Piracy Makes Games Suck

I'm a geek. I'm not shy about that fact. Being a geek means you have friends who are geeks. Having friends who are geeks means that when a new game or movie comes out, you're sometimes offered a copy before it's even been released. Piracy is big, especially in the PC gaming world. Less so for console games, but don't think it doesn't happen.

Games are expensive. It's a fact. If you take into account the level of quality people want in their games these days, and what it costs to make them, it's not surprising the unit price is so high. And don't tell me movies are cheap games should be. In movies they only have to worry about how it looks, not what'll happen if the player decides to do something ridiculous. 

So when you're offered an opportunity to play the game, no strings attached, before you pay for it (if ever), people tend to go for it. But what are you missing?

Many times the process of cracking the game breaks some aspect of the game. Things like online play or achievements. In some cases the game may crash because of the workarounds involved. Some people may seize the opportunity to plant and distribute their virusses through these "cracked copies". Often, in an attempt to crack the game before the official release date, an unfinished or reviewer's copy of the game is used, which may include critical errors. Cracked games can also not be patched, leaving it open to vulnerabilities or flawed gameplay. For the online play that did work with the cracked version, the fact that you can't patch it means that now you can't play online because the servers require you to have the latest fixes installed.

And worst of all, your experience of the game is tainted. 

As a programmer I know how it goes. You sit for days writing a small part of the game or program, but you can't get it perfect. You've been working so hard on the whole project that you think this little problem can be fixed later, or is really not so bad. So someone gets a pirated copy of your game. They didn't pay for it so they're willing to install it and try it for an hour or two. If they don't like it, they skip it. Or worse yet, they go onto public forums and discredit your game because of that small niggle in gameplay you decided can be left. They are in general more critical of the game.

If they had payed for the game, they would see the niggle, but think to themselves "It's really not that bad. The rest of the game makes up for it. It's a good experience in general." Because they payed for it, they want to get their money's worth so they give the game a proper chance.

Personally, I enjoy a game more if I have the physical package I can put on my shelf. Often the game comes with some special trinket, or there's a collector's edition. It makes it an experience instead of a pastime while you wait for your pizza to be delivered or whatever.

The last problem I have with piracy is DRM. I know it sounds backwards, but it's simple. When games are pirated, the producers don't get money for it. So they need to stop a game from being pirated. They end up licensing outside software to do it for them (Starforce or SecuROM). These methods are never perfect because no two computers are set up the same, so by doing so you introduce a margin of failure to your games: a number of buyers for whom the game will not work because something on their computer isn't how it should be. In some cases it also introduces an install limit. Someday I'm going to look at an old game and think "I want to try this again", but when I try to install it, the game will firstly require internet access to a service that may no longer be available. If that service is still there, it may tell me that I've installed the game too many times. How can this be? I'm sitting with the disc in my hands. I payed for it. The slip is still in the case, although the writing has faded a bit... If I pay these exorbitant amounts for my game, I expect it to work when I want it to.

Even games with DRM gets cracked. Sometimes the DRM is only there to stop it from being cracked on release day, but it will be cracked within a week. However, it ruins the game for years to come.

Unfortunately piracy is here to stay. Unless they can find a way to make sure you can't do anything without a legal copy (WoW did it) you can really only rely on people's good faith and support.

Words:
"In the case of pirates, say, I would like to know whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar glory about it. It sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed; but only at the gallows."
-Herman Melville

Organic Computing

Anyone who's seen sunlight in the last 20 years knows that computers work in binary. Ones and zero's. On or off. There's no inbetween. It's structured, organised and predictable. It allows people like me to control a user's experience, anticipate their behaviour, and provide them with what they need. But why is this? Humans have a natural urge to organise. To put concepts into categories. To decide what is relevant and what can be ignored. But why is this? Because when we were barbarians (no offence to barbarians, they did a lot for our species) knowing what to pay attention to meant the difference between life and death.

