So Sony has announced the stats for the PSP, their forthcoming handheld game console... And it's a lot more impressive than I'd expected. I had been anticipating essentially a PS One in a handheld device.

Some highlights:

• Dual 333Mhz processors, if I'm reading this right.
  
• 8 megs of addressable memory.
  
• 802.11j... For WLAN play, apparently.
  
• Plays MP3s and compressed video.
  
• Uses a minidisk format that can hold up to 1.8GB, roughly three times the capacity of a CD-ROM.
  
• 7 channels of audio
  
• USB port, infrared port, and a slot for a Sony memory stick (for saved games, presumably).
  
• 24-bit color, claims the ability to push 664 megapixels per second.
  

This thing is not going to be cheap to develop for, unfortunately. But it sure does make both GBA and N-Gage look sick.

posted by Greg at 1:35 PM

And another event that sounds pretty cool-- Edward Castronova writes:

Something that may be of interest to many of you: The Black Hat conference of computer security professionals, taking place in Las Vegas next week, sponsors a moot court called Hacker Court. This year, Hacker Court will try the case of a man accused of hacking into a MMOG server and destroying another player's digital gear. If prosecution can show that the damage exceeds $5000, it is a US felony.

Prosecution is being handled by Richard Salgado of the US Department of Justice. I will be testifying as an expert witness on valuation issues. An actual Federal judge will be presiding. The verdict might become an important historical marker in humans' migration into the machine.

Time: 4:45 pm, Wednesday July 30
Place: Caesar's Palace.
More at the Black Hat site.

posted by Greg at 1:54 PM

Hugh Hancock of Strange Company writes:

Just thought you might be interested to hear about a documentary on the entire Machinima phenomenon that's just been made available on Machinima.com [here]. It was originally shot for Scottish TV, and contains a bunch of interviews with the Ill Clan, Charlie Stross, and a whole pile of other cool people (not least Strange Company, of course).

...And Paul Marino of Ill Clan writes:

[On July 23rd evening], the New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center will open, with the program "Game Engine" as one of its lead events.

Focused around visuals created with games, the program will cover several works based on video games. To that, a good portion of the program will focus on Machinima - including works by Cory Arcangel, Fountainhead Entertainment, Jake Hughes, The ILL Clan, Overman, Tommy Pallotta, and the Red Vs. Blue team.

Capping off the Machinima segment will be a new Machinima short, Love-Death, commissioned specifically for this event - and created by David Kaplan, Dan Torop and yours truly. The short was made in record time (if anyone's keeping track) using community made assets as well as Fountainhead Entertainment's uber-Machinima tool, Machinimation.

With Executive Producers Katie Salen and Ze Frank giving us our marching orders, our small 3-man team put together the short over the last couple of weeks using two PCs and a Macintosh. It was clearly a place for Machinima to shine and shine it did. We put shot a number of hours of footage in various settings with various characters. And both Dan and myself acted out entire scenes using different characters in these other-worldly settings - often in sync with other recordings of ourselves - somewhat akin to digital puppetry where you're the entire cast. All the while, David Kaplan directed and editing the short to its final 3:57 mark.

It should be a great program and encourage all of you to attend if you're in the area. You can see more information about the event here.

Cool that machinima seems to be breaking into the film world's consciousness... But I admit to a degree of "recognition envy." I suppose it's inevitable that the the culture mafia will more readily identify something that looks like a movie as being "legitimate" than something that looks like a more novel medium... But it might be nice if anyone other than gamoids and a few academics started treating games as equally legitimate expressions of culture.
posted by Greg at 1:47 PM

So.... I took my share of sillyass courses in college, including one on the Gothic Romance (where else do you get to read The Monk and The Castle of Otranto for credit?)

But I do find this Ethnography of Roleplaying Games course fairly amazing.

Quotha: "In lieu of a textbook, you are expected to purchase a copy of the Everquest Trilogy software."

Yes, very well; and how deep an understanding of the ethnography of MMOGs are you likely to obtain from a single (flawed, but well-executed) title?

It's enough to make me fantasize about being back in college again, though.

Thanks to Stefan Jones.
posted by Greg at 12:24 AM

Oh.... kay.

So you know, I'm not exactly a fair-use fundamentalist. Unlike, say, Cory Doctorow, I don't walk around with a Mac with "Fair Use Is Not a Crime!" stickers on it. (Although surely it should be a Linux box, eh, Cory? I guess lookin' cool is more important than fighting proprietary software. But I digress.)

In fact, when you come down to it, I make a living off of intellectual property, and I don't like it when folks pirate my work. Indeed, in the last few months, I've licensed French, Spanish, and film option rights to one of my novels; Japanese rights to one of my games; and am currently negotiating over both English- and Spanish-language rights to another game. It sure is nice when the work of years past come back to drop a few bucks in the bank account.

