Monday, February 16th, 2009

Time	Event
10:38a	Internet a great social research tool Washington: Scientists have of late started to consider the Internet to be a great tool to carry out social research. Thomas Dietz, Michigan State University researcher and director of the university's Environmental Science and Policy Program, says that the is increasingly moving beyond its use as an online messaging   platform to a virtual world where social interaction and communities can inform social science and its applications in the real world. "Although social scientists, engineers and physical scientists have studied the World Wide Web as an entity in and of itself for some time, there is now a growing group of social scientists who are learning how to use the World Wide Web as a tool for research rather than as a subject of research," he said at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Chicago. He revealed that University of Michigan political science professor Arthur Lupia had observed that new virtual communities were improving surveys and transforming social science. "Lupia is one of the world's leaders related to survey research on the Web. His focus is on learning to use the Web as a way of soliciting people's opinions and getting factual information from them via online surveys," Dietz said. He also revealed that Adam Henry, a doctoral fellow in the Sustainability Science Program at Harvard University's Center for International Development, was working on novel ways to measure social networks using the World Wide Web. "Henry is developing very innovative ways to identify networks that are actual face-to-face relationships by tracking evidence streams on the Web. In other words, it's not simply about who's connected to whom on Facebook or Twitter, but who's doing research with whom in the real world. It's using the virtual world to identify things that are going on in the real world rather than using the virtual world simply to look at the virtual world," he said. Dietz also revealed that William Bainbridge, program director for the National Science Foundation's Human-Centered Computing Cluster, was studying the role of social science in creating virtual worlds. "Bainbridge is studying group formation and social change over time in virtual worlds such as 'World of Warcraft' ( Buy wow gold ) and 'Second Life' to inform and build on what sociologists have studied for 150 years," he said. "He contends that virtual worlds are excellent laboratories for observing and prototyping new social forms that can later be applied to the outside world," he added (Comment on this)
10:39a	Stupidest Claim Evah High Tech Crime Centre in Canberra. My guess (hope) is that his words were taken out of context. If not, one has to wonder just how much real life research has gone into these virtual assumptions. Or maybe he really thinks all those Chuck Norris jokes in Barren's chat are secret code sent by clandestine operatives? Bruce Schneier nails this and other terrorist conspiracy theories in his article "Helping the Terrorists". As Bruce says, "Let's all stop and take a deep breath...Criminals have used telephones and mobile phones since they were invented. Drug smugglers use airplanes and boats, radios and satellite phones. Bank robbers have long used cars and motorcycles as getaway vehicles, and horses before then. I haven't seen it talked about yet, but the Mumbai terrorists used boats as well. They also wore boots. They ate lunch at restaurants, drank bottled water, and breathed the air. Society survives all of this because the good uses of infrastructure far outweigh the bad uses, even though the good uses are -- by and large -- small and pedestrian and the bad uses are rare and spectacular. And while terrorism turns society's very infrastructure against itself, we only harm ourselves by dismantling that infrastructure in response -- just as we would if we banned cars because bank robbers used them too."   (Comment on this)
10:40a	Twitter’s secret: the law of unintended consequences When Stephen Fry was trapped in a broken elevator in London earlier this month, he pulled out his mobile phone and sent a short text to his more than 160,000 “followers” on Twitter.com: “OK. This is now mad. I am stuck in a lift on the 26th floor of Centre Point. Hell’s teeth. We could be here for hours.” He even sent a picture of himself to illustrate his predicament. Nearly immediately, many of his “followers” replied to the British actor, author, and comedian with return “tweets” – as the brief, 140-character or less texts are called. Charmed by the responses, Mr. Fry “tweeted” back, “Your brilliant comments are keeping us all (hysterically) cheerful.” In a Twitter-fied world, no one ever need feel alone or unconnected. Fry is now the second-most popular individual on Twitter, trailing only President Obama, who has about 250,000 followers. (The Obama “tweets” have gone silent, however, with only one entry since last November. Conversely, Fry has “tweeted” some 1,400 times in the last 200-plus days.) Twitter has quickly become the preeminent way to go about “micro-blogging,” sending short real-time comments to the world (if it’s looking) and especially to anyone who signs up as a follower. When the service was introduced in 2006, it was ridiculed as the latest narcissistic way to waste time online. Last year, minds began to change. Twitterers tapped out tweets during the earthquake in China while the ground was still shaking and live during the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India. One of the first pictures of the airliner downed in the Hudson River last