As most denizens of the Internet are well aware, one of the fiercest and most public battles over Internet freedom in the United States was fought at the beginning of the year.  I am, of course, referring to the fight over the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA and its Senate counterpart, PIPA.  Both bills were supposedly designed to combat copyright infringement overseas, but granted broad powers that would have made it possible to censor the Internet to a greater extent than ever before.  The justification for this legislation according to the MPAA, one of the major backers of these bills, is that downloading copyrighted material is theft and that loss in profits means the loss of American jobs.¹

Fortunately, through the combined protests of much of the Tech Industry and countless netizens, the bills suffered a devastating defeat.  The harsh and unexpected backlash to the legislation has left many in Washington shaken and unwilling to go out on a limb on any other bills that could be seen as trying to censor the Internet.  While this turn is in many ways a good thing for advocates of Internet freedom, nothing in politics is ever that simple.

One of the central questions to the debate over Internet freedom and censorship is the nature of copyright infringement.  Entertainment lobbyists, such as the MPAA and the RIAA, deliberately conflate the copying and distribution of copyrighted material with theft.  Clearly, copying is not theft.  Even the Supreme Court agrees on that point:

…interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer of a copyright does not assume physical control over the copyright nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud.²

Nevertheless, distributing digital material over the Internet is most often discursively constructed as being the same as stealing physical goods.  We talk about these phenomena in terms of “IP theft” and “software piracy,” often justified with the concept of the “lost sale.”  While the idea that everyone who illegally downloads a song or movie over the Internet would otherwise have bought it is fairly ridiculous, it is a metaphor people understand.  People are comfortable with the creation, sale and theft of physical items.  It’s harder for people to make judgements based on the complex relationships between things like creative input, virtual labor, and computer code.  But then again, that’s what metaphors are for – keeping things simple so that we can understand them.  So, if the idea of “copying as theft” encourages people to pay for their entertainment through legitimate channels, it’s not doing any harm…right?

Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend a presentation by Sean Lawson on cybersecurity discourse.  Cybersecurity has become a hot topic in politics over the last decade, but particularly since the cyberattacks on Estonia in 2007 and Georgia in 2008.  As Lawson pointed out, however, our motivations for pursuing cybersecurity have changed considerably over the last decade.  Initially, the motivation behind developing cybersecurity was to prevent an attack on the country’s infrastructure – the “cyberdoom” scenarios where hackers are able to knock out the nation’s power grid or cause a meltdown at a nuclear plant.  As time went on and no such attacks took place, the emphasis began to shift away from threats to critical infrastructure and toward the more practical problems of IP theft.  In the White House’s 2009 Cyberspace Policy Review, threats to infrastructure are dealt with, but much of the focus is placed on threats to intellectual property.  The report estimates the financial losses in 2008 from intellectual property and data theft to be as high as 1 trillion dollars.³ How they came to that number isn’t exactly clear, since the document that they cite estimates losses from IP theft at only $559 million and is focused on security breaches, not piracy.⁴

While the White House’s estimate may be a bit suspicious, more significant than its accuracy is its meaning.  What does it mean to lose money to IP theft?  If a million people download a movie that retails for $30, is that a $30 million loss in sales?  What about people who download the file multiple times?  What about people who later buy the DVD?  What about people who later watch the same movie on Netflix?  Did the time I watched my friend’s bootlegged copy of Lord of the Rings (complete with Korean subtitles) in high school negate the hundreds of dollars I probably spent on movie tickets, DVDs and other items?  The real problem isn’t that these estimates on “informational damage” are inaccurate, it’s that they’re practically meaningless.

While trying to estimate the informational damage to the entertainment industry is very problematic, it becomes even more so when applying these same estimates to military technology.  While you can argue that a teenager downloading an MP3 without paying for it takes money away from someone, a foreign agent stealing plans for a new fighter jet is a very different problem and requires a very different solution.  In cybersecurity discourse, however, teenagers and spies are often lumped together in the same category.

