It only struck me when I picked up and leafed through the magazine, but this is actually the first time in five years that I’ve been in print in the UK. Ironically, during that time, my exclusive focus on web publications has been offset by regularly appearing in print overseas; while I was editor of GamesIndustry.biz, I fielded requests to republish my stuff in various magazines around the world at least once a fortnight. However, I’ve not actually had an original article printed on paper in the UK since CTW, the trade newspaper I used to work on, shut down in early 2002. I went to work for Eurogamer at that point and never really looked back.
(Actually, this isn’t strictly true. A few years ago, Eurogamer did a deal whereby it was providing content to Nintendo Official Magazine, and I wrote some features for the magazine about getting into the games industry. I never saw how they turned out on paper, and they had to be so dumbed down for the target audience that it’s fair to say they weren’t exactly my proudest moments in journalism. Let’s all just pretend it never happened, eh?)
Seeing my words in print for the first time in years gives me a sudden insight into the motivation of the many, many journalists who fiercely resist the gradual decline of print mags in the face of online competition. Don’t get me wrong; I still consider the rise of online media to be as inevitable and inexorable as the replacement of copied manuscripts with printed documents was. However, as a writer, there’s still a wonderful thrill to seeing your words laid out in print. It simply feels more substantial and important and weighty than the web does – from a writer’s point of view. To me, having worked in online journalism for seven years (exclusively so for five), that’s simply a point of mild curiosity; I can, however, sympathise with writers who have worked in print for a decade or more. To them, the web must feel ephemeral and transient almost to the extent of pointlessness.
Of course, such feelings don’t actually matter, in an ultimate sense, any more than the feelings of monks who created illuminated manuscripts mattered as Gutenberg’s printing presses marched across Europe. This revolution is about the consumer, not the creator, and exactly the same was true of the printing press; online will become the dominant form of media for some of the same reasons that printed books replaced manuscripts. Still, when I consider that flame of pride that even a hardened net-hack like myself feels at seeing an article in print, it’s hard not to sympathise, and to hope that the ‘net can one day soon become a medium that ignites a similar sense in its contributors.
Secondly; censorship. This is a topic that’s been batted back and forth quite a bit in the last couple of weeks, thanks to Manhunt 2’s recent “ban” in the UK and North America. I’m not a fan of the idea that anyone should tell adults what they can see, hear or read; in fact, that’s one of the things I’m most basically opposed to. However, I think there’s a line to be drawn between censorship imposed from outside (e.g. the BBFC judgement), and censorship imposed internally by a company or an industry (which is what happened in North America). One of those things is a government agency gagging expression; the other is simply the industrial equivalent of you choosing not to say the word “fuck” in front of your grandmother. Freedom of speech means that it’s your right to choose not to say things, as much as it’s your right to say things.
I guess that’s why, by and large, I see the decision to prevent Manhunt 2 from reaching the shelves as a positive thing. It’s a shame that in the UK, it had to happen in the offices of the BBFC; while in recent years the BBFC has been laudably open, liberal and sensible in its adjudications, it’s still ultimately a government-controlled board capable of making censorship, rather than classification, decisions. I don’t think such a board has a place in a modern, democratic society, and that makes me uncomfortable with its role in this series of events. However, in North America the industry itself moved to prevent the game from being released, and I like to believe that this would have happened in Europe as well; the BBFC just got there first.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I dedicated my column last week on GamesIndustry.biz to this issue. Here’s the obligatory extract;
“In a game like Manhunt 2, however, the player is in the role not of the hunted, or of the victim (as they are in, for example, survival horror type games); instead, they take on the role of the predator, of the serial killer, of the murderer who enjoys inflicting pain and torture. There are certain parallels for this in literature, of course – Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho and Iain Banks’ Complicity both deal, in very different ways, with murderers portrayed in the first person.
