Summary:
A story about a light/medium weight internet user who didn’t want to pay line rental or risk being lumbered with an early cancellation fee and opted for wireless mobile broadband.
I recently moved flat, and as any internet addict savvy individual will know, picking an internet service provider is a very important decision. So important, it came above council tax and utility bills on my list of things to do.
Always irritated by the need to pay BT line rental AND ISP fees, ADSL was immediately ruled out and the search for a cable provider began. It promptly ended when none of the companies online coverage checkers worked* with my new (and apparently, yet to be registered) postcode. The council were however able to find me to tell me they had not yet received the tax application… odd that.
Rather than attempt to sort this out on the phone (which ultimately would lead to the same conclusion after 35 minutes on hold) I considered something a little out of the ordinary. For a while, i had been using my mobile via bluetooth as a modem for my laptop. I have an optional extra on my phone contract which allows me ‘unlimited’ (In reality they get funny after a gigabyte) internet access on the handset. Technically you’re not meant to tether it, but desperate times and all. The speeds aren’t amazing, with perfect signal i think i’ve had it get up to around 40kb/s. So i thought why not live off a mobile broadband dongle in the home? No contract, no line rental and if my phone can get 40kb/s in the flat then a dedicated dongle could surely do better.
I borrowed a pay as you go mobile broadband USB dongle on 3 to test it out and the results were quite pleasing. Download speeds in excess of 1.2mb/s, not blistering that’s for sure, but good enough considering the saving i’d be making. Safe in the knowledge my flat was in an adequate 3G/HSDPA area i proceeded to buy my own dongle for surfing. As to be expected, it worked fine, but one USB dongle can only get you so far, namely, one computer. My ipod touch was desperate for some wifi, not to mention my xbox. After trying in vain to get the dongle to work with internet sharing on my mac (I’m sure there must be a way, but i CANNOT figure it out, i suspect the connection manager software provided by 3 is throwing a spanner in the works), I decided to buy a router.
This router costs about £70 and lets you plug in a compatible huawei USB mobile broadband dongle (mine is a E160G) and in turn broadcast wifi. It also has a single RJ45 jack (ethernet/LAN) for a network cable. This is enough for an xbox, or a switch if you wanted more ports. I am pleased (and rather surprised) to report xbox live works. The ping is a little higher than you’d like at times when the wifi is being used, but i’ve been causing chaos in Liberty City with no real trouble. Also, unlike the terrible free routers i’ve used in the past (cough)
So to conclude, I am on an 18 month contract at £15 a month (as an existing 3 customer i get a discount, applicable to contracts only). The 15GB a month is not ideal, i would happily pay for more, and an considering an add on, it’s more than enough for my current evening & weekend usage but i suspect a podcast/iplayer heavy individual would struggle. The great thing is, unlike a hard line internet connection, if i move inside the 18 months i can take my internet with me and not have to worry about cancellation fees, not to mention no line rental. Similarly, i can go out with the dongle and my laptop and use them anywhere in the UK.
This solution will not work for everyone. If you’re a heavy internet user (read: A torrenting pirate) you will eat up your limit in no time. Also, signal strength varies around the country so if you’re considering using mobile broadband, do check the internet strength on a handset of that provider in the location you intend to use it. That said, for me it’s worked very well and will save a lot of money in the long run!
Should probably sort out the council tax now.
*Tell a lie, there was one site that worked, Virgin media, but as discovered in my final year at university (when the same ISP question was being asked) their postcode search is actually broken and ‘works’ with any postcode. It has been well over a year and a half and they have yet to fix it… well done Virgin media!
Sonic The Hedgehog - Really hard, but luckily really fun.
I’ve been playing a lot of games recently. All sorts of games; flash based games, pervasive games, video games (in the purest sense e.g. PS3, XBOX360) and alternate reality games. One thing I’ve noticed is that some games are really really hard. Not hard in the sense that, I’m too impatient and don’t have the courage or will power to persevere and learn the important lessons they’re trying to teach me, but hard in the sense that they’re almost impossible without playing them over and over and over and over until my thumbs are no longer in tact, or until I’ve killed myself in frustration.
