Games * Design * Art * Culture

On Hiatus

2009-02-27T16:19:00.002-05:00

Play This Thing! has been consuming my blogging mojo for some time, now, so I'm officially putting this one on the shelf for now. I've also turned off comments, since they were getting filled with comment spam (boo hiss), though of course in many cases the comment streams were quite interesting. Some day I'll get around to culling them. In any event, try PTT, or my personal site for more.

BeerOverIP`

2008-05-16T12:17:00.001-04:00

Well, we've been working on a new business plan, and I think perhaps it's time to go public with it. Click here for the investor presentation.

Game Criticism, Why We Need It, and Why Reviews Aren't It

2008-02-24T00:18:00.002-05:00

Cross-posted from Play This Thing!.

The proximate cause for this rant is one of the few sessions I attended at GDC, run by N'gai Croal, about game journalism. I won't discuss the session (which was moderately interesting), but instead the conflation by the panelists, from sources as diverse as Kotaku, 1 Up, Game Informer, and MTV of "reviews" and "criticism."

Surely these are people who should know better.

There's virtually nothing we can point to today as "game criticism." And we badly need it.

During the panel, the participants mentioned both Pauline Kael and John Simon, historically important critics of film; neither seemed to understand that neither were reviewers, let alone journalists.

A review is a buyer's guide. It exists to tell you about some new product that you can buy, and whether you should or should not buy it. A good review goes beyond that, and suggests who should buy it, since not everyone enjoys everything. (E.g., A romance novel may be very fine of its kind, but is quite unlikely to appeal to me, since it is not a genre I enjoy.)

Thus, Ebert is, ultimately, a reviewer; the net result of his discussion of a work is a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Mind you, he is also an informed and intelligent watcher of film, and his discussion of a movie frequently veers in the direction of criticism; but he is not being paid to write critical works. Pauline Kael was.

Criticism is an informed discussion, by an intelligent and knowledgeable observer of a medium, of the merits and importance (or lack thereof) of a particular work. Criticism isn't intended to help the reader decide whether or not to plunk down money on something; some readers' purchase decisions may be influenced, but guiding their decisions is not the purpose of the critical work. Criticism is, in a sense merely "writing about" -- about art, about dance, about theater, about writing, about a game--about any particular work of art. How a critical piece addresses a work, and what approach it takes, may vary widely from critic to critic, and from work to work. There are, in fact, many valid critical approaches to a work, and at any given time, a critique may adopt only one, or several of them.

Some valid critical approaches? Where does this work fall, in terms of the historical evolution of its medium. How does this work fit into the creator's previous ouevres, and what does it say about his or her continuing evolution as an artist. What novel techniques does this work introduce, or how does it use previously known techniques to create a novel and impactful effect. How does it compare to other works with similar ambitions or themes. What was the creator attempting to do, and how well or poorly did he achieve his ambitions. What emotions or thoughts does it induce in those exposed to the work, and is the net effect enlightening or incoherent. What is the political subtext of the work, and what does it say about gender relationships/current political issues/the nature-nurture debate, or about any other particular intellectual question (whether that question is a particular hobby-horse of the reviewer, or inherently raised by the work in question).

If I'm not clear on this, the set of questions in the previous paragraph are not intended to be an exhaustive list of all possible questions that criticism can address; criticism can, in fact, address any set of questions of interest to the writer (and ideally, to the reader) that are centered on a particular work of art.

The most important word in the last sentence is "art." Criticism is about art. Reviews are not about art; you can review anything. You can compare brands of butter, you can review detergent, you can review the hand-jobs given you by different whores. Reviews are simply about whether something is worth the money, nothing more and nothing less.

And you can, in fact, write criticism on these self-same subjects, as strange as that may seem. Criticism on the subject of butter might go into the techniques used in butter-making, and the effects produced thereby, and the passion brought to their craft by particular small-batch artisanal butter makers. Criticism about hand-jobs might begin with interviews of the whores involved, and their motivations, and to what degree they enjoy giving pleasure and to what degree they simply want their clients to come so they can move to the next one, and the effects of specific finger placements at different times in the process. Criticism about detergent -- well, you've got me on that one, but I'm sure a writer that was passionate about the subject would find something more to say than "Brand X is better than Brand Y, for the price."

The point is that a critic has to take his subject seriously, as an example of art, or at least of craft; and take seriously as well the intentionality of the creator, and the importance to those who experience the results of the results, and the impact on how they think and feel. Reviews don't go there; they give you three stars. Good or bad, that's all that reviews are concerned about.

Criticism understands that "good" and "bad" are just the surface. What's more important is why, and how, and to what end.

Have I made it clear now? Reviews are the inevitable epiphenomenon of our consumer society, writing to help consumers navigate the innumerable options available to them. They can be well or poorly done, but they are nothing more than ephemera. I'm sure the newspapers of early 19th century America ran reviews of the novels of James Fenimore Cooper; they are utterly forgotten, and should be, because by nature they were of interest only to the readers of the newspapers of the time. Contrariwise, Mark Twain's Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses is still considered an examplar of literary criticism.

(To divert by the way, it is an utterly unfair critique, and ignores Cooper's manifold literary virtues; one may point out that in Samuel Clemens's era, Cooper was widely considered America's greatest novelist to date, a position Mark Twain later supplanted. The essay can also be read--as it rarely is--as a calculated, and highly effective, attack on a literary rival, and as such, should be treated with far less respect, and far more skepticism, than it normally is. There: In the space of a paragraph, I've written an effective critique of a work of criticism.)

Similarly, there would be no point today in writing a review of Ultima IV, since it is long out of print. A useful work of criticism, however, is entirely conceivable: discussing, perhaps, its role as one of the first games to consider the moral implications of a player's acts, and to use tactical combat as a minigame within the context of a larger, more strategic title. Such an article, well-written, ideally with an understanding of the influence of tabletop roleplaying on the development of the early western CRPG, and of the place of this title in the overall shape of Richard Garriot's ouevre would be of interest to readers today, even if they'd be hard put to find a way to buy the damn game. And it might find a place in anthologies and studies of the 20th century origins of the popular medium of the game, going forward into the indefinite future.

The truth is that, for the most part, we don't have anything like game criticism, and we need it -- to inform gamers, to hold developers to task, and to inform our broader cultural understanding of games and their importance and impact on our culture.

We need our own Pauline Kaels and John Simons -- and we need to ensure that when they appear, no one insists that they attach a damn numerical score to their writing, because that is wholly irrelevant to the undertaking of writing seriously about games.

And even in a more proximate matter, we need those drudges called reviewers, despite the meager pay they receive, to think more seriously about critical issues, too. Why should a review of an RTS which doesn't understand the historical evolution of that genre and the place a particular work holds in the spectrum of previously published RTS be considered of the slightest interest?