However, the clear opinion of the BBFC – and presumably of the ESRB – is that Manhunt 2 doesn’t represent the sort of insightful commentary represented by those works. This is killing, maiming and torturing for the sake of it; this may, in fact, be the game which lives up to the shrill claims of the conservative wing that games are “murder simulators”.”
Go have a read, if that’s your sort of thing.
(Corey also wrote an interesting assessment of the whole situation for Wii Chat, which approached it from a slightly different angle to mine.)
Technorati Tags: anime, Eurogamer, magazines, Manhunt, Manhunt 2, censorship, SFX, videogames
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06.20.07
Posted in web at 12:59 pm by Rob Fahey
Housemate and fellow blogger Nic, despite his fine efforts in the field of providing genuinely useful stuff on his blog, appears to be annoyed at the fact that his top Google results – by a vast margin – are from people searching for “naked old men“. Under the circumstances, I feel that it’s beholden on me to help out by linking to his blog using that phrase, just in case Google needs that extra nudge up the search rankings. 
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06.15.07
Posted in technology at 12:36 pm by Rob Fahey
The short and sweet form of this article; ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley, a soi disant tech blogger, reckons that Apple is copying Vista in its new operating system. Okay, blink a few times, shake your head slightly as if attempting to dislodge a small grain of idiocy lodged in your brain, and read on.
I posted earlier this week about how disappointing Steve Jobs’ keynote at WWDC 2007 was, and I wasn’t exactly alone in this. Tons of tech blogs and news sites criticised the “Stevenote” for its lack of content, bad pacing and general failure to match up to public expectation. It was, unquestionably, something of a miscalculation.
As with any event of this nature, though, the really interesting reactions come from the fringes – the slightly loony vested interests who sit on the edge of the debate. What’s interesting this week is that one of the most clearly biased, unresearched and ignorant pieces I’ve read in the wake of the keynote came not from a tin-foil hat wearing nutter on the outskirts of the tech community, but from a by-lined blogger employed by one of the larger tech sites, ZDnet.
Mary Jo Foley describes her column as “An unblinking eye on Microsoft”, and as you’d expect from an intrepid investigative reporter into the shadowy world of technology, she was clutching her media pass and ready to get to the heart of the truth about the Apple keynote. In the process, she has uncovered a massive conspiracy; Apple’s operating system is copying Microsoft!
You can have a gander at Foley’s take on the whole matter on her ZDnet blog.
Now, the key problem here isn’t so much the dismissal of a whole lot of interesting OS ideas because they’re from the wrong company (she basically says out of hand that Time Machine and Core Animation aren’t important, apparently because she doesn’t understand them). The real problem is that Mary Jo Foley has taken it upon herself to deliver these judgements without doing the slightest bit of research. She has splurged her ideas into a word processor, hasn’t even bothered googling for a few facts and some background info to back up her conclusions, and published it on a blog on a prominent tech site.
This leads to some brilliant howlers, like her apparent belief that Dashboard, Spotlight and so on were actually entirely new features, rolled out in a hurry to counter Vista’s functionality. Five minutes on Wikipedia would have disproved this – and ten minutes spent talking to any one of the 5000 developers who surrounded Ms Foley at the Moscone West Convention Centre would have set her straight on several of her other broken, un-researched assumptions, like her confusion over 64-bit functionality.
I find two things interesting about this whole mess, neither of which reflects particularly well on the editorial hands on the tiller at ZDnet.
Firstly, as someone who edited a business and technology website for nearly five years, I’m astonished that any editor allowed this article onto their publication without demanding that Foley go back and research some of her claims. I’m aware that this is technically a blog, and that ZDnet may have decided that writers’ blogs should be free of editorial oversight; if so, this is a terrible mistake. You cannot absolve yourself of editorial responsibility for blogs, so long as they continue to carry your banner and logo. Any decent editor would have thrown this article over to another contributor with some background in the field for a quick fact-check. That’s how the quality control process works, and ZDnet clearly chose to bypass it.