Hard games suck. They’re not fun, they’re not good, they’re bad in every single way except one…entertaining the people who love to play hard games. The experts, the people who play for hours and hours on end just to complete the game on ’super survivor arcade one life and if you die that’s it mode’ The audience for these type of games is very low, and unsurprisingly so, so why do game developers feel the need to make games, or parts of them ridiculously frustrating? I suspect it’s something that they had very good reason for, back in the day and it’s just something that’s stuck. The disillusion that there’s millions of people out there demanding to be entertained with the next ‘hardest game in the Universe’.
Sonic Unleashed - Really Hard, Not Fun.
Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here, I’m not stating that games can’t be hard. I’m stating that if games are just hard then they’re probably not fun, and that’s really really bad. Look at games like Wipeout and Warhawk for example, both games that have a very steep learning curve. You could say that they’re hard. Yes, they are hard, but what’s different about these games is that they’re fun, and the mechanics within the game allow for you to play and have fun without worrying about whether you’re actually winning or not. Contrast that with games such as Sonic Unleashed, where you get a handul of lives to complete the hardest level at the end of the game. Sounds easy, right? Wrong. The last level is probably around an hour in length for the average player and sure, you can gain extra lives along the way. But it’s far easier to lose a life than gain one. Oh and did I mention that it’s not only 4/5 times longer than your average level, but it’s about 2/3 times harder too. More tests of skill, more tests of timing and more tests of patience. So un-fun it’s actually funny. After investing so much time into games like these, it’s both heartbreaking and confusing when they pull out the joker on the last level. In my opinion, it’s a giant no-no.
So when did games become hard, and why are they still unnecessarily hard?
I remember playing Sonic The Hedgehog as a child. I loved it. I played it all the time. In fact, although I owned an Atari, Sonic The Hedgehog was the first game that I really loved and was hooked to. Like a lot of video games of that era, you couldn’t save your game and come back to it later, and you definitely couldn’t continue if you lost all of your lives. So, basically if you wanted to get through to the end of Sonic The Hedgehog, you needed a lot of practice and patience. Sonic The Hedgehog was hard.
So, wait? Sonic The Hedgehog was really hard, but you still loved it? Yes. And here’s why…
At the end of the 80’s and in the early 90’s (pre-Playstation era), games were still relatively new, or at least games consoles were. In fact, they were becoming more and more popluar, but in terms of the number of good games available at that time, there weren’t many. People also didn’t buy games very often. I seem to remember a sort of attitude that if you buy a few games, they’ll last you. You can play them over and over again, and it wasn’t really thought that you’d need any more. That’s exactly what happened. I played Sonic The Hedgehog, Space Invaders, Pong, Alex The Kidd over and over and over, and the game mechanics allowed me to, because they were hard. I wasn’t going to give up becuase there wasn’t anything else to play.
I guess that’s one of the classic money-spinners of Arcade Games back in the 70’s and 80’s. The addictive arcade games made lots and lots, because they were really addictive, competitive and hard. It’s only natural that games that spilled over to the home consoles followed the same formula, at least until they could make better games faster and there was more to choose from.
So why are games still hard? Who knows. I feel it’s a mixture of developers not realising people don’t want to play hard games (especially when they can easily switch to any number of millions of games at an instant) and not being very inventive with game design. Kongregate for example allows people to find games they find fun. If it’s too hard, they’ll just find another one. Unfortunately, companies like Sega still to this day have something very arcade (or should that be arcane?) about them. To me, the Dreamcast was pretty much an arcade machine, from the titles released for it, to the graphics. Part of me thinks that Sega’s set in their ways and out of touch with reality, but the other holds out hope that I’m deluded and they do have a genuine reason to make games uber difficult. Because if they do, I certainly can’t see it.