month, picked up by major newspapers and magazines, was “tweeted” by a 23-year-old tourist with an iPhone who happened to be aboard a ferry sent to the rescue. Suddenly, Twitter has become a venue for “citizen journalism,” a way to learn what’s happening sometimes even before news organizations themselves could find out. “News no longer breaks, it tweets,” blogged Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley-based technology forecaster, last November during the Mumbai attacks. “If newspapers are the first draft of history, then blogs are the scratch pad. And in front of blogs are tweets,” he added in a phone interview last week. Twitter is a classic example of the “law of unintended consequences,” says Matthew Fraser, who tracks the world of online social networking. At first, he says, people shared the “micro-banalities of life” such as “I’m at McDonald’s having a Big Mac.” But Twitter now has “morphed” into something with real value and utility, says Mr. Fraser, coauthor of “Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom: How Online Social Networking Will Transform Your Life, Work, and World.” More and more Twitterers share useful information, in essence giving the “headline” and sometimes sharing a web link that points to more information, says Fraser, the former editor in chief of Canada’s national daily newspaper, the National Post. Growing chorus of tweeters Twitter’s mushrooming growth has observers wondering if it could possibly be the next online phenomenon. The service is starting to grow beyond geeks and early adopters and beginning “to hit the mainstream,” says Louis Gray, a technology blogger in Silicon Valley. The service has attracted 4 million to 5 million users, 70 percent of whom joined in 2008, calculates a recent report from HubSpot.com, which analyzes business activity on the Web. An estimated 5,000 to 10,000 new Twitter accounts are opened each day, and traffic to the site grew by more than 600 percent in the most recent 12-month period HubSpot measured. Last month, Twitter passed Digg.com, a successful, established news aggregation website, in market share of visitors, says Heather Dougherty, research director for Hitwise, an Internet measurement and analysis firm. And Twitter is “probably much bigger” than the Hitwise statistics show, she says, because much of Twitter’s traffic flows through mobile devices or other third-party software that isn’t being captured in Hitwise’s data. But where’s the business plan? Facebook, the popular social networking site, tried and failed to buy Twitter for a deal some valued at a half-billion dollars. Like Facebook, Twitter has yet to make a penny for its founders. It’s living on money from investors. According to the website Techcrunch, a recent infusion of more than $20 million in venture funds would mean that Twitter has, in theory, a value of $250 million. But that’s only if a way to make it pay for itself can be found. “We plan to build Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company,” the company website says. “Twitter has many appealing opportunities for generating revenue but we are holding off on implementation for now because we don’t want to distract ourselves from the more important work at hand, which is to create a compelling service and great user experience for millions of people around the world.” Even if Twitter fails, it’s already proven that micro-blogging is here to stay, Mr. Saffo says. Second Life and World of Warcraft weren’t the first to jump into the online role-playing arena, he notes, but they were the ones who figured out how to make it pay. “Someone will figure out the model” for profitable micro- blogging, he says. Charging a fee to use Twitter isn’t likely. “Anytime you have a service that is free, customers are going to expect it to stay free,” Mr. Gray says. Advertising would seem to be a logical next step (Twitter has no ads now), but other social networks have found that users find them intrusive. “They see it as a social space,” not a commercial venue, Fraser says. But businesses might be willing – and able – to pay for a Twitter presence. In an e-mail, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says the company plans to talk about revenue sources later this year and that paying for “commercial usage” is one possibility. Another is that a big player, such as Google, might buy Twitter and add it as a feature among the many that it offers. The new haiku Meanwhile, the ways people use Twitter continue to proliferate. For consumers, it’s become “a big complaint box” where Twitters can voice their dissatisfaction, Ms. Dougherty says. That, in turn, “is making companies pay attention to Twitter” to see what is being said about them – or even start their own Twitter accounts, she says. Celebrities beyond Fry are beginning to use Twitter to talk to their fans too. Britney Spears, Lance Armstrong, Stephen Colbert, Shaquille O’Neal, and Tina Fey are among those sending tweets, each attracting thousands of followers. Some might charge that Twitter is still largely a vast wasteland of self-indulgence and irrelevancy. But Twitter’s best days may still be ahead, Saffo says. “It’s already become a new news form, and I think it’s in the process of becoming a new literary form,” he says. He notes how Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, so brief yet so profound, was influenced by his use of the telegraph, which disciplined Lincoln to get to his point quickly. Twitter, Saffo says, may become “Haiku in the age of attention deficit disorder.” The 140-character limit “really forces the writers to compress their thoughts into a very short space,” he says. Twitter is a “disruptive” technology because it is in “real time,” Gray says. With blogging, “there’s still a lag between when they post and [when] you get it…. If you want to find out something that is happening immediately, the place to go is Twitter and not Google anymore. And that’s revolutionary. And that’s why Google, in my opinion, should be watching this closely.”   (Comment on this)
