(With Star Wars, Lego, Doctor Who and Halo in it, this is easily the nerdiest post I’ve ever written, but it’s actually about something really important).

We just fought off SOPA and PIPA. ACTA is, immediately, the next fight. EMI have gone batshit crazy and are suing the Irish Government for not passing abusive laws fast enough.

Against this backdrop, The Pirate Bay have added a category for things. It’s probably a strange blip to people with their heads right down in the media industries, but as John Robb says:

The copyright battle over the control of 3D printable designs/shapes is going to make current fights over copyright look tame

and DanW:

“You wouldnt download a car” https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6960965/1970_Chevelle_Hot-Rod_3d_model (TPB, contains impolite popup ads)

It has me thinking about the way we consume stuff, right now in 2012. Shaping Things is six years old. Bruce Sterling’s lovely vision of cradle to grave recycling seems a very long way away, but his vision of the trend for objects to increasingly become information is spot on. There are important things to do with it right around the corner. At the moment, thanks to my being a member of Nottingham Hackspace, I have access to Repraps, laser cutters and CNC machines. There’s a lot of digital stuff I can draw from scratch myself then make, like this Darth Vader snowflake:

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Caveats: This is very long, you’ll probably get annoyed at the way I jump between economic, social and political factors, and the title is bastardised from lyrics in this. I use “England” and “English” a lot because England was affected far more than other parts of the UK. Hat tip to Harriett Feenstra for the term “subaltern”.

tl;dr version: The August 2011 UK riots were a very new thing, that tactically had far more in common with insurgency than with familiar types of domestic political unrest. If we want to start solving the problems that led to the rioting, we begin by eradicating the word “chav” from our everyday speech.

It’s been over seven days since the riots died down here in the UK. It was a tense and wearing week, especially for business owners.

Something really dysfunctional happened that week, and not just on our streets or in the minds of the rioters. A lot of people called for blood, including people who regard themselves as relatively liberal and non-disciplinarian. It discomfited me to see so much outrage on all sides, and relatively few humane responses. Here are a few of the latter, from Twitter:

Robert Florence:

“These young people exist. They’re not staying in Hamsterdam tonight. They’re visible. It needs fixed, they need a future.”
https://twitter.com/#!/robertflorence/status/100684779313307650

“All this casual “hoodies”, “chavs” and Cameron’s favourite “Broken Britain” speak – this is where it all leads. Exactly here.”
https://twitter.com/#!/robertflorence/status/100713446726836224

Marcus Brigstocke:

“I hate the feelings + thoughts that I have been having seeing young people in Clapham wearing new trainers. #thisisnothowiwishtobe”
https://twitter.com/#!/marcusbrig/status/101647168015835136

Conor Houghton:

“Rioting is not an answer, but the chorus denying that there is even a question has, I think, told me what that question might be.”
https://twitter.com/#!/conorjh/status/101607071220367360

Rare dialogue, even in the week and a half that has followed. I think, in all the bluster and rhetoric, very little has been achieved in even understanding what happened, let alone what might solve it.

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A few weeks ago, also at Games:EDU, I saw David Braben present on the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It’s a brilliant idea. A cheap, tiny Linux box with an ARM 11 Processor, a USB port, a HDMI port, an SD slot, and wifi or ethernet connectivity.

It’s the first glimmer of something that occurred to me few years back: Given that my last few phones have been way more powerful than my first desktop computers, how long before I can plug a keyboard and a display into one and run an OS designed for that as well as mobile?

What’s also interesting is that one of the main people driving it is the head of a UK games studio. There’s history to that. An important chunk of the history of UK debate between game developers and games academics looks like a long chain of buck passing and PR baiting. This was a further part of what I heard during the years I ran Games:EDU:

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A couple of weeks ago, I was in Brighton for Develop 2011. It was pretty strange to not be running Games:EDU, but I nipped in and caught some good discussion. There were two main things I took away from it, and below you’ll find the main one.

Here’s a bit of background, skippable if you’ve been involved in or aware of issues facing university level education for the game development:

Not long after the turn of the millennium, a lot of crap media courses from the 1990s had begun rebranding as “game design” courses. They were, of course, shit, and vanishingly few people who’ve ever done these courses have got a job in anything other than QA. The industry needs good 2D and 3D artists, good animators, good programmers, and good mathematicians. Increasingly, there are suitable, high-quality courses out there for all of these subjects.