At Six To Start, we’re all about making fun games, they don’t have to be difficult, and most of the time they shouldn’t be. One of the huge lessons we can learn from games like Werewolf / Mafia, hide and seek and other social games is that it’s the mechanics and interactions that make a game what it is, not it’s difficulty.
Some ARGs use difficulty as a barrier in puzzles. Whilst it does create a problem that the community must solve collaboratively (pushing them closer), it also alienates. For this reason codebreaking is bad, steganography is bad and cryptic puzzles that don’t tell you what the question is, let alone how to answer it are bad. Of course, there are exceptions, but I’m not going to go into them now.
The most important element to games should be that they’re fun. If you can entertain people for hours, I guess it doesn’t matter if they’re hard or not. But game designers should definitely learn from their audience more. When people are sleeping in a lecture, do something to wake them up. When people are being put off by a difficult game, remove the difficulty and make it more fun.
Yesterday was probably the first gloriously sunny day London has seen for quite some time. Not only was the sky clear, but the temperature was warm. As a direct result, i decided to walk the 1.3 miles from the station to the office to enjoy the weather. Upon making this decision, as if by magic, my ipod decided to play U2 – Beautiful day. “Clever ipod!” i thought.
No, not really.
But why not?
Why couldn’t my ipod be as clever as this brief moment of serendipity suggests? Or more importantly, when will my ipod be this clever? At the time of writing, Apple’s latest release of itunes provides the itunesDJ feature. This is a glorified rolling ‘Genius’ playlist which, based on number of factors, attempts to play your music library in an order it has established as most like to be pleasing to the ear.
Let’s think a moment about our portable music history. The Sony Walkman, easily the first personal, truly portable music player that let consumers take the music they wanted, where they wanted. We’ve come a long way since then, in some areas at least. We can now carry more songs, access them with greater ease and ultimately listen to them at higher quality. In other areas however, we have advanced very little.
Until the introduction of the genius feature, playlists were very static. In the 80’s you made a mix tape, the 90’s a CD and 00’s a digital playlist. All of these formats required your input as a DJ. For those unfamiliar with the ‘Genius’ feature of itunes, it allows you to pick a starting song, and the computer will decide what songs will flow well after it. Being able to do this on the latest ipods means an original playlist can be created in a second. This is all well and good, but it’s only the beginning for dynamic playlists. Imagine an iphone, it plays music, has internet connectivity and knows where you are. Now project your thoughts, along the lines of Tim Berners Lee and the semantic web/linked data principle. From knowing the location, the device can determine the weather, the time of day, the season, the history… Tapping into the semantic web would allow it to create a constantly evolving playlist from your library or even introduce you to new artists. Walking over Waterloo Bridge at Sunset? I wonder which song you’ll hear.
Now let’s go further, many years down the line to a time when your iphone monitors the blood glucose levels of diabetics, the heart rate of joggers and the emotions of the wearer. Wouldn’t that make for some interesting listening?
As technology continues to become smaller, better connected and smarter, dynamicism or ‘On the fly’ features are going to crop up a lot more. As Tim points out in his TED talk, the key is access data. The more data avliable, the more specific these features can be. This is both an amazing opportunity and a scary prospect. Once all that data is out there, things can get personal. Real personal. Targeted advertising has already been on the web for a number of years now, it’s only a matter of time before it crosses over. Be it via tracking iphones, or retina recognition, it’s coming and this revolution will be televised. It will be on every street corner in full HD with speakers aimed directly at you, speaking to you, influencing you.
I’m not old, I hate people my age who say they are old. But I do feel that I must be somewhere near the top end of the Skins target audience. However, and I do for some odd reason feel slightly sad saying this, I love it.
