Monthly Archives: January 2014

Technology

Changing the World in 3/4 Decades

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D&D games on the Mac? Yeah, I remember that.
Kicking it old-style…

Last week was a week of anniversaries. World-changing anniversaries, in fact, though I’m going have to make an argument for at least one of them.

The anniversary that got the most press inches was the 30th anniversary of the introduction of the Apple Macintosh in 1984. The launch is best known for that Ridley Scott advertisement invoking Orwell’s Big Brother, but recently a video came to light revealing a launch event in front of the Boston Computer society.

It’s a fascinating watch, mostly for the fact that it contains so much of the future. The Mac is front and centre, and it’s amazing just how much of what we take for granted in our computers today appeared right at the start of the Mac age. It’s not just the MacOS that still bears the ancestral marks of its progenitor. Every modern desktop/laptop OS can trace its ancestry back to 1984. Amazingly, it’s a trick Apple has pulled off more than once: its iOS is similarly the root from which the modern smartphone/tablet ecosystem arose.

It’s also instructive to watch Steve Jobs at work, long before his keynote speeches grabbed attention around the world. The delivery isn’t as smooth as it later became, but so much of those keynotes is already in place: the idea of the intersection of art and technology, the attention-grabbing video segments, the on-stage demonstrations to wow the audience. Jobs would soon be ousted from Apple, only to return and lead it to world leadership years later, and his keynotes would be much more controlled, so getting to see him do a question-and-answer with the original Mac team is a rare treat.

The other anniversary is for an event ten years earlier and one less easy to nail down. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson’s Dungeons & Dragons also changed the world, albeit in a less direct way than the Mac. It birthed, of course, the roleplaying game (RPG), a combination of board game and improvisational storytelling. RPGs have never been a big industry, but their influence has spread far and wide.

D&D drove an interest in fantasy, and followup RPGs drove interest in science fiction and horror, even as they followed trends in wider culture: Star Wars, Anne Rice, Ghostbusters, etc. RPG players got involved in the growing computer games industry and the entertainment industry, leading to a lot of what is now mainstream. Game of Thrones’ George RR Martin? A roleplayer. Joss Whedon? Roleplayer.

The Mac is still going strong, despite some dodgy moments along the way. D&D has lost its leading position everywhere except cultural memory, but the hobby it kicked off has endured and spread like a weed, its roots and tendrils going everywhere. The Mac changed how we interact with the world. D&D created a new spawning ground for content, and an avenue for storytelling and offbeat genres that wasn’t there before. Happy birthday to them both.

Politics

Closing Down Dissent. Or Satire. Or Anything, Really…

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I'm not really trying here, am I?
Shakespeare says NO! (via Wikipedia)

Ah, the joys of following the Northern Ireland news. Every so often, you get served up the kind of insanity that only the combination of parochial religious zealotry and a genuine 17th-century mindset can provide.

This week, it seems that the DUP councillors in Newtownabbey, evidently nostalgic for the days of the Life of Brian controversy, elected to force a shutdown of the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s The Bible: The Complete Word of God (Abridged), just a week before performance time. Because, hey, there’s nothing more important going on in Northern Ireland than a slapstick play that might put a few religious noses out of joint.

Let’s just clarify here: this is the Reduced Shakespeare Company that has been in existence for three decades and has been a fixture on the London theatre scene for much of that time. This is a show that has been around for nearly 20 years, winning awards, being performed around the world in numerous languages. And this is the DUP councillors standing up en masse and doing their best to bully the local arts board into shutting it down without a vote.

It would be funny if it weren’t so predictable. The combination of political power with the certainty of religious faith brings tends to results in the shutdown of dissenting points of view. Underdog sects and religions can favour freedom of conscience, but history shows that when the boot’s on the other foot, attitudes change. After all, when you’re in possession of the ultimate truth, isn’t it a public good if that’s the only truth that’s going to get promoted?

