Video Games, World of Warcraft, & Stephenson's Reamde

Here's Wednesday's Forbes article, "Chasing Dragons: How A Misunderstanding Of Video Games Led To The 38 Studios Disaster:"

It seems like a simple tale. Almost an admirable one. A retired sports star loved video games so much, he wanted to make one of his own...

Unfortunately, Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios now stands as a cautionary tale on overreaching expectations in the video game industry...

Schilling...was shooting for the moon... The game was Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, meant to be a World of Warcraft style sword and sorcery MMO... After all, how hard could it be to make another World of Warcraft?

That’s a question that would make anyone with even a passing interesting in gaming burst out laughing... For as much as Schilling claimed to love gaming, he was entirely delusional about the ease of crafting smash hits in the genre. Companies far more established than his have been trying to make a dent in World of Warcraft’s armor for a decade now

For a novel about the creation of a World of Warcraft-like game, try Reamde by Neal Stephenson:

Four decades ago, Richard Forthrast, the black sheep of an Iowa family, fled to a wild and lonely mountainous corner of British Columbia to avoid the draft. Smuggling backpack loads of high-grade marijuana across the border into Northern Idaho, he quickly amassed an enormous and illegal fortune.

With plenty of time and money to burn, he became addicted to an online fantasy game in which opposing factions battle for power and treasure in a vast cyber realm. Like many serious gamers, he began routinely purchasing virtual gold pieces and other desirables from Chinese gold farmers—young professional players in Asia who accumulated virtual weapons and armor to sell to busy American and European buyers.

For Richard, the game was the perfect opportunity to launder his aging hundred dollar bills and begin his own high-tech start up—a venture that has morphed into a Fortune 500 computer gaming group, Corporation 9592, with its own super successful online role-playing game, T’Rain.

But the line between fantasy and reality becomes dangerously blurred when a young gold farmer accidently triggers a virtual war for dominance—and Richard is caught at the center.

E-Cigarettes & Buckley's Thank you for Smoking

I've covered pot and alcohol; now it's time to move on to cigarettes.  Electronic cigarettes, that is.

From the March 23rd editorial in The Economist, "No smoke. Why the fire?:"

Some inventions are so simple, you have to wonder why no one has come up with them before. One such is the electronic cigarette. Smoking tobacco is the most dangerous voluntary activity in the world. More than 5m people die every year of the consequences. That is one death in ten. People smoke because they value the pleasure they get from nicotine in tobacco over the long-term certainty that their health will be damaged. So it seems rational to welcome a device that separates the dangerous part of smoking (the tar, carbon monoxide and smoke released by the process of combustion) from the nicotine. 

And that is what an e-cigarette does. It uses electricity from a small battery to vaporise a nicotine-containing solution, so that the user can breathe it in. E-cigarettes do not just save the lives of smokers: they bring other benefits too. Unlike cigarettes, they do not damage the health of bystanders. They do not even smell that bad, so there is no public nuisance, let alone hazard, and thus no reason to ban their use in public places. Pubs and restaurants should welcome them with open arms.  

No wonder the e-cigarette market is growing. Though still small compared with that for real smokes, it doubled in America last year and is likely to do so again in 2013. 

Who could object? Quite a lot of people, it seems. Instead of embracing e-cigarettes, many health lobbyists are determined to stub them out. Some claim that e-cigarettes may act as “gateways” to the real thing. Others suggest that the flavourings sometimes added to the nicotine-bearing solution make e-cigarettes especially attractive to children...

It seems that the next evolution in the long history of tobacco has arrived.

For a book about cigarettes and the tobacco lobby, try Christopher Buckley's satirical novel Thank You for Smoking:

Nick Naylor likes his job. In the neo-puritanical nineties, it's a challenge to defend the rights of smokers and a privilege to promote their liberty. Sure, it hurts a littIe when you're compared to Nazi war criminals, but Nick says he's just doing what it takes to pay the mortgage and put his son through Washington's elite private school St. Euthanasius. He can handle the pressure from the antismoking zealots, but he is less certain about his new boss, BR, who questions whether Nick is worth $150,000 a year to fight a losing war. Under pressure to produce results, Nick goes on a PR offensive. But his heightened notoriety makes him a target for someone who wants to prove just how hazardous smoking can be. If Nick isn't careful, he's going to be stubbed out.