One of the main points that Lawson brought up was that the discourse of cybersecurity has combined a number of different threats into a single “generic cyberthreat.”  The concept of a generic cyberthreat combines the prevalance of IP theft and the potential impact of cyberdoom scenarios.  Unfortunately, by distorting cybersecurity threats in this way, we ignore more plausible threats.  We also end up with solutions that don’t fit the problem, such as the US Cyber Command, a military command whose role may or may not include policing bootlegged copies of Avatar.  Additionally, in the wake of the SOPA debacle, lawmakers are now terrified of being associated with any kind of legislation that could be seen as trying to regulate the Internet.  This includes cybersecurity initiatives.

So if the realm of cybersecurity is so hyped and convoluted, how should we deal with things like cyberwarfare?  Lawson made two main suggestions.  First, we need to disentangle the many different issues that make up “cyberthreats.”  The military should be left to deal with actual threats to national security, such as attacks on critical infrastructure.  Issues like copyright infringement, which are most certainly not threats to national security, should be dealt with in more appropriate ways.

His second suggestion, which caught my attention, was for the US to focus less of its resources on cybersecurity and more on basic computing research.  To many, this may seem like a counterintuitive move, especially if we continue to conflate things like military research with entertainment products.  For the entertainment industry, the value of movies and songs is in its ability to control them and sell them to consumers.  With military R&D, the value of their work is keeping us two steps ahead of other military organizations.  Losing valuable research is a setback, but as long as we still have a good lead, we’re still in good shape.  Lawson’s concern is that as we focus more and more on cybersecurity, we’re not doing as much research in the basic computing fields that put us in the lead in the first place.  With the job market in cybersecutiry booming,  more people getting degrees in computer science are going to move into security, rather than fields that Lawson calls more “progressive.”  Even with the best security around, it’s hard to win a race when you’re not moving forward.

Not surprisingly, this reminded me of a similar situation within the videogame industry, the debate over DRM.  Since companies like Nintendo and Sega were among the first to attempt to control intellectual property and licensing agreements through technological means, the inclusion of DRM on a game usually goes without saying.  Like many aspects of cybersecurity, however, this is often a losing battle.  What do you do when the best security money can buy doesn’t stop your game from being pirated?

Why not focus your attention elsewhere?

In contrast to the mainstream videogame industry, many independent developers have taken a stand against DRM.  While there are many reasons why indie developers choose not to use DRM (including many ethical and ideological reasons). one of these reasons is simply that time spent adding DRM to the game could be better spent actually working on the game and making it better.  While this inevitably leads to piracy, that doesn’t prevent the game from selling.  In fact, many developers like Introversion (you may have guessed that I’ve been playing a lot of their games recently) and the other Humble Bundle participants have had amazing success without any DRM at all.

This is certainly not a call to abandon cybersecurity completely.  As unlikely as they may be, we should still make sure that we don’t leave ourselves open to potential cyberdoom scenarios.  On the other hand, when it comes to trying to use the military to police threats that are clearly not matters of national security, I really think we have better things we could be doing.

References

1. Testimony of Michael O’Leary on Behalf of the MPAA.
2. Dowling v. United States.
3. The White House, Cyberspace Policy Review.
4. McAfee, Unsecured Economies: Protecting Vital Information.

Filed under: Copyright, Cyberwar, Hacking, Indie Games by Pete
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Last weekend was a busy one for anyone involved in the local Utah videogame scene.  Two of the biggest technology events of the year, the PushButton Summit and the Gaming and Electronics Expo (GEEX) both took place last week.  Unfortunately, they took place at pretty much the same time.  Even though I’ve been looking forward to PushButton for over a year now, I had to skip it for GEEX.  Although there were more presentations that I wanted to see at PushButton, GEEX happens to host one of the most exciting gaming events around – their annual Game-in-a-Day competition.  As a big advocate of indie game development, I could hardly pass up an opportunity to practice what I preach.  As the name implies, participants have just 24 hours, from noon on Friday to noon on Saturday, to complete a game.  Most of the developers work in groups, but I went solo this year.