Secondly, Mary Jo Foley writes a column for ZDnet under the title “An unblinking eye on Microsoft” – suggesting, to me at least, some kind of watchdog role. A perusal of her earlier entries reveals that a caveat is required; Ms Foley’s unblinking eye is often utterly adoring.
Granted, she has a relatively healthy disrespect for some of Microsoft’s more odious marketing antics – the commissioning of biased studies, for example – but her coverage of the company rarely rises above simple, credulous posts about product announcements. Her coverage of other companies, however, is routinely negative. Apple takes something of a hammering; Google, too, attracts ire. In a later entry updating her stance on Leopard (but mostly just bashing the people who mailed her letting her know how retarded her original post was), Foley openly admits to being too set in her Microsoft ways to give any other product a fair chance. She didn’t need any such admission; anyone with the time to read some of her blog efforts already knows.
I always find this kind of individual, and their seeming success, quite surprising. It leads me to wonder if there are any political correspondents out there who are paid to cover a specific party, despite openly admitting to having a preference for that party’s politics. I’ve been accused of bias in the past myself, but at the very least, I can happily say that the allegations swung my way have been even; I’ve had as many accusations of being a Sony fanboy as I’ve had of being a Microsoft fanboy or a Nintendo fanboy, which I think means I’m probably hitting things nicely down the middle of the lane. I find it pretty hard to sympathise with journalists like Foley who take great pride in their bias, and then express annoyance when they’re called up on it.
Technorati Tags: Apple, Mary Jo Foley, journalism, Steve Jobs
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06.13.07
Posted in games, web at 4:59 pm by Rob Fahey
Earlier this week, SCEA (that’s the US branch of Sony Computer Entertainment) launched a new blogging site which will see Sony staff posting information about what they’re doing, using their real names and job titles.
This is probably the most positive thing I’ve seen Sony doing from a PR perspective in ages. The company right now has a massive, massive image problem, and it only has itself to blame. From the very top of the organisation through to the PR lackeys on the front lines, it has displayed an attitude for years which is nothing short of impenetrable, arrogant and aloof.
That works (or at least, doesn’t hurt quite so badly) when you’re on top of the game. When you’re millions of units behind the competition and need to actively compete for hearts, minds and wallets, it’s a losing strategy.
Blogging is emerging as one of the best ways for companies to open themselves up to the public and remove that kind of arrogant, inhuman face from their organisation. More and more big companies (with Microsoft on the vanguard, it’s worth noting – even if I’ll never quite forgive the company’s wonderful blogging efforts for the sin of imposing the odiously self-important and ignorant Robert Scoble on the world) are turning to transparency as a way to engage with consumers and build a fanbase.
Sony hasn’t been quick to come around to this idea, and I get the impression that it’s probably viewed with outright suspicion in some parts of the company. However, it’s exactly what the firm needs – especially in view of the fact that Microsoft has been so successful with efforts like Major Nelson and the GamerscoreBlog, and in light of the significant rise in importance of games blogs like Kotaku and Joystiq in recent years. Admittedly, on the latter subject, I’m wont to grumble about the death of journalism, declining standards of English and the damaging credulousness of bloggers as compared to proper journalists – but none of that changes the fact that those sites have significant readership. Companies need to adapt to that environment.
Actually, this isn’t Sony’s first courtship with blogging; late last year, the firm’s European arm launched a blog site called ThreeSpeech, which was actually quite an interesting experiment in blogging. SCEE was paying for the whole thing, but they left production to an external company, and didn’t (as far as I could gather) apply any editorial control to what was posted.
