Monthly Archive for March, 2009

Geocultural Sensitivity and The Art of Video Games

Published by Jarred on March 25, 2009 in Art, Business and Culture. View Comments

This post is out there a bit, but humor me.

An interesting man named Tom Edwards stopped by Google today to give a talk about “Geocultural Intelligence and Global Business”.  A geographer and designer by training, he spent thirteen years at Microsoft as a Geopolitical Strategist, vetting products before they launched to be sure that they would not raise any ill feelings — or outright outrage — among foreign governments or other constituencies.  He’s since gone on to found Englobe, a consultancy that expands his work to a broader platform.

To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, I’ll give you a few examples that he shared with us.  Did you know, for example, that Windows 95 was temporarily prevented from being sold in India because the borders of the Kashmir region were not drawn to the government’s liking in the time zone settings (yes, that tiny 1.5×4″ map!)?  Or that several video games have been recalled from, delayed, or outright canceled in some countries because their soundtracks included chanted prayers from the Qu’ran, or because they featured radioactive two-headed Brahman cows that were… edible during gameplay?  Or that Turkey blocks a majority of YouTube traffic in its borders because of videos critical of Ataturk?

At Englobe, Tom’s adapted the idea of “geopolitical” to “geocultural“, and for good reason.  Samuel Huntington proposed back in the 1990s that the powderkegs of the post-Cold War era would not explode primarily over traditional political or military disputes, but rather over cultural and religious conflicts.  It’s certainly hard to argue that this hypothesis is not well on its way to proving true.  This shifting dynamic is not limited to the realm of geopolitics, however.  In the business world, too, we increasingly see the importance of national boundaries fading as so many diverse markets begin to merge into a truly global one.  While governments will still often be the official agents for expressing concern or taking action regarding geocultural issues, the issue goes much beyond the political realm.

I don’t want to rehash Tom’s talk or dive too deep into the details, but I wanted to toss out a thought, which I also posed to him in a question at the end of the talk.  To many people — and especially to developers themselves — video games are not just products.  To them (and me), video games are also an art.  Those who develop the elaborate narratives, painstakingly model the characters, precisely design the environments, labor over how the characters will move and how the user will interact with and feel a part of the virtual world they create — these people, to a certain extent, are artists.

Yes, video games form a mammoth entertainment industry.  But unlike musicians or writers or painters, video game developers can’t just set up a studio in their garage to achieve the pinnacle of their art.  They require complicated tools and training to reach the levels they want, and those things cost money.  Furthermore, the distribution of their work is tightly controlled by the console manufacturers, since video games require access to console APIs (remember this post?) to work at all.   Among the media of art, theirs is perhaps one of the most constrained in terms of access and resources.

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Passing On Your Cloud

Published by Jarred on March 11, 2009 in Computing, Data Portability and Legal Issues. View Comments

During my time at college, our small Davidson community (there are only around 1,700 students) was twice saddened by the death of fellow undergrads: Josiah Cameron (who would have been graduating this year) in April 2006, and then Jay Chitty (a fellow classmate of Taylor and myself) in December of the same year.  Like the rest of the college, I was sickened with grief — for their families, their friends, and for the sudden vanishing of such young and promising lives from the Earth.  But, when my shock had finally dissipated and I had come to terms with the reality of their passing, I had a fleeting (and admittedly somewhat morbid) thought.

What happens to your online presence when your physical one is no longer?  Intrigued, I visited their Facebook pages.  My mind was racing.  “What’s going to happen to all these wall comments that were accumulated over the years?  What about the comments people left for him on his Thanksgiving photos?  Who decides when it is time to close this account?  What’s the procedure?  Does it all just disappear?”

I’ll understand if you perceive these to be insensitive and petty questions in the face of such a tragic subject, and perhaps for the present times it is indeed a little irrelevant.  But if you are paying even the smallest bit of attention to what is happening in technology, you are certainly aware of two things.  First, more and more of your personal “effects” — e-mail, photos, documents, music — are being turned into 1′s and 0′s and kept online.  Second, the tiny actions we take online (like leaving comments or clicking the “like” button on a Facebook news feed item) are little pieces of a larger online narrative that, in a sense, journal our lives for us.  If determining the fate of this data once we’re gone is not a crucial question to address right now, it certainly will be in the next two to three years.

Take your personal e-mail, for example.  E-mail has succeeded letter writing as a principal form of communication among most people of my generation.  My grandmother has letters from my grandfather when he was fighting in Guam, and I wouldn’t doubt that my parents have a few keepers stashed in a shoebox somewhere.  But most of the written missives that are important to me are either archived somewhere in my Gmail account, or stashed in a folder of PDF’d e-mails that I saved from my old college e-mail account.

Touching emails from friends in far away places, notes of encouragement or praise from professors, love letters sent to old girlfriends, my first e-mail back from Google telling me they wanted to interview me… if I were to die today, what would be the fate of these messages?  Would they sit in my account for a year or two until it was deactivated due to inactivity, eventually deleted to make way for more messages among the living?  Would someone know to go into my computer and save that PDF file?  Would I have been prescient enough to stash my password somewhere for my survivors to find it, or to include instructions in a will or elsewhere detailing if (and unto whom) I wanted that data to be bequeathed?

