That was quick

William Gibson once complained innovation moves so fast now that it’s just about impossible to write science fiction. Now, it seems, that it moves so fast that one can barely speculate ahead of the curve, much less put it in fiction form.

Earlier this week, I speculated , somewhat unoriginally, that if one could use Facebook as a platform to recruit clients for a MMORPG and keep them connected through multiple devices even outside of the game, they would have a World of Warcraft challenger.

Hours later, Blizzard announced a new iPhone app to conduct auctions within the game, even when you aren’t logged onto the Warcraft software client (today, Penny Arcade skewered the concept).

This action proves that Blizzard understands the threat posed by social media platforms, and it also raises a whole new set of interesting problems. One of the great things about Blizzard’s nearly airtight software client was that it limited that damage that bots could do in their fantasy world. The company has strenuously fought to level the playing field level and keep the economy from crashing. Opening the game to a more neutral platform like Facebook might compromise that tight control.

Which brings us to another point about Blizzard’s relationship to the iPhone. With the Armory and now the auctions on the Apple platform, will the company branch out to Google’s Android, RIM”s Blackberry and other mobile platforms? Or will it stay safely inside Apple’s sealed app system?

Facebook, the MMORPG

The humbling thing about the Internet is that you can instantly discover just how unoriginal you really are. Take my “brilliant” idea for a massively multiplayer online roll playing game: Put it on Facebook. Amazing, right? You take the addictive atavism of World of Warcraft and build it around Facebook’s ubiquitous social infrastructure, instantly reaching 350 million users with the lure of fantasy adventure. I am a genius.

And so is everyone else.

EverQuest designer Ryan Barker stated in June that he believes WoW could dramatically increase its 11.5 million user base, if the title was on Facebook. And Gamasutra made a laborious examination of merging the two concepts as recently as December. What strikes me as hilarious about these two articles is that neither mentions last year’s attempt by social media gaming giant Zynga to do just that with its short-lived Facebook fantasy RPG.

First known as Burning Realms and then as Guild of Heroes, the game launched this time last year and was abruptly shut down in July 2009. The lack of any tearful postmortem of the game’s demise on Google leads me to believe it didn’t have a terribly dedicated fanbase. After hunting for a bit, I found a Nov. 2009 Forbes article that said Zynga CEO Mark Pincus killed the game after spending $2 million to develop it. In an earlier interview with the blog Notes from a Wireframe World, Pincus was quoted as saying:

“Farmville was a hit, Guild of Heroes was a big flop. …Everyone in our office did like Guild of Heroes, and we killed it because the metrics sucked.”

Or the game sucked. I never played it, but it I saw it described as a 2D isometric Diablo clone. Given my experience with the animation quality of Zynga’s “ville” series of games, I can’t imagine the game posed a serious challenge to WoW’s audience.

But I don’t really think the key to leveraging Facebook for an MMO lies in browser-based games like Zynga’s. I see Facebook serving as the catalyst for interacting with MMOs while the player is stranded with only a browser or mobile device. Imagine Facebook Connect being the conduit for something like WoW’s Armory on steroids.

Currently, WoW is very much a closed ecosystem, better than Second Life, but still learning to play with the larger web. I’ll let my level 80 mage friend describe the problem:

The game is rather self-enclosed. There is no real mechanism that pushes out information from the game world to another application… There are ways to query the game, to glean information on characters – such as their guild name, gear, etc. – but no way to tell if the user is logged into the [game] client. You can ping the server to see if it is up or down, but this in no way allows you to ping characters on the server.”

Instead of just reading stats about other players and guilds, imagine being able to chat, schedule raids and do loot business inside Warcraft or some other game from your mobile phone while sitting on the bus (or in a meeting). Sure, you may not play the actual game on the Facebook site or phone app, but you could use the Facebook Connect platform to suture an MMO to the larger Web ecosystem.

Talk about addicting.

However, Zynga’s failure raises crucial questions. Is there even an audience for this? Yes, Facebook does have a hell of a user base, but how big is the fantasy RPG niche of that base? And has Blizzard, whose admittedly pretty amazing WoW support web sites are well-used, claimed that niche already?

Farmville: What is it teaching people?

My Farmville farm, Orgasmo Organic, at the height of its powers.

The social network game Farmville has been in the news a lot lately. From the New York Times treatment to the whole Scamville uproar to the revelation that those practicing point-n-click agriculture outnumber Twitter-ers (Twits?), much has been made about how more people harvest virtual crops in this country than those who harvest real ones.

