Reflection

Through out the course I have tried to look at the material given from the perspective of a game developer, or at least a prospective one. The blog posts I have written mostly reflect that, especially later ones. The world of social media is huge, and is a part of the everyday life of most people from the social networks of Twitter and Facebook to using crowdsourced sites with open sourced software so it’s no real surprise that the social aspects of playing video games are starting to get a lot of investment from big companies.

Last year Microsoft and Sony launched new consoles. Throughout the year both companies spent a lot of time making announcements about the new features that their consoles will have, with a lot of emphasis on social functions. One big thing that Sony announced was that the Playstation 4 would allow the sharing of live video streams of play sessions [1]. Microsoft also talked about their big plans for increased social gaming, with being able to follow certain players to get updates on their game statistics, in a way much like Twitter [2].

So there is a drive to make gaming more social while still retaining the essence of playing games. But some games themselves have a far larger social basis than that is the norm, mainly those games classified as massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs or just MMOs), the most well known of these being World of Warcraft [3]. These games generally consist of large game worlds in which multiple people are playing the same game at the same time, and there is a large social aspect to this in that it is encourage to join other people in taking on large quests and such like. People who do this regularly tend to join a clan or guild and tend to take part in lots of online conversations in forums or over social networks. There are literally millions of people spending hours of their days playing MMORPGs (World of Warcraft alone has over 7.8 million subscribers [4]), and socially that’s a huge market which social companies are trying to tap into as much as they can.

Facebook’s purchase of Oculus Rift (a virtual reality head mounted display unit [5]) for $2 billion [6] a couple of weeks ago can been seen as an attempt to try and place themselves in a position to make game a lot more social, more Facebook like than ever before. Opinions on the purchase are very much divided, especially among developers. One long time fan of the Oculus VR team was Markus ‘Notch’ Persson, the creator of Minecraft [7] who contributed during the initial Kickstarter for the Rift and has now decided to cancel all plans to make his game compatible with the virtual reality (VR) device because of the purchase by Facebook [8]. An opposing view has been given by John Carmack, co-founder of id Software [9] and current CTO of Oculus VR says that a company like Facebook has gets the big picture and can only help bring the VR technology to a larger mass market audience rather than it remaining as something of a specialist bit of technology [10].

Generally there has been a fair amount of backlash over the deal [11] a lot of which revolves around the fact that the original project was funded by Kickstarter, raising nearly $2.5 million in September 2012 [12] and now a year and a half later Facebook spent $2 billion to buy the company which leaves a lot of backers wondering why they gave their money to an independent company only for them to ‘sell out’. In this I cannot blame the people at Oculus VR. No one could or would turn down $2 billion as that sort of figure just isn’t real, in a way. I mean you can just about imagine a million or two but a billion? It has no basis in reality. But one worry shared by many is that this VR technology will go down the Facebook route and become a haven for advertisers using all your personal data. That is a possibility as you’d expect they would want something of theirs involved in this now and as they’re a software based social platform it’s hard not to imagine that a VR version of Facebook will exist in the near future.

And maybe that’s the point. If Facebook made their site VR compatible, you can be sure that plenty of other websites will try and do the same which would herald a whole new way of just browsing the internet. So this could be the start of the realisation of a completely virtual cyber world, in which we all live online in massive social communities.

References:

[1] http://www.destructoid.com/playstation-4-social-features-revealed-246135.phtml

[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2013/10/14/microsofts-xbox-one-will-be-a-social-media-machine/

[3] http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/

[4] http://www.gamespot.com/articles/world-of-warcraft-subscriptions-on-the-rise-ended-2013-at-7-8-million/1100-6417575/

[5] http://www.oculusvr.com/

[6] http://kotaku.com/facebook-buys-oculus-rift-for-2-billion-1551487939

[7] https://minecraft.net/

[8] http://kotaku.com/notch-says-hes-canceled-oculus-rift-minecraft-because-1551568311

[9] http://www.idsoftware.com/

[10] http://www.computerandvideogames.com/456388/john-carmack-expands-on-facebooks-oculus-rift-acquisition/

[11] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/27/oculus-rift-facebook-buy-out-kickstarter

[12] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1523379957/oculus-rift-step-into-the-game

Game Jams & Amnesia Fortnight

While considering the topic of civic hacking I was drawn to thinking of it’s equivalent in the world of video game development which is the game jam. A game jam is usually a one or two day event in which developers, both professional and amateur, get together and make very small rough and ready games based on a given topic/subject. The scale of these jams vary with some that happen across the world, like the Global Game Jam [1] which has people getting together at over 400 locations worldwide just to make games. Other jams are about a specific theme like Molyjam [2] (aka What Would Molydeux) the premise of which was to make games inspired by a parody Twitter account of well known game designer Peter Molyneux.

