Exasperated Calculator

The story of one of the greatest heists of all time.

I love a good heist movie, and this one looks like it has some fun conspiracy theory stuff added on over the top of it all.

For some reason, I played quite a few computer games in 2007.

Aftering buying a Wii in 2006, I got an XBox360 and PS3 to go along with it. And a few games as well.

Over the next few months I’ll do a series of game reviews (and there’s likely to be a fair gap before the last few, as I haven’t finished them yet…). I’m looking at games released in Australia in 2007. I’ll also review things that come out in 2008 as I play them.

Once I’ve covered them all, then I’ll announce gaming’s most prestigious prize: The Exasperated Calculator Game of the Year.

The shortlist (aka ‘Games I played’) for 2007 includes:

• Bioshock (Xbox 360)

• Mass Effect (Xbox 360)

• Portal (Xbox 360)

• Super Mario Galaxy (Wii)

• Uncharted (PS3)

• World in Conflict (PC)

I’ll try and review all of these by the end of 2008.

The latest take-off from the makers of Scary Movie and The Naked Gun.

If you have any thought that it’s possible for these people to be funny, watch the trailer. It’s one of the most horrible things I have ever seen.

A table with built in marble runs.

Please buy me one of these, work. I promise I won’t be completely distracted by shiny marbles all day long.

How different cultures around the world count money.

Someone once demonstrated that differences in the way people rolled cigarettes were driven by tax policy. It’s probably the same here.

Using lies to engage students

I think this is a good idea. But maybe I’m lying…

The comic Garfield with everyone but the character Jon deleted

It’s incredible, really. It totally transforms the comic, but it still works.

Net Neutrality is one of the biggest hot button issues among the nerd illuminati of the Internet right now. The simple question is whether all internet bits are equal, or should ISPs be allowed to privilege some bits (from their customers or people who pay them) over others.

There are some side issues here, but a big part of it is peer to peer. Which brings me to this story from today that online video distributors can save a lot of money by using peer to peer protocols

In the example given, Democracy Now saves $1,000 (of a $1,200 bill) by using BitTorrent. My question is - who ends up paying that $1,000? If we assume (and it’s not a great assumption) that everything is competitive, then that $1,200 represents the cost of pushing that many bits to end users. If it goes down, then it must mean that $1,000 worth of bits are now being pushed by someone else - in this case, the upstream bandwidth from the users.

So who pays?

At first, probably the ISP of the end users. Their bandwidth out gets used up, costing them money.

They’ll pretty quickly pass that on to the end users. Which means they’ll increase prices for everyone.

So what’s DemocracyNow really doing here? They’re pushing the costs of distributing from themselves on to end users. Which, due to the way pricing is set up, will be borne equally by everyone, regardless of how interested they are. In fact, people who have no interest at all in the video probably end up paying for this too.

I’m not arguing against net neutrality - there are other reasons why it’s a good idea. This is probably more an example of how the pricing for internet access is set up wrong - flat rate charges create strange incentives across the Internet, not just for the end users.

But that $1,000 saving? That doesn’t exist. You’re just making other people pay it.

A dark comedy about a man who decides that in order to stop his wife suffering when he leaves her, she has to die.

Looks beautifully acted, should be quite good.

What happens if you put a Gummi Bear into molten potassium chlorate.

Hannibal Lecter would be proud.

Forbes’ guide to the most sinful cities, arranged by sin.

Congratulations Denver on being chosen #1 for Lust.

The trailer for Wall-E set to the soundtrack for the trailer to The Terminator.

Not a perfect fit, but given there’s no apparent editing it’s quite uncanny how well it all fits.

Up to this point, I’ve written a little over 56,600 words in this blog.

That’s a little over the minimum length of a novel.

Just last week Electronic Arts offered $US 2 billion to purchase another publisher, Take-Two.

This is part of a continuing trend in the computer video game business, with the really big publishers consolidating. In some sense, this is a lot like the film business - the big studios make up a very substantial proportion of the total turnover of the industry.

But the big difference is with the next level down. In the film industry almost everyone is a contract player - directors, writers, and actors all move from studio to studio, only settling at one studio for the amount of time to make one or two projects. But in the games industry most of the ‘talent’ is permanently employed, staying with the company for many years.

