Demonstrators offer biscuits to passers-by. One of their placards reads: “We have cake, they have lies.”

When I asked the police on Saturday if they were expecting trouble, one laughed. “They aren't a problem,” he said. “I just wish that they'd stop playing that bloody Rick Astley song.”

Nothing too unique here but the source: Prospect is a UK-based "high culture" magazine similar to the Atlantic Monthly or Harper's. So the fact that they're publishing a sympathetic article on gaming is interesting.

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10209

I'm sitting in EWR (Newark Airport, yes I'm one of those people who refers to airports by their codes) returning from a day-long session dealing with legal stuff and mass collaboration technologies. (*) That's a fancypants way to say I was in a boardroom with a bunch of lawyers and consultants working on how to use blogs and wikis to benefit companies. Looking at it basically from two directions: what legal issues arise when employees are speaking to the world and how can in-house counsel manage these, and how can we leverage these technologies in our practice to make dealing with the legal department a less frustrating task.

Can't say much about what we're going to conclude (too early in the process) but it was definitely an interesting day. Sometimes I forget how to behave among grownups. I think I didn't humiliate Microsoft too much. (For me personally, there is no hope).

Oh, the singularity? That's the city of Newark. I think now that I've been here I will have to re-evaluate my feelings about Buffalo and Pittsburgh as I was obviously too hard on them before. I think all the suck in the universe might have collected itself here.

(*) Okay, technically I'm going to have to post this when I get network connectivity so I won't be in Newark when it posts. It just feels right now like I'm never getting out of here.

As mentioned/threatened, I've been reading books on the Comics Code to see if they've got anything to teach us about the current and constant complaining about video games corrupting children, etc. I've already given my thoughts on David Hadju's "The Ten-Cent Plague". This time I'll talk about a book I found to be much better: Amy Kiste Nyberg's "Seal of Approval: the history of the Comics Code".

Unlike Hadju's book, "Seal of Approval" is written by an academic (Nyberg is a professor at Seton Hall) and it shows. It's a very balanced historical overview coupled with an analysis of the Code and its various iterations over time. It speaks to the cultural context to the original Code but also to the way the companies governed by the Code adapted themselves over time, as well as the fact that not all publishers were governed by the Code and yet some managed to stay in business (Dell being the most significant). It's very well-researched (15 pages of bibliography) and it's definitely worth picking up.

The strongest part of this book is the way that it puts the crusaders in their social, cultural, and professional context. Fredric Wertham, who seems to have been the Jack Thompson or Carrie Nation of this issue, is often caricatured as... well... just like Jack Thompson. In Nyberg's presentation we learn that Wertham was a social scientist of some note before he got to this issue. He may well have gone off the deep end when he got to comics but it's interesting to see how he got there and explains why he got the exposure he did (again the comparison to Thompson may or may not seem apposite here).

The most cogent criticism I'd give of the book is one that's common to books written by academics: except for social scientists who are used to doing interviews most academics don't like to get out and deal with people in their work and so they end up relying on source materials where source interviews might be more helpful. I don't know whether Nyberg did do interviews or not, but the sections on how the review process actually worked over time and still work today read like they're assembled from materials. They could have used some perspective on how the business actually is done. As the guy who often does content review for Microsoft games, I know that a policy manual is tough to work with because of the edge cases and the subjective nature of reviewing, and if you went only from written documents you'd miss the flavor of the exercise.

But seriously, this is a good book on its own merits.

As a source for consideration about whether and how the games business might develop "Seal of Approval" is also helpful. Although not perfect for the reasons I mention, the sections dealing with life under the Code and the changes to the Code over time have been instructive. Nyberg isn't Niall Ferguson either but I'll be recommending this book to colleagues anyway.

Sometimes we spend so much time in our own part of Microsoft we forget what kind of cool stuff this company does. Check the link below for a new piece of our tech, Microsoft Photosynth, that was recently featured in an episode of CSI.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2008-04-29-microsoft-csi-product-placement_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip

I mentioned a while back that I was going to read this book to see if it has any interesting insights that we in the games business could use. The book is about the people who worked in the comic book industry and the development of that industry up to the institution of the Comics Code, a self-regulatory system enacted to avoid government regulation of the comics industry. That's not actually what the book says it's about - it says it's about the industry as a whole and the impact of the Code - but I guess you can't judge a book by its cover.

I kill me...

Seriously, this is an interesting bit of history and stands on its own there. It recounts the business, and the political and cultural environment in the 1950s that all but killed the business. But it's those words "all but" that make the big difference between what this book purported to be and what it is. The fact is, comic books survived. They were published through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. They started coming back into their own in the 1980s, and by the 1990s the graphic novel craze had brought them right back. How did this happen? You won't find out in this book. Considering its subtitle is "The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America" I would have expected to see it deal with events both before and after. It doesn't.

Net-net: if you're looking for a historical document to describe a period of time and the people who were active in it, this book does that very well. The author is a journalist and uses those skills. Those aren't really the kinds of books I usually buy or read for pleasure, but your mileage may vary.