It feels to me that the main point of these game jams is to have fun while exercising the creative side of people and they can be used as a form of networking between developers. For some a weekend isn’t enough and within game development companies it’s becoming a trend to set aside a week or two to have an internal game jam of their own in order to help the staff unwind from whatever projects they’re working on (especially long term projects) and also potentially get ideas for new games that could be made. Not a lot is usually known about these jams as they tend to be private to the company in question. But at least one company has decided to go public with their internal game jam and that is Double Fine Productions [3].

During the development of Brutal Legend issues arose with the publisher which stopped the production of the game and while the company attempted to find a new publisher Tim Schafer (founder of Double Fine) decided that instead of the staff just doing nothing until the issues were resolved he asked them to pitch ideas for games that could be prototyped in two weeks. This became known as Amnesia Fortnight (the amnesia relating to forgetting whatever projects that are currently being worked on) and out of that first Amnesia Fortnight four games were prototyped, two of which have gone on to be developed into full and complete releases: Iron Brigade [4] and Once Upon a Monster [5]. Other full games coming from an Amnesia Fortnight prototype are Stacking [6] and Costume Quest [7].

In 2012 the Kickstarter funded project was into development at the time and it was also being documented by 2 Player Productions [8]. Because of the success of their Kickstarter campaign and that a documentary crew is already embedded into the studio Schafer decided to make that years Amnesia Fortnight a public thing, allowing people to pre-purchase the resulting prototypes and letting them vote on the pitches made by the staff, deciding what actually got made while documenting the whole process with live streams and daily video updates. And less than a month ago they started the whole thing again with Amnesia Fortnight 2014.

As someone who wants to get into games development these sessions are very inspiring and while being involved in something of the scale that Double Fine does is very unlikely at this moment in time, the spirit of what they’re doing is very much still present in the more normal weekend length game jams and I have to seriously consider getting involved in one or more of them in the near future.

References:

[1] http://www.globalgamejam.org/

[2] http://www.molyjam.com/

[3] http://www.doublefine.com/

[4] http://www.ironbrigadegame.com/

[5] http://www.onceuponamonstergame.com/

[6] http://www.stackingvideogame.com/

[7] http://store.steampowered.com/app/115100/

[8] http://www.2playerproductions.com/

Data

The internet is made up of data. But what is data? There isn’t a single answer for that. The definition I like the best is “facts and statistics collected together for reference or analysis” (source). The typical thought of data is as information but really it’s information that has not had anything done to it to show what it means or what it is. Data becomes before information and the internet is full of it at all levels. Computers are passing large amounts of data across networks every second of the day and for the most part we have no idea what is actually being passed around and that can be a concern.

The sharing of personal data is a big issue in the current era of the internet especially with social networking sites, and the biggest of these sites draws the most concern. Facebook retains everything you ever enter into their site, even if you delete it from public and private view. It’s hard to imagine how much data Facebook has gathered in it’s lifetime when you remember that it keeps everything. And what worries most people is that the people behind Facebook are always looking for new ways to make money out of your personal data, from selling it to advertisers to allowing other corporations to use it as sample data for some product or other. It does seem to be the case that Facebook starts a new feature, which then turns out to have other hidden features which border the ethical use of personal data and when challenged they make a convoluted way to opt out of being involved in the latest data mining operation that the average user doesn’t know how to find. And the cycle continues.

The Data Protection Act does exist to stop the sale without permission of personal data. Permission being one of the key factors there which is why there usually a pre-ticked check box at the bottom of a terms & conditions page regarding the sharing of information given because most companies realise that a lot of people won’t read these pages and just click the accept button. In other cases these permission pages are even more hidden. There are people who are fighting against the likes of Facebook and their privacy policies, such as europe-v-facebook.org who are trying to fight a legal battle with Facebook regarding the EU privacy laws. But a lot of this will come down to money and power and Facebook as more of both.

