Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

Tobold is annoyed that mmorpgs " evolved into a bunch of derivative and repetitive chores instead of living and breathing worlds" and his post inspired me to record my own thoughts in a comment which I am recording here for posterity:  I am the same age as you Tobold and like you I once thought mmorpgs would be stepping stones towards fully immersive alternative worlds such as those envisaged by William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and Tad Williams.  I think a few virtual worlds did try to go that way including obviously "Second Life" but also a number of titles aimed at younger audiences such as "Club Penguin" and "Free Realms" but none of them ever really took off and in the end mmorpgs became just another type of game to play. I think that Blizzard realised this early with  World of Warcraft and while WoW did offer a large immersive online world the game aspect always came first. This proved a smart business decision because pretty soon afterw...

The increasing use of  highlight aggregators to discover popular content on the internet is on the one hand very convenient and on the other hand a great step backwards towards discrete centralised media  services. I am talking about Google Play News Stand, I am talking about Feedly, I am talking about Mediagazer and other news aggregators but I am also talking about content streaming services like Spotify, Netflix and Youtube. I am even talking about certain aspects of Facebook. All of these services try to address a problem of information overload by providing users with a filtered list of highlights. Of course this is an essential trend because there really is too much content out there and we need some assistance at discovery and selection. However I think it is important to realise that the more we come to rely on aggregators the more blinkered we become. We hand over control of our information inflow to a few hopefully trusted  organisations. In many ways we are...

There doesn't appear to be any way to add  custom location labels to the current incarnation of Google Maps (Android and Desktop) and it is driving me nuts. It is not just that I miss being able to give saved locations friendly names like "Uncle John's place" or "My Golf Club". It is also that there are loads of places which the current version of maps doesn't seem to be able to provide any address for at all. These include the tennis club I bring my daughter to and the headquarters of a major company that I visited this morning. Not only does Google not know where these places are. It has no mechanism of addressing them because they do not appear on a standard road with a standard building number. I live in a major city in which Google employs several thousand people and this is still an issue here. I can only imagine it is a complete deal breaker for those living in rural locations where every address is something like "The cottage beside Murphy...

I grew up in a house with a basic aluminium kettle designed to be used on an externally heated hob.  http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photo-very-old-kettle-isolated-image16622230 Although we did not possess one ourselves the height of kettle technology at the time was a similar externally heated vessel with a whistle attached to the spot which made an audible noise when the water was boiling vigorously. http://www.ecvv.com/product/459875.html I was still quite young when we purchased our first electric kettle. This object of wonder was made of stainless steel rather than aluminium but it had a similar shape to the kettle it replaced. An internal electric heating element meant water could be boiled without the aid of a stove. It also boiled its load of water a good deal more quickly probably because the heating element is fully immersed in the water.   http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/VINTAGE-RETRO-RUSSELL-HOBBS-ELECTRIC-KETTLE-/291114219730?pt=UK_Homes_Garden_Kitchen_Kettles&h...

The rise of F2P games with in app purchases has introduced a new twist to the ethics of cheating in single player games. Life used to be simpler. Pretty much everyone agreed that cheating in multi-player games was  despicable, interfering as it does with the enjoyment and achievements of others. There was no ethical issue however about using cheats in a single player game. The only person affected was yourself and while many might contend that cheating diminishes the pleasure of a game by removing challenge plenty of others felt that cheats or god modes gave them more control over their gaming experience. The point was that no one else was affected but the player who choose to use cheats. Today however a huge number of single player games especially in the mobile space use a free to play business model with in app purchases. Surprise, surprise, cheating has become a thing in such games and tools have become available for many popular titles that will allow you to progress witho...

Google Now keeps directing me to a spot in some isolated woods near my home. I am pretty sure I have never visited that spot.  Is Google trying to tell me something? This intelligent personal assistant is also convinced that the only blog I read on a regular basis is Greedy Goblin though I have never subscribed to him. At least I have finally managed to convince the oracle to stop giving me a daily blast of profanity from the Urban Dictionary. For years I tried to resist the ever more intrusive data gathering of Google, Facebook and similar services but a few months back I bowed to the inevitable. Accepting that Google, GCHQ  and the NSA already have more than enough information to profile, analyse and categorise every single aspect of my on-line existence I decided to go all in and at least try to get some benefit out of it. I started a new Google+ account in my own name to which I linked my email accounts and web searches. I switched to the Chrome browser and turned on loc...

Recently I have rediscovered  the simple pleasure of Jam . Growing up in the pre-industrialised Ireland of the 1960's and 70's jam, often home made,  was a staple of our diet and one of our few regular treats. The vast array of manufactured delicacies now available have sadly reduced the importance of jam and the shelf space allocated to it in shops. I myself neglected it for decades but the increasing health consciousness of middle age encouraged my re-acquaintance with this delicious food as a better alternative to cholesterol laden pastries and biscuits. Fibre rich wholemeal bread covered in jam may not exactly be good for you but it is better than many alternative treats and does not come with a payload of artery clogging saturated fat.   When it comes to flavour I tend towards traditional fruits:  I believe that blackcurrant jam has the best flavour of all jams although the pulped berries do give it a somewhat uneven texture. Raspberry jam is also a very stro...

