Whatever...

The serious business of gaming

By Dominic Walsh

The annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco proved to be a storming success.  Mobile phone convergence received a shot in the arm, new developments in artificial intelligence were discussed, interface alternatives to the keyboard and mouse were proposed, and a Microsoft demo product went faulty on them.

Admittedly, the interface alternatives were a balance board or guitar, the artificial intelligence was mostly concerned with playing football, the mobile convergence was to do with Second Life (again), and the Microsoft demo was... well, business as usual.

Talking of which, and despite it being primarily a games show, there was also plenty for a B2B audience to mull over too.

First, mobile convergence.  Given the interest in/hype over Second Life as a social networking and business tool, it’s interesting that its major mobile debut should be made at a gaming conference - will this perhaps result in business exploring the potential of other themed online worlds that have a far greater user-base, such as World of Warcraft (which has over 5.5 million subscribers in Asia alone)?  The development of online worlds for mobiles points to their growing sophistication and capability – and it's less effort to carry a mobile phone on business than a laptop. The interface still isn't useful for all applications, but progress is certainly being made.

Alternative control methods are also of interest to users other than gamers. Touchscreens are already being touted as the next step for mobile phone interfaces, and Microsoft's Surface technology is also moving the interface away from highly specialised applications and into more general use, whether for design or just organising files.  And once they can cope with more complex commands, even thought control-based interfaces could move beyond gamer headsets’ current "jump, duck, shoot" capabilities.

There was more, of course – the enthusiasm for online developer communities, continued moves to make as much content as possible downloadable, and a growing push towards user-generated content.  But what has really come to the fore this year is that gaming is most definitely a business, with as much interest, activity and potential as, say, storage, telecoms or messaging.

You might still think in terms of spotty teenage inadequates feeding fifty pees into Sega Rally – but the truth is that the users, developers and related industry have all moved on to more serious territory.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to have another go on Minesweeper.

I’m A Nanobot… Get Me Out Of Here!

By Tom Kirkham

US inventor Ray Kurzweil has this week courted controversy by predicting that machines will achieve human-level artificial intelligence by 2029. 

However, given the amount of people now regularly following television programmes such as “I’m a Celebrity…” and “X-Factor”, frankly I think Mr. Kurzweil is being rather conservative in his estimation… Surely robots will be able to match the intelligence of your average reality TV viewer a lot sooner than that??!

OK, I’m being facetious, but it does scare me that while machines continue to get smarter at an alarming rate, an increasing proportion of the public seems content to spend every evening observing former models and washed-up pop singers writhing around in tanks full of creepy-crawlies, or watching George Galloway pretending to be a cat.

I recognise the value of a little mindless escapism – the problem is, it’s not just our light entertainment programmes that are being dumbed down.  Sections of the media seem to be suffering the same fate.  I live in a city where approximately 861,000 people each day now read a free paper that has seemingly as much in common with Heat magazine as it does with a newspaper.  What’s more, a further 858,000 people read its rival, even though it appears to be exactly the same!

In contrast, the most recent statistics show that national broadsheet readership remains in decline – only The Independent has recorded a rise in daily readership, though has the smallest audience of the nationals anyway.  While the shift towards online media may offset this, typing 'Britney Spears' into Google News still brings up a lot more entries than 'Darfur' or 'Northern Rock'.

Ray Kurzweil believes that machines and humans will eventually merge through devices implanted in the body to boost intelligence and health – certainly an astonishing claim.  I’m just worried that in years to come, if anyone still wants to interview a leading thinker like Mr. Kurzweil, they’ll be more likely to ask him what’s on his iPod rather than to outline his vision of Dalek-like man-machines.

Yes, I absolutely recognise that, to a large extent, the media works by providing exactly what their respective audiences want to read.  But at some point you have to ask, is it really going to take putting nanobots into people’s brains to make them realise that a Paris Hilton wardrobe malfunction probably isn’t as important as the political crisis in Kenya or the recognition of Kosovo as an independent state? 

And if the nanobots do in fact achieve human-level artificial intelligence, you'd suspect they’d raise a pretty strong objection to being implanted in the first place!

The Art of IT

By Susan Siegl

While browsing on the website of the upcoming CeBIT event, I came across an interesting cultural award, the Künstlerpreis.  On the weekend of March 8 and 9, eight nominated artists of various categories will give performances as part of the programme, each focused on a specific IT area.