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How Twitter Content Can Be Simple and Compelling

Published by Taylor on March 9, 2009 in Twitter and Web 2.0. View Comments

Jarred and I are proud alumni of a small, prestigious liberal arts college in North Carolina named Davidson.  As soon as we left, the college eliminated loans in financial aid packages, the men’s basketball team made a storybook run to the Elite Eight, and the notoriously underwhelming Spring concert suddenly became a venue for one of our favorite bands (though, to be fair, Ben Folds and Bob Dylan’s band both rocked).

For further proof that Davidson is improving by leaps and bounds without me and Jarred around, one need look no further than the college’s latest use of social media.

Davidson’s application for admission is notoriously extensive.  In addition to the common application and long essay, prospective students must solicit teacher and peer recommendations, write essays on topics ranging from the college’s honor code to characteristics of Davidson that inspired the individual to apply, and provide a list of books they’ve read the past year.  The admissions counselors I’ve known at Davidson have often commented that these application portfolios are often a source of inspiration, humor, wisdom beyond the applicants’ years, and tremendously interesting stories.

Now some of these nuggets of wisdom, humility, hilarity, and inspiration have found a home on (where else, for nugget-size wisdom?) Twitter.  Here’s a sampling from @DCAdmission, a Twitter feed compiled by admissions counselors quoting quasi-anonymous applicants from around the country:

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Changing Congress

Published by Jarred on March 4, 2009 in Politics. View Comments

Two weeks ago, I was lucky enough to watch Lawrence Lessig give a presentation to Googlers about his new Change Congress movement.  Lessig is renowned for his unique presentation style (he probably uses every Keynote transition and effect there is), and it was indeed a very engaging experience.  I’m embedding the recording of that presentation at the end of this post — you should definitely check it out.

The Change Congress website describes the movement’s purpose thusly:

Right now, special interests have more influence over our political system than regular folks because of our broken campaign finance laws. These special interests pump millions of dollars into congressional campaigns each cycle, and as a result, they block real change on issue after issue.

Here at Change Congress, we believe that politicians should work for the people, not special interests. But it’s not enough to push politicians to stay out of the system of corruption—we have to reform the system itself. That’s why we support a hybrid of small-dollar donations and public financing, to keep big money out of politics.

Change Congress is supporting new legislation that will be introduced in the next few weeks to reform campaign finance laws:

Under this legislation, congressional candidates who raise a threshold number of small-dollar donations would qualify for a chunk of funding—several hundred thousand dollars. If they accept this funding, they can’t raise big-dollar donations. But they can raise contributions up to a certain amount (such as $100 or $250), which would be matched several times over by a central fund. This would create an incentive for politicians to opt into this system and run people-powered campaigns.

But while this bill shows more promise than ever of passing (President Obama is reportedly going to advocate for it), Lessig’s new organization is not just pushing legislation; it’s also trying to get people involved.  To kick off its campaign, Change Congress is organizing what it is calling a “donor strike”.  Essentially, it is asking supporters — that is, ordinary Joes and Sallys like you and me — to withhold contributions to politicians who do not explicitly support the hybrid model of campaign financing that Change Congress champions.

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It’s Not About the Technology, and This Isn’t the Jetsons

Published by Taylor on March 3, 2009 in Computing, Culture and Gadgets. View Comments

Let me paint a picture for you that, despite the snark, is not an exaggeration:

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At a conference I attended recently, a speaker made the legitimate and important point that technology–particularly broadband–should be included in our definition of “infrastructure.”  In order to illustrate this point, and the potential economic boom that virtual commuting represents for rural communities, we watched a video…featuring a family that was unrecognizable to even the most tech savvy people in the room.

Look, it’s Dad on his Bluetooth headset in the kitchen.  Mixing fruit salad as he talks to his colleagues in NY or Atlanta.  It’s a snow day, but instead of sledding or starting a snowball fight, little Johnny and Susie are downloading their assignments from the web, listening to 7th grade history lectures on podcasts, and exercising on the treadmill.  They’re even (gasp!) attending class in a virtual world reminiscent of Second Life.  All the while Dad is locked in his office working remotely while Mom places inventory orders for her small business.

Here’s my issue.  Nobody–and I mean nobody–loses sleep over the question of what their children will do if they can’t access their school work on a snow day. Likewise, though many of us imagine working primarily from a home office some day, that vision maintains some semblance of connection to our current lived experience: leaving the house, interacting offline with friends and peers, and (you guessed it) PLAYING OUTSIDE IN THE SNOW.

People see this sort of technologically-dominated futurecasting and become overwhelmed by the disconnect, seemingly caused (worsened?) by technology, between their lives and this vision!  Because when the focal point is the shiny gadget and the slick interface, we’re not solving problems anymore.

Technology is more integrated into our lives now than we could have ever realistically imagined 20 years ago.  Yet, instead of recognizing how current and emerging technologies can help us accomplish great things, we’re  still wasting energy trying to figure out why our lives don’t resemble EPCOT and the Jetsons.

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