I worked on the site for a little while, and they never edited a single word I wrote, or prevented me from asking any questions I wanted to ask. I’ve actually been criticised a few times for working on ThreeSpeech, the implication being that I was essentially being paid to be a Sony shill; it certainly never felt that way to me (not least because I was actually only meant to be paid for one of the articles, and I totally forgot to invoice for it – doh). In fact, in the small number of articles I wrote for them, there was as much bad stuff as good about PS3 revealed; for example, an excerpt from an interview with Phil Harrison where he admitted that the company had over-stretched itself by including Blu-Ray, and an article where I interviewed Insomniac Games boss Ted Price and he revealed that Resistance: Fall of Man wouldn’t use the PS3’s built-in buddy lists. Neither of which is exactly what you’d call Good News; both of which broke exclusively on a Sony-funded site.
So, to my mind, ThreeSpeech was actually quite brave. Badly designed, and a bit scattershot in terms of the content it posted – but brave. Unfortunately, it’s the kind of thing Sony needed to do before it fell out with gamers; doing it afterwards just attracted ire from people who saw it as an attempt to “deceive” people with cloaked PR spin, which is a bit harsh given that the site was honest from the outset about being Sony-backed.
Hence why SCEA’s initiative makes more sense, given the climate. It might be interesting to see if SCEE could now morph ThreeSpeech into some kind of platform where prominent journalists and bloggers talk about the PS3 and its software fairly openly, which I think was the core idea; it could be complementary to the PlayStation Blog in that form. More importantly, though, let’s see some of the UK staff blogging too. Openness and transparency won’t work straight away, but they’re exactly the magic pill Sony needs to rescue them from their own tarnished public image. (Well, that and making Jack Tretton shut up, but let’s aim for the attainable goals first…)
Technorati Tags: journalism, PlayStation, PS3, PlayStation 3, Sony, videogames
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06.11.07
Posted in technology at 11:18 pm by Rob Fahey
In my last post, I suggested that perhaps Steve Jobs’ showing at D: All Things Digital was rubbish because Apple was keeping its powder dry for its own WWDC event.In the wake of today’s keynote at WWDC, I wish to apologise for any confusion caused by my own confusion. For “keeping its powder dry”, I should have said, “wondering why it has no damn powder in the powder-box, and where it can get some more.”
To recap; where we had hoped for hardware and cool new software, what we got from Jobs was:
- A demonstration of OSX Leopard, which still looks like a wonderful upgrade, but hasn’t really changed much since he originally demoed it at WWDC last year.
- The announcement that Safari 3 will be available on Windows. This is good news for web developers, who can now test in all browsers on one system, and utterly meaningless to everyone else in the world.
- The announcement that if you want to develop apps for the iPhone, you’ll have to build them as websites. In itself, this might not be a bad thing if the promise of fully implemented iPhone interface elements for AJAX (the web scripting technology that makes websites properly interactive) comes through – but it does mean that unless you have a flatrate data tariff for your phone, the iPhone could well be prohibitively expensive.
For the consumer, in other words, there was sweet fuck all in this announcement – it was utterly meaningless to anyone who isn’t an Apple developer. Now, from Apple’s perspective, perhaps that feels fair enough; WWDC is, after all, a developer conference.
However, this to my mind represents a complete misunderstanding of both consumers and the media – which is surprising, coming from the typically media-savvy Apple.The issue, to my mind, is that WWDC is seen as Apple’s quarterly product update – perhaps not by the company itself, but certainly by the rest of the world.
It’s that latter perception which matters. Tens of thousands of people view the news from the keynote in real-time, and they expect there to be exciting product news in there to justify their attention. When WWDC fails to deliver this, it reflects incredibly badly on Apple – and with the iPhone launch coming up in a few weeks’ time, Apple cannot afford to seed bad feeling in this manner.
Interestingly, I had… Well, not an argument, but certainly a difference of opinion, with Sony’s Phil Harrison on a similar matter a few months ago. Some of you may recall Ken Kutaragi’s keynote at the Tokyo Games Show last September, only a few weeks before the launch of PlayStation 3. Rather than showing off new games, or revealing the online service, or generally exciting the world about his new console, Kutaragi chose to deliver an interesting, but disjointed and somewhat irrelevant, lecture about his vision of how technology will look in ten years time, how important Web 2.0 is, and how data services will evolve. It was the wrong thing to do.