Ok it has got a flaky and sometimes barely plausible story line and might be a little distant from actual life for a lot of teenagers, but for me that is beyond the point. What Skins has done is create a new style of broadcasting. It’s used its position as a show that is watched by young, hip and trendy types to really show how TV can work with the internet.
I remember when the first series was about to air the cross media blanket of promotion Channel 4 used to get it noticed. And I remember how impressed I was at the continuity between print, tv and web, both in terms of message and creative. However the third series see’s the skins team really push themselves in with online prescence. Luckily e4 have created a good platform to base this, with their new very slick site. This in addition the use of twitter, ok this may not be ground breaking. But what other TV show tweets the song that is currently playing on the show? Or invites users to discuss the episode straight after its finished. I may be wrong but I dont know of any.
Ok this wouldn’t work for all shows, but what e4 have managed to do is use Twitter in what I think is the correct way, as a feeder to their main content site. Also with music playing such a strong part in the show and the audience bringing this information to the the viewer is brilliant. Another thing i’ve loved, its a bit girly i know, is the fact that they tell viewers where they can get the clothes the characters were wearing during the episode.
Its so easy for broadcasters to make these great shows and then walk away and hope the public like them. Keeping the audience involved and answering their questions about things. Its a very rounded approach to TV, one that works extremely well with this excitable and interesting audience. I don’t know if this approach would work with slightly more mature content. But i’d like to think it would.
Anyway see I don’t just love it for Naomi and Emily’s lesbian kissing, like you all thought!
There has been a hell of a lot of talk online about cloud computing lately. Mainly based around the safety of your data whilst stored online. Again recently there has been some more facebook related stories of people posting things they probably wished they hadn’t.
What is it that makes us throw all our privacy out of the window when it comes to the internet? Are we all just ignorant of completely caught up in what the internet has to offer that we don’t stop to think what we are freely giving away to third parties. Ok some data is ’safer’ than others, like things on google mail etc. But anything posted on the Internet is somewhere along the line open to access from people who shouldn’t be accessing it.
I always used to be a firm believer in the idea that you shouldn’t post anything on the internet that you wouldn’t put on the back of a post card. But even I have information on my website that I probably wouldn’t want my postman to read.
So does the Internet because of its place in our lives make us forget our principles around privacy? And if so how and why? Anyone got an answer?
Games are changing and while you might not notice it now, in a few years you’ll look back in wonderment at the early games and ideas that sparked change.
As I mentioned on my personal blog, I’m on the advisory board for Superstruct, an online game that will help predict and invent the future for the Institute For The Future. The IFTF is a non-profit organisation that analyses trends to provide insight and advice about the future and how to embrace the waves of change in areas such as business strategy and social dilemmas.
So why does that matter? Well, it’s clear to me that through a process of analysis, trend spotting, thought and speculation we can not only predict the future, but we can also work with the raw materials and invent it! If there’s something changing for the worse (e.g. global warming) then we can spot that in analysis and invent a solution before it happens. Or, and back to our topic if something’s changing for the better (e.g. games) we can embrace it and use our analysis to make them even better.
I’ve noticed a few things in gaming that have been changing dramatically lately. We don’t necessarily notice these big changes, because they happen in chunks and not all together, but believe me that things are going to be different in the future. You might think some of these are fairly simple observations, and that there’s no special analysis that’s gone into them and you’d be correct. These are simple changes, simple facts. After all, isn’t it always the simple things that have the most impact?
Before I open the envelope and reveal my nominees for the “Changing Games Award 2008″ it’s important to understand why people play games. If we know why people play games, then we know why they’re changing, or need to change. People play games because they get something out of them, lower level escapism needs and higher level self actualisation and esteem needs (We’ll be here all day if we look into everyone else’s definitions). So let’s get to the good stuff…
Ubiquitous
Everywhere gaming. Mobile, handheld and urban gaming are really pushing ubiquitous play. These advances take play to situations it was never possible before (in the video game sense), meaning that people can escape from reality wherever and whenever they like. I played Tap Tap Revolution on my iPhone on the way home from work this evening. Not because I’m a gaming junkie and needed a fix, but because it took me out of the dire situation I was in on the District Line. I’m really interested to see how location based play changes the dynamic and really pushes these advances in gaming.
