Michael Jennings

Well it seems my dastardly plan to get the URL of this weblog on the front page of slashdot has succeeded . If you have come from there and want to e-mail me, the address is mjj12@btopenworld.com .

Here is a review of the Game On exhibition that is on at the Barbican centre in London, and which will tour Japan and the US in 2003. I wrote this to submit to slashdot , and they may or may not publish it, but I may as well post it on my own site as well.

On Friday I attended the Game On exhibition about the history of computer games, at the Barbican Centre gallery. (Admission charge, 11 pounds (16ドル)). This is on in London from 16 May to 15 September, before moving to The Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh from October 2002 to February 2003 and touring to be announced venues is Europe, America and Japan in 2003.

The exhibition starts off well as you walk into it. The first thing you see is a PDP-1, with a description of the development of SpaceWar in 1962. Sadly, the PDP-1 is not actually operating, but there is a later (1977) coin operated version of Space War that you can play. From there, we jump straight to the 1970s, where we have a couple of instances of "Computer Space", the very first coin operated game, from 1971, which had a truly cool cabinet and was produced by Nolan Bushnell, who had then not yet founded Atari, but was otherwise unmemorable, (although this photo does seem to indicate that the sixties were not yet over). We then have working versions (of both cocktail and upgright versions) of many coin operated games from the 1970s.

Most of the classics are there, from a 1972 version of Pong (or Ping, as it was known in the UK due to the world "Pong" denoting a bad smell in British English). Space Invaders, Mr and Ms Pacman, Asteroids, Tempest, Defender, Missile Command, Galaxian, Donkey Kong, Centipede etc. There is a very brief description of the Mame project, and a projection TV system running Mame with a choice of about 20 classic games. Unfortunately, the significance of the project from a preservation point of view is not adequately described, nor are the various issues that go with it. (I asked an attendant whether they legally owned copies of the 20 individual ROMs, and he had no idea what I was talking about). As we go on, a lack of explanation of the things on show turns out to be the major weakness of the exhibition. There are quite a few very significant things in the history of gaming in the exhibition, but in a lot of instances it isn't adequately explained just why they are significant, or even in some cases what they are.

From there, we go to a room containing "Ten playable consoles", showing a few of the things we might have had in our homes: working axamples of both dedicated game consoles and early microcomputers: the Magnavox Odyssey, Atari 2600, Sinclair Spectum, Nintendo Famicon, Spectravision, Commodore 64 (why not the Vic-20?) up to an early Amiga. This room also contains brief potted histories of the gaming activities of Atari, Commodore, Sega, Nintendo, Sony, with one or two pieces of classic hardware to look. Plus there is a little potted history of the IBM-PC (with an AT in a display case to look at). There is no mention of the Apple 2, somewhat curiously. No, it wasn't perhaps principally a gaming machine, but it was the first machine providing high resolution colour graphics that people could have in their homes. It was the first non-arcade machine I personally played games on, and I think this is true of a lot of people. (I cite the results of the "most nostalgic item" poll on Slashdot last week).

Up to this point, the exhibition has been largely chronological. From this point on, it drops the chronological aspects and becomes more theme based. This works with variable success. (Some themes work better than others). Some things that are historically quite closely related to each other are not close to one another in the exhibition due to the way they are categorised. A strictly chonological exhibition may have worked better.

Firstly we have a couple of rooms full of about 50 (mostly console) games that you can play. These are supposedly divided up into "Games of Action", "Games of Simulation", and "Games of Reflection and Thought", supposedly, but the distinctions are not very clear. Largely though it's just a room with lots of games in it. In one corner I found the Infocom game of "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy", which was the only text based game in the whole exhibition. (No Star Trek, no ADVENT, no ZORK). This was a shame, as the culture of text games would have amongst other things helped bridge the gap between Space War and the 1970s arcade games and would have fit in well in the early history of games section).