Academia is also about research though, not just training. Not many game developers understood this, given that prior to good university education, the traditional route into the games industry was to teach yourself relevant skills throughout your teens and early twenties (i.e. sitting in your bedroom with a cracked copy of 3DS Max. Still is the way in, to an extent). Subsequently, even when applicable, non-shit courses started to turn out graduates, they “weren’t good enough”.

This has been the argument that has come up again and again between game developers and games academics, usually framed as vocational versus research-based courses. Each side has made defensible points, and dug in to an extent. The biggest concession made has been that the more approachable studios recognise that tools are so diverse, and so constantly changing, that no graduate will be ready to drop straight into their pipeline without extra studio-specific training.

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I read this piece the other day. Not only is it an intersting insider account of call centres in India, but it comes from a truly bizarre sounding place: Gurgaon.

It’s a town built entirely by corporations, to the extent that there’s just dirt instead of paving between the buildings. It’s like a gimmick from fiction that’s been slowly growing for real in Northern India. Look at it on Google maps and you can see the voids between the buildings, as well as utilitarian district names and the rather disconcerting “Police lines”.

Almost as if civil unrest has become so ingrained, it exists long enough for us to map it.

I’ve been messing around with Google+ for a few weeks now, and I like it. The one thing it did better than Buzz or Wave is this:

Which is an obvious copy of this…

… but appears in the top corner of my gmail account. Additionally, it doesn’t bug me with notifications from pointless games and apps. All the noise I’ve used FBPurity to mute in the past simply isn’t there. Delightful.

The phrasing on this is a bit creepy:

If they just knocked out the word "Live" it would be 100% less so.

The real thing that sells it to me is that it copies the asymmetric following of Twitter. I’d never post my Facebook profile online, but here’s my Google+ one.

Personally, I’m finding it great, but that’s largely because most of my friends and many of my work contacts have migrated and are using it. There is one serious problem related to psuedonyms that should be solved.

I share my hometown, Nottingham, with Games Workshop’s HQ. They have a bar there called Bugman’s, where gamers converge to drink and play stuff. I was even surprised and quite delighted to find games not published by Games Workshop on the shelves there, free for visitors to play. It’s been a while since the last time, but I’ve had some excellent evenings there with friendly people, interesting games and beer.

So I was perturbed to read this in the Page 45 mailshot yesterday:

We don’t open on Sundays outside of December but Emma Vieceli and her husband Pud were converging with their mates Lisa, Dan, Paul Duffield (artist on Warren Ellis’ FREAKANGELS) and Kate Brown (colourist on Warren Ellis’ FREAKANGELS vols 3 onwards) on Games Workshop HQ and its bar last Sunday and I really, really, really needed restocks of DRAGON HEIR. Also I had fallen in love with Kate Brown’s FISH+CHOCOLATE and was desperate to see the visual splendour that is Paul Duffield’s own SIGNAL. So I said that I’d open especially for them around 6-30pm on Sunday.

And I was happily writing last week’s reviews whilst keeping my eye out on Twitter when it emerged that they had been kicked out of Games Workshop’s HQ bar mid-afternoon for playing games there that weren’t owned/published by Games Workshop itself. Okay, there weren’t actually kicked out but told reluctantly by the rather apologetic barman that there was a new policy strictly enforced that you could only entertain yourselves in their bar by playing Games Workshop scenarios.

These comicbook creators had built up a tradition of converging there every few months, and when they did so they spent money on miniatures and booze while they played, and food to soak up the booze. Plus, of course, at Games Workshop HQ, you have a captive audience to whom you can advertise your own wares regardless of whether that audience plays your games already. And I know Pud does.

I am honestly struggling to find any strategy behind this new prohibition that is either pleasant, constructive or in any way financially intelligent.

Likewise.

Hearing this about Bugman’s doesn’t entirely surprise me, given how jealously GW guard their SPACE FASCIST and FANTASY FASCIST LEAGUE IPs, how prohibitive they were with videogame modders when Relic put out the tools for Dawn of War, how culty their shop staff are, and the stories I’ve heard from ex-employees who were too irreverent of GWs fiction and now cannot even get a hello in the street from the people they worked with. I’ve not been into one of their stores since I was 14, but to this day “culty” is the one word that comes up recurrently when I’m talking to people who no longer shop there or used to work there (including salaried positions at HQ).