The Game-in-a-Day Competition had its share of ups and downs for me this year.  On the downside, I managed to crash Flash Builder at 11:30, corrupting the entire directory and erasing all my source files (and guess who forgot to make a backup).  On the upside, however, I was able to salvage a SWF file from 6:00 in the morning to enter in the competition, which managed to win an honorable mention, despite being a fairly rough version of the game.  It was also my first attempt at making a game using Flixel, an open-source library for Flash game development.

All things considered, the game went better than I had expected.  Despite having a few problems getting used to the quirks of some of the Flixel classes (Which I’ll go into detail about on another day), I managed to implement almost all of the features that I wanted to experiment with, including a two-player splitscreen mode.  I also got plenty of encouraging comments from people who played, other developers, and even a few random industry people who were checking out the competition.  If nothing else, it was a nice ego boost, especially after losing all my code.  It also makes me wonder how my game would have done had I been able to use the full 24 hours instead of just being satisfied with the 18 hour version.  In any case, it’s now been added to my long list of unfinished games, but it has the advantage of being much more complete than my average project.  Maybe that means I’ll get around to it sooner.  For now, I’ll simply leave you with the trailer I made for the presentation.  Enjoy.

Filed under: Game Dev, Good Old Utah, Indie Games by Pete
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As I mentioned last week, I ended up with pages worth of notes after this year’s Frontiers of New Media symposium and a number of ideas that have been floating around in my head ever since.  I decided to start by talking about my impressions of the presentation that was closest to my own research, hence, this post will be all about videogames.  More specifically, I will be talking about Clare Woods’ presentation about the portrayal of books and libraries in World of Warcraft.  Her arguments, as I saw them, mostly revolved around two central themes.  The first was that books as in-game artifacts are completely divorced from the methods of their production.  The second theme was that the implementation of books in the game world is shallow.  In both cases, she didn’t argue that the game’s final design was necessarily bad, but that the designers had missed opportunities to make the game more meaningful and engaging (and maybe even *gasp* educational).

World of Warcraft is nothing if not immersive.  Although “realistic” may not be the correct description for a virtual world populated with elves and trolls, the designers at least went out of their way to make it “internally consistant” in that the game conforms rigorously to the conventions of the neomedieval fantasy MMO.  The landscape is marked by tall stone towers, quaint villages and other appropriately archaic architecture.  People may be running around with huge glowing swords, but there are also people mining iron, smelting steel and generally supporting the huge glowing sword industry.  Despite a number of deliberate anachronistic elements, such as the conspicuously capitalist nature of its supposedly feudal society¹, the game stays true to its pseudo-historical setting…except perhaps when it comes to books.

As Woods pointed out in her presentation, there are a number of public libraries in World of Warcraft.  Given the value of books during the middle ages, this ease of access itself is somewhat ahistorical.  Perhaps more problematic, however, is that these libraries have a distinctly modern layout.  They primarily consist of the easily recognizable stacks that one might see in any local library today.  What is absent from these medieval libraries are the desks, the lecterns, the scribes – everything associated with the production of books.  Historically, books were incredibly valuable, both because of the resources involved in their production and because of the small number of people skilled enough to actually write them.  While you can become a scribe in World of Warcraft, this profession is centered around creating exotic inks to craft magic scrolls and charms, not the traditional books you find in the libraries.  Those books are simply there, sitting on shelves, lying on tables.  As Woods noted, we’re never encouraged to give up our modern notion that books are cheap and common.

When the player does interact with those books, at least the few that are not simply part of the background, they generally give a small snippet of game lore.  Many players might find a few paragraphs of fictional history less than compelling, especially when there is so much else to see and do in the game world.  Of course, there are still those out there who really love lore, but for the majority of players, books are little more than decoration.

