Archive for November, 2007

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27
Nov

How the Music Industry Failed in Technology

By Drew 0 Comments
Categories: Music, Media Wars and Linear Media

Living through the Napster debacle it was hard to imagine that the music industry could have been any more clueless than they appeared to be.  But it turned out they were, and they still are:

When Morris is asked why the music business didn’t work harder, in the early days of file-sharing, to build its own (legal) online presence, there’s this exchange:

“There’s no one in the record industry that’s a technologist,” Morris explains. “That’s a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn’t. They just didn’t know what to do. It’s like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would you do?”

Personally, I would hire a vet. But to Morris, even that wasn’t an option. “We didn’t know who to hire,” he says, becoming more agitated. “I wouldn’t be able to recognize a good technology person ? anyone with a good bullshit story would have gotten past me.”

Even though we shouldn’t be, we’re actually a little shocked. We’d always assumed the labels had met with a team of technology experts in the late nineties and ignored their advice, but it turns out they never even got that far ? they didn’t even try! Understanding the Internet certainly isn’t easy ? especially for an industry run by a bunch of technology-averse sexagenarians ? but it’s definitely not impossible. The original Napster hit its peak in 1999 ? kids born since then have hacked into CIA computers. Surely it wouldn’t have taken someone at Universal more than a month or two to learn enough about the Internet to know who to call to answer a few questions. They didn’t even have any geeky interns? We give this industry six months to live.

Whether it’s for better or worse, new technology always presents an opportunity for change.  It’s something you have to deal with, and for the right person it can be an exciting and fun way to spend your days.

These guys obviously decided that the best thing to do in the face of change is to stick your head in the sand, and then sue everyone who dares to tap you on the shoulder and ask you what the hell you’re doing.

26
Nov

Comic book companies fight the future

By Drew 0 Comments
Categories: Media Shift, Media Wars, Comics and Linear Media

While the rest of us were consuming our Thanksgiving turkey, Marvel and DC decided to take action against the Internet and comic book scans:

The popular comics tracking site Z-Cult FM has received legal letters demanding the immediate cessation of all illegal activities on the site from both DC Comics and Marvel Comics, according to a report at TorrentFreak, a blog that tracks activities related to BitTorrent file sharing.

According to the report, Z-Cult immediately took their tracker offline to assess the situation and to double-check the authenticity of the threats. At press time, they were able to verify the threat from DC Comics was legitimate.

The report goes on to sat that a prolific scanner of comics named ?Oroboros,? who posts his releases on Usenet newsgroups, has received a DMCA notice from his newsgroup service and will no longer be offering his illegal scans on the newsgroup.

It’s understandable that they don’t want their stuff up there without getting any money, but once again they’ve stymied consumer who’ve showed a preference for what they really want without offering any real alternative. 

It’s likely that some people would be willing to pay a fair price to get high quality comic scans digitally, but neither Marvel or DC is offering that service.  Instead we’re getting an indie comics experiment, and a greatest hits subscription service that’s still in search of a business model.  And in neither case do you actually get to own anything.  It’s hard to believe that after ten years of the music industry managing to sue itself into a corner the content providers are still making the same mistakes.

While they still hold the biggest licenses Marvel and DC aren’t the only game in town these days, and one comics company has decided to take a different tack:

One publisher sees some benefit from illegal comics downloading. In a surprise move, SLG Publishing, who  previously asked the Z-Cult administrators to ban the distribution of SLG titles on their tracker — which the Z-Cult admins agreed to — has reversed it’s decision and has given permission to Z-Cult and its users to distribute their titles on their tracker.image

In a statement posted on the site, SLG said, “SLG publishing would like to thank the moderators and forumers of Z-Cult for the respect they have shown in regards to our ban request. Obviously, our preference is to have each comic legally paid for, and the efforts undertaken to honor this desire have clearly shown that Z-Cult is not a forum overrun by those expecting a free ride. In return, we have decided to lift the ban from our independently published titles being distributed on Z-Cult. Of course, this is not an entirely selfless act - we hope that exposure to our large library of titles will help encourage support of our legal download site, www.eyemelt.com. It is our belief that there is a market for legally downloadable comic books, and we hope that we can prove this to the comics industry by showing success through our our digital distribution system.

Very succinctly put. It’ll be worth following up and seeing how it works out for them.

26
Nov

Mario has feelings, and flow

By Drew 0 Comments
Categories: Video Games, Think Like a Designer and Game Design

There’s an interesting article in Gamasutra that discusses game “feel” using the Mario series for its examples. It’s a little pedantic in parts, but I think it does manage to lay out some of the difficult issues that a designer can face when trying bring a character to life, and then hand control of it over to an anonymous player.