No surprise here, just a creeping sense of horror at another piece of the expected. Bugman’s was their chance to get me interested again. Seeing those games from other publishers in there made me think that maybe Games Workshop weren’t so bad after all, and that maybe some of their games could interest me. Reaction to this from me and my friends at Gambling Lambs is generally “What the fuck?”. We liked Bugman’s, but we’re not going back now.

Rather than end this post with disappointment or bile, I have a couple of Nottingham recommendations. Page 45 (twitter) are, hands down, the best comic shop I have ever been in, and have broadened my horizons over the fifteen years they’ve existed. Mondo Comico (twitter) are my favorite board game retailer, and host regular gaming events. Each of those can introduce you to a load of stuff that is a whole lot more interesting and enriching than wizards or shooty men in armoured space suits, and they’re both run by real, lovely human beings that you can actually talk to.

via Mike Rose of the Indie Games Blog:

Receipt Racer is a very whimsical way to waste paper, while *also* using electricity. The developers obviously despise trees, and the ozone layer, and the very forces that animate a laughing child, and the moments of silent communication that pass between lovers. Therefore, they must in fact want our planet to burn to an existentially bereft cinder dotted with fallout shelters inhabited by nothing but investment bankers and politicians… but their project still made me smile. Because I’m an enormous bastard and I hate plants, obv.

This quote really stuck out to me while reading The Controller:

“We should take pride and feel legitimacy in just making stuff. Just writing stuff. We should have fun, be happy and not worry about being an artist or a journalist or marriage material”.

– Zachary Reese, Why Games Cannot be Taught
Source: The Controller, by Cory Schmitz

I can’t find the piece anywhere online, but his website is here.

Anyway. I’m going to put this quote up somewhere at the hackspace. Nottingham Hackspace is something I’ve been meaning to write about.

We started a hackspace in Nottingham. There were three of us in February 2010, and we quickly expanded. I think you naturally get quite cautious types around an enterprise like this, but Dominic wanted one to exist first of all and has been driving us since the very beginning, screaming “Fuck it! Let’s do it!” in our ears every time we hesitate, and at every stage so far it’s worked out pretty well. We’ve gone from bunch of guys in pub, to bigger bunch of guys in private room, to having a store room, to having our own tiny space, and just lately we’ve moved again. We’re now in a four thousand square foot workshop and studio. It’s amazing. Spit and sawdust, but I think that’s how a hackspace should be.

Boing Boing and NYC Resistor, among others, have been really helpful, and we’ve had a lot of other kind donors giving either tools or money. We need to keep expanding membership all the way to the end of the year, but so far it’s going well. The cost to be a member is whatever you want to pay, within reason. No one has been a dick over this so far. The space is run on a non-profit basis, with all surplus money ploughed back into improving the facilities and getting more tools.

A lot of people I knew growing up dreamed of having their own workshop. Everyone wanted a garage or an outbuilding with a lovely collection of tools, and few ever reached it. In the past few years, I found I wanted things like a pillar drill, would get a drill stand as a compact compromise, then only use it twice a year. I’m finding it makes more and more sense for a substantial chunk of my tools to live at the hackspace rather than at home, and I’m not the only one. Beyond that, there are more significant effects of gathering a group of like minded people. Someone has an old PC to use as a server. Someone else happens to have an old industrial sink that’s been sitting in their loft for years. All of us together can afford something many times better than anyone can afford alone. Basic economics goes into one end, and something really magic comes out the other.

The group of people it’s gathered in a year is the most amazing thing about it. Slightly shamefaced, I’ll admit I expected, actually braced myself, for a different crowd.

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I was browsing through someone’s copies of these the other day. Kicked myself for missing out on them, as they’re beautiful. You can see a little of The Controller here on Flickr. They’re created by people who already care about and understand games, as well as other things, rather than people from other areas trying really hard to make a cool thing that talks about games. It’s hard to explain, but everything in them has a graceful and implicit cognisance of the subject matter.

We’ve been pushed beyond consumer facing reviews into the rampant experimentation of NGJ, which has resulted in some brilliant pieces of writing, and some really wanky ones. Moving beyond NGJ, recently there have been a bunch of things coming from outside the industry, like Invert Look, which should have been brilliant but felt like it was trying too hard. Coverage of games is getting there. Implicit understanding of what they are is taking root in culture, and while at present a lot of the more popular things aren’t rooted in that, eventually they will be. As that does take root, it’s going to replace a lot of the frustratingly earnest stuff along with the frustratingly ignorant stuff.