The recurring question throughout Woods’ presentation was how could the developers have made books more useful to the players?  I think that the best way to address that question is to look at the way that books are implemented in other games.

Not surprisingly, the first game that came to mind as I was listening to her presentation was Minecraft.  Of course, there are no classes or professions in Minecraft, but if one was to analyze my style of play, I think that “scribe” would be an appropriate title for my character.  As soon as I had managed to build a secure shelter, I set out to make myself some books.  Unfortunately, making books in Minecraft is a fairly labor intensive process.  This was especially true for me, as my home island didn’t happen to have the resources to make books.  Thus, the first step in my quest was to construct a boat and set off in search of sugar cane (originally known as reeds).  I found some growing on the shore of a nearby island, which I harvested and took home.  Of course, two pieces of sugar cane isn’t enough to create a book, so I began cultivating it on my island until I had a decent amount stockpiled.  I was then able to take it back to my workbench and craft it into paper, which I would in turn craft into books.  I then took my new books and some wooden planks and set about building bookshelves.  Eventually, I was able to create enough books to build my own library within my tiny hobbit hole.

Although Minecraft portrays the process of book production in a much more detailed way than World of Warcraft, it shares a similar problem in that there isn’t really much you can do with books yet (Notch has suggested that books may eventually be usable, just as maps are).  For now, they are simply ornamentation for the game world, rather than a meaningful part of it.

One of Woods’ suggestions for increasing the depth of in-game books beyond their current state was essentially to crowdsource it.  Rather than the developers slicing the fictional history of Azeroth into enough tiny slices that one can be placed in each book in the library, why not take advantage of the in-game history being made by the players themselves?  After all, the whole premise of the game is that players get to run around doing heroic things all day.  If even a fraction of this activity were recorded, it could easily fill every empty tome in the game.

So what would such a system look like?  There is already a great deal of content being created by World of Warcraft fans in the form of both fan fiction and art.  Could it be a simple matter of making a way to display such content in-game?  It’s hard to say if such an approach would be compelling.  Even though millions of people are embarking on quests every day, they pretty much embark on the same quests over and over.  Most players would probably rather go battle dragons themselves than read about another player doing the same thing.  While there are certainly unexpected happenings that occur while on these quests, including the occasional Leeroy Jenkins moment, the structure of World of Warcraft is somewhat limiting to its literary potential.

This doesn’t mean that such an approach is impossible within the framework of a videogame, it just requires a different approach.  A good counter-example is Dwarf Fortress.  With it’s ASCII graphics and Everest-like learning curve, it may not seem like a likely candidate for creating more engaging stories.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Dwarf Fortress is essentially a complex simulation for generating unique narratives.  Not only does the game task itself with generating a complete world map when you start a new world, it creates a complete history of wars, nations and heroes.  Every dwarf who comes to your fortress has his or her own story, and it’s different every time.  Whereas no one wants to hear the story of the awesome loot that dropped when you killed Rend Blackhand, tales of fallen fortresses are spread far and wide across the Internet, even if only among Dwarf Fortress‘ cult following.  You would be hard-pressed to find a dedicated Dwarf Fortress player who hasn’t heard of the sagas of Oilfurnace, Boatmurdered, Bravemule or Bronzemurder.  Even a novice like me (who has yet to have a fortress survive the first winter) can get almost as much enjoyment out of hearing the experiences of others as playing for himself.

I don’t know if any of these ideas could necessarily be implemented in a game like World of Warcraft, but they are intriguing ideas.  At the least, Woods’ presentation suggests new lines of thought, both in terms of analyzing historical content in games and in imagining new possibilities for game design.  I would be really interested to see some of these ideas implemented in a prototype.  Something to put on the back burner, I suppose…

World of Warcraft images from WoWWiki.