The reason more people play at agriculture than work in it is because most Americans don’t buy their food from farms anymore. They purchase it from giant conglomerates that use gargantuan food factories (Contained Animal Feeding Operations, for example) like those profiled in the documentary Food Inc. The cheeky Real Life Farmville Project is aiming to change that ratio, but I suspect real life farming will not appeal very much to gaming gardeners. The reason is that Zynga’s Farmville projects such a sanitized, bloodless and bucolic view of farming that most of its fans wouldn’t recognize the real thing.

Let’s take a look at Zynga’s worst offenses:

No weather zones: Weather does not exist in Farmville. I have banana trees and date palms growing on the same farm as apple trees and sugar maples. I’m bringing two fields of pineapples out of the ground in the dead of winter with snow blanketing the farm. This is madness. Weather patterns and seasons are integral to farming, yet, in Farmville, every plant comes with its own perfectly attuned micro-climate. You can buy greenhouses, but they are decorative. And rain? What’s that?

Bizarre skill levels: How many hobby gardeners do you know who say, “I think I’m going to plant some aloe vera and pink roses this season.” None. They grow peas, tomatoes and onions here in the States. Yet, if you want to grow such staples in Farmville, you are first going to have to master aloe and roses. Makes perfect sense… No, it doesn’t. Whoever drew up the skill level hurdles for crops in this game never once picked up a rotor tiller. They remind me of the geniuses who developed Fallout 3: Point Lookout … and never visited Point Lookout, MD. And the whole concept of restricting what you can plant and when you can plant it seems bizarre to me as well. What is this, Monsanto: The Game?

No blood: Perhaps this part of the game was done to appease all the militant vegetarians out there, but, last time I checked, most farms do not raise turkeys and geese for their feathers. Pigs do not spontaneously produce or find truffles. And I have yet to see a successful business plan based around “brushing” calves and lambs. These animals are raised for meat, and they do not evolve naturally into foam and plastic packets of boneless protein. They must be slaughtered and butchered, but you won’t find a single abattoir listed among the houses and barns offered for sale in Farmville. This also avoids another thorny issue of modern animal husbandry – antibiotic overdose. If PETA wasn’t so out of touch, it might have developed a Farmville satire, showing the real life of a food animal, instead of its clumsy attack on Cooking Mama.

No maintenance: The most work-intensive actions you take in Farmville are plowing, planting, fertilizing and harvesting – three actions that, in real life – are done in two short seasonal bursts. The large majority of real farming work is weeding, spraying and irrigation. Farmville’s crops and trees never have to be sprayed for bugs or even watered, and weeding is done only on friends’ farms with the click of a single button. Don’t get me started on the lack of any nutrient management planning. But I’ll end on a note of what I thought was common sense: If your friends did decide to come over and “fertilize” your already growing real life crops with manure that came from your cows, as they do in Farmville, your entire crop would be contaminated with E. coli bacteria.

Anyway, for all its faults, I have enjoyed my time in Farmville far more than Zynga’s other flagship product, Mafia Wars. But I don’t think that a game this popular gets a pass with the “it’s just a game” excuse, anymore than violent video games get a pass for their role in desensitizing players. Food production is one of the most important aspects of any functioning society, yet it has become one of the most mysterious in American culture. The fact that Zynga can make a farming game that is this popular while being so wildly divorced from reality is a sad commentary on both the company and its fans’ level of agricultural ignorance. Even SimCity taught basic urban planning, even if it did ride roughshod over little things, like property rights.

Farmville does get one thing right, though. Large-scale farming is fuel intensive. After rapidly expanding my farm using the free fuel bonanza of the holiday season, I’ve run out of the free fuel refills, and I refuse to pay real money for any more of the stuff. I also refuse to manually plow, plant and harvest my virtual crops. After all, it’s just a game, right?

Cheap gaming roundup, PS2 edition

For the last couple of years, as Sony and Microsoft have touted their HD dream toys, and Nintendo has hounded us to buy yet another add-on for its “cheap” console, the Playstation 2 has been in a golden period. The platform has enjoyed a low entry price point ($99 for a Playstation 2 slim and one controller), a gigantic library of games and continued quality software support from the big boys like EA and Ubisoft as well as import publisher Atlus. It may not be the latest and flashiest machine, but now is the time to be a Playstation 2 fan, as quality software litters pawn shops and retailer bargain bins.

Over the holidays, I went on a cheap game buying tear, picking up three titles that missed my attention as I have been paying most of my attention to my Nintendo Wii. My interest in the Wii is petering out, and I’m considering a PS3 purchase, so I wanted to have some quality time with these games before my next gaming obsession begins.