Mapping

There are all kinds of mapping and cartography related sites on the internet. The most well known is Google Maps, especially their mobile application version. A large part of why it’s popular is that Google allow people to embed a version of the map onto their sites to give their users useful and accurate direction data. But at the end of the day it is a closed source system in that Google itself is responsible for the updating and management of the maps. They do have ways of allowing some user generated content, especially in areas where their own mapping systems aren’t as fully developed but this just comes down to people submitting a change or amendment and then it goes through various stages of peer review before appearing on their Map Maker site. Eventually with enough reviews from Google moderators the amendment may appear on the full Maps site.

So while immensely useful, there are downsides the biggest of which is inaccurate or missing locational data. These are mostly not huge problems but sometimes a place you’re searching for cannot be located through Google Maps for one reason or another. And so you may want to try other mapping projects, ones that are more open and reliant on crowds to update and maintain the maps. One such site is OpenStreetMap and it seems to be a very powerful and robust site for the task and well maintained. I’ve even made a couple of small edits myself, to see how the site works. Of course the down side of crowd sourced sites is that the data is only as good as the moderators and editors abilities and desire to verify the data. But it is still a very useful site and will give results you won’t get via Google maps.

The idea of using crowds in mapping projects is a growing one and there is a lot more to it than just accurate location data. One project of note is the Ushahidi platform and more specifically Crowdmap. Ushahidi (the name comes from the Swahili for “testimony” or “witness”) is a company from Kenya that created a site in the aftermath of the disputed 2007 presidential elections in Kenya that collated reports of violence from emails and text messages and placed these locations onto a Google Maps map. Since then they created a platform that allows other people do to the same kind of thing and that brought about Crowdmap. A large part of what Crowdmap is about is geolocating crisis data. Essentially people can make a base map site for a particular crisis, like an earthquake somewhere, and then users from around the world can make reports of incidents to the site and once authorised this data is added to the map. Of course not all data submitted is accurate and so a verification stage is also used to keep the map well maintained. The original sources for the map data is usually social media sites like Twitter but verification is usually done by people actually on location when possible. While imperfect this sort of thing is a fast way of attempting to help as many people as possible in really bad situations and projects like this will only get better and more used as time goes by.

Kickstarting Video Games

Kickstarter [1], a crowdfunding website was founded in 2009. I didn’t become aware of the site until February 2012 when Double Fine Productions [2], a video game studio founded by well known designer Tim Schafer, decided to use the site to attempt to fund a new video game project, a project that would not get funding through traditional publisher routes [3]. They asked for $400,000 within 30 days to fund the production of a small point and click adventure game and the documentation of the project by 2 Player Productions [4].

It took just 9 hours for that funding goal to be reached and within 24 hours it has surpassed $1 million in donations. By the end of the Kickstarter campaign more than $3.3 million had been donated by over 87,000 backers. And in January of this year (2014) the first part of the game that was funded by this Kickstarter was released [5] with the second and final part coming later in the year. The success of this campaign lead to a surge of other similar projects as well as some not the same but even more successful, like the Pebble watch [6] which raised over $10 million and a film based on the Veronica Mars TV series which reached more than $5.7 million [7]. But I’m going to concentrate on the video game companies that tried to follow Double Fine’s success.

Not many could match or beat the amount that Double Fine had raised which was at least partly due to the nature of the project and who was leading it (Tim Schafer is a very well respected designer of adventure games having being involved with creating Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango). But other well known designers of older and well respected games were able to get funding for new projects based on these old licences. So since 2012 there have been many sequels funded, like Broken Sword 5 ($771,560) [8], Dreamfall Chapters ($1,538,425) [9] and Wasteland 2 ($2,933,252) [10]. There have been some remakes of classic games funded as well like Leisure Suit Larry ($655,182) [11] and Carmageddon ($625,143) [12]. But the biggest Kickstarter projects came from new game ideas from well known designers and studios.

Project Eternity [13] from Obsidian Entertainment raised over $3.9 million for an old school RPG in the style of the Baldur’s Gate series and others of that ilk. Keiji Inafune [14], heavily involved in the creation of the Mega Man series of games, got over $3.8 million on Kickstarter for a game that many see as a spiritual successor to Mega Man. And the project with the biggest amount funded just through Kickstarter is Torment: Tides of Numenera [15] from Brian Fargo of inXile Entertainment which received more than $4.1 million.