And by and large, I like organizations like, say, the Authors Guild or the Interactive Digital Software Assocation that work to preserve intellectual property rights.

Brainworkers gotta eat too.

But of course the reality is that most "IP" is seized from its original creators--often, at least in the case of the music industry, from young blue collar folks with no sense, and lacking access to a good lawyer--by companies with no real justification or reason to exist. Thus copyright law often seems more a means of enriching Disney than enriching, say, the several thousand SFWA members who love what they do but can't actually make a living at it.

[To digress again, if I had run Napster, at some point, I would have said: Sure, we'll pay mechanicals to the artists. Fuck the labels. And then let them try to turn it into a "poor starving artist versus the copyright thieves" argument. I woulda had every recording artist in the known universe lining up to lick my shoes--starting with Courtney Love. Which I could get into. But I really do digress.]

Anyway, the point is: IP law good, corporate highjacking thereof at the expense of artists morally dubious, but piracy clearly bad. I buy the argument. Sure. And I generally support the efforts of the Sony Secret Police to eradicate with extreme prejudice piracy abroad.

But when you talk about passing a law that characterizes uploading a single copyrighted file as a felony offense, I start to wonder what the fuck is going on. Particulary when the IDSA comes out in favor of it.

I mean, think about it. I've written any number of articles for print and web publications that are now defunct that I keep live on my website. They're copyright by the publishers, in many cases they're work for hire--but the original publishers are out of business, nobody gives a crap except me, and I'll take the documents down if anyone complains. Nobody will.

Still, I uploaded content copyright by somebody else to my website.

Under this bill, I'm a felon.

My older daughter, a year or two ago at camp, put together a website that includes images of animals that I'm sure she simply scavenged from elsewhere on the web. She's 14 now--but a felon under this bill. Perhaps she'd be tried as an adult.

I don't have the link still--but my younger daughter did a little site too, a year or so ago, mostly with anime images she thought were cool. Geocities or onea them sites, I think.

As for the wench--God knows what she gets up to.

The cats, the dog, and the rats--well, they don't have Internet access, although maybe in the brave new world of IPv6 they'll all have IP addresses, for their identification chips, at least. But I don't guess they get up to any felonious conduct--and if they do, they aren't responsible for their actions, and I guess it just adds to my jailtime.

The problem with this kind of thing is that contemptible laws breed contempt for the law. I'm tempted to go pirate some games now. Or at least find a cheat that gets me around Andariel.

posted by Greg at 11:52 PM

Mark Barrett, a long-time industry veteran, recently posted a piece on the ways in which licenses channel game design in particular paths, often to the detriment of the game itself.

He points to Jason Della Rocca's blog, where an older post does a financial analysis of the top 20 best-selling games of all time. Only two licensed titles (Goldeneye and Harry Potter) hit the list. The list is dominated by sequels--but if you average sales by category (licensed; sequel; original and not a sequel) the final category has the highest sales.

Its interesting, but not a conclusive analysis, of course.

Finally... yesterday I submitted a proposal for a session at next year's GDC entitled "Resolved: Licenses are Evil." The idea is to present it in a classic debate format--one debater with 15 minutes to make the "pro" case, another with 15 to make the "con" case, 5 minutes each to respond, then throw it open to the floor. I'd take the "pro" position, with Warren taking the con.

We'll see if they go for it, but it sounds like fun, in any event.
posted by Greg at 4:16 PM

So Game Daily picked up a release from The Research Room that claims mobile games will be a $41.3 BEEELLLIONNN dollar market by 2007.

Harahahrahhackcough. Sorry.

Geez, I guess I'll own mansions on three continents and my own private jet by then.

Fucking morons. It's enough to make me ashamed to call myself an analyst. If you add up PC, console, online, arcade, board, and hobby games worldwide today, you don't get to $30b. Digital games get you maybe to $20b. You have to be an idiot to believe this.

Coupla bil, maybe. $10b--oh, it's possible, I suppose, particularly if you include unit sales of games for wireless-connected handheld game consoles like, say, N-Gage. And if we're lucky. But it takes pretty damned amazing gall to say that games for your cellphone are going to gross more bucks than the conventional games industry in a few short years.

Here's the game: Analysts like to make big-growth predictions, because they sell reports--to entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs who want big numbers to justify their business plans to their investors or bosses. Analyst projections are always inflated--well, almost always; we take the contrarian view of being, if anything, pessimistic (we like to say "realistic"). But they do have to be at least semi-plausible.

Sigh.
posted by Greg at 4:50 PM