Odin Sphere: One of the last Wii games I’m still interested in purchasing before moving on is Muramasa: The Demon Blade, a gorgeous Vanillaware production and somewhat of a spiritual sequel to the side-scrolling action RPG Odin Sphere. Odin Sphere is nothing if not pretty. The stylized, hand-drawn artwork, huge sprites and inspired animation are a joy to watch. But the game gets bogged down by a rigid fighting system, godawful voice acting and a camera locked too close to the main character to allow the player to see much else. I made it to the end of the second level before losing my patience with the clunky (and too small) inventory system. This is definitely a try-before-you-buy, but it hasn’t turned me off to trying Muramasa, just paying full price for it.

Rogue Galaxy: Rogue Galaxy was also another proxy test for a PS3 game I’m very interested to play – Level 5’s White Knight Chronicles. I’m a huge fan of Level 5’s art design, to the point that I still have a soft spot for Dragon Quest VIII and the Dark Cloud series, despite the games’ puddle-like depth. I was hoping that Rogue Galaxy would be Level 5’s breakout hit, a challenger to the Final Fantasy homogeny. But, as it stands, I had a hard time even getting through the first section so the game. The decent visuals and competent-if-clunky action RPG system didn’t turn me off. Even the blatant Star Wars sampling (a young man yearning to escape a desert planet, an older guide, an effeminate robot; etc.) didn’t bother me too badly. No, it was the voice acting that was too godawful to bear. As with Dark Cloud, Level 5 spared every expense for the English translation, only making sure to include much more awfulness to make us feel we’re gettting our money’s worth. Play this one with no sound. You won’t miss much of the story if you’ve ever played a Final Fantasy game.

Psychonauts: What can I say about this game that hasn’t already been said? It’s a masterpiece. I’m only halfway through it, and I can confidently say that. If Brutal Legend was your first Double Fine experience, then I suggest you pick this game up on Steam ($2!) and wash the bad taste out of your mouth. I can and will complain about the game’s tortured PS2 control scheme and dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb stupid-ass camera, but the writing, animation, voice acting, level design  and artwork far surpass just about anything save perhaps Nintendo’s efforts in the past 5 years. This is a cult classic, and it deserves a sequel.

Layar is awesome, I think

I have been salivating over this thing.

The Layar browser the only reason I’m even considering a two-year marriage to an ugly stalker. I think this is the razor edge of information systems integration, ripe for all kinds of fun and scary applications. I’ve read Spook Country, watched all the online videos, and even visited the Wikitude site, uploading all kinds of useless location-based information so I can show it off to my amazed friends … when I get a phone that can run it. Here in the Washington, D.C. region, the Blackberry is king, and my Blackberry Curve is not known for its muscle.

I finally got my hands on the software today after months of fantasizing about what it could be. I grabbed a display Droid at the Verizon booth in the local BJs store and downloaded the app as I listened to two saleswomen have a disturbing conversation about the distressing state of the local cellular phone market. I gratefully returned my attention to the Droid and started the app. I began swinging the Droid around me (as much as I could tethered to a security cord). There wasn’t much to see on the screen, given that I was stuck in the middle of a big box store. The browser rumored the presence of a Pizza Hut Carryout store a few miles to the south. I switched up to the Wikipedia layer and was informed that I was, indeed, in the town in which I was standing. However, when I tapped the icon, no Wiki article loaded.

By this point, I had attracted the attention of the salesladies, who descended on me with a hunger in their eyes that cannot be politely described. I ceased my experiment and quickly retreated.

Because of the brevity of my testing and the lack of data to test, I’m not sure how I feel about the Layar browser yet. It was much faster than I anticipated, but I didn’t really stress it. So, I’m left with yet more anticipation.

The Pad and the POTUS

I slunk back to Twitter again Wednesday night during the State of the Union Address to post my up-to-the-minute venom, since CNN’s Facebook mashup only managed to hobble Facebook and clutter the site’s content-rich feed. [I'll admit this is Twitter's one strength over Facebook. Its short messages are easy for the reader to parse, and its trending topics, which could be implemented better, make it ideal to create impromptu chat rooms between complete strangers united only by their interest in a single topic.]

Anyway, during my grousing, I saw a great re-tweet from, of all people, John Mayer (verified account, no less) that read:

More people would watch the State of the Union Address if President Obama introduced a new gadget at the end. Just saying.