After this, we had a section devoted to the making and marketing of 5 famous games (or families of games), Grand Theft Auto, The Sims, Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider, and Pokemon. This section is good. We have original character concept drawings, storyboards and design diagrams from Yoshitaka Amano, James Kenny and other original designers of a number of these games, plus both artwork (both for marketing designs and simply for the sake of art) from many of the game designers. Most notably, we have a series of paintings from Ocean Quigley of Sims fame, showing his visions of various Sim Cities and Sim Worlds. This is really cool.

Upstairs, we find a display comparing games culture between "Europe and the USA" and "Japan". The "Europe and the USA" section is unimpressive, containing a few sports based games and a few military based games, without really explaining what these have to do with Europe and the USA. (A discussion of how military simulators and games have influenced each other is the best). The "Japan" half is much better, talking about the influence of manga and anime, the inluence of the Pachinko culture, the Japanese love of simulations games ("Go by Train", and "Bass Fishing"), plus a really good demonstration of how the game "Renegade" was modified from its Japanese version (which was set in a violent schoolyard) to its US version (which dealt with violence in a perhaps politically less sensitive gang dominated urban jungle).

The section devoted to "Character Design" gives us a brief overview of the development of Mario and Sonic, and we then get to a section on "Childrens Games". The most interesting part of this is a display of handheld games, in particular early single game handheld versions of Donkey Kong, and Scramble and a few others like this. (These were quite important to me, as I remember playing many of these in the early 1980s), as well as the usual Game Boys and the like. (I am not sure what makes these "Childrens Games" any more than a lot of the other games in the exhibition, however).

We then have brief sections on game sound and movie related games. Nothing too exciting here, although lots of movie posters for masterpieces like "Super Mario Brothers" plus a couple of non-working arcade machines with movie related themes. (Tron, most notably. A bit shame this one isn't working. Also a shame they didn't devote more time to the movie, given the movie was about game culture. At least the are showing the film as part of the film season associated with the exhibition).

A section on multi-player games is much too small, unfortunately. There are a small number of networked PCs playing a small number of games. (Red Ace Squadron and Worms Word Party when I was there), plus a sign saying that a changing program of games will be shown over the course of the exhibition. This was a little disappointing, as quite frankly this is a small part of a bigger story: the development and evolution of Doom and Quake into things like Counter-Strike is an interesting story, and one that is not covered in this exhibition. (Perhaps they thought that if they had lots of people playing death matches, this would make the exhibition less family friendly). One of the following sections of the exhibition is devoted to the use of gaming technologies for urban planning, and demonstrates the produce V/Spacelab, which is a planning tool used in real urban design, that was developed from the Quake 3 engine. This is really interesting, and one of the best things in the exhibition, but it the obvious connection with the multiplayer game section is missed.

Finally, we have a section on "Future Technology" which talks about where we are going from here. A little bit on games with evolving characters, and voice and body based user interfaces. I would have liked to have seen something on cell phone based games (Japanese i-mode perhaps) as I think this is going to be a big deal.

On the way out, there is a theatrette showing documentaries on the history of games. I sat an watched the documentary "Thumb Candy" from Britain's Channel 4 hosted by Iain Lee, which gave a much clearer history of games than did the exhibition, but this is at the very end of the exhibition when most people are tired, so I was the only person in the theatrette.

As well as all this, the exhibition includes a number of generally small, "contemporary commissions" , mostly concept art on games based subjects. None of this tells you very much about computer games, but I did have the opportunity to place a game of Space Invaders where I got to shoot down the words from quotations from Focault while listening to the sounds of short wave numbers stations. If nothing else, this reminds me that I am in in Europe.

I was accosted by a reporter for the Russian language programs of the BBC World Service, who saw me taking notes for this review in front of the PDP-1, and after I told him a little about the history of Space War and the like, he recorded an audio interview with about my impressions of the exhibition. Thus, the people of Moscow may be hearing my thoughts translated into Russian.

The exhibition bookshop has a book devoted to the exhibition for sale for 20 pounds, plus copies of virtually every book devoted to computer games that the organisers could lay their hands on, a bit of manga and books devoted to manga, one or two tangentially related board games (Harry Potter, anyone?) a little bit of cyberpunkish sf (The Difference Engine, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep), and, perplexingly, a large number of copies of Naomi Klein's "No Logo".