Now here at Play This Thing!, we do not view ourselves as "game critics," at least in the high sense I've ascribed to the notion here. Our remit for writers is simply "find a game you like, and write something interesting about it." At the same time, we also don't view ourselves as reviewers; we're here to point to games we think are interesting, not to tell you what's good and what's not. And yet that very approach frees us from the jejune constraints of "reviewers;" we need to tell you that something is interesting, and why, not give it a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. As a result, our writers do, I think, get closer to real criticism than the writers on most sites -- each in our own individual way. Thus I tend to take a pedantic approach, with references to the history of the form and the place of works in that evolution; the99th tends to talk about theoretical design ideas and indulge in hip-intellectual verbal pyrotechnics; and EmilyShort tends to talk very much about design intentionality.

Even if we do not, in general, produce true criticism--which is almost always in essay form--we are still viewing the works under question from an inherently critical stance.

Would that anyfuckingone else in gaming did so. And would that other publications thought it important, or even interesting, to foster the critical analysis of games, rather than yet another scored review.

And that, I think, brings us to our close; but I cannot stop myself from pointing out a few things, which are inherent but may not be immediately obvious.

This post is an essay. It is an essay in the form of a criticism; the critique is that of the failure of our writers about games to take a critical and analytical view of the works they write about, and of their failure to make a clear distinction between "review" and "criticism," which are, in fact, very different beasts. It is, if you will, a critique of game criticism.

And a thought in conclusion: Would either Pauline Kael or John Simon have ever allowed their criticism to suffer the indignity of having a numerical score attached?

And would their work have been improved if they had?

Sean Ryan on Why Casual Game Development Isn't a Landrush Any More

2008-02-15T17:20:00.005-05:00

Sean Ryan, a Bay-area VC, back from Casual Connect in Amsterdam, has two posts anyone interested in the casual game space should read: part one and part two.

His take is "natural maturation of the industry"; my take is "live by the Yahoo, die by the Yahoo." That is, the casual game market was built on piggy-backing onto preexisting audiences at major portals -- developers and publishers did no real marketing, because they didn't need to, and simply attached themselves to a firehose of traffic. But the firehoses have woken up to the fact that they're the chokepoint in the chain, and are using that to claw back an increasing amount of the consumer dollar. And meanwhile conversion suffers, because there are so many me-too clones that at the end of a one hour trial, consumers go and find another identical game with a one hour trial instead of purchasing. Which shows both the inanity of the "one size fits all" model in casual gaming (all games are 60 minute trials, all games cost $20, and all games ~~rip off~~ imitate in the essentials successful product from others instead of spending a little time, effort, and talent thinking about actual design).

Of course, what the portals are doing in terms of grabbing an increasing share of the consumer dollar is extraordinarily short-sighted; for casual gaming to be a large and growing market, they need to provide incentives for innovation and creativity, and there needs to be a functional ecosystem in which developers can profit--something the conventional industry has utterly lost sight of.

Oh, well, as usual, my opinion is that things are going to hell, but then you knew that, right?

Games, Storytelling, and Breaking the String

2008-01-10T13:33:00.000-05:00

Last year, MIT University Press published Second Person: Roleplaying and Story in Playable Media, an anthology of articles on the subject by a diverse group of contributors edited by Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. By "a diverse group," I mean everything from game studies academics to digital game developers to tabletop game designers; it also included three experimental tabletop RPGs (John Tynes's Puppetland, James Wallis's The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and my Bestial Acts).

Recently, the editors have been putting selected articles from the volume online (under a Creative Commons release). One such is the piece I wrote, entitled Games, Storytelling, and Breaking the String, which is a look at the ways in which both digital and non-digital games (or game-like entities) have tried to address the inherent conflict between the demands of the game (interactivity and player volition) and the story (linearity and narrative coherence).

It's somewhat theoretical, but written plainly, and worth a read if you're interested in these issues.

The other articles they've posted from the book can be found here.

"Here Comes Another Bubble"

2007-12-07T15:49:00.000-05:00

They told me to blog about this song, so I am. Quite funny.

December Song: The Publishers Dwindle Down to a Precious Few

2007-12-02T17:08:00.000-05:00

Activision merges with Vivendi Universal Games Group.

Apparently, Vivendi corporate get 52% of "Activision Blizzard," and Kotick gets to head up what may, depending on 4Q results, be a larger publisher than EA.

To give a little history here, the game assets of Vivendi were originally cobbled together by CUC International, a conglomerate that dealt mostly with travel companies; CUC merged with a company called HFC in 1998 to create Cendant, whose main assets were Days Inn, Ramada, HoJos, Travelodge, Avis, Coldwell Banker, Century 21, and Shoppers Advantage. That, plus PC gaming. One of these things is not like another.

To no surprise, they started shopping the game side around, and sold it to Vivendi's Havas division for something like $800m; turns out they needed the money too, because CUC had been cooking the books, its managers were indicted (and convicted) for fraud, and Cendant's share price went south.

It was never clear to me why CUC was in the game industry in the first place; I have to assume that someone there just happened to like computer games. But the net effect on Sierra, at any event, was more than a little disastrous; with weak internal management, and a series of owners (CUC, Cendant, Vivendi) with no real understanding of or expertise in the game industry, Sierra went from bad to worse. Blizzard, at least, was more or less left alone to do its thing -- its corporate masters at least had the sense not to kill a goose that produced golden eggs every few years. Blizzard is, of course, the value Vivendi is contributing; the tattered remnants of Sierra are not (alas) worth much, if anything.

There are some complexities to the deal, including the possibility of Vivendi increasing its stake to 68%, but this is one of the few big deals in the game industry that looks to me like it might actually make sense to stockholders; Activision has the kind of focus and industry expertise that Vivendi never did, and may actually do better with these assets.

From an industry perspective, though, it's kind of appalling. As the number of publishers continue to dwindle, independent developers' negotiating leverage dwindles with it, along with any real pressure for innovation. And while portfolio theory says size is important in a hit-driven industry, it's not clear that there are real gains to growing beyond some critical size, with Activision, at least, had surely reached before this. It looks to me like this is the end-game of the business conditions our industry has faced for decades--continuing consolidation of publishing--something that may prove to be basically irrelevant when the inevitable disruption caused by online distribution starts to change the nature of the game.

I wouldn't be surprised for this to renew rumors about an EA/Ubisoft merger, however.

Coming of Age Among the Venture Investors

2007-11-28T01:41:00.000-05:00

As a teenager, my subculture wasn't "punk rockers" or "hippies" or "young Republicans," but science fiction fandom. I tend to view other subcultures, therefore, from a sort of anthropological standpoint, noting similarities and differences from my own "native" culture. I understand "the science convention" as one of the cultural practices of my own tribe, and therefore perceive other similar cultural practices--such as the trade show, the industry conference, the acadamic conclave, or, in the case of today's post, the venture conference--as interesting cultural variations on that basic motif.