Amen. A quick look at the trending topics sidebar for both the USA and Washington, D.C. during Obama’s speech showed Steve Jobs’ newest trinket dominating four or five of the top 10 topics. “Union address” clung to the bottom of the list for dear life, beaten even by the derogatory iTampon tag.

I confess I don’t really see the appeal of the iPad. No, I do see the appeal for other people, born before 1980 and crippled by raging technofear. But the damn things is just a big iPod touch with the same proprietary everything. No USB. No SD slot. No Adobe Flash. No multitasking. No physical keyboard (though you’ll probably be able to purchase one from the inevitable ecosystem of baubles and augmentations that tend to orbit around Apple products). And, the most disappointing of all – no revolutionary interface.

It’s as closed as a closed platform can be, a hermetically sealed media ecosystem rivaled only by Amazon’s Kindle. The media giants like this aspect of it, since it strongly discourages file sharing. And the business offices of the Washington Post Company have been abuzz with speculation of how this could save journalism. However, with MSI announcing a tablet and Verizon busily flooding the East Coast with Droid phones, Google is creating a (somewhat) open software ecosystem with its Android platform. Andoid may not stymie Apple’s momentum, but it could slow it down considerably.

Finally, $800. Seriously? For an overgrown media player?

Twitter: Slightly less worthless now

If you don’t own stake in a tech company, work in media or live close to a downtown metropolitan area, you are excused from thinking that Twitter is an over-hyped leftover curiosity from the now retreating mobile phone Short Message System era. Seriously, what the hell is the point of “tweeting” text when you are no longer bound by SMS’s arbitrary character limit or lack of graphics? Anyone with a slightly smart phone (soon to be just about everyone) has access to MMS or robust social media applications.

I stopped using Twitter for anything in October after Facebook did some heavy updates to its Blackberry application, eliminating my desire to use the lightweight Twitter app for quick Facebook updates. Despite some excellent content finally appearing on the service (Fake AP Stylebook, Shit My Dad Says and Time Lost Batman), I was done with the whole concept. I uninstalled the Twitter app from my Facebook account, locked down the Twitter account and walked away. The only thing that has been appearing on my Twitter feed since then are the update notices sent out by this WordPress blog.

However, as I’ve been helping The Redhead update her blog and Etsy store over the last two days, I’ve reluctantly returned to Twitter to see how it has changed. Overall, it’s slightly less worthless than it used to be. Site performance has definitely improved, although it is after the holidays. I like the retweet button, the local trending topic sidebar and the lists function…but where the hell are simple things like Twitpic integration?

Facebook made massive design and privacy changes to its site to head off the slightest advantage that Twitter might gain from its freewheeling, open-door nature, but Twitter has done little to integrate the Frankenstein’s monster of off-site services that make its system even remotely competitive. Where can I find a comprehensive list of popular off site Twitter apps? How about an automatically scrolling list of tweets, saving me from having to refresh the static site for the latest? This is basic, basic stuff that hundreds of other web noodlers and ne’er-do-wells have cobbled together over the last few months, but they are not reflected in Twitter’s web site, the first place people go when their friends finally harass them into using the service.

Paranoid about the Droid

The Droid. It's both ugly and a stalker.

Earlier this month, I copped my first drunken feel on a new Motorola Droid, Verizon and Google’s bid to dethrone the almighty Apple iPhone. My initial impression, through the haze of gin, was that the Droid was aimed at the insecure male, uncomfortable with Apple’s vaguely homosexual minimalist aesthetic and almost humanly empathetic interface. The Droid’s Darth Vader lines and douchy Flash web site did little to dampen this assessment.

But feelings change. With tax rebate time looming, I’ve been seriously considering upgrading my Smartphone status from my lowly Blackberry Curve to something that can actually surf the web and do interesting things. My relationship with my Curve started out reservedly affectionate and moved into a solid partnership, but now it just reminds me of all the things I’m missing from not being with a younger, sexier phone.

So, despite my distaste for Verizon’s marketing department and Motorola’s styling, I’ve been warming to the Droid as my taste for power has increased. It may not be as sexy and fast as the Nexus One or have the software support of the iPhone, but, here in Southern Maryland, those concerns pale in comparison to network availability. And I would rather have a slightly inferior phone running on Verizon’s network than the biggest collection of bells and whistles chained to AT&T or T-Mobile.