There is also a program of films and lectures/discussions taking place to go with the exhibition. The films are "Tron", "The Driver",
"Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (huh?) , "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within", "Resident Evil", "Existenz", "Ghost in the Shell", and "The Matrix", some of which are clearly worth seeing.

What's good? There is some very cool stuff on display. They have a PDP-1. They have lots of old arcade machines. You can play most of the games. Most of the stories in the histories of gaming are here if you look carefully. The final section on the use of the Quake 3 engine in urban design was great. There haven't really been any major museum exhibits on computer games before, and this is a good effort.

What's bad? There is a lack of coverage of text based games, and anything PC like prior to Windows 95. There is a lack of coverage of PC gaming. Many of the items on display aren't adequately explained. The organisation into categories doesn't really work.

Is it worth spending my money on? Yes.

Rating: 7.5 out of 10.

I read in the Economist about East Timor's impending independence, and about how everyone wishes the new country well. The Economist tends to do this whenever a new country comes into being for some reason, and this seems a bog standard article.

Oddly enough, and in what will not ultimately prove to be as big a digression as it appears, I was reading "The Salmon of Doubt" last week, the final book from the late, and greatly missed Douglas Adams. This book consists of about ten chapters of an unfinished novel, as well as various other bits and pieces of his writing, either unpublished or unpublished in book form. One of them is an interview from a British magazine.

What is the most remote or bizarre place you have ended up?

Easter Island is, of course, the most remote place on earth, famous for being farther from anywhere than anywhere else is. Which is why it is odd that I ended up there completely by accident. I learned a very important lesson from this, which was -- read your ticket

When were you there and why?

I was flying from Santiago to Sydney and was a bit tired, having spent the previous two weeks looking for fur seals, and didn't wake up to what the plane's itinerary was until the pilot mentioned that we were just coming in for our one-hour stopover on Easter Island.

There was a little fleet of minibuses at the airport, which whisk you away for a quick peek at the nearest statue while the plane refuels. It was incredibly frustrating because if I had been paying attention the day before, I could have easily changed my ticket and stayed over for a couple of days

What was amusing to me was that I had a very similar experience myself once. I was flying back from Nairobi to London on Sudan Airways in March 1993. (Why was I flying Sudan Airways? Because it was cheap, because I was a poor student, and because I wasn't aware just how dicey the civil war in the Sudan actually was. This particular flight would be hijacked a couple of years later). On the plane, I was reading a copy of the Economist. (I was one of those sad students who reads the Economist religiously. I got over it, although I still browse the magazine from time to time, and it does admittedly make good aeroplane reading). I read an article about the imminent independence of Eritrea - an article that read very similarly to the article about East Timor above. The plane I was in started to descend. As we descended further I saw a relatively small city outside the window. Eventually we landed. On a building, I saw "Welcome to Eritrea". Unlike Douglas Adams, reading the ticket wouldn't have helped me, as Sudan airways hadn't advanced so far as to puting all the stops on the ticket. However, this did qualify as a really obscure and potentially interesting place where I accidentally found myself for an hour. I certainly would have liked to have got off the plane for a couple of days to explore the place, but I didn't have the opportunity.

Eritrea was in some ways a similar case to East Timor. You had a small area with the misfortune to be right next to a larger country, despite a very different history. You had the small area incorporated into the larger country through actions of dubious legality. You had a struggle lasting decades during which time the rest of the world didn't recognise the struggle. You had the rebels eventually winning, and the small country achieving independence and recognition. And you had seemingly honourable people taking over the new country and promising to learn from past failures.

While things looked very promising for Eritrea in 1992, Eritrea has since fought another war with Ethiopia, which has retarded its development immeasurably. While there is no reason that things must go this way in East Timor too, it is a relatively depressing thought.