Personally I don't make decisions until I know something about all the options presented to me. When there are only 2 options, the decision is easy. You can then begin assigning theoretical meanings to each value. "When this link changes colour, it means I've been to this page." The information that is given to you is simple, but you're willing to be more loosely coupled about the concept when it's in your mind, because then you're in control. As long as it's in the computer, the values of on or off means that electricity is flowing or it is not flowing, like a complex network of electric extention leads all plugged into each other, back and forth. Depending which lights you want on, you walk around flipping different switches. After a while you get bored and you start doing strange things such as synchronising Christmas lights to music.

This is the core of all electronics: Flipping switches really fast to make it do what you want.

The truth is, nothing is coldly logical. A computer may present itself in ones and zero's, but when you drill all the way down, those digits are stored somewhere on a disc. On that disc there's some physical medium being forced into a positive or negative state. The medium may well be able to store more values, such as half-on or almost off. But if it did, it would be much more complicated to control.

But now we've become used to the basic functionality of computers. (I use the term "basic" loosely) Now we want a computer that can think and deduce like a person. We want a computer in our fridge that will order milk over the internet when you're running low. We want a door that unlocks when you ask it to. We want computer-controlled players in games that can play against us as if we're playing against a friend, making mistakes like a human player would. So we programmers end up trying to get ones and zero's to seem like they're thinking. To appear to have several options such as half-on or almost off. We end up taking the analogous medium, forcing it into a controllable digital medium, only to create a pretend analogous experience.

In my opinion, the only way we can create machines that can think, is to leave the electronic and robotic environment behind and work with something pure, something natural. Something that works like a brain. As long as we're stuck behind coldly logical situations, we have to think of every possible scenario and prepare for it. We can never just leave the thing to learn. A computer, no matter how advanced, can never truly be spontaneous. The problem is, creatures have spent millions or years making mistakes, only the lucky few surviving, to develop the natural ability to learn. Even a child of a few weeks old can learn from their own experience (with a little help).

As far as I know the closest we've ever come to a human-created thing teaching itself is Lucy the Android (pictured).

There isn't really a point to this. I'm just putting out there something that was mulling around in my head the last few days... It's all very interesting once you start reading up on it a bit. Comments welcome, especially if it's philosophical...

Words:
"Anyway what went wrong with A. I.? Well its all this guy’s fault and I presume most of you recognise Alan Turing. He was probably the one person qualified to expect that by now nobody would be making me stand up here and talk about how we were going to achieve human like intelligence because we would have done it. Because 52 years ago, he made this prediction 'By the end of the century one would be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted'. Well the end of the century came and went a couple of years ago and coincidentally the time ran out for Turing's prediction the exact second when computers were destined to tell us how stupid they were on account of the fact that they couldn't add up the date properly. So it all went horribly wrong and around the turn of the century I started thinking about why it went wrong. I considered it carefully and came up with the following considered opinion "its because we A. I. researchers are all narrow minded, domineering, chess playing computer nerds'."
-Transcript of Steve's keynote speech, "Machines Like Us," given at the Applied Knowledge Research Institute's 2002 Biennial Seminar

Survival of the Smartest

If you spend a little time observing a pack of wolves, you quickly notice a hierarchy. There's an alpha male, considered the leader, and his followers. The followers all want to be the alpha, but unless they can challenge and defeat the alpha, they're forced to follow him. The females in the group would want to be with the alpha because he is the strongest or fastest of the males, and thus holds genes that would guarantee their offspring's future.

Humans were very much the same for a long time. The jock was the guy with the girls. He was the popular guy until someone appeared to be better than him, at which point he was replaced. Later this was shifted towards money. The richest guy was considered the popular one. He could make things happen. But recently, this balance of Survival of the fittest has shifted.

I read somewhere once that woman find Dilbert(pictured) attractive. Why is this? By all standards he's the lesser man. He's unhealthy and ugly. It's because he's a geek.