For about a decade I maintained a monthly subscription to a PC gaming magazine called PC Zone . Perhaps my favourite bit of the magazine was their list of essential PC games. This buyers guide changed format a few times over the years but the basic principle remained the same. It was a ranked list of essential PC games classified by genre. The genres included Shooters, RPGs, God Games, Space games (for a while) and a few others I can't remember. There were about ten games in each category. For several years this list was a cornerstone of my PC gaming. I strove to acquire and play every game on the list in the categories I was interested in.  I even tried to get the top titles in those categories I wasn't so enthusiastic about. I miss that list because gaming seemed much simpler then. I could play perhaps ten games and consider myself an expert on shooters or RPGs or whatever. Once a game got on the list it usually held its place for some time so this was an achievable goal...

Imagine it is sometime around 1910 and you are the worlds largest producer of buggy whips. Your last product the Model 7 was a big success but the young folk don't seem at all interested in buggy whips any more because they are excited about these new fangled auto-mobiles. Of course no self respecting gentleman would be seen in a noisy smelly auto-mobile so buggy whips are going to be around for some time yet but you cannot deny that the real growth business these days is motoring goggles. Do you: a. Develop a brand new buggy whip (the Model 8) that has a buggy whip welded on to a set of motoring goggles. It is a pretty good buggy whip but unfortunately to bind the two parts together you had to dispense with the handle of the whip. Users wear it like a pair of goggles and they crack the whip by nodding their heads vigorously. or b. Accept that the buggy whip market is going to shrink but make sure that you keep the lion's share of it by making Model 8 the best buggy whip...

Last night I introduced my 12 year old daughter to a cornerstone of nerd culture by watching the "original" Star Wars, now known as Episode IV , A New Hope . It is 15 years since I last watched this myself so I was really surprised at how well this 1977 story has held up. I know Lucas has spent millions of dollars over the years fixing some of the hokier special effects but I think there is another reason why the movie still feels fresh and exciting. Star Wars has been so influential on just about every space opera film and video game made since that it feels incredibly familiar. Its blasters, its grey metal corridors its junk strewn depiction of alien planets have all become absolutely canonical to the genre. This struck me forcibly watching the scene where Luke and Leia are trapped on a narrow platform looking for an extending bridge while troopers try to break down the door behind them and another trooper shoots from a higher ledge. I have played versions of that sc...

I note that the recently announced PS4 will not initially be backwards compatible with PS3 games but Sony are looking at ways that might make it possible to play PS1, PS2 and PS3 games play on their new console. That made me think about the importance, or lack of importance, of older games and retro gaming. Do older games actually matter at all? I play a lot of older games myself (witness my recent sojourn in Baldur´s gate) but I am an old curmudgeon. I remember when these classic games were released so they have significant nostalgia value for me. I am also fortunate that my gaming platform of choice, the PC has unparalleled backwards compatibility. This is not representative I suspect. I guess that the majority of gamers have neither the desire nor the mechanism to play ten year old games. Are retro games important from a business perspective? I guess not very. Sure there are websites and forums dedicated to retro gaming and at least one company (gog.com) se...

Why do despotic governments make such a big deal about internet firewalls and trying to clamp down on "insidious foreign websites" like Facebook and Youtube. It seems to me that such loudly proclaimed efforts are as amateurish as those of the most inept Bond villain. Can these would be megalomaniacs not see that the internet is the greatest surveillance tool ever invented? No longer do we have to pay an army of informers to eavesdrop on the conversations of their friends and families. Gone is the need for midnight secret police raids on subversives meeting in abandoned warehouses. Instead of such outdated techniques monitoring the communications of your citizens over the tubes of the internet will provide vastly more information. Rather than banning Youtube, Facebook or any other seditious website invest in warehouses full of hard disks and record all of the online activities of your populace. The more seditious the website the more useful will be the information it gath...

I recently found myself in a position where the only practical solution for me to enjoy ebooks I had legitimately purchased (would have been) to engage in the highly illegal pursuit of using a drm removal too. The cause was a clash of software upgrades and activation limits with a healthy dose of misunderstanding from me thrown in. I am not a lawyer and the law on drm circumvention is pretty confusing at the moment. There is an EU treaty from 2001 which appears to makes it highly illegal to even think about anti drm but it hasn't been transcribed into my own countries national law yet and I believe there is still some discussion over possible exceptions (ie fair use provisions).  Well I am not going to admit to breaking the law but I will say that Google informed me that there was a very easy to use open source, community supported tool available to perform drm removal  (if I felt so inclined). I quickly realised that this tool (if I were to use it) would make the wh...