The hall was packed with the cameras of the world’s media – from specialist press like ourselves, through to the big news agencies from all over the planet. They wanted to be wowed by the PlayStation 3, and no matter how visionary Kutaragi’s speech may have been, they walked away from the keynote feeling let down and underwhelmed. Across the globe, game fans tuned in to live broadcasts in text, audio and video, and felt similarly let down by Ken’s speech.
Now, you could argue that this is a case of gamers failing to understand the event in question, or of the media hyping it up to be something it was never intended to be – and that’s certainly what Harrison believes. He told me that Kutaragi had been invited to give a talk at TGS about the future of the industry, not about Sony or its specific plans, and that it was felt that it would have been rude to TGS’ organisers to break with that arrangement.
I disagree – or rather, I feel that such rudeness is merely practical, and necessary. Sony, like Apple, is in business to make money by selling products to consumers. When your consumers are available to you, when the media has hyped them up and they are hoping for something good, you give them something good. Previous Steve Jobs keynotes have delivered fantastic new products – the Intel macs, the new iMac designs, the Mac Mini, the iPhone, the AppleTV. Previous Ken Kutaragi keynotes had included new games, new hardware, new technology. When you set a standard for yourself, and it’s obvious to any fool that the world is expecting you to continue hitting that standard, then you must be prepared to pull out the stops to make that happen – even if that means reorganising a product schedule a little to ensure that you have worthwhile products to show, when people want to see them.
In that respect, WWDC is egg on Apple’s face. The company needs to look carefully at how it approaches WWDC in future; if there’s no big reveal, then perhaps it’s best not to put Steve on stage. At least that way, the world won’t be waiting for a One More Thing that can’t deliver.
Technorati Tags: Apple, PlayStation 3, iPhone, Sony, Steve Jobs
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06.10.07
Posted in technology, toys at 9:56 pm by Rob Fahey
The D: All Things Digital conference, which ran in the United States last week, was an interesting look at what happens when you run a highly promoted event where the major players want to turn up and be seen without actually committing to announcing anything useful. Three big companies were meant to take the stage with something to show off; by the end of the week, you’d forgive anyone with any remaining critical faculties for wondering why they bothered at all.
Perhaps the worst off after this whole mess is poor, beleaguered Palm – a company which has watched, apparently powerless, as the PDA market it practically invented is dominated by rivals with better devices, better technology, better marketing and better vision. I’ve always had a soft spot for Palm, if only because I thought the interfaces and technology used in the original PalmOS devices were very elegant and clever. I thought it was a real shame when it became apparent that the company’s strategy had changed over from building small, lightweight, clever operating systems to trying to snap at the heels of feature-rich, overpowered and overweight systems like Microsoft’s various Windows implementations on smartphones.
I think my soft spot for Palm has turned into outright pity in the wake of this week’s reveal of the Foleo “mobile companion”. The company has spent a fortnight hyping up the entirely new class of mobile device it planned to reveal at D; when the Foleo appeared on stage at the conference, that suddenly all seemed like a cruel joke. Except Palm’s execs weren’t laughing. They looked deadly serious, in the way that a completely batshit insane old woman on the street who thrusts a dog turd wrapped in a dirty blanket at you and insists that it’s her baby might look serious.
Out of options and out of creativity, Palm has seemingly chosen the road less travelled; madness. The Foleo is, in essence, a particularly ugly, underpowered and overpriced laptop; its small screen and form factor are offset by chunky plastic styling and large surrounds. Trying to sell this device as a magical new class of mobile technology is incredibly misguided – and what’s worse, it speaks of a company which has presumably run out of ideas for improving its smartphone device, the Treo. The iPhone may turn out to be far from perfect, but at least it’s innovating and pushing other manufacturers to do likewise. Trying to persuade people to carry around a chunky slab of laptop to extend your smartphone’s functionality is a step in the opposite direction. It feels like a white flag.