Earlier this week, I attended the New England Venture Summit--my fifth conference of the venture-investing tribe as an attendee, my third in a money-raising capacity, and the second at which I presented.

As with conferences in other cultures, the focus of the event, which takes place typically over one or two days, is the agenda, a series of speeches and panel discussions. Unlike most other such events (e.g., the science fiction convention or the industry conference), the Dionysian aspect is downplayed--there may perhaps be private dinners sponsored by one VC firm or another after the day's event itself, but the conceit of the participants is that they are there purely in the Calvinist pursuit of worldly wealth, so that open partying would diminish their own respectability in the eyes of the participants with whom they most desire to build social credit.

The organizers of these event are profit-making enterprises, who charge fairly stiff fees for participation, and target three sorts of potential attendees: entrepreneurs seeking capital; venture investors; and service firms. Under the rubric of "service firms" are included lawyers, accountants, headhunters, providers of outsourced HR services for small businesses, and the like. My impression, in fact, is that half or more of the revenues that such events produce are derived from service firms, both from the (higher) attendance fees they are charged, and through sponsorships.

The events on the agenda are of two types: panel discussions, usually among VCs, and usually moderated by someone from a service firm (who presumably has paid for a sponsorship in another context); and investor presentations.

Panel discussions are common to the conferences of all of the subcultures considered in our current study, but (in all cultures) they vary enormously in how interesting they are. In the worst case, you have as a topic for discussion something that has already been thrashed to death repeatedly at previous events, and a moderator who poses excruciatingly dull questions, eliciting rote answers from the panelists. Whatever your subculture, I'm sure you can bring to mind any number of these, from events you've attended. In an SF convention context, I would be very happy never to attend another panel on "Gender in Science Fiction" or "Breaking Into Print." (Although even in these cases, creative panel members can overturn the conventions; I am unlikely ever to forget Michael Swanwick [writer] on a "Breaking Into Print" panel discussing his relationship with Gardner Dozois [editor], and saying "There's a reason they call it 'submission.'")

The basic problem with the venture conference panel is that the conditions under which they are created mitigate against anything of the slightest interest ever being said. They exist to motivate the attendance of VCs, who may be flattered to participate; to reward service firms for contributing money (by allowing them to provide the moderators); and to attract the interest of entrepreneurs, who may reasonably be expected to find what potential investors say of interest. But the choice of topic is inevitably anodyne ("Emerging Trends" -- can't pass that one up!), and since the moderator is from a service firm, which has an interest in sucking up to both investors and entreprenuers, he is extremely unlikely to ask challenging questions, and is likely to stick to the equally anodyne. E.g., "Which is more important when you're looking at a company--the finances or the team?" -- a question at this actual conference, to which the only honest response is "Which are you, a moron or an idiot?"

(Oh, if you care --So let's do a gedankenexperiment. 1. My team is Bill Gates, Thomas Alva Edison, and Henry Ford, and my business models is, we sell hot dogs at a loss and make it up on volume. PASS!

(2. My team is three heroin addicts who haven't bathed in a week -- but -- wait! Billion dollar oppor... PASS!

( You tell me. Which is more important? The finances or the team?)

So from an entrepreneur's perspective, there's only one reason ever to attend these things: To put a face with a name, and know who to button-hole later.

The company pitches are the real meat of this kind of event. Typically, over the course of an hour or ninety minutes, a series of entrepreneurs get up, each allocated something between 6 and ten minutes, to pitch their company. The inevitable tool is the Powerpoint presentation (occasionally you'll see someone using OpenOffice Impress, and good for them); this is jejune in its own right, and some day I'll have the guts to do something completely offbeat, like hire a team of mimes and jugglers to provide visual representations of what I'm pitching.

There's usually a 'mandatory' training session the day before, in which entrepreneurs give their pitch to a handful of venture-experienced people and get advice and feedback; this is actually useful, in many cases, since it's surprising how many entrepreneurs show up under prepared, and quite often advice like "nobody's going to be able to read 12 point type on your slide, no more than 4 bullets per, thanks" or "I still don't have a clear idea what you do" is just what they need. For your ultimate six minutes of exposure, it's a bit of a pain to take half a day off to watch painfully amateurish presentations from other entrepreneurs, but it's still almost always worth it, even if you're pretty polished. It never hurts to rehearse before a critical audience. (I didn't take advantage of that this time, and it was a mistake not to do so.)

Watching entrepreneurs pitch is painful, because each of them has taken months of work and passionate dreams and a universe of ideas and tried to distill them down to six tight minutes. And it's painful, because so much of what they're pitching is jejune or just dumb; a minor tweak on the delivery of mobile content, a better way to sell real estate, a mechanism for making mobile games even less interesting than they are already by making them "free" and advertising supported. (Advertising supported inevitably means "dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.") "Secure DRM," hah. A mechanism for reducing cigarette theft at convenience stores.

All the kinds of things that maybe might make money, but my god; it makes you despair of capitalism. Is this the best that the Promethean creativity of the market can produce?

But to get back to the anthropological analysis, all conferences, of whatever type, have three purposes, though they vary on which they emphasize: to impart information; to build social ties; and to do business. For me as a teenager, the science fiction convention was first about information; it was an enormous thrill to hear the writers I admired speak, and I learned a great deal about writing, and the business practices of publishing. Later, it served a business purpose; promoting my work in the field, and establishing relationships with editors. And these days, on the rare times I attend one, it's primarily social--catching up with old friends.

In terms of imparting information, I would suggest that "the venture conference" is a poor medium, except for very naive entrepreneurs. If it has any value as a social event, it is for venture investors (who often cluster and talk shop with each other, even as the entrepreneurs scan badges and try to figure out how to start a conversation with them--the entrepreneurs have little to say to one another). Which leaves the business function, and since these are events built around a business subculture, that is, or ought to be, their main purpose, redeeming the fact that they don't do so well on the first two scores.

I would argue, however, that they don't work particularly well in a business context, either.

Let's start with venture investors. A typical venture capitalist spends the bulk of his days listening to pitches from entrepreneurs. Just as fiction editors are up to their eyeballs in slush, a VC has seen so many Powerpoints he has trouble remembering which is which, and probably has nightmares in which "the opportunity" and "go-to-market strategy" chase him screaming off a cliff, the jaws of negative EBITDA spreading threatening below.

Now let us say that you are, to pull things more or less at random, a VC who invests in, oh, the enterprise software space, specializing in expansion capital to already-established firms, located in Boston and almost never investing in companies farther than drive-distance.