So, I spent some quality time with the Droid and its little brother, the Droid Eris, this afternoon at the local Verizon shop. The Eris is a crapcicle; enough about it. And the Droid? Well, I like the physical keyboard, and it’s fast as hell. The touch screen, likely abused by several customers before me, didn’t have the ready responsiveness of the iPhone, and the interface was not nearly as slick and clean as the iPhone or the Palm Pre. So, my infatuation has fallen off a bit, but I haven’t fallen out of love.

What truly bothers me about this phone is that it is in just about all ways powered by Google, the omniscient tentacle beast of the Internet that could compile a dossier of your life if it could just ensure that you are the person using the device that queries it. With the Android phones, people are no longer just IP addresses. They are individuals whose every communication and query can be tracked, indexed and filed. The Droid both ugly and a stalker.

Is it really the right girl for me?

A Post in the mud

Yesterday, I saw two articles on the Interwebs that unknowingly complimented each other with such jigsaw puzzle precision that I felt compelled to actually update this here blog. The first came courtesy of a venerable source, The New Republic, and chronicled the utter collapse of the Washington Post’s newsroom over the past few years. The second oozed noxiously from Gawker’s Silicon Valley rag, Valleywag, and noted a five-point trend of old media redoubts hiring programmers to help them navigate this newfangled web thingie.

Yes, 15 years after Netscape revolutionized the World Wide Web and kicked down the old content delivery walls to allow any old idgit to rant to the masses, newspapers are still trying to figure out how to make something at which the “money for nothing and chicks for free” generation will actually bother to spend more than 5 seconds looking. There is a reason why newspapers never saw Craigslist, Yelp, Facebook, WordPress or Google coming is because they have no desire to automate anything. Automation kills jobs, right? It’s a tool of the publisher to lower costs! Hence, you have The New Republic telling the embarrassing tale of the Post locating its Web division across the Potomac from its actual news operation, creating an nasty culture clash when the two were finally forcefully merged.

Contrast this Luddite idiocy with the comments of the High Priesthood of Coding that weighed in on the comments section of the Valleywag article. Here’s a good one:

Content is the easy thing — there are millions of competent folks who can churn out copy on a variety of subjects.

Oh really? Perhaps you are referring to the drivel at Associated Content? Here’s another:

Sorry dude, but writing some HTML and poorly written CSS, neither of which passes W3C for structure and accessibility and maybe throwing in a little jQuery does not make you a programmer. … This article is obvious trolling.

I smell fear. So does another commenter:

Yes, in the future everyone will be a programmer. So, more liberal arts and business and journalism majors should take programming in college.

Oh dear God in heaven. Whatever will happen then?

It will slaughter “programming” jobs by the millions. That’s the funny thing about automation. It kills jobs dead, no matter what the job. Slowly and surely code libraries and the tools to build web apps will become more and more accessible to people who don’t think in binary. I’m writing on one of those tools right now. How many WordPress users are actually doing any coding? How many people in the future will bother with Adobe Dreamweaver and its convoluted mess of menus when someone develops a CSS editor that looks like Microsoft Word? How many straight journalists or straight coders will the world need then?

My year in Facebook, according to some bot

Not a big shocker, but Facebook and its application developers can parse your personal data in ways that the site doesn’t let you do on your own. At least, not easily.

If 2009 is remembered for anything positive, it will be the year that social media hit critical mass. As if to celebrate The New Banality, there’s now a Facebook application called My Year in Status. This could have have been around for a while. I wouldn’t know. It wasn’t until this year that the kinds of friends who are attracted to these light fare applications finally joined the site to discover and “share” them with me.

MYIS initially appears to be one of those dumb apps, like spreadsheet-driven “games” or viral quizzes, that only provide the thinnest cover of entertainment necessary to gain access to your profile and pillage your personal information. It searches through the past year of status updates, uses and algorithm to sift out the most interesting-sounding ones and collages them all on one of a half-dozen non-offensive backgrounds to form a graphic that you can then save or spam to your friends’ feeds.

I’m always interested in the flashpoint of communication between man and machine, so this app interested me purely for the novelty of seeing a pre-programmed formula edit down a full year of my mental flatulence. The result was uninspiring, so I took advantage of the app’s offer to edit the collection myself.

Lo and behold, once I clicked this option, I was given a single-page readout of my entire year of status updates, undiluted by the posts of news stories, videos and cellphone pictures that pollute the “Wall” section of my personal profile. It was just my musings, unplugged, like a daily journal written by someone in dire need of Adderall.

I’m not suggesting that this readout was any great feat of technology. I just wonder why I should have to involve a third party in order to get it. Why can’t I parse my own wall listing at will like I can with my main feed? Somebody else obviously can…