The trend towards secular government is one that took a long time to hit Ireland, and arguably it still hasn’t hit the North. Everywhere else, there has been pushback, in the form of Texas creationists altering school textbooks, Islamist efforts to marginalise secular Turkish youth, or a UKIP councillor linking gay marriage to recent floods. In Northern Ireland, the linkage between religion and the sectarian divide and the fact that parties from either extreme hold the whip hand means that it’s not so much pushback as an effort to hold onto power (something the Unionists have been doing for decades).

There’s no indication that anyone involved in cancelling the play had actually seen it, or had any interest in seeing it. Whether their chief interest was in “defending Christian values”, grandstanding for a few more votes or simply throwing their weight around, they both overstepped the mark in terms of their electoral mandate and completely undershot in terms of doing something of benefit for the people of Newtownabbey.

Technology

Don’t Be Evil?

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Adapted from http://www.flickr.com/photos/nottsexminer/7181655884/
My Photo-fu ain’t getting any prettier. (Adapted from http://www.flickr.com/photos/nottsexminer/7181655884/)

It’s one of the best—and best known—corporate mottos of the technology age. Google’s three-word mantra positioned it as something different from the corporate behemoths it disrupted as a scrappy startup. It was also an implicit promise, that as a company it was on the side of the customers it served.

Except, that was years ago, and Google is now one of the biggest of those corporate behemoths. Many of its products may still be loved (just witness the Android/iOS flamewars) but the company itself? The reaction to its recent acquisition of Nest shows that beyond a sense of confusion as to what Google was paying all that much money for, Google itself just isn’t trusted all that much.

Nest is an odd little company in and of itself: founded by Tony Fadell, one of the creators of Apple’s iPod, it looks to bring the same design ethos to neglected home products and add some Internet-era connectivity and device awareness. Nest are one of the leading lights of the “Internet of Things”, so it’s not a surprise that Google has swooped in, but the reaction from technology pundits has been broadly negative.

Why? Well, we tend not to trust those with too great a power over us, and Google’s huge collection of information and ability to leverage it gives it immense power. Nest’s connected devices suggest a desire to extend its awareness of our activities even further into our homes and our every waking moment.

Paranoia? Maybe, but in this case they are watching us. Wasn’t Nest doing the same thing already? It was, but there’s a difference between communicating with devices that form part of our lives, and having those devices communicating with a vast database that already contains details on our lives.

A company like Nest, as with Apple, makes its money by selling products to consumers. A company like Google makes its money by selling advertising and licensing software, both to other companies. As long as there’s a viable alternative, it’s vital for Google to retain the goodwill of consumers, but the fact that their money comes from elsewhere means that they’re always going to be a servant of two masters, and the temptation is to rely on PR to deal with consumer attitudes.

This is not to say that Google, much less the people who work for it, is evil, but the company relegated its famous motto to the backburner a while ago. The pressures of capitalism, as practiced in the modern world, don’t leave much room for moral scruples. The law and how to follow or sidestep it is the main limiting factor on the goal of maximising profits.

The fact is, the Nest acquisition is a good deal, expensive though it may be for Google. Nest gets funding and the chance to supercharge its entry into homes around the world. Google gets not only the hardware design expertise of Fadell and his team of ex-Apple employees (something it badly needs) but also that extra angle of attack for visualising our lives in data.

As for whether Google can regain its standing in the eyes of consumers, the question is does it want to? It’s become one of the world’s largest corporations and it’s hugely profitable. There’s an inevitable sense of sadness at the loss of innocence from those idealistic startup days, but maybe that’s always the price to be paid for success.

Reviews

Comparing Distractions

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Yes, my image editing kung-fu is not strong.
Only one will walk away…

Over the Christmas period, I went in search of distractions. Specifically, of new apps that would entertain me while wasting my time. (I’m trying to give up on apps that promise entertainment but actually just waste time in various elaborate ways.) The result of this search was two promising free apps, Clumsy Ninja and QuizUp. As usual, I’m a little late to the party in both cases, but they’re an interesting study in contrasts anyway.