Your expectation--and a reasonable one--is that anyone who has a company dealing with enterprise software, with some solid base of revenues, and within drive distance of Boston either knows you, or knows of you, or will ask around until he finds someone who does know you, and you will eventually see his business plan. Or if not, he can't be a very competent entrepreneur, because he damn well should be able to find you.

So you learn of some venture conference, in the Boston area, where umpty-dozen companies will given a six minute pitch.

The basic thesis behind the venture conference is that you should be all excited to attend, because here you'll get quick exposure to umpty-dozen potential investment opportunities, and all in the space of a day! Efficient use of time, yes?

No.

Out of those umpty-dozen, maybe two will fit your investment criteria, and if they were semi-competent, they'd find you anyway.

So... Maybe you send an associate. You certainly don't go.

From an entrepreneur's perspective, the supposed appeal to the venture conference is this: I'm pitching to a room containing maybe 200 people, all interested in venture investing, and even though there's a fee attached (and maybe travel and a hotel room), and even though it's a couple of days out of my (and maybe my senior staff's) life, it's a more efficient way to reach a lot of potential investors at once!

Right?

Well--no. That room of 200 people is maybe 25% other entrepreneurs waiting their turn or listening to other pitches to get a better sense of how to polish their own, and maybe 50% service folks who actually want to sell you stuff, and maybe the other 25% are investors of one kind or another. Of whom the vast majority would never invest in whatever it is you're pitching. And of the handful who remain, almost all are so junior that unless they go back foaming at the mouth with excitement, it doesn't really help.

You would be far better off staying at home, figuring out the right VC firm and the right person there, and figuring out how to network to them, so your submission doesn't fly over the transom and land in the "slush", but gets a sympathetic read.

As Michael Swanwick said, "there's a reason they call it submission."

***

Which is a nice pat way to end it, but leaves two obvious questions, I think. I'll take them in order.

1. "So... How did you do?"

Ehn. I think the Powerpoint itself was pretty strong, but this is the first time I've tried to do this with a partner; Nathan took half the slides, and I the other half. We both floundered a bit, and were not as crisp, clean, and confident as you want to be in this context. We could have used another few hours of rehearsal to get it down pat. We didn't, for two reasons; one, Nathan and I live in different cities, and our time for rehearsal was three hours the night before. And second, perhaps, I'm skeptical enough about the value of the whole enterprise that I didn't make it enough of a priority for us to get together with time to do the work we needed to do. Penny wise and pound foolish; if you invest in the money and time to do this at all, you ought to do it well. I take responsibility.

Not that I think we made idiots of ourselves, but we could certainly have been better.

2. "Would you do it again?"

I think I've just made a strong argument for why this kind of thing is useless. But... Yes. And probably will. For two reasons.

First, the discipline of trying to distill what you want to do down to six minutes and a handful of slides of worthwhile--and refreshing, in its own way. More than that, distilling it down to a business case; it's obvious, I think that I'm doing what I'm doing for a slew of reasons, many of which have nothing to do with a business case, and if I were doing a six-minute presentation for an audience of, say, game developers, it would look very different. But if I can't make a strong business case, I shouldn't be trying to do this as a business--an art project, perhaps, or a non-profit enterprise. But if I can persuade myself that this makes sense in a business context, that's self-motivating--and an excellent framework to make a case to people--beyond the context of the venture conference--who are utterly motivated by monetary return, and don't care as passionately as I about the larger issues.

Second... Even if, as I've argued, the venture conference is not an efficient fund-raisng tool, if you're out looking for money... Well, it's just one of the things you have to do.

Part of the subculture, you know.

Dead Game Project: Cocktail Hero

2007-11-17T18:46:00.000-05:00

A combination of gameplay elements from Diner Dash and various X Games simulations, in Cocktail Hero you have a steady flow of cocktail orders you have to fulfill--but at the same time, you earn points (and extra tips) by triggering special maneuvers (e.g., passing the cocktail shaker behind your back while shaking it). At the end of a level, if you've been particularly spectacular, one of the bar patrons goes home with you. Rated M for alcohol theme and suggested sex. Promotional tie in with the Mr. Boston Guide and Tanqueray gin; a side benefit of playing is that you learn how to make a Singapore Sling and a Screaming Orgasm.

Dead Game Project: EverWar

2007-11-10T20:21:00.001-05:00

EverWar is a massively multiplayer game specifically designed with the following goals in mind:

Real community: Players come to know and play repeatedly with the same group of players, not through mid-game election to a guild, but because thrown into a community from the inception of play.

Massive hierarchies: Guilds typically self-select for sizes less than Dunbar's number because it's hard for people to retain connections to more than 150 people; in the real world, we have institutions with many more people, which we sustain through hierarchy. Build hierachy into the game from game inception.

Possibility for conclusion: The never-ending nature of MMOs has some negative effects, including the feeling that nothing you do has a real impact on the world. Contrariwise, developers don't typically want to allow a game to "end" because they fear the loss of some subscribers if it does in a particular shard. But allowing for the possibility of conclusion also permits a system where players can feel they have a real impact, beyond simply improving in personal capability.

Therefore:

A. At game start, there are seven powers, symmetric in terms of strength. (Different individual capabilities, but we try to balance them, anyway.) If adopting a fantasy motif, call them elves, dwarves, humans, orcs, ogres, what have you.

B. Each power is a hierarchy of players, modeled on real-world military organizations (squads, companies, battalions, regiments, divisions, corps). At the apex is the Monarch, who is a non-player.

C. New players (except at game start, when we populate the hierarchy initially) are Privates.

D. The game is an ongoing war for world dominance among the seven powers; there is no concept of "peace." Powers are either allied or at war. Alliances are formed by non-player Monarchs, who shift allegiances semi-randomly, but typically to preserve the balance of power or for temporary advantage. (This reduces the likelihood of any side "winning" in the short term, although not eliminating the possibility.)

E. Combat is bloody and rapid, with "higher level" characters quite as vulnerable as lower-level ones.

F. Privates respawn as Privates in the same unit.

G. Characters at ANY higher rank respawn, when killed, as Privates, in their original unit if open slots, otherwise assigned to a random unit.

H. Battlefield promotions are at the immediate commander's decision, and automatically ratified by the hierarchy. Thus, if Sarge dies, the Lieutenant chooses a Private as the new Sarge. In the absence of an immediate commander, the position is automatically filled by the most senior living player in the of the next rank down.

I. Fragging is permitted; if the General is a moron, his Brigadiers may kill him. However, to discourage fragging with the view of rising in rank yourself, any fragger himself becomes a Private. Thus, either a Brigadier has to be willing to sacrifice himself for the good of the army, or they have to find a patsy. This can lead to an interesting dynamic whereby the General has his guards and the subordinates try to maneuver a patsy into a position to assassinate him.