However you describe it, it?s hard to deny that the sensation of controlling a digital object is one of the most powerful — and overlooked — phenomena ever to emerge from the intersection of people and computers.

There are lots reasons for this, but the main one is that game feel is slippery. It?s mostly subconscious, a combination of sights, sounds, and instant response to action. It?s one of those ?know it when you feel it? kinds of things. If it?s off by just a little bit, a game?s goose is cooked. If it?s ?responsive?, ?tight?, and ?deep?, it can be magical. image

A good action games lets us connect to the game in a way that almost feels as if its us inside that world.  It’s more than just the imagination. On some level you’re looping and flipping with the character. This column does a pretty good job of teasing out some of the ways that games allow that to happen.

One thing that I think it does overlook is animation.  Even if you’re looking at classic “non-interactive” cartoons, there’s something about the clear animation that gives an audience the feeling of being there.  It’s the same vicarious experience that draws people into a sporting event, or an action sequence. If you can’t capture the right details in your drawings the audience isn’t going to get what you’re going for no matter how powerful the engine is under the hood.

It’s not as hard as you might think to get it to work right either.  The Xiao Xiao series started out as a series of short animations that manage to really capture the fluid feeling of a Hong Kong action film using only stick figures.  Later on some actual games were created using the animation techniques, and it’s pretty obvious they were weaker than the animations themselves in terms of communicating with the audience. Finding that delicate balance between feedback and attention is where the real mastery often lies.

In his response over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Jim Rossignol adds a little more depth to that part of the discussion:

I can?t help thinking that what people are talking about when they refer to the ?feel? of a game is its capacity to get us into a flow state. We reject games with a poor feel because we aren?t able to get into that state. It?s somehow analogous to listening to music: we?re just able to enter the pattern completion of certain types of music, while our tastes seem to reject others. Games with bad feel can still be played, but they irk us, like dancing to music we don?t enjoy.

Feel and flow are one of those topics that we’ll probably never reach the bottom of, like music or dance, but it’s certainly a worthwhile discussion.

23
Nov

Bumper Shock

By Drew 0 Comments
Categories: Comics and Internet

Once again, Mr. Ellis catches a good one.

On the surface this New York Times story is a deconstruction of the various presidential candidates bumper stickers.  It’s also an excellent use of the comic book medium on the ‘net, and has a simple interface to boot.  It’s easy to underestimate the power that comics can have to communicate.

Zuda, are you taking notes?

21
Nov

What the Facebook?

By Drew 0 Comments
Categories: Marketing, Media Shift and Culture

When it comes to user data the line between right and wrong is pretty wide and fuzzy. After all, we’re often getting someimagething for nothing, so it should be expected that we’ll have to pay the piper with a little demographic data from time to time.

But Facebook’s new “Beacon” technology is so insanely egregious it’s jaw dropping.  Through some kind of dark (java based) alchemy, your transactions on the Beacon partner sites are automatically reported back to your Facebook account, and posted for all your friends to see.

This isn’t an “opt-in” thing either.  If you decide that you’d rather not tell the world what games you’re playing, movies you’re renting, or books you’re buying, then you had better be quick on the trigger, because you have only a few seconds after the pop-up appears before your virtual ass is exposed to the world. The first time it jumped up letting me know what was happening I couldn’t even parse what was trying to say before it was gone.  The second time I fought through my disbelief (It’s what now?) and began to figure it out.  But I didn’t have a chance to really react before it closed again.  Honestly it wasn’t until I read about it somewhere else that I realized that how thoroughly I’d been taken advantage of.

If I had been able to react I would have discovered that I can only opt-out on a per-site basis at best, and only from inside the pop-up itself.  There is currently no way to go to my Facebook account and globally tell Beacon to go screw itself. To do that I needed to install an add-on into my browser that blocks the application entirely.  Which is what I did. 

Today moveon.org entered the fray. They’ve created a privacy petition that’s telling Facebook that they need to stuff the genie back into the bottle. 

Personally I can’t understand how they thought they were going to get away with this. It’s one thing when it’s inside of web page, or I make a decision to allow myself to be exploited. It’s another to wake up one morning and discover that the wall between entirely different web applications has breached and nobody bothered to ask for your consent.

Facebook can play innocent and coy, but my transaction information is still mine. The thousands of tiny little scraps of our lives have meaning when they’re gathered together, and very few of us are still so innocent that we don’t recognize that.  It’s not just rude to take it without asking.  It’s wrong.

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