On a subconscious level, people realise that with the advent of the internet as a business and social tool, and a massive part of everyday life, the people who are involved in this sector are the ones with the reliable income in the foreseeable future. On the other side of the spectrum is the current sports star. Though they make millions in a very small time frame, their earning ability is directly linked to their health. And in this world of fast food and couch entertainment it becomes increasingly difficult to stay at the top of your game. It's no longer the survival of the fittest, it's survival of the smartest.

But don't think it's easy to stay at the top in the IT sector. The problem with a web-driven life is that it becomes susceptible to trend. Today people will love your product. Tomorrow they could be enthralled in someone else's product. Or worse, you could get sued for some repercussion that your product has in the real world, like what happened to Napster.

To stay on top in this environment, you need to stay up to date. And by date, I mean literally to the day. You need to know what's hot on the net, and what's the next big thing. This creates the problem that you might fall for a trend that lasts only a week. You could become a cloner...

Definition of word I just made up:

Cloner (noun)

A product or company that copies a successful idea almost to the letter, differing only enough to be distinct, but not enough to discredit the popularity.

On the other hand, cloners can often hit on an idea that makes their idea better than the original. You don't always get it right the first time. Take for instance MySpace. It allowed you to tell other people about you (and later about your band, company or whatever). You had a list of friends, but that's basically as far as you could take it. Then Facebook came along. In essence it was the same concept, but it was focussed on your real identity and your real friends. Not just that, but it shows you your mutual friends to help you figure out how you know someone. Later it also started showing you who you might know on Facebook that you didn't realise was on Facebook, by tracking who's friends are also your friends.

This simple link between the internet and everyday life made Facebook much more popular than MySpace. Not to mention more sophisticated. When you go to someone's MySpace page, you're bombarded by animations, video's, music, flashing banners, games... basically anything that you feel like putting on there. It's messy and noisy. Facebook has a rule: No active content on your profile unless the viewer activates it. It's much cleaner. They're also working on separating your profile into different areas, your critical information being the first thing you see. The rest of your content will be shifted to another page, so a viewer only has to see it if they're interested in it. (do I get my commission now?)

The internet and its relating technologies is where the sustainable income of the future will be. And if you're careful, you might be one of the lucky few to end up on top.

Words:
"First, I sit up. Writing is serious business for which your spine must be straight. I also lean my head slightly downward, looking up at my words as I write. Occasionally I mumble what I'm typing… no clue why."
-Rands in Repose

Computers Are Suddenly Cool

Having grown up a geek, I've always been seen as a bit of an outsider. My frame of reference was slightly out of focus with the rest of my friends. The same goes for my sense of humour. You find things funny that other, seemingly normal, people don't. It's what I like to call The Geek Effect. There's even been a comedy series made on exactly how debilitating the Geek Effect can be.

People with this disorder also tend to have the same type of general knowledge: "3000 miles wide but 3 inches deep". You know enough about everything to understand it on a very high level, but you're not really intimately knowledgeable on any subject. This causes dangerous leaps in relevance during conversation. I've many times replied in what I considered to be a perfectly rational manner and was answered "How the hell did you get to that topic?".

Your work environment also tends to influence this notion, as all work environments do. If you're a geek by day (superhero by night maybe?), you spend most of your day contextually shifting between a few tasks. By extension you can do the same during conversation. For instance, you would be discussing cars, then move on to movies, and you would suddenly say: "Hey wasn't that car in this movie?"

I also have the habit of interrupting someone as soon as I know what they're going to say. Not finishing their sentence for them, but actually starting my reply. I always thought it was a character flaw all my own, until I realised my colleagues and I do it all the time. Once the notion of your talking has been passed, there's no reason to keep talking, so why do you?

But back to the topic.

Whenever I mentioned a computeristic notion in general conversation it was received with a slight sourness. "Oh you're talking about computers right? I don't know about computers." I've since developed a method of explaining geeky terms to a laman with relative ease, but that's for another post.