All of this has a really important overall effect. I was talking to my friend Marie a few weeks ago, and she articulated something really important to me about the videogames industry: In publishing, and in music, there are all kinds of people who are not directly creators, but feel like they belong there. Not so for games, it’s all about the developer. You feel kind of awkward at an industry event or conference because you don’t make games any more. Perhaps that’s been necessary in the face of colonial land grabs by journalism, the humanities, and other industries, as well as hostile management practices at big studios. Now though, people are appearing who are not necessarily game developers, but are nonetheless doing brilliant things with games and games culture.

Indie games are very cool right now. This is for two main reasons:

1. Commercial success stories.
2. Small developers are the ones who are now really driving the experimental fringe of games culture.

Big organisations are trying to figure out what to do about it. The bar is low, but their structures mean they’re not necessarily very good at jumping it.

Example: Activision launched an indie games competition last year. It attracted controversy over what appeared to be their intentions with IP. The finish date sailed by, then was eventually followed by a “We’ll announce the winners soon, honest” update. After that, it seems to have disappeared without trace.

I picked the least successful example by far. I don’t want to link any others because I don’t want to associate them with something that went so wrong, but there are people building various platforms for indie developers, ranging from competitions to portals and distributors.

I don’t think all of these efforts are doomed, but structurally I think the nature of big organisations works counter to a good understanding of independent game development.

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A few weeks ago I left my last employer, Mudlark, to start freelance projects. I worked on a lot of exciting projects and ideas there, but ultimately I had other ideas and had to move on. It’s going well so far, and I’m excited. Suddenly, many more interests have a commercial dimension where they did not before.

The past four years of work revealed an interesting dichotomy in me: I care about culture, but I also care about commerce. I don’t think I want a career that could be defined explicitly as either.

Setting aside any cliches of ruthlessness in business, it is at least a savvy place where clever people can make money. To its detriment, things are produced under all kinds of pressures and as a result, creativity and cultural relevance can suffer. Products can lend themselves to really ill behaviour from producer and consumer/end user alike, while asset columns and balance sheets don’t necessarily indicate long term strategies or the value of R&D. Good numbers rarely compensate for bad judgment, and when they do, it never lasts.

Cultural sectors, on the other hand, tend to rely heavily on patronage. Whether that’s government funding or the largesse of the wealthy, funding opportunities can lead to rapacious applicants and existentially doubtful decision makers. As someone stated it to me once: If you don’t take the money, someone else will. It’s true. At the other end of the process, when you’re in charge of disbursing large amounts of money and trying to make sound decisions, no amount of paperwork and procedure can stop the doubts creeping in. Those processes can at least make sure you’re not handing over a huge load of money to someone incompetent, but still, funding bodies are systems and as a result they can be gamed.

It’s easy to become cynical about the systems the UK has had for cultural funding for the past decade, and almost a moot point as they’re presently being gutted by Cameron’s Tories, but culture itself is important. Setting aside my mundane gripes, it’s really important to me. Whether it’s funded via grass roots or from above, it’s vitally important that we have methods to explore ideas and bits of the world that exist outside the constraints of markets.

The two worlds of culture and commerce don’t understand each other very well, and as a result don’t always work well together, but when they do it’s magic. I see very few organisations that seem to understand this.

I understand more of the world than I did four years ago, and I crave learning more by the year. One of my aims in going freelance is to study as much as I work, and some of the things I do are explicitly non-commercial.

Ten years ago I met people who described me as entrepreneurial, and I didn’t understand what they meant. I’m beginning to see, but at the same time I don’t think I’m chasing the same big score or investment vehicle as many who describe themselves as entrepreneurs. I’m still not sure I’d ever apply the label to myself, but there’s loads of stuff I want to have a go at, some of it risky.

Things I may not have mentioned are Gambling Lambs, the Nottingham Hackspace, GameCamp, and the Indie Arcade at the Eurogamer Expo, all of which I’ll talk about a bit here in future.

I’m more commercial than I was, but have the same values. It’s been an interesting ride so far, and now I feel ready to start poking and driving things a bit more.