On the other end of ubiquitous play are alternate reality games (ARGs). Not everywhere in the literal sense, but in terms of media they really are everywhere. They come to players at all angles, in every situation forcing them to think on their feet and challenge. Again, since I’m working in this field I’m keen to see how this changes other forms of gaming.
Casual
I’m not going to go too deep here. I’m sure it’s a trend you’ve all spotted. With the Nintendo Wii really pushing the field (fun pickup and play gaming), more people than ever are joining in. Not only are they a broader range of people than ever before (it’s not unusual to see Wii gamers in their 80’s), but they’re prepared to just dip in and out of games. Long gone are the 50+ hour narratives, this audience want something fun for a short period which they can come back to and not worry about what they’ve forgotten.
Accessible
Not to be confused with casual, they often go hand in hand but are actually very different. Accessibility is about opening up gaming to people who wouldn’t normally play. In the ARG industry we’re making games more accessible by making them easy to dip into during the game’s running, as well as making re-playable games and games which people find very easy to see what’s going on. Transparency’s the key word, and it’s getting more transparent.
Rewarding
XBOX 360 has had Achievements for ages now and PS3 followed suit a couple of months ago with the long awaited trophy patch. For those who don’t know what achievements or trophies are, they’re incentives for players to play through games, sometimes more than they would normally would. The Nectar card of the gaming world! I particularly like the Playstation reward system, as the ‘trophies’ come in bronze, silver, gold and platinum variety. It turns completing games, and finding treasures into an olympic session for my inner brain that thinks I’m Michael Phelps. Not only can you compare your medal count to other friends. This creates a sort of ‘Hero syndrome’, where everyone’s a hero, striving to be a better hero. Surely a good thing? It’s really driving positivity and motivation to do better in life as well as gaming.
Also under the header of ‘rewarding’ would be community based games. MMOs are ever popular and the usage statistics of social networks are outstanding. Once again, these are very rewarding. We’re a social species, we love to talk and interact with our friends. Playing with 2 people is more than twice as fun playing with one. These sort of games are going to creep more into everyday life as they water down mundane tasks from answering calls and emails to keeping fit training plans.
Real
Games have been mimicking reality for some time now, with the ever improving graphics in video games, to the avatar representations in the virtual world Second Life. The tides are shifting however, in favor of reality becoming more like a game and ties into ubiquitous play very nicely. Once again this is where ARGs fit in. What could possibly be better than raising morale and satisfying higher level needs by changing your reality? Sure, I’m Marc McGinley, but I’m also Agent Mango, who’s secret mission it is to brighten people’s day by complementing them on the tube. Why do we need to play representations of ourself when we have a really great tool for changing who we already are (the imagination).
Urm what now?
So, what does this mean for the future then? Games are going to be even more everywhere, taking people to more bizarre places, with more bizarre personas and less boredom. Games were once used to pass time and forget troubles, but now they’re being used to make a real social impact. Next time you pick up a game, think of the features within it and the cool new thing it does, and wonder what changes it could have on the world. Dare I even say it, invent the future!
Recently, Asus, a company generally known for its motherboards and graphics cards took a stab at building a computer. Not just any old computer, a laptop, and a cheap one at that. Almost certainly drawing inspiration from the hubbub surrounding the OLPC/$100 laptop they focused on something small, cost effective and modestly equipped. Unlike the OLPC however they were targeting the general public instead of governments, with a minimum order of one instead of several hundred thousand.
The result of all this was the Asus eeepc, launched in the UK in late 2007 which caught the eye of many.