J. Conquest of territory is a part of the game, and territory gives the conqueror access to resources useful in the construction of weapons, magic, etc.

K. In the event that a single power conquers a majority of the globe, they have "won," and this instance/shard/server is "over." Those on the winning side receive some benefit should they choose to continue in a new server (perhaps reverting to Sergeant rather than Private when killed), while the losers are free to move to other servers as Privates.

L. While there's cool equipment to be collected (and looted from your corpse when you die), there's no concept of "level," only rank within the hierarchy.

Play This Thing More Authoritative than Games * Design * Art * Culture

2007-11-03T00:18:00.000-04:00

Yay.

Per Technorati, Play This Thing (which I guess counts as "my other blog," although it's really a group blog and less than half the posts are mine) now has an authority of 122, while this blog had an authority of 98.

I have no idea how they count that, but I guess blogging daily (well, 5 times a week) helps rack up the points.

Take 2 Can Dish It Out But Not Take It

2007-11-01T23:53:00.000-04:00

I've never been a fan of Take 2 Interactive, or, for that matter, their Rockstar label. The parent company has been multiply investigated by the SEC for manifold sins (including back-dating options to management), and of course, even the name of Rockstar gets up my nose--I'd like it if they actually worked to make "rock stars" out of game developers, but instead the founders apparently wanted to behave like rock stars themselves (complete with absurdly glitzy parties in NYC, where the corporate headquarters are but no actual development work happens) without, you know, actually doing the creative work that implies. (Not irrelevantly, one of my favorite indie music labels is Kill Rock Stars, which publishes L7, among others.)

Sure, GTA is a fine game, but you know, it was developed by DMA Design, purchased and rebranded as Rockstar North by Take 2, and what have the suits got to do with that?

Two things of late have gotten up my nose:

1. The EA Simpsons game wanted to include a segment called "Grand Theft Scratchy"--an idea that would absolutely and clearly and utterly be covered under the parody exemption under copyright law--but apparently EA's lawyers caved under pressure from Take 2, the wimps. Incidentally, my use of "Grand Theft" above is also utterly and obviously protected under the parody exemption, and even the font is public domain.

2. And apparently when releasing Manhunt 2, Take 2/Rockstar decided to simply omit everyone at the Rockstar Vienna studio who had worked on the project, because, after all, they closed the studio in May of last year, and they don't work for the company any more, so screw them. Truth doesn't matter, and credits belong to those who have the clout to grab them, I guess.

How hard is it to adhere to some minimal standards of ethical behavior? And what do you really lose by doing so?

EA/Pandemic/Bioware Deal

2007-10-12T14:21:00.000-04:00

So the deal whereby EA buys out VG Holdings, the parent company of Bioware and Pandemic, for $860m, has been widely reported. Let's analyze it a little bit.

VG Holdings was founded in 2005, when Elevation Partners, a private equity firm, invested $300m in the new entity, which merged developers BioWare and Pandemic, both highly regarded independent game developers--among the few high-profile studios left, in fact.

At the time, I mused that the attraction to Bioware and Pandemic might be that they needed capital to self-fund more costly "next gen" console games (though I've been told since that it was for "other business reasons"). Private equity firms, however, generally invest with the expectation of VC-like returns--that is, the hope, or at least prayer, of a cash-out within 5 years and a return of something like 10-fold.

It wasn't clear how Elevation Partners expected to see that kind of return; by self-funding, Bioware/Pandemic can, of course, receive a higher proportion of the consumer dollar (quite possibly, double) than they could if reliant on publisher funding--but they'd need quite a string best-sellers to generate returns at that level. At the time, I thought perhaps Elevation was grooming them for an IPO, which might also make sense, but either I was wrong, or they've given up on that thought.

Of the $860m, $620m goes to stockholders (the remainder as equity to employees, or in terms of stock options or working capital). So the best case for Elevation is that they've doubled their investment--but remember that the $300m bought them a "majority" of the combined companies, not full ownership. What that "majority" constituted was never reported, but let's say for the sake of argument that it was 60%, and wasn't diluted below that level by stock options to management in the interim. 60% of $620m is $372m, or a bit under 25% more than they invested. That's not an impressive return, and my guess is that's a lot closer to the mark than 100%, as implied by the CNet article linked above.

On the other hand, it's an exit; if, as I suspect, Elevation came to the conclusion that the investment wasn't really going anywhere, they got out whole, with a return better than if they'd parked the money in T-bills, and while that's not a win, it's not a bad recovery.

Of course, there are also tangled interests here. John Riccitiello, now CEO of EA, led the Elevation investment when at Elevation Partners. I suspect that some of EA's stockholders will have some questions about the transaction, as a result; it's the largest single purchase EA has ever made, and while there are reportedly ten games in the pipeline (and some nice IP), $80m+ per title is a pretty pricey way to obtain games for your publishing program. Not to mention EA's history of failure in terms of integrating and succeeding with acquired third-party developers.

All very interesting, to be sure.

More on MetaPlace

2007-09-29T13:21:00.000-04:00

Video of Raph pitching Metaplace:

(via Kim Pallister)

It's interesting, though I'm mildly disappointed; I wanted the investor pitch, instead of Raph describing the technology. But gives a better sense of what MetaPlace is than the press release. One thing that isn't at all clear is "how do we make money?" Of course the answer may be "Revenues are distraction," in the words of Yossi Vardi, founder of ICQ. In other words, the end-game is attracting a huge number of users and selling out to a big web firm (as Vardi did--to AOL for $400m, and as YouTube did, for $1.6b to Google).

Also, Damion Schubert has a smart post on why MetaPlace might work (which also has some nice bits on MUD history).

You Know You Are a Geek When...

2007-09-21T21:02:00.000-04:00

A three year-old asks you to sing a song, and this is what you dredge up:

Very Interesting

2007-09-19T05:54:00.000-04:00

Well, two things.

Barry Diller buys majority stake in Garage Games. Apparently to launch a new site called InstantAction where you'll be able to play "rich" 3D games in the browser. Hard to know exactly what this means, but reading between the lines, my assumption is that the Torque engine becomes a browser plug-in, and the games delivered there can be smaller because the engine doesn't have to be packaged with the executable--so they become downloadable and playable in the browser in a reasonable amount of time (at least over broadband).

If that's what it is, it's cute technology. On the other hand, isn't that what Wild Tangent was supposed to do originally?

And Raph announces Metaplace. Some interesting claims, and again hard to know what this really is, but it sort of looks like "virtual world mark-up language." Could be quite cool if half the claims are true.

Play This Thing!