This year has seen the start of releasing the end results of these larger Kickstarter projects and the future of Kickstarter, and other sites like this, as a viable platform for funding video games relies on how these games are received by the public and by the people who backed the projects. Personally I believe that while Kickstarter won’t become the main way to get funding for a video game it is a great option for those projects deemed too niche by big video game publishers.

References:

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/

[2] http://www.doublefine.com/

[3] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doublefine/double-fine-adventure

[4] http://www.2playerproductions.com/

[5] http://www.brokenagegame.com/

[6] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-e-paper-watch-for-iphone-and-android

[7] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/559914737/the-veronica-mars-movie-project

[8] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/165500047/broken-sword-the-serpents-curse-adventure

[9] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/redthread/dreamfall-chapters-the-longest-journey

[10] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/wasteland-2

[11] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/leisuresuitlarry/make-leisure-suit-larry-come-again

[12] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stainlessgames/carmageddon-reincarnation

[13] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity

[14] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mightyno9/mighty-no-9

[15] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/torment-tides-of-numenera

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is the name given to the activity of collecting the services or thoughts or content from a large group of people. It’s a fairly recent term having been coined within the last 10 years and usually used to describe online behaviour but the practice of what it means has been around for a lot longer. For example the Oxford English Dictionary asked for word suggestions from the public in the mid 19th century and in the 20th century variations of this type of thing has been used to collect genealogical and genetic data for use in research. [1]

The most obvious example of crowdsourcing online is Wikipedia [2], despite the Jimmy Wales’, one of the site’s co-founders, dislike of the term due to it’s origin from the word ‘outsourcing’ which, according to Wales, gives a bad impression on how Wikipedia uses the people who contribute to it [3]. So while the term may be imprecise, the practice of it is plain to see. Since it’s launch in 2001 it has grown to having over 30 million articles written in 287 languages with a membership of over 20 million user accounts and 71,000 active editors [4]. The sheer size of these numbers just mean more things are getting added, edited and deleted on a second by second basis.

 

So while Wikipedia may well be the biggest and most well known website that uses crowdsourcing for the majority of it’s content it’s not the only one. For example there is OpenStreetMap [5] which is a crowdsourced online mapping project, like Google Maps but freely open to editing by users. Similar is Crowdmap [6] which allows users to make maps for specific things like locations of organic farming projects or countryside clean up crews. Another big use of projects like these is for mapping crisis data during natural disasters or public revolts.

Another type of crowdsourcing is known as crowdfunding which essentially is where a person or group of people ask for money to help fund a project. Types of funding range from a simple donation to an actual investment or loan in which the person giving the money will get a return on that at some point in the future. Next time I want to talk about a particular type of crowdfunding which is of personal interest to me.

References:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing#The_Oxford_English_Dictionary

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

[3] http://apcmag.com/five-weird-facts-about-wikipedia.htm

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics

[5] http://www.openstreetmap.org/

[6] https://crowdmap.com/

Open Source Software

Open source software is ubiquitous these days. Open source software is software that is usually available for free and is completely modifiable by users. There is a similar movement with regards to free software for all which is the Free Software Foundation (FSF) [1] founded by Richard Stallman. Their focus is on the freedom of sharing software with other people whereas the open source drive concentrates on the actual code of the programs being modifiable by any who want to. A way developers in these areas are compromising between these two views is to describe their programs as Free/open source Software (FOSS), or Free/Libre/open source Software (FLOSS). For ease I’ll use the term open source software in this post.

The growth of the use of open source software is relatable to the increasing expansion of the Internet and the ease of sharing files with other people. But this isn’t a new thing. In the very early days of the Internet programs were freely shared among other people, mostly the academics who helped build the networks. The rising commercialisation of the Internet meant that while sharing of open source material still happened but wasn’t really known by the public in general.

What helped start the rising trend of the use of open source software was the creation and release of the Linux (otherwise known as GNU/Linux) operating system by Linus Torvalds [2]. The development of the Linux kernel and the other components that make up an operating system was and still is done completely open which means thousands of people have help develop parts of the whole, with many different versions (or flavours) being distributed throughout the community and into the general marketplace. The actual developing helped create a community for which the products are aimed at. Linux is very popular among big software companies such as Google who have used it to develop the Android OS primarily for mobiles and tablets and Chrome OS which is mainly used for small form PCs or specific notebooks known as Chromebooks.