After the buzz surrounding Ultra Mobile PCs (UMPCs) which promised consumers a revolution in highly portable computers, here was something that was ultra mobile at a price point the general public could truly embrace. Unlike their UMPC cousins netbooks have a keyboard so they really are useful for more than looking swish with a tablet. Small laptops are nothing new, Sony Vaio have been happily dishing out highly portable machines for years and setting up the association between high portability and high cost. The eeepc turned that idea on its head and suddenly people could have the joys of a cheap laptop which weighed less than 1kg. Sure the machine was lacking in drive space, optical drives and processing grunt, but to word process comfortably on the train it was ideal.
Fast forward a few months and we get to MacWorld ‘08 and the rumours are rife that Steve Jobs will be introducing a new laptop. Ever since the discontinuation of the 12″ powerbook I for one have felt Apple were missing something, and willed them to announce a smaller macbook. Unfortunately the macbook air did not fill this gap. To top it all off the price tag is typical Apple. Design it and they will come, at whatever price. Apple could have had a slice of the netbook market, the macmini shows they’re not against compact machines, but instead they have missed the boat for now.
The thing that makes these netbooks possible (and so very useful) is the now ubiquitous idea of “The cloud”. A new buzzword dedicated to describing a portion of the web on which users offload typical desktop tasks to machines on the internet with the benefit of being able to check in on them wherever they are on a machine which can connect. Kevin Kelly, executive editor of WIRED magazine, spoke in December ‘07 at TED on how he thought The Web would evolve over the next 5,000 days. When discussing this idea of cloud computing he referred to the Internet as ‘The One’ and he implied that the portability offered today by netbooks is going to filter down into even smaller devices still:
“Every screen in the world is looking into the one machine, these are only simply portals into that one machine.”
That’s the beauty of centralized yet distributed data, no matter where you are you can get access to what you need and it is as you left it. I wrote this article using google docs, starting at home on my mac, adding to it several hundred miles away while on holiday with my netbook and finally finishing it at my girlfriends house on her desktop.
Nearly a year has passed since Asus released the eeepc and a lot has changed. Seeing the success of their original model they have expanded their line, upping the features but keeping the low price in the forefront of their minds. Others too have seen this success and their are now many netbooks on the market or soon to be on the market, all at a very competitive price point. I myself have opted for an Advent 4211 and am very happy with the choice. For anybody who travels and needs to stay connected, this breed of machine are going to bridge the gap between mobile and desktop for as long as it takes for us to reach the constantly connected state Kevin Kelly speaks of.
That’s one small footprint for laptops, one giant market for laptopkind.
When are creative ideas inspired by others and when are they just straightforward copies? Its a fine line in my view, but still a very clear and present line.
I’m sure you have all seen the recent Berocca advert that takes its “inspiration” from Ok Go’s music video. Its plain to see where the idea came from for that ad and we can all shout “copycats!”, but the main reason for this glaring miscarriage of ideas is the implementation of the original idea. Let me cite another example, Honda’s Cogs and Peter Fischli & David Weiss’s ‘The way things go’. I have to thank my old creative director Flo for pointing this out. However from what I remember there wasn’t the same negative outcry about that ad, instead it was appluaded for its creativity.
So what is the difference between the two? Well I can think of two factors the most glaring here being that Ok Go’s video was probably seen by a much wider audience than Fischli & Weiss’s ‘The way things go’. Therefore of course creating a bigger swarm of defense when it was “copied”. But the more interesting point I think is the fact that Honda with the hlep of thier ad agency managaged to take one great creative idea and take it further to work with a product. However Berrocca’s attempt at the same failed misrably because it was the recyling of the same idea with no development towards the product. Simply directly recreating the same video again was a bit silly, they would of been better off paying for the OK Go Video and then just wacked their tag line on at the end..
Is there a difference between inspiration and copying? Yes, but telling the difference is hard for creatives and getting it wrong could be catastrophic.
hardware, lifestyle, the internet 
Stuart 
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