Clumsy Ninja (Natural Motion, iOS, Free) is the latest in a long line of virtual pets, stretching all the way back to Tamagotchis. In this case, your task is to take a clumsy ninja (hence the title) and train him up until he’s capable of rescuing his friend from a mysterious villain. The story is a thin veneer at best, but really it’s all about playing with your ninja using various toys. He has plenty of character, and though he’s not as reactive as some virtual pets, the sense of progression will keep you coming back to play with new toys as your ninja visibly improves.

QuizUp (Plain Vanilla, iOS, Free) is a very different beast. Rather than you and a virtual pet, it’s you versus the rest of the world. Melding Wikipedia, table quizzes, TV quiz shows and social networks, it challenges you to compete against anyone, anywhere on the topics of your choice. It’s a genius move—most people have at least one topic that they’d consider themselves to be an expert on, and QuizUp offers rewards for that expertise: rising through global and national leaderboards, crushing your friends and showing off. And if that’s appealing to the general public, it’s going to be even more appealing to true quiz freaks (like yours truly).

As free apps, both Clumsy Ninja and QuizUp rely on in-app purchases for funding. More specifically, both of them thrive on human impatience. Ninja allows you to buy crystals (part of its by-now standard two-tier currency system) that allow the purchase of in-app goods, such as costumes, or quicker repairs to training equipment. However, you can earn a small amount of crystals through the game itself, and the sense of progression is balanced so that you never feel things are going punishingly slow.

QuizUp’s in-app purchases are a little trickier: you buy experience boosts to double, triple or quadruple your experience gains from every quiz you take part in for an hour. It’s therefore possible to shoot up the ranks a lot quicker than non-paying competitors, but it won’t be cheap. Plus, it doesn’t matter how much you pay: head-to-head, it’s all about knowing the answers to the questions. In fact, those who don’t pay might have an advantage there: there are a finite, albeit plentiful, number of questions on each topic, and by the time you’ve reached the upper ranks in any topic you’ll likely have memorised many of them.

Both games obey the important rule for phone apps of keeping play times short and sweet. Each individual QuizUp bout lasts a maximum of just over a minute, so you can fit plenty into a bus trip, and even one or two into waiting for the kettle to boil. Similarly, with Clumsy Ninja, you may have a few tasks to complete and 4-5 training items to use, but a few minutes will see you through all of them, and built-in “repair times” mean there’s no need to play more than once every couple of hours.

It’s not hard to see why both of these apps are as successful as they are. Clumsy Ninja is polished, sweet-natured and rewarding, and it’s gentle with its in-app purchase prompts. It’s the first time I’ve played around with a Virtual Pet app, and while I’m not in love with the concept, I’m enjoying it enough to stick around for now.

That said, QuizUp is by far my favourite of the two apps, and that’s not just because I love quizzes. Its use of social networks to provide a competitive environment and supply it with a bank of questions is inspired, and there are a multitude of clever touches. Games against random strangers are played in real-time, but you can challenge your Facebook or Twitter friends to asynchronous duels, with the app reporting the results once you’re both finished.

It’s not quite perfect, but the few problems it has will likely be resolved with time. As mentioned, expert players have probably memorised most of the questions in their favoured topics, making duels with them more a matter of memory and speed of reaction (you get bonus points based on how quick you answer a question) than knowledge. However, the app’s web site permits users to submit questions (which can be queried in-game, adding a Wikipedia-like quality control element to proceedings), potentially solving that issue over the long term. The other issue is probably just a niggle for me: the app’s presentation of its gathered data. There’s no clear way to see your head-to-head record against a friend, and the app itself conflates categories (science, history, etc.) with their constituent topics (Chemistry, Ancient Rome, etc.) in presenting user statistics. A little more thought applied to this area could really sharpen QuizUp up.

Ultimately, though, it’s the application of the social that sets QuizUp apart. In Clumsy Ninja, training your ninja up only matters to you and your pet. In QuizUp, you can become the best in your country or even the world at a given topic, if you’re willing to put the time in.* And that’s just far more of a draw. Maybe a future version of Clumsy Ninja will offer duels or obstacle course races between users’ ninjas, but for now, it’s QuizUp by a length.

* If you think you have what it takes to compete against a former 15-to-1 episode winner, you can find me as “Cerandor” on the app. 🙂