Second place in this uninspiring list has to go to Microsoft – although, on form as ever, the company seems to have garnered plenty of positive headlines for “Surface”, the company’s ludicrous and pointless rip-off of a million tech demos of yore. Such is the joy of the modern tech news media; the perfect meeting of bloggers who don’t do even the most basic research on their stories in their rush to be the first to regurgitate the latest press release, and PR people who can dangle freebies in front of their credulous, eager faces in return for the disposal of integrity they never had in the first place.
Here’s some real, honest to got analysis for you; Microsoft Surface is shit. It’s not just shit, it’s old and shit.
I’ve seen demos of interactive tabletops for almost a decade now, and the concept itself is much older. Every year or so, regular as clockwork, the research labs at somewhere like MIT, or Cambridge, or Philips or Fujitsu, will churn out an interactive tabletop, controlled by gestures, or by RFID-tagged objects that you move around on the table, or by a pen, or whatever. Every year or so, we look at it, and go “right, that’s nice” – and nobody gets terribly excited, because while we can see the potential uses for such a system, they’re not very exciting uses and the whole thing is much too expensive anyway.
This is exactly the same problem Microsoft Surface faces; the uses aren’t very exciting, and it’s too expensive. Microsoft’s implementation faces a further problem; it’s rubbish. While other researchers have managed to put together systems that are entirely integrated into a table, mostly by using cameras under the glass to read hand positions, Microsoft’s Surface requires that you have IR cameras positioned in the room above the surface (yeah, they glossed over that bit in the demo a bit). While some systems use RFID or bluetooth, Surface requires that your various devices have stickers on the bottom of them with unique ID tags that the camera can identify. For a tech demo, this is fine; for the real world, I’m not exactly convinced by the usability (or by the $10,000 price tag).
To the large, expensive and poorly designed Surface, then, add Bill Gates’ astonishing comments on user interfaces for videogames. He heavily implied that MS is working on gesture based input for Xbox 360, but said that it won’t be like the Wii – going on to dismiss the Wiimote because you can’t, err, “pick up your tennis racket and swing it.” This, apparently, is a “natural thing” to want to do.
Strike one; Gates (not, it should be added, a man with a great track record in terms of predicting consumer technology trends) believes that we want to play videogames by picking up real-life devices and flinging them around our living rooms. Hmm.
Strike two; Gates then goes on to say that this revolutionary, amazing new technology will be based on… Video recognition. Unfortunately, his interviewer didn’t have the cop on to check that Bill has actually heard of Eye Toy, or seen any of the next-gen stuff Sony is doing with that technology.
It’s good that Microsoft is thinking outside the box on interface stuff, at long last, but perhaps they should try getting their thinking out of other people’s boxes while they’re at it.
Final strike for the week – albeit a somewhat weaker one – goes to Apple, who turned up at All Things Digital with really very little to bring to the table. Apple has an excuse, admittedly, since WWDC is just around the corner and Steve Jobs will want to keep his powder dry for an event on the company’s home turf. All the same, his announcement at All Things Digital was disappointing – an Apple TV box with a bigger hard disc, and the ability to play YouTube videos.
Now, the former is fine, but the latter? YouTube videos played full-screen on a HDTV? Even the normally far from incisive Walt Mossberg, interviewing Jobs on stage, couldn’t help but comment that this looked, well, a bit crap. As plenty of other have observed, what AppleTV needs isn’t YouTube support – it’s decent support for a wider range of codecs and containers. Admittedly, you can now hack that onto the box with relative ease; but supporting a full set of codecs out of the box would change it from a curiosity into a killer product. On that front, Jobs had nothing to say.
Oh well. WWDC tomorrow. I don’t know whether to hope for the rumours of a 12″ display, ultra thin and light MacBook to be true or not; if they’re true, I’m going to be significantly poorer in the coming weeks, I fear. The joy of geekery is matched only by the pain in my wallet.
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