References

1. Games of Empire. Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter.

Filed under: Frontiers of New Media, Game Design, Media History by Pete
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It seems that I’ve been doing a lot of reading on postcolonialism lately, so not surprisingly, I’ve been thinking a lot about how issues of colonialism are portrayed in videogames.  Of course, the first title to come to mind in any discussion of videogames and colonialism is Sid Meier’s controversial game Colonization, which places the player in charge of a European colony in the New World.  Trevor Owens has already done an excellent analysis of that game, in which he argues not that the game is offensive, but that the game is not offensive enough to accurately represent the nature of colonialism.

What really made me start thinking about this topic was the portrayal of colonialism in the genre of so-called “4X” strategy games.  These games, in which the objective is to “explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate,” are essentially games of empire.  The player is tasked with mobilizing their natural and human resources in order to subjugate their opponents and expand their empire across the map.  These games are known for their complexity, attention to detail, and for the number of different play styles that they afford beyond simple victory by conquest.

Given their level of complexity, I was kind of surprised to realize how simplistic their portrayal of colonialism is.  Although some early predecessors of the genre, such as World Empire, have some basic mechanics for occupied nations to rebel against their conquerors, most games in the genre seem to ignore the issue of colonialism all together.  Even Civilization, with its detailed mechanics for happiness and civil unrest takes a decidedly non-critical approach to the topic.  The moment your troops go marching into an enemy city, its identity is erased.  The occupied people don’t even need to be occupied.  Your troops could simply walk out the way they came in and it wouldn’t make any difference to your new subjects.  It’s as if they were part of your empire all along.

Of course, not every 4X game takes this approach.  Some force the player think about issues of colonialism and make difficult decisions concerning military occupations.  One good example is Master of Orion II.  The Master of Orion series follows the standard Civilization formula, simply changing the setting from historical to science fiction, making the player the emperor of a vast space empire.  Just like in Civilization, the games revolves around driving back your opponents’ armies and taking their colonies as your own.  In the original Master of Orion, battles between colonies and invaders take on a somewhat apocalyptic flavor, as every man, woman and child on the planet takes part in the combat and every engagement is a fight to the death.

In Master of Orion II, this invasion mechanic is refined in a number of ways.  Firstly, there becomes a distinction between combatants and non-combatants.  Instead of combats being between entire populations, they are carried out by soldiers, occasionally with some support from colonial militias.  When the invasion is complete, you don’t simply have a new city in your empire as in Civilization, you have a planet full of uncooperative people who only grudgingly will work to support your cause are likely to attempt to revolt and kill your occupying soldiers.

Like in the original game, you do have the option of wiping out your enemy completely, but the mechanic is implemented in a very different way.  Instead of being an unavoidable part of the invasion or even taking place during the actual combat, genocide is an option that is given to you only after you’ve conquered a colony.  The player must make the choice to have his soldiers start killing civilians.  Doing so is both a slow process and one that incurs a number of penalties (and, of course, an option that is not available to the noble, democratic human faction).

The other, and generally more sensible option in terms of mechanics, is to try and help conquered peoples to assimilate into your empire.  Doing so puts your troops at risk throughout the occupation, but doesn’t enrage the interstellar community.  The rate at which populations are converted depends on what form of government you have and can be aided by building special facilities to help ease their transition.  Once assimilated, the conquered citizens lose their manacles and yellow jumpsuits, begin producing normally, and can be moved about your empire just like any other citizen.  Unlike in other games, however, these conquered peoples keep their identities even after being assimilated – Psilons can still research faster than other races, Klackons still produce more.  Winning the game doesn’t require you to turn the galaxy into a bland, homogeneous order.  A prudent emperor can turn his empire into a melting pot of giant ants, shape-shifters, telepaths and cyborgs (remember, it is a sci-fi game), each with their own unique skills and abilities.