2007-09-05T10:43:00.000-04:00

We just launched a new site, called Play This Thing. It'll feature a game a day--free games, interactive fiction, mods, and weird stuff like alternative reality and "big urban" games, as well, of course, as independent games.

When we launched the Manifesto site, we expected it to be a content-and-community site as well as an online retailer. That hasn't turned out as well as we had hoped; "The Word," our pages with reviews and articles about games, never got a lot of traffic--and in any event, reviews there sat a little uneasily on a site that was trying to sell you stuff. It was also not updated frequently enough to draw much repeat traffic--and perhaps was too much inspired by print magazine reviews. Online, where a demo download is a click away, short squibs are perhaps more useful than lengthy reviews--quick reading, and enough to give you a sense of whether it's worth your time to check the game out.

Also, I wanted to celebrate the full range of creativity in games outside the mainstream, including games that we ourselves don't necessarily sell--free games, games from people who haven't signed up to sell here, and so on. Play This Thing lets us do that, without confusing the Manifesto Games mission unduly. Of the five games on the front page at launch, for instance, only two are ones we sell.

When Play This Thing features a game that Manifesto sells, we'll link back to the Manifesto site for purchase, of course--but we'll be covering a lot of games we don't sell, too. In essence, we're divvying up responsibilities: Manifesto Games becomes an ecommerce site, while Play This Thing takes care of content and community.

Give it a look...

Eat Well, Pinch Your Pennies, and Get on the Bike (and screw eating locally)

2007-08-29T22:52:00.000-04:00

Lately, I've been reading a bit about the local foods movement, which posits a moral (and green) value in purchasing and living exclusively off local foodstuffs, in order to reduce the impact on the planet's ecosystem from the transport of goods from distant places. On the one hand, I've always liked local specialties--e.g., a spring does not go by when I don't make a dinner of shad and shad roe, a very New York thing. Similarly, at present I'm rejoicing in the availability of Jersey tomatoes at the local green market--the pale pink things we get from California during winter, and even the redder "vine ripened" crap we get from the Netherlands (a bait and switch if ever there was one--they may be redder, but equally tasteless) are hardly worth calling tomatoes at all.

On the other hand, this "eat local" thing is one thing to espouse if you live in, say, Berkeley, California, and have year-round access to a huge variety of local produce and other foodstuffs, grown year-round--and largely the product of water irrigating the Central Valley, heavily subsidized by the federal tax-payer at (among others) my expense, and with its inevitable consequence salinization of irreplaceable soils in the region. It's quite another if the only local produce you're likely to find year-round in your region are (as in New York) apples and potatoes--and I shudder to think what eating this way in, say, Finland would be like. In the winter you'd be left with rutabaga and lutefisk. Maybe the occasional reindeer fillet.

Nonsense. And I'm more than a little skeptical that eating locally reduces global resource consumption. International seaborne transport is amazingly cheap, really; the cost of shipping something from China to an American port, say, is a tiny fraction of the likely retail price in American shops. While the carbon footprint of shipping an orange by truck from California to New York may be fairly high, I rather doubt that I'm doing the planet much harm by purchasing, say, tilapia resulting from efficient Vietnamese aquaculture instead a piece of cod from the horribly depleted fisheries of the Grand Banks.

There's a piece by Adam Gopnik in the current New Yorker, in which he describes his experiences in attempting to eat for a time off things produced entirely within the boundaries of the City of New York--no mean feat, as there are only two commercial farms remaining within the urbs. While it's entertaining, it's also clear, reading between the lines, that he spent a fair bit of time at the wheel of one motor vehicle or another to reach the farflung places necessary to obtain his provender. I strongly suspect that spending a half gallon of gasoline in order to obtain a "local" chicken has greater impact on the planet than whatever is saved by ensuring that it doesn't come from the Purdue packing plant in Maryland.

Indeed, it seems to me that "price" is a pretty good meausre of "negative global impact," since the more energy and work involved in bringing something to me, the more it's going to cost. While we're abjured to purchase (more expensive) organic products and (more expensive) local products, I rather wonder: the lamb from upstate is local, but perhaps the natural, well-watered dells of New Zealand are more efficient places to raise lambs than Rockland county.

Of course, I'm a cheapskate by nature, a tendency reinforced by running an unfunded startup, but I suspect a lot of the "eat local" meme is fuelled by a combination of moralistic posturing and Veblenesque conspicuous consumption: by buying locally-grown heirloom tomatoes at $5 a pound, instead of mass-market ones at $1 a pound at the local supermarket, you're wearing both planetary consciousness and a supposed culinary sophistication on your sleeve. Me, I'll stick with nice, ripe local tomatoes at, say, $2 a pound. And live with the $1/pound ones in the winter, when there's nothing much better.

Since I'm working at home, and no longer have the opportunity to bike to the office, in fact, I've taken to combining an opportunity to exercise with the opportunity to get better food than is available in my repulsive local supermarket by venturing out twice a week. Common stops are at the Essex Street Market on the Lower East Side, for vegetables and fish; East Village Cheese, for feta and bleu for salads and some brie to go with whole wheat bread; the Wine Warehouse on Broadway south of Astor for decent wine at <$10 a bottle; the Union Square greenmarket for local produce in season; Western Beef on 16th between 9th and 10th Avenues, for cheap meat; and when I hit Western Beef, the Chelsea Market for veggies. (More expensive than the Essex Market, but not by much.) Occasionally, I'll go to Bell Bates--not for the usual stuff, since in keeping with most "natural foods" places, their general prices are insane, but they have bulk spices at very reasonable cost.

The general rules I suggest are:

If you have to take your car there (or drive farther than normally), don't fool yourself that you're doing the planet any favors. Get on your bike, goddamn it.

Price is an imperfect but real signal of the all-in costs of bringing something to you--including environmental impacts. Absent other signals, cheaper is better.

Eating local is largely bullshit; there's no virtue in sustaining the incomes of local fishermen depleting already devastated local fisheries over Vietnamese struggling to survive working at sustainable aquaculture on pennies a day, or yuppie Wall Street refugees who want to make artisinal cheeses over hard-working Danish peasants. Sure, eat the local good stuff in season, but why would you avoid using limes if you live north of Florida?

Eat well, pinch your pennies, and get on the bike. Sounds like a pretty good recipe to me.

This book is set in....

2007-08-26T02:39:00.001-04:00

1. ...Heinermann, a font long thought to have been created by Jan Peders van der Heinerman (1658-1702), who was a pioneering typesetter based in Antwerp, but since conclusively proven to have been invented by the Comtesse Madeleine d'Anjou, third wife of Germain (II), Comte de Paris, and filched from her by van der Heinerman's child bride, Genevieve Fleurement, as part of a complicated sexual triangle that some authorities believe may also have involved a goat. Which would make it a quadrangle, we suppose.