10:41a	The mother of invention: Innovation in MMOs at NYCC Even if we've decided not to face the facts, it's clear that rival developers have: World of Warcraft ( Curremcy: wow gold ) has become nearly synonymous with massively multiplayer online gaming. The great emigration back to WoW with the release of Wrath of the Lich King may be a clear illustration for the consumer and the critic, but after speaking with developers at New York Comic Con this past weekend, it was clear that they'd come to this realization long ago. More importantly, they've come up with ways to stop it. Or at least, that's the pitch.    Over the next few days, I'll be examining a few of the MMOs that were shown in the exhibition hall, and looking at how they plan on secreting away with WoW's loyal fan bas. The tour of duty starts with...   DC Universe Online   When philosopher René Descartes' finished his studies, he was left confused. He effectively thought "That's it? That's what people are confused about? Don't they see the answer?" Speaking with Oge Young, Producer on Sony Online Entertainment's DC Universe Online, revealed a man in much the same attitude. To him it didn't seem hard to find an audience alongside WoW's. The keywords he kept going back to? Action. Physics. License.   Oge accepted appraisals of SOE's forth coming superhero title as being "similar to Crackdown," but went even a step further, comparing the game to forthcoming Prototype. "This is an RPG, but it's also an action game. You won't stand in front of each other watching attack animations play."   It shouldn't be too surprising that SOE is laying on a healthy smattering of action key words. DCUO is poised to hit both the PC and PS3 platforms (and before anyone asks, Oge was clear that it was a done-when-its-done proposition. They're committed to shipping a finished product.) That second platform is inhabited by games like God of War and, by the time DCUO releases, the superhero action game inFamous. The player base will be expecting a certain degree of comic book action out of their comic book game.    Again and again, Oge and the other SOE employees suggested to players of the pre-alpha build that they toss benches, cars, and even buses at each other. This was perhaps best illustrated when the pre-made, player controlled villain "Kid Frostbite" zapped hero "Afterburner" with a freeze ray, locking him into a big block of ice before tossing him away into the skyline of Metropolis.   The demo available at the con focused on giving players quickly recharging powers (which are organized by set, with staff there saying that players can pick from multiple sets as they reach higher experience levels.) This meant that there was little waiting around for powers to come back into play, and the action was constant. Even the travel powers, a hallmark of MMOs and a defining feature of superhero settings, were PHYSICAL. Superspeed allowed one hero to sprint up the walls of buildings. Flight includes the ability to boost into high speeds, sacrificing some control precision. Moving, fighting, being in this world... it felt like an action game. Even the organization of missions seems to suggest a push towards open world mayhem and away from mushroom collection and bandit slaying. The segment of the world presented to players at NYCC was a huge chunk of Metropolis, the action focusing around the S.T.A.R. Labs building. Heroes were alerted that big-bad Doomsday was tearing apart the interior of those very labs, and to get in and stop him they had to take out a certain number of the attacking forces.    This might seem a lot like standard MMO questing, but it differs in two key ways. First, the quest you're performing is also constantly active in the world itself. The NPCs (both heroic and villainous) were constantly doing battle around the location, making the locale feel like a constant siege. Second, the reward is different. Instead of rewarding your flower picking with some XP and a little dough, the real reward from this sort of "Get n of X" mission is the instanced content that follows: in this case a showdown with Doomsday, and with backup from the big guy himself, Superman.   And that's where things get a little murky. After blasting commandos with Afterburner's laser rays, tossing a car onto an incoming set of spies, and atomic-upper-cutting a villain played by a player elsewhere in the DCUO booth, it was easy to feel comfortable with the "kinetic" (another keyword) play. Expectations were high for the Doomsday fight. And to be frank, it was a let down (and a peak behind the curtain of design.) The combat on the outside could be fast paced because things died quickly. Even against the other player character, power blasts and physical slams sent the characters flying down the road. But inside of S.T.A.R. Labs, watching Superman square off against Doomsday was a lot like watching a warrior fight a rat in Everquest circa 1999.   Yes, that's harsh. And it ought be. Inside that computer lab, the entire vibe of the game was betrayed by the Oge's final selling point: "License." The truth is, being tied to a license is a benefit and a liability, just ask BioWare. Being stuck inside of a continuity, especially one as storied as DC's, means making fans happy and remaining internally consistent while still trying to be FUN.  