Synaptic Sugar

Building a model of the (first version of the) fascinating German Enigma cipher machine, the same machine that gave the Allies more than one headache during World War II, is as easy as printing the PDF document found on Mike Koss’s paper Enigma page, cutting out strips and putting them together. The result is a 3-rotor Enigma without the ring settings or the plug board, but that captures the main working principles of the real machine. A great educational tool, and a great addition to your squadron of paper airplanes or your team of paper communication operators.

Source: Schneier on Security.

It has now been one year since the birth of this blog, and I must say it’s been an invaluable tool for expressing my personal interests and sharing knowledge and pseudo-randomness with any like-minded reader. Availability of time to blog has fluctuated through highs and lows, and perhaps at times the level of topics discussed has followed the same path; but that is to be considered a feature, rather than a bug. In a year this blog has grown to a moderate success in ratings, and for that I can only thank my readers. I hope you will stay tuned to this channel and will find further stimuli for discussion or thought in these pages; whatever the case, I’m going to keep dumping here summaries of what I find of interest in the universe and beyond. If you care to listen, there are some available chairs over there and some fresh coffee on that table in the back.

I don’t like to leave ends loose, so I’ll follow up to at least part of a previous post in which I mentioned the game Manhunt 2 and its troubles with national classification committees ("Blind supervision"). After having been successfully released in the US last October, although with a rating of “Mature” (which, if on one hand let Rockstar Games avoid the dreaded “Adults Only” rating, had imposed a necessity of censoring parts of the original game), the game in question seems to finally be able to see the light (of stores) in the UK as well.

You may recall from the previous post that the British Board of Film Classification had initially refused to give Manhunt 2 any rating at all, preventing it from reaching the stores in any form. Rockstar did not sit idle since then though, but when they submitted the revised edition to the BBFC they again rejected it, only to have the decision overturned by the UK Video Appeals Committee, forcing the case to end up in court; this didn’t seem to end well for Manhunt 2, as the High Court ruled in favor of the BBFC citing a misinterpretation of the law on the VAC’s part. In a, perhaps unexpected, turn of events, the VAC subsequently agreed to ignore the High Court’s decision and give the game an “18″ certificate, making it “adults only” but at least allowing its commercialization.

I’ve already expressed my thoughts on this kind of censorship and will not repeat them here. It’s worthy to mention how the case was born with the alleged influence the first Manhunt game had on the murder of teenager Stefan Pakeerah, a link that was denied both by the police, who identified drug-related robbery as the motive, and the judge presiding over the case in court at the end of the investigations, who placed sole responsibility on the murderer (moreover, Manhunt was owned by the victim, not the murderer); such a missing link was nonetheless advertised as solid and true by the media and a member of Parliament. However, if there was no such link, who should have been censored instead?

I recently found a relatively old (dating back to November 2007) interview to producer and game design legend David Perry while reading articles on Gamasutra, the well-known game industry news website. The interview itself is highly interesting for a variety of reasons, but among other things I would like to quote a point on in-game advertising (since I mentioned the topic last October, see "Hellgate: localhost") that I find quite insightful. Here’s an excerpt worth commenting on:

“Players will have no problem with advertising if you don’t charge full price for your game and then include a little bit of paper that tells people that you’re sending their IP address to agencies and cover the game in adverts,” Perry joked, referring to player backlash over Battlefield 2142.

Another condition required for players to accept in-game ads is that you: “Don’t delay or interrupt the gamer at any time with advertising, or require them to click anything to get rid of it,” [...] “Give them something valuable in return - obviously a free game is great. Make advertising an exchange.”

I believe the last point in particular is the key. If companies want to successfully introduce advertising in games, they should follow a model that is as unobtrusive and transparent as possible, and should give something tangible in return to the players. Moreover, I add, if the ads are not custom-tailored to fit in the game context, the experience for the players can be severely damaged (how does an ad for the (real) DVD release of the movie Ghost Rider fit in a game set in the 22nd century?). In other words, they should follow a model that TV advertising is not following at all; but given the peculiarities of the gaming culture and platforms, the choice of imitating the TV model as it is, as undoubtedly many companies that are more eager to fatten their wallets than to offer a pleasant and engaging gaming experience are ready to do, would be little more than a failure.