2. ...Sativa Monticello Roman, a font originally created by Thomas Jefferson, allegedly after a long night of hemp-induced visions in the arms of his mistress Sally Hemmings, in celebration upon the victory of American arms at Yorktown.

3. ...Chateauneuf du Pape Serif, a charming font with notes of oak and tannin, its present style codified and popularized in the typography of labels from vintners in Chile's Casablanca valley, but ultimately deriving from graffiti carved in ancient Druidic stelae, possibly by Roman legionaries, in the department of Vaucluse in France.

4. ...Cthonian Medium, a font generally credited to Unamit Ahazredit (1323-1348), known as "the Mad Armenian," whose calligraphy in the only extant Latin translation of the "Neopublicon," a work of obscure origin, served as the basis for the font used in Gustav Klimpt's print version of the same work (1672, Leipzig). Per legend, the ornate nature of the serifs used in this font themselves encode arcane knowledge, and assist in imparting whatever hidden and potentially dangerous message the text itself contains.

5. ...Berlow Historia Obscura, a font designed by Jurgen Berlow, one of the most prolific modern creators of faces. This body type is, so he claims, derived from a printed folio composed in Volapuk, an artificial language created by Johann Martin Schlayer in 1879; the manuscript was ostensibly discovered in an Etruscan tomb dating to the sixth century BC, and its pages have been radio-carbon dated to the middle Cretaceous. Some authorities consider this an amusing hoax and credit Barlow with this attractive type; Barlow, and the occasional crackpot, maintain that it is the product of time travellers from our future (when, presumably, Volapuk becomes the human lingua franca) back to the primordial past.

6. ...Derrida Plain, a font in which all characters are rendered as identical rectangular black blocks. Named after Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), this font extends his philosophy of deconstructionism, which holds that all texts have no meanings except for those constructed by their readers, to its logical extreme, by making the text wholly indecipherable, and therefore susceptible to whatever construction the reader desires.

N. ...ISO Latin ASCII, because humans are obsolete, and the only people who need to read such texts (presumably from some fit of nostalgia) are we machines.

The Funghi That Came to Piglet

2007-08-20T21:10:00.000-04:00

Making light has quite a thread going on the possibilities of a Milne/Lovecraft mashup. Works quite well, I think, and a mode I could definitely get into, if I weren't rather inclined to find a mattress at present. I quite like:

Just Like Old Times

2007-08-18T20:03:00.000-04:00

So there are, at present, dozens of fire vehicles on West Street in front of the WTC site. Karen, Simona, and I noticed them returning from the subway--we were away at a wedding in Connecticut for the day, dropped off the rental car uptown, and were returning by train.

Hundreds of gawkers were looking toward the Deutsche Bank (formerly ~~Bank of New York~~ Banker's Trust) building, which was on fire. (Or here, if the Times chargewall keeps you out.)

The Deutsche Bank builidng--a black, ugly 70s structure damaged by falling members from WTC 2 on 9/11--has been boarded up for years, and was in the process of being deconstructed, storey by storey. The damage it sustained on 9/11 opened much of the structure to the elements, and apparently there was a toxic mold problem, as well as contaminants remaining from 9/11. In what I view as a pusilanimous over-reaction to an essentially non-existant danger, my neighbors and local politicos required that, instead of it being demolished via normal practices, it would be boarded up, environmentally sealed, and slowly deconstructed from within, in order to avoid "toxic contamination". Air quality monitoring stations, connected to alarm klaxons, were set up in the surrounding vicinity in case there should be an environmental breach. Needless to say, this was an enormously expensive proposition--leading to a dispute by the original contractor, which delayed demolition by years--but the whole thing was finally in progress, with the top 14 storeys of the 40-floor structure already gone.

Apparently, the fire broke out on an upper floor, spread to several others, and is still smoldering as I post. I could visibly see a number of broken windows--and given normal firefighter practice, which is to knock hell out of any barrier when fighting a fire to provide better access--I have to assume that the ballyhooed "environmental seal" is, well, now non-existant to all intents and purposes.

We noted hundreds of people watching avidly, some dining desultorily outdoors at Merchants, a mere two blocks away from the structure. Sauteed sea bass and toxic mold. Yum.

As I've indicated, I don't actually believe the supposed threat of environmental contamination is remotely as great as my excessively fearful yuppie neighbors apparently do. Nonetheless, I find it curious that the two (no doubt hastily written) news items on the story don't raise the question of whether the fire has raised any danger of environmental toxin release.

You note that I'm happily ensconced in my apartment--three blocks away--and obviously don't think there's any great environmental danger myself. But then, I never did. My guess, however, is that over the next few days, this will become a shrill local political issue, and we'll have sobbing local residents on local TV whining about it. (I don't get cable, and local broadcast reception is nonexistant, because of the high level of radio and microwave traffic locally; for this I am thankful. The Internet--and the good gray paper-printed Times--will do me fine, thank you.)

But my guess is that the demolition gets delayed many months to come--quite likely with a major impact on the WTC reconstruction project as a whole, since, IIRC, the Deutsche Bank tower has to come down for them to build some access ramp to the rest of the site--the whole project, a major one in so crowded an area, is like a jigsaw puzzle, and if one piece is missing, others can't be put in place.

Wanna Play Pong, Sugar?

2007-08-10T17:14:00.000-04:00

Okay, so we've seen a variety of interesting new interface devices for games recently, including the Wii controller and such. But this strikes me as fairly loony.

The project began as an exercise for networked objects. I made a pong controller that was made from a bra. The mapping for the controller was simple - touching the left breast made the pong paddle go left and the right breast made the paddle go right. I then found out about a phenomenon called gamer widowhood where men essentially abandoned their wives to play video games night and day. I wanted to create a type of video game play that would center around a couple's intimacy and where two people would touch each other in order to play the game.

Well, so here's the thing. Touching my partner's tits can certainly be fun. Playing Pong can be (modestly) fun. Touching my partner's tits in order to play Pong?

Um. Not fun. Either I wind up concentrating on the game, and grabbing tits with no regard to, well, mutual pleasure, or I wind up concentrating on my partner, in which case the Pong game goes to hell, and obviates the whole point here.

And I'm not sure making it two player works... After all, where would she grab? I mean, I've only got one. Ahem. Well, motion in different directions... never mind.

Despite Jane's experience with the Rez vibrator--which, I'll note, pretty much divorced gameplay (her boyfriend's) from the erotic aspect (hers), except to the degree that one reinforced the other--I think if you want to make this work you basically need to build a game that is itself erotic in intent (a major design challenge in its own right) and build gameplay around your controller.