Staring at Doomsday swing and hit Superman, and then Superman swing and hit Doomsday as Afterburner cleared the room of no-name goons, is, well, correct in one sense. The up and comer would be left with clean up duty when facing a menace that almost killed Supes. But in the more important sense, in the sense that this is a video game, it wasn't fun, and it wasn't satisfying.    After dropping all of the henchmen, the final showdown with Doomsday left the player character expending all of his powers in a row, then waiting for them to recharge, standing or hovering a few feet away from the massive grey titan. Like the old man in the booth revealed to be Oz, all of that fast-paced action was shown to be window dressing. Dial the numbers up high enough and the physics-based combat just doesn't matter. Throwing a table at Doomsday isn't like throwing one at a row of thugs. And slowly watching his health drain isn't like sending a group of incoming peace keepers flying. This was not an action game. It was slow. It was tedious. It was button pressing with no real "play." It was an MMO in the traditional sense.    "In the traditional sense," in the sense that René Descartes might use to insult men who believed that the health of body and mind was determined by the four humours.   I saw behind the curtain of DCUO in that moment, and in honesty, that feels a little unfair. So here, look behind mine. The role of the critic is not to whittle away at a thing until some universal value rating is found. Certainly, a reader should be moved to some mindset by these impressions, but what we do as writers is also to stimulate creation and challenge the artist. The game is pre-alpha. That doesn't mean that critics should go easy on its design. If anything, now is the time to be vocal because things can still change.   SOE is clearly passionate, and are on the right track to creating a game that embodies DC's world and characters: the key be figuring out how to embody DC gameplay, which is something that simply doesn't exist yet. More than that, we'll see in DCUO an attempt to overcome WoW by combining a bankable license with frenetic action (a feature that I believe SOE can still pull off.) Whether or not the PS3's audience will hop on board or not is yet to be seen, but we might get a preview of how console players react to MMOs with the next game on the docket...   DC Universe Online wasn't the only MMO featuring capes and cowls at this year's New York Comic Con. Also on floor and playable was the latest effort from Los Gatos, California based Cryptic Studios, Champions Online. If DCUO brings the general MMO experience and long history of developer Sony Online Entertainment, then Champions brings a very specific sort of familiarity. After all, Cryptic brought together MMOs and superheros for the first time with their 2004 release City of Heroes (and it's pseudo-sequel City of Villains.) But that released before World of Warcraft, and as online gamers emigrated en masse into Azeroth, Cryptic began to develop their next project: Marvel Universe Online. When this project was eventually scrapped, its resources and dev team were eventually incorporated into Cryptic's new superhero MMO, Champions Online. Champions would be based on the 28 year old tabletop role-playing game of the same name, which will conveniently be releasing its brand new edition in August of this year.   This might seem like a long, unnecessary history lesson, but in this case it is very important to understand the structure of Champions Online in order to differentiate how Cryptic wants to beat out WoW from how SOE plans to. After all, playing the demo at NYCC and speaking with both a content creator on the game and Design Director (and industry icon) Bill Roper about the game's direction and feature set brings to mind three very familiar words: Action, Physics, License. (If these don't strike you, be sure to check out my preview of DCUO.) Much like DCUO's creators, Cryptic claims that their game will draw people away from WoW, or into MMOs for the first time, because unlike their primary competition they are offering a fast paced action RPG instead of a stand-and-watch affair. Still not sure why knowing the timeline matters? Then take a look at how Cryptic fufills these promises and compare them to SOE's outing, and see if you can connect some of the dots.   To some degree, Champions Online feels very much like the sequel to City of Heroes. Perspective, costume design, animation, user interface: even where improved, they feel just like home to someone who's spent some hours cleaning the streets of CoH's Paragon City.   The aspects that do feel different do so substantially, and are all grounded in game design. Where CoH forced players to pick an archetype and then a pair of power sets at the beginning of play (a Scrapper with fiery fists and invulnerability, for instance), Champions offers players a long list of powers to build their character with. How would someone like Superman (with his super breath, super strength, heat vision, etc.) fit in to a class system, right? Well, to anyone who's played a console or computer or pen-and-paper RPG, this might send up warning flags: classes and archetypes and the like exist in order to make the game fair. After all, without balancing, some of us might make power choices leading us to be Superman, and others, well, how is Stilt-man doing these days?   