This is odd - in many respects the requirements are the same. Video games are expensive undertakings these days - $10-20 million to produce, millions more to market and distribute. This is still well short of the cost of a major movie, but the gap is closing.

In fact, the structure of the video game industry looks a lot like the movie industry of the 1930s. The studio system lasted until the vertical integration of the industry was stopped and a single tycoon (Hughes) stepped in. At present, much like the 1930s film industry, the video game industry has a few stars (which, in this case, are the intellectual properties like Halo or Quake), and most people in the industry are relatively anonymous.

So what will change? My guess is that it will be the rise of the talent.

At present there isn’t a single famous video game writer, and only a couple of famous ‘directors’ (the analogy isn’t perfect, of course). In fact, if you look at the industry’s Game Developer’s Choice Awards the nominations for writing, art direction and so on only mention the game, not the actual writer!

That’s slowly changing. The enthusiast press has been paying attention to the project heads for a while, and is starting to pay a lot more attention to the writers as well.

Once people know the names, the names can ask for more money. A few people can do this now, but as the media pays more attention, more people will become famous (at least in the video game world), and they’ll start to move from project to project in search of better money.

And once that happens, then the game publishers are going to start to look a lot more like Hollywood - they own the IP for some of the series, and they bankroll the whole thing. But the people making the games aren’t usually tied to any one publisher, and they move around a lot more than is the case now.

And this will be a really good thing for games, because the best talent will be recognised appropriately, and the best projects will attract the best people.

The directors of the Matrix go very strange in this film based on a cartoon.

The style of this looks superb. I think it’ll be a huge flop, but incredibly enjoyable at the same time.

Try installing this floating chair.

I’d love to know what this feels like to sit on - it’s hard to imagine what it would be like. I also wonder what kind of magnets you’d need to have in order to sell this safely in America.

A spice gun.

This would definitely make cooking more fun!

The vaguely menacing Curta mechanical calculator.

Beautiful design, but there’s something about it that makes it look a lot like a gun of some kind.

A survival kit in a barrel.

Slightly more sensible than the furniture in a crate from last week.

I was struck by a really interesting post by Greg Costiykan on the difference between reviews and criticism, and the absence of real criticism of computer games at present.

Most people aren’t very interested in ‘criticism’ per se. Pauline Kael was one of the most influential film critic, but I’d imagine there are third teir reviewers for small outlets who are more widely read than she was. Most people are interested in the consumer reports side - is this a good example of the type? Should I go and see/buy it or not? And for computer games the outlets are very much in that mode.

As an aside, I’d note that ‘Criticism’ has become one of those over-loaded words. I think that when most people hear the word, they think of the dictionary meaning:

the art of evaluating or analyzing works of art or literature.

It’s hard to think of a review of anything but an analysis. But there’s this additional, academic definition that a lot of people use: Criticism (a cousing of Theory). Which is where a lot of the points Greg Costiykan makes come from. So I think it’s a little unfair to say that reviews aren’t criticism - in the everyday sense of the word they certainly are.

But there’s still a really substantial point here - there are schools of Criticism for film, novels, poetry and other art. Why isn’t there one for games yet?

(Another aside: Computer games, as a mass market medium, are around 30 years old. The most common major theories of film didn’t arise until that medium was nearly 60 years old).

It’s a really good question.

Part of it is simple immaturity. And I don’t just mean that the industry is young. The industry sells to young people, who are really not the best audience for formal Criticism. This has changed a lot recently, but it’s still a big part of the media that surrounds the games market. We have 1Up, which is a lot like Empire, but there isn’t yet an equivalent to Framework.

Another part is the very real question about whether video games are art or not. Personally I think they can be, much like any other artistic medium, but the difficulty of the question has meant a lot of people who are interested in Criticism end up diverted into that question first.

And a final part of it is academic snobbery. Most Criticism today is the product of Arts faculties at universities. And I suspect most of the faculty members think of video games as a childish pursuit beneath their attention. Without the grounding in some of the pointless pursuits of academic Criticism (such as deconstruction) it’s hard to make your criticism sound like Criticism.

There’s a lot to be gained from having some better understanding of what works and what doesn’t in games, and the ways that they are put together. Some formal Criicism could be a really good thing for the maturity of the medium. I hope it happens. And I hope we can come up with a better theory than Auteur Theory.

Because Auteur Theory really sucks.