The Game Tunnel 100

2007-08-07T00:30:00.001-04:00

So Game Tunnel has up its list of the 100 Top Indie Games of the last three years--which I'm finding fascinating reading, because we cover kinda the same area they do, and yet their tastes are so obviously so different from--I won't say "mine," but say from Manifesto's collectively. (Bill Folsom and Johnny Wilson have a big influence on the games we go after, albeit so do I.)

I'm not posting with any intention to dis Game Tunnel; I love what they do, and I think Russell Carroll is a good guy, and I write for them myself. But I look down the list and think:

The only adventure games listed are installments in the Bone and Sam & Max series from Tell Tale Games--except for The Shivah, at #85... You know, this single game is what got Dave Gilbert nominated for "Best New Studio" at the Game Developers Choice Awards, his competition consisting of teams of 30 or more people, all working on multi-million dollar budget titles. Dave works by himself, at Starbucks, with his laptop, on a budget of zero. He's a fucking genius, you ask me. And actually, The Blackwell Legacy is a better game. And, um, don't Al Emmo and Penumbra: Overture rate a mention?

As far as I can tell, the only wargame mentioned is Gates of Troy, at #64. Okay, maybe they only review games that are submitted to them, and maybe Matrix and Wargaming.net don't often submit games (though there are a number of non-wargame titles from Shrapnel listed)... but this seems like an obvious blind spot to me.

And not a game from Chronic Logic or Apezone?

In the top 10, incidentally, are an Arkanoid clone and a Pong variant--and yes, both have different and imaginative twists on the games they copy. But... well. Among the top 10?

And there seem (to my taste) to be a lot of fairly dull casual titles, arcade game retreads, and unexceptional shooters of various kinds rated rather more generously than I would.

Clearly, though, there's still a strong overlap in taste: We carry almost half the games in Game Tunnel's top 100.

Update: Oh, dang. Almost as soon as I'd posted this, I ran into Derek Yu's top 50 indie games list. I suspect my taste and Derek's vary too, but at least a cursory glance suggests this is much more on target.... A post for another day, perhaps.

Skypeing Douglas Adams

2007-08-04T06:28:00.001-04:00

Sorta.

This is a bit of a technical hat trick, but a cool one: Tie a Z-Machine interpreter to a Jabber IM bot. The Z-as-in-Zork-Machine is what most of Infocom's text adventures were developed using (and still used today by many people in the IF community). Jabber is an open XML protocol for instant messaging, used by both Skype and Google Talk for IMing (and many other Jabber clients available as well).

To play Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, message "!startgame" to prakbot@jabber.org.

Developed by one of the Perplex City guys, apparently.

I hope he releases the source; while there are plenty of Z-machine interpreters around, everyone knows how to IM, and setting one up on your box does require a little bit of technical knowledge. Would be a convenient way to offer IF games to people.

(Via James Wallis).

Whining about FiOS

2007-07-25T22:47:00.000-04:00

So I'm one of the few broadband customers for whom upstream speed is a serious limitation--vbloggers and podcasters are others. Given the nature of my business, I'm often in the position of having to upload multi-hundred megabyte files to our servers--installers for large games. This can take me hours--and god forbid Time Warner Cable should have a hiccup, or one of the kids should kick the powerstrip that leads to the cable modem in the process, because hours can be lost. I often stack several files up and let it run all night.

(In case you aren't aware, on both cable and DSL, upstream speeds are generally far lower than downstream--by an order of magnitude or more--because they expect you to be downloading pirated music a great deal, but don't assume you're actually serving files to people or somesuch.)

So naturally, I've been salivating over Verizon's FiOS (fiber online service); they draw fiber optic cable to you, and you have vastly more bandwidth available than either over cable or DSL.

I used to be a DSL subscriber, until terrorists blew up my local telephone switch (no joke--it was located in World Trade Center 7, and while my local phone company, which is called Verizon, restored POTS [jargon alert: plain old telephone service] quite quickly after 9/11, DSL wasn't a priority, and the cable company was willing to supply broadband service instantly). But I've never regretted the switch, as both up and downstream speeds are considerably higher over cable.

But I need more, and while I suppose I could subscribe to a T1 line or something, well, the budget is tight, and it ain't gonna happen. But FiOS--that would be nice.

However, while FiOS is available in the region (and indeed, at a local festival on the Battery Park City esplanade recently, Verizon had a tent promoting it), it's available so far only in exurban New Jersey and remote New York suburbs. So far, Verizon has offered FiOS only in the burbs, presumably to high-income customers. And they've claimed that servicing "multi-unit dwellings" is technically more difficult.

This is obvious and complete utter bullshit. Here's why.

Offering FiOS involves pulling a fiber optic cable directly to the user--that is, solving the "last mile" problem (whereby everything in the telecoms network is already fiber, except for twisted-pair copper to the home) by tackling it full-on, and bringing fiber to the home. But actually, doing this in a densely populated area is easier and obviously more profitable than doing it in remote exurban areas, because short lengths of fiber bring you access to large numbers of users. Yes, you need to have intermediate switches to multiplex out to large numbers of users in a concentrated area--and yes, you typically have to bury the fiber rather than stack it along a series of telephone poles. But density has its own rewards; your per-square mile costs are higher, but you reach a vastly greater number of potential users per square mile.

So why are they wiring Hicksville instead of Broadway? Not because "multi-dwelling units" are hard (as claimed); that's an obvious crock of shit. Not because urban environments are harder to wire; Verizon is already the local phone service provider throughout the Northeast, and already has the rights of way and authorization to pull wires, and while there's a cost in digging up the street, the potential market per mile of cable here is hugely greater than in Podunk.

Nope. For one reason, and one reason only.

Verizon wants to offer cable television service in the city, and they're holding up deploying FiOS here until they get the city's approval to do so. In other words, unless they can offer the "triple play"--telephony, Internet, and cable TV--they'll take their marbles home.

Now, I'm not against this; competition for cable TV sounds fine to me. But the stated problems are obviously nonsense, and it's clearly a competitive problem for the City if car-culture, environmentally profligate schmucks have superior Internet access and we don't.

So?

So are our regulators and politicos awake? Or have they bought into Verizon's lullaby?

And does Verizon realize it really can't afford to wait, that it loses by pouting until they get the pretty candy of cable TV approval before they provide better broadband? For my part, I'm no longer a Verizon customer--I get my telephony from Vonage via my ISP, and my Internet service from Time Warner, and I am not now, nor am I likely ever, to be a cable TV customer. (TV--what a waste. You could be playing games, or reading a book, for that matter.)

If they delay too long, they will have eroded their existing customer base, and find it that much harder to sell people on an alternative source of cable. Contrariwise, if they build FiOS customers now, how hard will it be to upsell those customers on cable once Verizon has regulatory approval?

Twits.