Now, whether it's instructive from a work perspective is a different story. Comics was an industry that was confronted with widespread hysteria that they were turning children into criminals, ruining and warping their minds, and had no redeeming social value. I do see a parallel here. They even had an industry CEO who showed up to testify in front of a Congressional subcommittee and said a bunch of weird things that made other people in the industry cringe, and this bad performance led to a lot of unwanted consequences. I don't quite know whether that whole set of events has occurred in our industry; I don't know if there will be consequences to the weird Congressional testimony, but history does sometimes teach lessons. Unfortunately because of the limitations I mentioned above the book leaves off before it could answer the questions of how comics dealt with self-regulation. That's the part that would have been interesting to me because of our industry's relationship with the ESRB and not having it there makes this book less useful than it could have been.

I would have liked to have known the answers to questions like:

• Did companies that were subject to the Comics Code sell more issues than companies that weren't?
• Did parents actually consider whether a particular book was subject to the Comics Code when allowing their children to purchase?
• Did members of the Code try to push its limits or self-censor to make sure they stayed well inside its scope?

Without them, it was instructive for me and not a waste of time from a work perspective. With them, I would have made all my colleagues buy it. But this would have taken an author like Niall Ferguson, and this author isn't Niall Ferguson.

Available at Amazon if you're interested: http://www.amazon.com/Ten-Cent-Plague-Comic-Book-Changed-America/dp/0374187673/ref=pd_sim_b_title_1

Interesting post on Kotaku about why it's hard for Western-style games to crack the Japanese market. One thing I find interesting is tucked in at the end: Japanese game publishers don't like community because they can't control it. Interesting when you think about people who ask why there's no Major Nelson at Sony (who at least have their PSN blog team) or Nintendo (who are a cipher). I think it's a bit of overgeneralization - the Pokémon site at least has a mailbag (don't ask why I know these things) - but it's still interesting data...

http://kotaku.com/385604/how-to-bring-the-west-to-japan

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3167619

1Up is reporting on rumors that "Peekaboo Pole Dancing -- a company that produces home pole dancing kits endorsed by Carmen Electra -- is looking for a partner to help license their concept to create a pole dancing fitness game for the Wii."

Wow. Just... wow.

Like I've said before, I don't get involved in American politics. That said, I do like the nuanced attitude that Barack Obama seems to show to the video games industry. In a Q&A session he referenced GTA4 and then - the horror - said it's not for kids! And went on to say that perhaps the issue is that parents are letting their kids be raised by video and not given a thirst for knowledge instead, and maybe that's what causes some of the problems in America today.

Found in a lot of places, tip to Keith Boesky's blog. Keith is the ex-CEO of Eidos, and generally has a lot of interesting ideas. http://boesky.blogspot.com/2008/05/politician-finally-got-it-right-obama.html

Newsweek reports that a cosmetic surgeon in Bal Harbor, Florida has written a book called "My Beautiful Mommy" for mothers to give to their children to explain why mommy, who is already "the prettiest mommy in the whole wide world", is having a tummy tuck and a nose job.

There are no words.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/132240/page/1

Pat Vance was interviewed on MTV and gave a clarification to GamePolitics about the way that DLC gets rated. What she said is how it works: if the DLC has new pertinent content as opposed to the original game (basically: the stuff that triggers a ratings notice), then it has to be submitted for rating, and if not then it doesn't.

http://gamepolitics.com/2008/04/18/esrb-dlc-must-adhere-to-games-original-rating/

I don't know that people understand how we in the industry feel about the ESRB. There seem to be plenty of fans who think that we in the industry are adversarial to the ESRB. Nothing could be further from the truth. We want them to provide consumers with an accurate assessment of what's in a game, what's in a DLC, whatever. If the DLC diverges from the regular game, we *want* them to know it and tell the market. We pay money for the privilege of having them provide this kind of information to you.

We do this because the ESRB provides a very valuable service for our industry. Their logo on our box is an objective statement of the kinds of things that you can find in our games. Same with our competitors and partners.

I raise this because a lot of people seem to think that it's inappropriate for us to have to resubmit our content for DLC when it's different from the regular game descriptors. Nothing could be further from the truth. We want these descriptors to be accurate. We appreciate the ESRB and its efforts for us and for the customers.

Hope this helps explain issues.

As a guest in America I don't take a position on its politics (as I used to say when I did briefings for Congressional staffers, I love all 535 of your bosses equally), but I always admire the politicians who will take shots at themselves. Recently, from both sides of the aisle (ha!), two of the best.

Mitt Romney: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/04/17/romney-i-could-have-won-with-a-few-more-osmonds/

John Edwards: http://www.comedycentral.com/colbertreport/videos.jhtml?videoId=166019

Perhaps it's not obvious from my current role but I once did graduate work in Environmental Science which included field work in marine biology (corals in Barbados - yep, tough gig), very nearly went and did reforestation work in the Gambia River valley, and was offered a spot in a PhD program in limnology (study of lake ecosystems). All of which by way of background to why I relax with books on evolutionary biology. And yes, I did get my books mentioned below about the Comics Code - all 3 of them - and I'll be giving you my thoughts on those later. But trust me - I'm going to be able to tie this back to games and maybe even the Comics Code issues in a bit.

