Synaptic Sugar

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.

Here’s an excerpt of what the license agreement to accept before installing the demo of the long-awaited game “Hellgate: London“, developed by Flagship Studios and distributed by Electronic Arts, says:

“Consent to Use of Data. You agree that EA, its affiliates, and each Related Party may collect, use, store and transmit technical and related information that identifies your computer, including without limitation your Internet Protocol address, operating system application software and peripheral hardware, that may be gathered periodically to facilitate the provision of software updates, dynamically served content, product support and other services to you, including online play. EA and/or the Related Parties may also use this information in the aggregate and, in a form which does not personally identify you, to improve our products and services and we may share that aggregate data with our third party service providers”

“EA, its affiliates, and each Related Party”, “without limitation”, “periodically”, all for just a demo? Sorry but it’s a little too much to improve updates and product support. It sounds more to me like this is one of the first attempts to effectively implement that practice of serving dynamically targeted ads in videogames, tailored around the behavioral and commercial patterns of the players, that EA and other companies seem to appreciate. Either way, for now I’m not installing.

As promised, here’s the second bright idea. Perhaps it’s of more interest to my Italian readers, but it may serve as a warning to the others. But let me start from the Beginning.

Initially, I wasn’t sure about how to structure this blog and what topics to post about. Then I just decided to let it flow as it came because, after all, that’s one of the points of blogs; by the looks of it, even too many others have chosen the same approach (no need to give out links here, you all know examples). Like so many others, this blog is not affiliated with any company, doesn’t pretend to be a newspaper, doesn’t have any monetary gain from its own existence. It simply makes use of the freedom represented (so far) by the Internet.

Online newspapers are a different matter, and that should be obvious to anyone. Maybe not so obvious to those (clearly smarter than us) people who work hard all day to come up with fair and intelligent laws in Italy. In the middle of August, when everyone else was on vacation, those people came up with a draft for a law that wants the editors of all publications (or “editorial products”) to be registered at a public registry, after paying a suitable tax, so that they could be more efficiently prosecuted in cases of defamation (to sum it all up). It wouldn’t be much different from the way it’s been so far, if not for the fact that the notion of “editorial product” is brilliantly extended to all those “products” that exist as non-profit, and to those edited on the Internet. Personal websites, blogs, et cetera. To have a blog, you’d have to pay registration fees, go through quite a lot of bureaucracy, and be more easily subject to defamation claims that could make you (literally) end up in jail (please note that, even under the previous regulations, non-profit blog authors have in some cases been tried for defamation — publishing on the Internet has hardly ever been a “Wild West” sort of thing like so many are eager to cry out in outrage).

To the rescue come the Undersecretary of State Ricardo Franco Levi (yesterday) who admits the text is different from what was intended but is sure it will be corrected; and the Minister for Communications Paolo Gentiloni (today), who admits the wording was a mistake and comments (ironically, on his own blog) that he “thought the law proposal merely confirmed the previous regulations” and that he “should have personally read the text, word by word” before approving it. Yes, it was a mistake, no, admitting it is not enough (although appreciated), if your job is to vote on laws that have anything (and in this case everything) to do with Communications. Or, in general, if you happen to be in the Council of Ministers (who has approved the proposal as is, allowing it to go next through the Parliament). Average people who have more typical jobs and make big mistakes aren’t always able to make it all better by just admitting the mistake — keep that in mind.

That’s the latest trend: to come up with a faulty, poorly written and deeply nonsensical law that takes into no account the reality of technology and is criticized by many, and justify it with a “Let’s just do it for now; we’ll amend it later on” (remember what happened with the Urbani law not more than a few years ago, which among so many other things tried to force webmasters to send the contents of their websites on a floppy disk to a National Library every time they were updated “to preserve Italian culture” — newsflash: they have Web crawlers and Google nowadays who can serve an equivalent function automatically — witchcraft!). What happens before it’s amended? Let’s not just do it: let’s instead focus on what we’re doing and pass a law that makes sense to start with, and if needs be amend it later.

Now that so many are protesting against this draft (but I wonder, if they hadn’t, how many others would have come to know about it before it fully became a law), I’m sure it will be corrected. If not, this blog will probably have to move elsewhere, and with it who knows how many others. But it’s all to preserve Italian culture and spur innovation, I’m sure.

Another break is gone, another wait has ended. I now return to this blog bringing ideas for the future and curious news I’ve read while I was gone, hidden from the all-knowing eye of the Web. Not long ago I heard about Wikiscanner, a tool developed by Virgil Griffith to scan the Wikipedia database dump and trace the IP addresses of editors to the parent network or organization, allowing searches of edits performed by this or that company. While this obviously doesn’t let one find out the names of the people who directly edited pages on Wikipedia, it shows potentially entertaining (or sad) associations between the editing entity and the contents of the edit itself.

It is thus worthy to note how a quick examination of the results produced using the tool reveals how someone at The New York Times (but most certainly merely a guest who had access to the newspaper’s network) decided to add a personal comment on the Wikipedia entry about George W. Bush, repeatedly calling him a “jerk”; or how whoever was on the Google network at the time (but most certainly it couldn’t have been an employee) suggested Wikipedia users pick their nose for best results; or, again, how an unknown user of the Dell network (but most certainly a malicious hacker) deleted the whole entry about Dell to advise people to buy Apple products instead.

Funny moments aside, other kinds of edits may create more concern. I’m referring to those who look as though they were done much more in the interest of the corporation that (supposedly) did them rather than for fun, for example to delete information that could constitute bad publicity for the company itself or to inject wrong information in entries about competitors. As above, it’s not possible to know who really did the edits; but it’s possible to see how it appears that the Kimberly-Clark company deleted whole paragraphs regarding protests from Greenpeace against the company; or how it looks like Wal-Mart changed a line that hinted the company paid their employees much less than its competitors with one, much more reassuring, that explains how employees instead receive twice the federal minimum wage on average; or how apparently PepsiCo (makers of Pepsi Cola) thought it was best to completely eradicate all criticism regarding the effects on health of their popular drink.

The examples are but a minimal fraction, and my considerations follow. While it is true, like I’ve said more than once in this post, that one can’t be sure who those edits originated from, Wikiscanner reminds us of a few key points that should be obvious, but that for some reason aren’t to a lot of people:

• Nothing you do on the ‘Net is ever truly anonymous. Wikipedia can be modified by anyone, but it is always possible to know who changed what, and such information is public;
• The reliability of Wikipedia is high enough on non-controversial topics; when it comes to controversial topics, such as maybe politics, or corporation information, or anything that various subjects may be interested in manipulating, its reliability can’t be that great, and unless more control mechanisms are put in place (such as trust and reputation advertisement mechanisms, for example) it can only become a public relations battlefield;
• If companies would like to blame those “awkward” edits on guests or hackers, then they should definitely improve the behavior of their employees at the workplace, their network access policies or the security of their networks against unwanted intrusion. Unless they’d rather claim they directly manipulated Wikipedia entries to make themselves look good or to make their competitors look bad; discovering which of the two stances is better publicity, is left as an exercise to the reader.