The Arts and information technology have developed a strong relationship over the past few decades, particularly as artists explore the new possibilities on offer.  Initially, computers were only used for digitilisation of existing works, colour changes or the creation of illusions.  Later, images started to be created on the computer, leading to virtual realities with interactive elements being built.  Nowadays, the internet can connect communities of artists or producers, enabling them to create a joint work.

However, I believe that the Arts have only just begun to explore the options that technology offers.  Yet even some of the most well-known museums for modern art such as MOMA in New York still mainly rely on the classical styles.  Only occasional shows – for instance the annual festival Ars Electronica – highlight new media arts.

Of course, information technology has influenced not only fine but also performing arts.  For film producers, the possibilities that CGI have created are practically limitless.  It's almost sweet to think now of the mechanical King Kong or the rubber shark in Jaws, which can still be admired at Orlando's Universal Studios.  Imagine the herd of Jurassic Park dinosaurs we could have visited if only they hadn't been digitalised!

One innovation I recently came across is the creation of artwork out of internet security threats. The Romanian artist Alex Dragulescu has developed with his Malwarez technique a way to display spam, phishing mails, spyware and viruses as graphic objects, based on the codes provided by a security service provider he cooperates with.  Take a look here at how deceptively beautiful these images are!

So next time my mailbox is jammed with spam, I will just try to see these messages as nice, flowery, fragile creatures...

Is file sharing really such a nightmare?

By Jonathan Mathias

Like Kazaa and Napster before it, BitTorrent, the brilliantly efficient file sharing protocol, is the latest peer-to-peer technology to be denounced as a threat to the future of society as we know it.

Placing vast amounts of music, movies, games and software a few clicks away, 'torrent' sites don't actually host content, they merely facilitate its exchange – a small file is downloaded which contains information on how a given movie or album should be broken up and reassembled when sent between other users – this has so far enabled the torrent sites to avoid prosecution. 

By its very nature, this technology facilitates the fast exchange of files without the overheads of needing huge storage space and bandwidth – so for instance, artists and copyright holders could register their material with a legitimate, private tracker site which could then charge users for access to the torrent file.

 
We constantly hear execs, studios and labels whining that file sharing is killing the industry, yet instead of openly advocating a proactive approach to solving the problem, the plutocrats seem to think that if they have a loud enough and long enough tantrum, they’ll be able to continue dictating how content is made available – thus artificially extending the lifespan of existing distribution channels.

However, the growing success and popularity of mixed pay and free download services such as 4OD and iTunes shows that, high quality, safe and fairly priced material is a better option than ‘free’, but unreliable and often illegal file sharing alternatives. 

With more and more download services from the film, music and software industries becoming available, it’s clear that technology and consumers are already changing an out-dated business model.  I fear we'll hear a lot more whinging though from the fat cats before the file sharing debate is finally won.

From classic to obsolete

By Kathryn Mills-Webb

My brother got a new iPod classic for Christmas, only to find that when he plugged it into his two year old Mac laptop, the two were incompatible. 

At first, I couldn't believe that Apple would lock out its own users – does it really assume that every iPod user would also have bought a new Mac computer within the last year?  After all, isn't one of the main advantages of today's home computers that they last for a very long time and don't often need replacing?

On closer inspection, we discovered that the new iPod classics only work with Mac OS X v10.4.9 or later – yet v10.4.9 was only released last April! On the other hand, if you have a Microsoft OS, you can use both Vista and XP, which means that anyone who bought their Windows PC in the last seven years is alright.  And while the Apple fanatics out there will shout that you can upgrade and download the latest version of the software, the reality is that most people a) don't want the hassle of doing this, and b) don't really know how to. 

However, if we look at the figures, perhaps it's not surprising that Apple is doing this.  If someone can't use their iPod with their current laptop, they might as well just go down to the Apple Store and buy a shiny new computer, yes?  I think not.  If you’ve just bought an iPod classic, you’re hardly going to have the money, or inclination, to splash out on a brand new computer too. 

What's more, Apple's phenomenal iPod growth is now beginning to slow down, which is negatively impacting the company's share price. This is hardly surprising though, as iPods are not like mobile phones, with consumers happy to throw them away and upgrade every year. You can almost always get a free phone by signing up to a contract, but you're always going to have to pay for an iPod and as most people only use them for listening to music, the extra features wouldn't necessarily justify the expense...

Yet Apple's constant launch of new versions and special edition iPods would seem to suggest the opposite.  I think that Apple needs to take a hard look at itself and stop believing its own hype – we’re always being told how nice it is to live in Mac World, but reality might just be about to bite.