A few years ago I noticed things start to change. MySpace tried to make people cool, but only ended up creating a slightly less geeky geek. But when Facebook arrived it all changed. You would hear seemingly pop-culture-driven people say "I'll add you on Facebook!" It shocked me the first time a non-geek asked me if I was on Facebook.

After this initial shock, I started noticing other things. I would watch a TV show and the people in the show would be playing a game. Several movies would, soon after the movie, release a game based on the movie. These games inevitably sucked, but in my opinion it went a long way towards acclimatising people to the idea that sitting behind a computer for a few hours constitutes a respectable form of entertainment. And when they played a proper game, oh my word were they surprised! The detail! The atmosphere! The plots! It was all so much better than they thought!

Another big help in this notion was the next generation consoles. You always had your Playstation 2 players, but not until the active advertising for the xBox360and Playstation 3 was it really seen on TV or the mass media. Now it's pretty common to see that shape of the controller lying on the coffee table.

In the relative beginning of the previous century, much the same series of events transpired. The subject was also technology. It was also initially used in business and later for everyday use, and now for entertainment. It was cars. Motoracing is such a large part of our culture these days that it's hard to think at some point your average person never even considered owning a car, much less afford one within their lifetime.

In South Korea, StarCraft 2 is a national sport. They have celebreties. It's broadcast on TV with advert breaks almost longer than the match itself, warmups, discussions, magazines...

In South Africa specifically, MXit also helped. This little java-based chat application that runs on your cellphone propogated many geeky acronyms into popular culture. Things like WTF, lol and rofl are now considered commonplace. Many geeks are actually offended by this, because it was something that they could call their own. The 'secret handshake' of the masses.

This train of thought was inspired by this article from a few days ago. Read and enjoy.

Words:
"So they're demoing the game... and he's like lighting the brush on fire because there are like japanese soldiers hunkered down in camoflage, you're like burning them, they come running out and everything... Then he goes over to the hut, he like flames the hut and burns the guys out of the hut... And the flames don't catch the hut on fire even though it's a wood hut with thatch roof. I'm like 'WTF is this'."
-1UP Yours Podcast 27 June 2008

Consistant Innovation

Everyone seems to be moving to "web-solutions" for several reasons:

1. Your programs, and their settings and data, are available everywhere you have internet access.
2. In most cases it works on your PC and on your phone.
   
3. You don't have to worry about backups going sour or crashing hard drives destroying your data.

But there's another point that I never noticed... until this morning when I opened Google Reader and there's was a new button saying "Share with Note". I thought to myself "Hey that's handy. I wonder when they added it..."

And that's when it hit me: If your application runs on the web, you can add little features and updates without telling anyone. You don't have to roll our a whole new version of the software.

Google have(has?) been doing this for years. You would open your GMail account one day, and suddenly that little irritation that was the bane of your mailing was gone... or fixed... or some new feature has appeared overnight, like a new interface with coloured tags. It's probably the one reason I've been using my Google account for so long (5 years). Everytime I see something is owned by Google (or bought out by them) I automatically prefer it over any other service in the same sector, such as this Blogger account. I even subscribed to Google's RSS feed so I can know when something happens.

As a developer it's your job to think of the things other people don't. That's what gets you ahead in this business.

There is one other thing worth mentioning: Auto-updating apps. If you can engineer your application or game in such a way that it updates itself with new features, with small enough downloads that users don't mind waiting, you immediately have an upper hand.

So for the other programmers out there reading this, take it as good advice.

Words:
"In every project there is always one file that strikes fear into the hearts of all programmers everywhere. These files are usually full of code that could render a battle-hardy coder to complete gibbering tears within seconds and that is just for looking at it – if they have to make changes to the file then they usually make their farewell calls to their loved ones, have a swift drink of something to bolster their courage and run into the battlefield screaming as they go. Somewhere in the world is an honour monument to those who fell."
-Byron, Introversion