Despite Linux’s popularity among developers is has yet to be adopted by the general desktop market largely due to the fact that most PCs have either a Windows or Macintosh OS pre-installed. There are calls to get more PCs with Linux pre-installed to allow users more choice. But some type of open source software is used by most people these days anyway. Browsers like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox are open source. Other widely used open source software include Mozilla Thunderbird (an email client), VLC media player, Apache OpenOffice and GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). These programs largely exist because people are wanting a free and stable version of other proprietary software like Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop. And open source is not restricted to software, with websites like Wikipedia being a free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit. The use of open source, software or otherwise, will continue to grow as long as there are people who are happy to give over their free time to make it with little to no recompense.

References:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation

[2] http://www.linuxfoundation.org/about

The Internet & The World

The internet is a vast global network covering most of the world. The data on the internet connects millions of people together in so many different ways and it’s easy to forget that it has a physical nature consisting of routers and servers all connected via masses and masses of cables. It’s easy to imagine a building full of this kind of thing connected to another building in a different city of the same country but how different countries are connected to each other is not so. Handily there are people out there who collect data on the submarine cable network between countries and with this you can get a very nice overlook of this network: [1]

What sites like the one shown above also allows us to see who owns the cables. Knowing about these cables and wondering who owns what leads to some interesting questions. Like could a single corporation hold to ransom a country’s internet connection? A massive denial of service attack via the possibility of severing the physical connections between countries. Of course such a thing would be harder to achieve against countries with multiple undersea connections. But it may be possible for a corporation to do such a thing to a smaller country, to what end I don’t know. What is possible and what is happen is that governments across the world are controlling (or at least are trying to) their country’s internet.

 

During the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, as part of the larger Arab Spring uprising in which the Internet played a hugely important role, the under threat Egyptian government forced a shut down of access to the internet [2]. While sites have been blocked by various governments in the past sites such as Facebook & Twitter (both of which we’re also blocked by the Egyptian government before the shut down) the total ‘net blackout of a country was unprecedented. But now that is has happened once, it’s entirely possible for it to happen again.

While most governments wouldn’t go to so far, they do try to limit certain actions, piracy being one of them. The most notable attempt at stopping internet piracy was the US government’s Stop Online Piracy Act or SOPA [3]. Essential what the bill proposed was that content creators (in other words the US film & music industries) would have the power to stop people going to sites that may have some form of illegal downloading of copyrighted material and do this without any judicial process just requiring a letter essentially of good faith stating that the site in question had infringed on it’s content. There is a lot more to SOPA than this but that will suffice as a brief overview. Thankfully this bill failed to get passed into law but there is always the potential for this or something like this to appear in the near future.

References:

[1] http://www.submarinecablemap.com/

[2]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/egypt/8288163/How-Egypt-shut-down-the-internet.html

[3] http://gizmodo.com/5877000/what-is-sopa

 

A brief history of the Internet.

First off it helps to understand what the internet is. The simplest way to put it is this: the internet is a series of inter connected computer networks. A networks of networks if you will. The basis of what we now know as the internet was created by a collaboration between academics & the military building a packet switching network called ARPANET, named after the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense which funded it in the late 1960’s.

Over time the ARPANET expanded, and more and more networks were joined to other networks this being helped by the Internet Protocol Suit (TCP/IP) being standardised in the early 1980’s. Because this was primarily a network supported by the military access was fairly restrictive and various science organisations tried to change that which lead to the creation of the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) the mid 1980’s which also paved the way for the commercialisation of the internet, with commercial internet service providers (ISPs) forming to sell access to the internet to other businesses and the general public. With the decommissioning of ARPANET & NSFNET in the 1990’s the internet became fully commercialised which combined with the development of the World Wide Web (WWW) by people such as Tim Berners-Lee at around the same time mean that the internet was becoming more accessible for everyone and was continually expanding, very rapidly.

At this point the internet is starting to look recognisable to modern day users thanks to the introduction of web browsers like Mosaic. The end of the 1990’s and start of the 2000’s saw the rise and fall of many “dot-com” businesses, and the increasing ubiquitousness of the web. As usage of the internet through the world wide web became easier for the general public it became a place for the free sharing of thoughts and ideas as well as other things. This new model of information exchange became known as Web 2.0 which has essentially led to the model of the web & ‘net that we know today. Some would say we are indeed now moving past that phase and entering into what is being coined the Semantic Web in which the machines which handle the internet can also analyse it across any boundary or border, physical ideas of countries & state imposed on the internet by governments.