Monthly Archives: February 2007

Gathering evidence that the Wii is what the GameCube should have been

  • Reading time:1 mins read

The system: small, inobtrusive.

The controller. The GameCube pad was a strange half-measure.
* Its premise: standard controllers are confusing, overly abstract, and have too many buttons, mapped too arbitrarily.
* Its solution: make the buttons more intuitive to find, and more intuitively map actions to them.
* Result: everyone was confused and annoyed.

Original games, conceived for said controller.
* Super Monkey Ball
* Pikmin
* killer7
* Luigi’s Mansion

What else?

Swash awash

  • Reading time:3 mins read

“Piracy”, in the intellectual property sense, tends to have a regulating effect. If people enjoy a work enough, they tend to want to own their own copy — preferably a copy presented in the best possible quality. That’s why people buy DVDs after seeing a movie or watching a TV show, and that’s why “free samples” exist. You’d have a much harder sell by avoiding the initial courtship and just asking people to buy an entertainment product, sight unseen. To an extent, the idea is kind of ludicrous.

The downside from a marketing perspective is that if people don’t enjoy a work, and they know that ahead of time, they tend not to buy it. As a result you get these interesting effects where, say, Brittney Spears loses sales to “piracy” because people don’t consider her music worth paying for, and smaller, more interesting bands are often “made” by “piracy” because people who might like the band’s music are able to hear it, hang onto it, and judge it over an extended period.

From what I can see, the only way this could be a bad thing is if you’ve invested a ton of money in something culturally vapid, and you expect your dividends nonetheless. I’m sure the natural balance of the universe would feel powerfully unfair in that instance, and you’d be tempted to lobby the government to draft all kinds of arbitrary regulations to ensure you get the result you wanted. If you’re offering something of real merit, however, there doesn’t seem much danger of losing profit. Indeed, the more people who know, the better.

To boil it down, people generally:

1) want to own things that they enjoy
2) are willing to pay for things they consider of value
3) tend to value “legitimacy”, to a point.

If you place before a person a dirty CD-R burn of an album and a full, legit copy, both for free, I think it’s fair to say that most people will choose the legit one. If instead you charge a reasonable price for the legit copy, a fair number may still buy it if they already know that they adore the music on the disc, they know they won’t find the CD for a better price, and they can afford it at the moment. If you charge an unreasonable price, or don’t allow people to test the album out first to see if they like it, the free, dirty copy will look all the more appealing by comparison.

All that things like Youtube and P2P networking and tape-trading do is bring a level of honesty and clarity to the exchange. So long as you offer something of merit, at a reasonable price, and your customers know that they like it, you’ve got nothing to fear. If anything, this kind of distribution serves as free advertising; all it should do is increase your potential customer base, to a certain threshold. (After all, every work has only a certain natural breadth of appeal.)

So yeah, whatever. Go ahead and watch what you will, how you will. Make up your own mind what you value, and to what extent. Then go ahead and purchase the things you like, provided you’ve the money after you buy what you need. There’s nothing dishonest or unethical about any of this. Anyone who tries to tell you differently has an agenda to protect.

Further Eefining the Definition

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Art is a means of communication through implicit, rather than explicit, symbolism and meant to appeal to the subconscious and intuition, rather than to the conscious and reason.

This communication can be conducted through any medium. The fun part about it: intent needn’t even be a factor; merely communication. So if the recipient of a manmade work reads in it something that was not consciously intended by its creator, that reading (presuming it’s genuine) is as legitimate an interpretation as any based upon a deliberate message. Perhaps more so.

As regards non-manmade works — a sunset, a rainbow, an orangutan; whatever natural beauty you might appreciate — that’s somewhat different in the sense that, provided you aren’t subscribing to a supernatural interpretation of artist (say, God), it truly is a one-sided conversation.

I suppose the act of receiving an artistic message would best be described as inspiration. One may be inspired by anything, of course; art is simply a manufactured way of appealing to that impulse.

Setting the Standard

  • Reading time:5 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part thirteen of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation, under the title “The Road to a Universal Platform”. Now, despite my wittering most of these title and spin changes have a minor effect on the article. This one was… regrettable, though, as the article sort of makes the opposite point: though a universal format may be our inevitable destination, the notion is terribly premature. And yet because of the title and the spin, most people jerked their knees in response without actually reading the article. Oh well. Here it all is, as originally framed.

David Jaffe recently came under some criticism for a few statements to consumer website 1UP about his future visions of the game industry. The big headline, repeated across the Internet for a day or two, was “Ten years from now there will be one console”. It was an unguarded comment, following his own nostalgia for the days of rampant console exclusivity. Jaffe expressed annoyance at the current standard of cross-platform development, and wondered if it was coming to the point where the only distinguishing factor from one console to the next would be its first-party software. From there he made the leap that this small distinction might not be enough justification for multiple consoles – therefore, he figured, perhaps we’re on a road to a single universal platform.

There was much tittering in the aisles; a few people made comparisons to Trip Hawkins’ dreams for the 3D0 – a console standard that, much like a VCR or other piece of home electronics, would be licensed out to any manufacturer with the initiative. In fact, that comparison is pretty appropriate in that both Trip and Mr. Jaffe have the same reasonable – and actually rather clever – idea, with the same understandable flaw.