We keep a jug of filtered drinking water in our fridge. The water from the tap is perfectly palatable but chilled water is that bit nicer so the jug is popular. It is a matter of seconds to fill the jug but it takes several minutes to trickle through the filter and a lot longer to cool down to a nice level of chilliness. It is therefore very frustrating to reach for the jug and find it empty and I take care to top it up every time I use it. Unfortunately other members of my family do not seem to be as considerate and on many occasions I have gone to the fridge only to be disappointed by a nearly empty jug. My usual response in circumstances like this is to express my dissatisfaction loudly in what my kids term a "Father Rant". This makes me feel better for a little while but long experience has convinced me that such rants are incapable of producing any lasting change of behaviour. On this occasion therefore I decided to be a little more scientific. Analysing the proble...

I am looking for a hdmi cable so yesterday I wandered into a major home entertainment store to see if they had the cable I need. Sure enough they had a big stand of hdmi cables between the home theatre systems and flat screen TVs. It was a slightly heavier sell than I expected for a simple cable. A multi-screen display looped a presentation eulogising the benefits of hdmi and stressing the importance of choosing the right cable for the job. It was pretty clear from the presentation that the "right cable" was the top of the range "ultimate super duper awesome adamantium plated" cable costing a staggering €120. If you are a cheapskate and prepared to take chances with your shiny new home theatre system you could always settle for the lowly "super duper gold plated" cable costing only €80. Now I am an electrical engineer and I know that hdmi is a purely digital protocol.  As long as the cable has sufficient bandwidth to carry the digital signals the metre o...

About once a week I get a large email from a large concert ticket selling agency detailing their latest offers. I have grown almost immune to to the flood of Viagra emails that have thankfully reduced to a trickle now that spam filtering has matured but this particular email really bugs me. The thing is I know this is a legitimate company because they are a well known a subsidiary of the largest ticket distributor in this part of the world. What annoys me to the point of frustration is that I am utterly unable to un-subscribe from their mailing list. Each new missive starts with the line "This is not unsolicited email - you have previously opted in to receive XXXXXX mailings" I am pretty sure this is not true. I have never bought anything from this company and I have no interest in their particular line of business. I may have bought stuff from their parent company but I am pretty fastidious at finding and ticking the box that says "don't send me spam" and...

Today's hullabaloo is all about the ethics of buying used games. Cory Ledesma from THQ started it by declaring  in a CVG Interview that "when the game's bought used we get cheated". Tycho from Penny Arcade rowed in in support here and here . Hundred of commenters have come out on either side of this debate and in the blogosphere Syncaine has declared his agreement while Syp and others have come out strongly against. I firmly believe that I should obtain a legitimate license for every piece of software I use but I don't feel particularly philanthropic towards game developers and I will try and get that license legally the lowest cost to myself. If a developer allows their game to be legally traded second hand, or if they allow it to be deeply discounted on Steam or if they choose to offer it in a "pay what you like" sale then I will happily take that license for the lowest cost possible and feel good about it. I will admit that my conscience genui...

In his regular weekly bargain bucket slot on Rock Paper shotgun this week Lewie Proctor made a simple yet profoundly controversial statement: You know, if you stop and think about it, PC gaming is in such a fantastic state at the moment. The very first response in the comments thread: I don’t know what it is you’re smoking, but please can I have some? This begins a lively discussion with strong views being taken on both sides of the argument. Many of the respondents are genuinely depressed with the state of PC gaming at the moment when consoles seem to get all of the love from big developers and the only happening things in PC gaming are the five year old World of Warcraft and Facebook's utterly casual games. Those supporting the golden age statement point to the incredible value obtainable on the PC via digital downloads and the explosion of creativity from independents. Having worked through my own bout of depression about the state of my pc gaming hobby I have come through...

Much as I admire Apple's business strategy I hate it. They capture an emerging market with superior product design and marketing and then lock customers in with proprietary restrictions. They did it to the digital music market and now they are doing it to the mobile internet. Except that the mobile internet is too big and too important to let one company control it. Not a day goes by without me hearing yet another organisation proudly boasting that they have "developed an Iphone app" for their service. People and organisations who have no business favouring one companies view of the internet over another, including public bodies and charities are all jumping on the I-phone bandwagon. This morning on the radio I head a surprisingly savvy journalist interview a representative of a public health body who was proudly touting their new Iphone app. "Not everyone has an Iphone" the journalist said "why didn't you develop an app that would work on other pho...

... you don't keep up with all the new releases? As a gamer in my mid 40's I am becoming increasingly aware of the fact that I am getting to the point where the number of excellent older games that I haven't gotten around to playing exceeds the quantity of living hours remaining to me to play them in.  While this reflection on my own mortality might be depressing it is also wonderfully liberating. I find that I am less and less incensed at the future direction of gaming because even if the whole gaming industry collapses tomorrow morning then I can continue to enjoy many years worth of engrossing virtual entertainment by playing existing titles. This fun cartoon from xkcd highlights some advantages and disadvantages of being a retro gamer. Writing about five year old games is certainly not going to do much for the popularity of my blog but I guess I can live with that although I will admit is is nice sometimes to be part of the buzz that surrounds the latest greatest t...