Bill Roper, Design Director on the project, was vocally confident that Cryptic could build a system that works, and maybe more telling, he insisted that this was the only way to do it. "Superheroes don't always fit into those sorts rigid classes. Here, we let players really create the sort of hero they want to."    Roper, a long time player of the PnP version of Champions, also explained that their game would allow players to specialized. Called the "Role System," players will be able to pick out a sort of temporary class. This changes the way they recover power-enabling endurance points, gives bonuses to stats, and allows a group of players to better make up for each other's weaknesses.   "Plus," Roper says, "It solves that old MMO debate: 'You're an awful tank! I could tank better than you!' Now you can say 'Oh yeah? Prove it.' It just works." By pitch alone, this sounds reminiscent of games like Call of Duty 4 and the Team Fortress series. By allowing players access to numerous powers, but then suggesting temporary roles, there seems to be a lot of possibility for some really unique characters. As mentioned, Roles help define how you recover endurance points. Endurance, was a large element of CoH, but was barely different than any other RPGs mana, or magic points, or ability points. It was just the 'stuff-I-know-not-what' that a hero needed to fire laser blasts or fly through the air. In practice, it still does the same things in CO. But unlike City of Heroes, WoW, and many other MMOs, Cryptic aims to change the way Endurance is gained, and in turn change the way MMOs are played.   Roper explains, "It just doesn't make any sense. A hero doesn't sit down an take a knee when he's fighting his nemesis and say 'Oh man, I'm too tired to shoot another energy ray. I better rest up.' He fights. And we're looking to emulate that feeling here." Instead of taking a potion, or a break, to regain Endurance, you get it back through two methods. First, every character begins the game with a special power that they can use at any point at no cost. In fact, it generates endurance, powering the rest of your abilities.     Whether or not they meant to, this design choice really summarizes the way that Cryptic is handling "The WoW Problem." They're not looking to simulate being a extra-normal hero, they're making an amalgamation of what it feels like to read a superhero comic book with what it's like to play a game. Comic heroes are physical, frenetic, active beings. They are not, except in times of human weakness, passive creatures. There is never a time when you aren't doing something, even if it's just your basic punch combo or power shot. Plus, the abilities don't require you to remain in a single place while they activate, allowing you to bounce from place to place, taking on enemies from all angles. You know, the way a superhero might.   Maybe Cryptic realized that a license can be a weight around your neck when they lost the work they put into Marvel Online, but whatever the case it's clear that they are making a game here before they're making a Champions game. And that's why, despite being a licensed game, they are in an advantageous position creatively to DCUO's dev team. Sony Online Entertainment needs to focus on creating a world that's believably one-in-the-same with their weekly releases. Cryptic only needs to make a world that feels comic-y. As far as the license they do have goes, they also have the advantage that the Champions table-top RPG is being relaunched and they don't have to worry too much about stomping on the feet of long time fans.  I'm not about to go easy on them, despite my own being a long time fan, though. The fact of it is, it still feels too familiar. If DCUOjust fails at feeling like an action game, then Champions Online didn't even show up to the test. Yes, you CAN run around while psi-blasting people, but it just isn't intuitive to do so. Time and time again the people demoing the game had to remind players not to just stand there and take it on the chin. It feels awkward to run and gun, and comfortable to stay rooted to the ground. Likewise, some of the new ways to deploy your powers (charging up shots for more damage, for instance) make it a little more complicated to juggle between powers, but I believe that will become easier with time and practice.    Just like DCUO, Champions doesn't yet fulfill the promise of being an action-rpg hybrid. For some players, used to WoW and CoH, that might prove a good thing - but it won't draw in the untapped market that Cryptic is aiming for. That said, the design changes that they've implemented are impressive and forward thinking. Even if they only mean being a more interesting, complex MMORPG, they're a welcome addition. Champions online is already in a closed beta, but history shows that it's never to late to fix things with an MMO: Just look at WoW.   The fact is, this preview is a publisher's nightmare. No where did I mention the numerous, varied areas of the game, the nemesis system, or the any of the other  long list of bullet point features that they want to get the word out on. The reason? Because those don't matter. Time and time again those cool features fall by the wayside to a new WoW Expansion (or sometimes even a new WoW patch.) What Cryptic is really trying to do with their eschewing of the class system is simply more, well, revolutionary.    Both SOE and Cryptic are looking to build in new areas, but neither seems willing to go all out and ditch the standard RPG raiments all together. Nor should they necessarily do that. But there was a game showing at NYCC last weekend that did take that step...   (Comment on this)

<< Previous Day

2009/02/16 [Calendar]

Next Day >>