About 12 years ago, I was going through a sequence of really shitty jobs and reading motivation theory. It was there I first wondered how menial jobs could be made more game-like. Compelling. Addictive even.

Now I know: Pay your workers a consistent token amount. Break the work into explicitly definable, consistent chunks. Like blocks in Minecraft, or points in Agile development. Relate completion of blocks of work to variable ratio extrinsic motivators. Instead of using them to separate people from their money ala Farmville, you’re using them to separate people from their time. The reward for completing a given block of work might be huge, but most of the time it will be minimum wage.

Work becomes a gamble that pays more than minimum wage. Work therefore becomes addictive, and more appealing than actual minimum wage jobs. Workers adjust their expectations of “good” and “bad” rewards according to what gets doled out, and the company can tweak numbers so that, overall, they aren’t really paying much above minimum wage. Value could be amortised against physical stock too; effectively the company gives a worker items of a certain face value, which the company gets at trade.

It’s essentially gambling, I doubt it would be legal in many places, and the thought of it makes me shudder. How it came to me: Working for Mudlark, digesting all of the stuff about gamification last year (particularly this post by Margaret), writing Claustrophobia on the Frontier last October, then today, listening to the music from Minecraft whilst cranking out work at the office.

I love Minecraft, but after reading the post linked above, a few people seemed to think I hated it. It’s beautiful, creative, and full of things to discover. Sometimes though, I get to the end of an evening, have a few stacks of painstakingly cast then mined obsidian in my inventory, and think “Why?”.

I love game design and believe in it, but from the very first ARGs have been aware that, even if it doesn’t resound deeply enough to cultivate habits, even in the moment it’s behaviour modification. That’s morally inert, and could be used for good, or profound fuckery and exploitation. Camps are emerging in game design, some of which lean toward the latter. I’m not sure how much of it I can stomach. It’s a variable extrinsic demotivator.

I’m cross-posting this from Facebook, which I’ve never done with anything else on here, but it appeared there first. I’ve also added a couple of relevant links.

It started out round 18 months ago as a very frank response to a “25 random things about yourself” meme that was going around. I stopped reading them because they were meaningless shite, but one piqued my interest. In it, someone talked a lot about their past, present circumstances and, IIRC, future ambitions. After reading it, I felt I had a much deeper understanding of them, and wrote a similarly frank note, tagging 25 people in it.

A friend recently reminded me of it, and I reread it then decided to change the content to what you’ll find after the jump. Facebook has changed a lot since I put it up, but I still have a lot of the same questions that inspired the note in the first place:

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When I run, I have a piezo in my shoe. In conjunction with a wireless receiver, my height, weight and some very clever maths, my ipod can work out how fast I’m going by the force and frequency of signals from the piezo. I get a graph of my run at the end, which is automatically uploaded to the web.

I just bought a mountain bike. It was £100 cheaper than the one I rode a decade ago, but is of a standard I’d have paid about £800 more to have at that time. As I ride, I have a phone in my pack that tracks me by GPS. I can always find out where I am. My phone can show me the stars to within a few degrees in broad daylight. The stuff the screen is made from has been around for decades, but was nowhere near commercialisation when I first got a mobile phone.

13 years ago, I went through utter infatuation with the internet over a dialup connection, then again some years later with broadband. I went through it a third time with mobile internet last year. It’s now very, very rare for me to not know a lot about my friends at any given time of day, and vice versa. A single tiny device with sleek industrial design, more than six times as powerful as my first desktop PC, allows me to talk to people worldwide in all kinds of ways.

Boston Dynamics have built intelligently adapting quadrupedal robots. Festo are building an astounding array of prototype robots based on organic designs. The ASIMO is history.

Not only has gene sequencing continued to become cheaper, leading to the mapping of more genomes, one has been designed then built from scratch and had an email address encoded into it. Media rhetoric and prejudice that I remember from my childhood around IVF has faded away completely; I haven’t heard the term “test tube baby” since the late 80s.

Someone I know has built a Reprap Mendel and got it printing things in a matter of weeks. Gmail scans for the words “is attached” and warns you if you’re about to send something with no attachments.

As Matt Jones said, “Here’s your fucking jetpack”

Sorry for not posting here much. I’m still very excited about a lot of things. Recent ramblings are mostly on Pixel-Love, with the lengthy ones I’ve thought about a lot mirrored at Gamasutra.