Although Master of Orion does much more to deal with issues of colonialism than most games, there is still plenty that gets left out.  There are no Mahatma Gandhis, no apartheid, no calls for independence, no apologies.  The legacy of colonialism that lingers for centuries in the real world fades in a few turns.  Could postcolonial discourse be incorporated into a strategy game effectively, and if so, what would it look like?

Filed under: Postcolonialism by Pete
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Those of you who follow me on Twitter probably noticed an uncharacteristically large burst of semi-coherent tweets over the weekend. This was due to my attendance at the Frontiers of New Media symposium last Friday and Saturday. The symposium is a biennial event organized by the departments of Communication and History at the University of Utah which brings together scholars from a fairly wide range of backgrounds to discuss topics of New Media. I’m always surprised at how interesting and relevant the presentations are, even when the subject is something like 19^th century telephones or city planning. I always get more out of it than I expect, and this year’s symposium was no exception.

I came away from quite a few of the presentations with new ideas and new questions – so many, in fact, that I won’t be able to do them justice in a single post (In other words, I’m going to be milking this one for a while). What I hope to do in this post is share some of the common themes that I got out of the symposium as a whole.

The first theme that I noticed was one that John D. Peters echoed in his closing remarks, namely the tension between technophobia and technophilia that people feel as technology advances. The two sides of this argument were quite eloquently demonstrated by the two keynote speakers. While Richard White showed how the railroad companies’ freight tables served as algorithms that harmed rural towns, Tim Lenoir showed us a potential future full of networked brains and monkey-controlled robots. As a bit of a technology geek myself, I have a tendency to want new gadgets without worrying too much about the social consequences. At the same time, being someone who studies new media, it’s easy to see how cyberlibertarian rhetoric can blind people to the way in which technology influences power dynamics. In the long run, these shifts of power can often stifle, rather than promote, technological development.

The other thing that struck me was something that I’ve seen as a common theme every year at the symposium, that what we consider to be the defining features of “New Media” really aren’t that new. Concepts such as “participatory media,” “the many-to-many paradigm,” and “non-linearity” are as much rooted in ancient forms of media as they are in the Internet culture of today. The only reason that these concepts are “new” is because we’ve been so immersed in the industrialized media of the last two centuries (newspapers, film, radio, television) that we assume that the media landscape has always been this way.

The reason that understanding how new media relate to old media is important is because we can see parallels to many of our own problems in the past. An excellent example of this was Richard White’s analogy between the Internet and the railroad. Both supposedly make distance meaningless, yet upon close examination, it seems that quite the opposite is true. While cities linked by rail across the country may seem to be but a stone’s throw away, a town a mere ten miles away without roads may as well be on the other side of the planet (a concept which is very well illustrated in the game Civilization once you start linking your cities by rail). This shrinking of space is further complicated when you consider the freight tables used by the railroads to charge shipping. These tables generally gave lower rates to distant port towns than to nearby rural towns, making the railroads cheap for exporters, yet expensive for small farmers.

While this is an interesting bit of Guilded Age trivia, it has a great deal of relevance to new media. The Internet, like the railroad, is a huge network linking locations together. Like the railroad, access is not distributed evenly among all classes of people. Also like the railroad, the way that traffic moves through this network depends on secret, proprietary algorithms – algorithms on which businesses succeed and fail. In the case of the railroad, the government eventually forced these freight tables to become public. I find it unlikely that Google will be making their algorithms public anytime soon, but the parallel does suggest some interesting lines of thought about how these technologies are used and how “democratic” the Internet really is.

Anyway, there were plenty of other good insights I had at the symposium, but they’ll have to wait for another day.  Instead, I’ll just leave you with a shot of the world-record-attempt water balloon fight that just happened to be scheduled right outside the window from the symposium. 

Fortunately, it didn’t derail the whole event (though a few presenters got a thumping techno-beat to go along with their presentations)

Filed under: Frontiers of New Media, Good Old Utah, Media History, New Media by Pete
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