Google Glass & Gibson's Virtual Light

From today's BBC article “Privacy 'impossible' with Google Glass warn campaigners:”

Google Glass and other augmented reality gadgets risk creating a world in which privacy is impossible, warn campaigners. The warning comes from a group called "Stop the Cyborgs" that wants limits put on when headsets can be used. It has produced posters so premises can warn wearers that the glasses are banned or recording is not permitted.

If you’d like to read a book which features augmented reality glasses, try William Gibson’s science fiction novel Virtual Light:

Welcome to NoCal and SoCal, the uneasy sister-states of what used to be California. Here the millennium has come and gone, leaving in its wake only stunned survivors. In Los Angeles, Berry Rydell is a former armed-response rentacop now working for a bounty hunter. Chevette Washington is a bicycle messenger turned pick-pocket who impulsively snatches a pair of innocent-looking sunglasses. But these are no ordinary shades. What you can see through these high-tech specs can make you rich--or get you killed. Now Berry and Chevette are on the run…

For speculation on what the future of Google Glass might hold, I recommend PC World’s 2012 editorial “Google Glass Horror Stories From Your Privacy-Free Future:”

Google has amassed immense power by cataloging and analyzing the Internet, as well as selling ads there. They are masters of that universe. Like many other tech companies, however, Google isn’t satisfied with such a confined sphere of influence. Google has been searching for ways to treat things in the real world the way it treats things in the digital domain, by numbering, locating, mapping, cataloging, and analyzing them... 

What’s to prevent Google from tracking the movements of our eyeballs to discover the things that catch our attention? When I walk out of my apartment building, for example, a car might pass by that turns my head; I might glance at it in spite of myself. Could the Google Glass technology form a heat map showing the things my eyes rested on? Perhaps someday the technology will be able to measure how fast and how far I turned my head to look at something, and then develop a likelihood-to-buy score based on that. Call it the Whiplash Index. Capturing that kind of data is the stuff of fantasy for marketers, a simple and direct indication of which types of ads to push at the viewer, and when to deliver them… 

Then there’s facial recognition. That technology is unsettling enough when it identifies faces in still pictures or recorded video. But if Google Glass were connected to a server that could recognize faces, facial recognition could happen in real time. Potentially, the wearer could scan a crowd of people and see labels above those who happened to be friends of friends of friends in Google+… This might not be a big deal if just a few people in every city were to end up wearing Google Glass. But what if the device were to catch on, becoming as big as the iPhone is today? All those glasses would be collecting monstrous amounts of audio and video information every minute of every day, possibly piping the data through the network for storage in some vast server farm… Judging from the wording of Google’s overarching privacy policy and terms of use, the sounds and images that Google Glass records would not be the property of the person wearing the glasses. Google could use those sounds and images for whatever it wants.

Facebook vs App Developers & Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires

From today's Wall Street Journal article "Tensions Rise Between Facebook, Developers:"

Last month in Paris, developer Antoine Morcos received an unexpected email: Facebook said it was cutting ties with his photo-sharing application, Vintage Camera. Mr. Morcos, 31 years old, instantly lost nearly half a million registered users who only accessed Vintage Camera through the social-networking site. Facebook, without being specific, said too many users had complained about Vintage Camera, said Mr. Morcos. He appealed, arguing his app fielded less than three complaints for every 1,000 photos shared, but Facebook didn't budge. "I was really shocked," Mr. Morcos said. "Users were sharing as much as 6,000 photos per day on Facebook; now access is blocked." 

Vintage Camera, which competes with Facebook's Instagram app, is one of a growing number of third-party apps that have been blocked by the social network recently. Facebook has long had a complex relationship with developers as it balances a complicated set of interests. The company says it is stepping up efforts to police the network by curbing spam and restricting apps that aren't adding sufficient value to the network. Developers say the crackdown is an attempt to stifle applications that compete with Facebook-owned services or part of an effort to get developers to pay for ads on Facebook...

On Friday, Facebook blocked MessageMe Inc., a messaging service that had just launched days earlier, from accessing users' friends list. Arjun Sethi, a MessageMe co-founder, said Facebook cited a section of its policy that addressed restricting apps that copied a core Facebook product or service. According to people familiar with the matter, the fledgling service had recently rebuffed takeover interest from the social networking company.

To see what makes Facebook tick, you might look into how it all started by reading Ben Mezrich's novel The Accidental Billionaires (which was the basis for the film The Social Network):

Best friends Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg had spent many lonely nights looking for a way to stand out among Harvard University’s elite, comptetitive, and accomplished student body. Then, in 2003, Zuckerberg hacked into Harvard’s computers, crashed the campus network, almost got himself expelled, and was inspired to create Facebook, the social networking site that has since revolutionized communication around the world. With Saverin’s funding their tiny start-up went from dorm room to Silicon Valley. But conflicting ideas about Facebook’s future transformed the friends into enemies. Soon, the undergraduate exuberance that marked their collaboration turned into out-and-out warfare as it fell prey to the adult world of venture capitalists, big money, lawyers.