In an earlier Amazon order I got a copy of a classic, Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker, and have been kicking back on my sofa with it tonight. As many evolutionary biology books do, it deals with the Intelligent Design argument about the eye and how it's impossible to posit that an eye just came into existence, therefore evolution is impossible. I'm not getting into the middle of that discussion, but Dawkins' response to that argument raised a chord over here.

Dawkins' response is pretty elegant: you don't need the eye to come into existence all at once, because having 2% vision is better than having 0% vision, and so if you get an eye that gives you even 2% vision then you're better off than the next guy. (And forget the fact that we don't have 100% vision now - I can't see into infrared or ultraviolet - let's just focus on the visible spectrum.) He then goes on to talk about camouflage and the idea that if all you have is 2% of an eye then your camouflage doesn't have to be very good either.

As I mentioned a couple of posts down, I own a PS2 as well as an Xbox 360. (And an Xbox. And a DS. Fine, take your shots now...) Before that I owned a Dreamcast. Before that, a ColecoVision. Before that, an Atari 2600 with optional cassette drive add-on. Maybe I was never going to mistake the Atari 2600 rendition of Donkey Kong for an actual gorilla, but I knew it was supposed to be a gorilla. That is, to my eye it looked like a gorilla. But give me a ColecoVision, suddenly I see a more "realistic" gorilla and the Atari gorilla doesn't look realistic anymore. And so it goes - each time I get a new system, the old system looks worse and less realistic.

You are at this point entitled to think that I am Sherlock freaking Holmes for this amazing power of observation. But it strikes me that there's an analogy between these two things and that it's instructive. In order for me to recognize something as "gorilla" all it has to do is look more like a gorilla than other things on the screen. So in the Atari 2600 day it didn't have to look much like a gorilla at all, because nothing looked like very much at all. But as the technology got better, the things had to gain more visual fidelity for me to perceive them in the same way. When I got my Dreamcast I was floored by the amazing graphics. Ecco the Dolphin looked like a real dolphin. The players in NHL 2K1 looked amazingly lifelike. Put those models in front of me now and I'd not think they looked like much at all. In just the same way an animal with crap camouflage might have been well-off when everyone only had 2% of an eye but now that animal is out of luck and would fall dead on the side of the evolutionary road. (To be fair, Dawkins doesn't quite say that, but he talks around it a lot and because he's from Oxford so he uses really big words anyway.)

Okay, this post is starting to feel like a Saturday Night Live skit - it maybe had a good idea once but it's gone on way too long and beat that idea to death if it ever existed. But here's where I'm going:

1. The days of the 2% eye are over, and a box with arms can't be a gorilla anymore. As we continue to insist upon real-world fidelity in our game environments, we will need more complex organisms to design and develop them. This may be why the days of the small garage game shop doing a full-box SKU are dead. (Again, not a Sherlock-level insight. Bear with me.)

2. If your environment doesn't allow for more than 25% of an eye because it can't resolve anything more than that, your organism doesn't have to be as complex as a 100%-eye environment. There's a reason that dev teams for ColecoVision or Dreamcast, or Nintendo DS or Xbox LIVE Arcade games, are so much smaller than Xbox 360 or PS3. What does this say about studios developing for the Wii?

3. It is extraordinarily burdensome to develop a complex system, exponentially more than a simple one. 1% of an eye just needs to be a photosensitive spot. It doesn't need complex systems of lenses, humors, rods and cones, etc. When you add complexity you add resource requirements. So too the more realistic games become, the more expensive they will be to make. If my analogy holds and my intuition is right, it will ever be thus. So we're going to need bigger inputs into the system. For development teams that means more money. But there are external constraints on the development ecosystem - the number of consumers, and the amount of money they will pay for games. So as games become more complex it will be more expensive to develop them, and it won't be a linear relationship. It's never going to be cheaper to make the most realistic game possible than it is today. What kind of install base and/or price points will it take to provide the necessary resources for these complex development systems? And will the absence of those resources eventually serve as an upper limit on fidelity?

Okay, I'll shut up now. Did this make any sense at all?

I received my morning Next-Gen newsletter (highly recommend it BTW) and saw the headline "Inmate Files Restraining Order Against GTA". My pulse quickened. My skin tingled. Could it be... I clicked through the link and in fact it was... JONATHAN LEE RICHES!

Jonathan Lee Riches is famous among lawyers and nonsense lawsuit fans. He is an inmate in federal prison who obviously has a lot of time on his hands. He sued Michael Vick for stealing his dogs and using them in dogfights. He sued Randy Weaver for hiring sharpshooters to stake out his prison. He sued NASA because they took his DNA to Pluto. And now he's suing Take-Two because the violence in GTA offends him, and because Take-Two put him in prison.

Link to all of his "cases": http://news.justia.com/cases/jonathan-lee-riches/. Good luck having any productivity today...