Keep in mind that since Mezrich's sources were Zuckerberg's enemies and not Zuckerberg himself, you should take the account with a grain of salt.

Cyber Attacks, Cyber Terrorism, & Russinovich's Zero Day

Earlier today I posted about drones.  Now we can read about another new technology used in warfare:  cyber attacks.  Here's Tuesday's NBC article "Cyber attacks are leading threat against US: spy agencies:"

Intelligence leaders said for the first time on Tuesday that cyber attacks and cyber espionage have supplanted terrorism as the top security threat facing the United States... They expressed concern that computer technology is evolving so quickly it is hard for security experts to keep up. "In some cases, the world is applying digital technologies faster than our ability to understand the security implications and mitigate potential risks," James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, told the committee... On Monday, White House national security adviser Tom Donilon, citing complaints from U.S. businesses about alleged Chinese cyber espionage, said the issue is a growing challenge to economic relations between the United States and China.

For a novel on cyber attacks, try Zero Day by Mark Russinovich:

An airliner's controls abruptly fail mid-flight over the Atlantic. An oil tanker runs aground in Japan when its navigational system suddenly stops dead. Hospitals everywhere have to abandon their computer databases when patients die after being administered incorrect dosages of their medicine. In the Midwest, a nuclear power plant nearly becomes the next Chernobyl when its cooling systems malfunction. At first, these random computer failures seem like unrelated events. But Jeff Aiken, a former government analyst who quit in disgust after witnessing the gross errors that led to 9/11, thinks otherwise. Jeff fears a more serious attack targeting the U.S. computer infrastructure is already under way. And as other menacing computer malfunctions pop up around the world, some with deadly results, he realizes that there isn't much time if he hopes to prevent an international catastrophe.

If you want further news coverage about cyber attacks, another interesting article from Tuesday was the New York Times' "Security Leader Says U.S. Would Retaliate Against Cyberattacks:"

The chief of the military’s newly created Cyber Command told Congress on Tuesday that he is establishing 13 teams of programmers and computer experts who could carry out offensive cyberattacks on foreign nations if the United States were hit with a major attack on its own networks, the first time the Obama administration has publicly admitted to developing such weapons for use in wartime.

Drones & Suarez's Kill Decision

Drones have frequently been in the news over the last year, and their increasing use by the U.S. military is a contentious issue in American politics.  Last week, Senator Paul's filibuster brought the drone issue to a head.  Here are the highlights from the relevant BBC article, "Senator Rand Paul's drone filibuster delays CIA nomination:"

A Republican US senator has delayed the nomination of a new CIA chief over questions about the possible use of drones against Americans. Senator Rand Paul spoke without a pause for nearly 13 hours, in a tactic known as a filibuster, before yielding the floor... Sen Paul - a critic of the use of drones - demanded a pledge from either President Obama or Attorney General Eric Holder that drones would not be used in the US to kill terror suspects who are US citizens... The Kentucky senator said he was "alarmed" by how difficult it had been to get President Barack Obama's administration to clearly define what qualifies as a legitimate target of a drone strike. "No president has the right to say he is judge, jury and executioner,'' Sen Paul said, adding he would end the filibuster if the White House clarified no such attack would happen on US soil.

For a novel on drones, try Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez:

Unmanned weaponized drones already exist—they’re widely used by America in our war efforts in the Middle East. In Kill Decision, bestselling author Daniel Suarez takes that fact and the real science behind it one step further, with frightening results. Linda McKinney is a myrmecologist, a scientist who studies the social structure of ants. Her academic career has left her entirely unprepared for the day her sophisticated research is conscripted by unknown forces to help run an unmanned—and thanks to her research, automated—drone army. Odin is the secretive Special Ops soldier with a unique insight into the faceless enemy who has begun to attack the American homeland with drones programmed to seek, identify, and execute targets without human intervention. Together, McKinney and Odin must slow this advance long enough for the world to recognize its destructive power, because for thousands of years the “kill decision” during battle has remained in the hands of humans—and off-loading that responsibility to machines will bring unintended, possibly irreversible, consequences.

UPDATE:  there are some longer reviews of Kill Decision over at the Daqri and ZenPundit blogs.