Dr Frank talks about all the wonderful questions his wife was asked on an immigration form by the American INS. (Were you involved in the Nazi government of Germany or Austria, are you a communist, is the purpose of your visit to commit an immoral act? Do you intend to work as a prostitute? That kind of thing). Silly as they sound, these are standard questions that any alien who wishes to visit the US has to answer when applying for any kind of visa. My experiences of entering the US have involved answering these silly questions and then being quite genuinely welcomed to the US by remarkably friendly immigration officials. Entering most other countries I have visited has involved filling out forms with much less information (if any) and then having officials be gratuitously rude to me. I can forgive the Americans the form. (An Austrian once recounted to me his story of being asked the "Are you a Nazi?" question and was quite surprised to discover that I had been asked it too: he had assumed it was just for Austrians and Germans).

A lawyer once told me that these questions were asked because it was easy to have someone deported for making a false declaration, whereas it was quite hard to have someone deported for some of the actions asked about on the form (eg prostitution).

There is a piece by James Fallows in the Atlantic on the US military's Joint Strike Fighter program, giving the history of the race off for the contract between (mainly) Boeing and Lockheed. The point of all this is that the military has traditionally decided what it wants in its hardware, and then has got contractors to build what it wants to exact specifications, almost from scratch, regardless of the cost. This sometimes gets you exactly what you want, and what noboldy else has, but also sometimes ends up with you paying 500ドル for a toilet seat. In the rest of the economy, generally you are trying to get as much as you can for a given amount of money, and therefore you try to use mass-produced, off the shelf components as much as you can, and you compromise on functionality if you can't afford everything on your wish list.

The JSF is something new, an attempt to take market discipline to an enormous military contract. Fallows wonders if it will work. The winner of the contract was Lockheed, a company that exists to be a defence contractor, and a company with quite frankly an appalling record of cost overruns. This was against Boeing, a company that is at least somewhat used to market discipline, due to its main business being commercial airliners. The decision was made on the basis of Lockheed having a technically better aircraft - having a better solution the short-takeoff vertical landing requirements of the Marines. This is a traditional non-market-based, military decision. This is perhaps a bad sign. Whether Lockheed is the actual company to make the first seriously cost-controlled fighter jet program work remains to be seen.

One of the greatest successes of the old style, define what you want to do and the invent the technology regardless of the costs approach was probably NASA in the 1960s. None of the technology to put a man on the moon existed, so everything was invented at enormous cost. The normal economy wouldn't have invented most of the technology needed for decades, but willpower and resource allocation let it happen. (NASA is a civilian agency, but it has traditionally used the military approach and it is a customer of the same aerospace companies). However, the approach failed in the 1980s and 1990s. Nasa built a collossal white elephant (the Space Shuttle) and then couldn't cope with the resources and the willpower not being there any more. A lot of the technology needed for what NASA wanted to do existed in the civilian economy by this time, but they did not do a good job of adopting technology. NASA adoped an approach called "Better, cheaper, faster" for its space probes in the 1990s, the idea being that rather than deciding what we want to do, inventing the technology and then figuring out what it will cost, we figure out how much money we have, and what technology exists, and then we decide what we can do. This seems good in principle, but as it ended up, generally this meant that such things as proper testing have been cut out and Mars probes have failed. I don't think there is anything wrong with this approach in principle, but NASA's culture didn't seem to be able to cope well with it. I don't know if Lockheed's can cope any better. I hope it can.

Interesting article in the Washington Monthly on the rise of "creative" cities - that is those cities that have the things that young innovative people want to live near, cities that contain amongst other things "a thriving music scene, ethnic and cultural diversity, fabulous outdoor recreation, and great nightlife". (However, there is obviously more to it than that, and the principle thing of course is simply that we are dealing with cities containing lots of other young creative types). Interestingly, of the large cities mentioned, three of the top ten are in Texas: Austin, Houston, and Dallas at 2, 7, and 10. This gets me back to the the question of "Why do so many cool people come from Texas?" that I have addressed previously. We can also make the observation that a city which is famous for its lack of coherent planning (or some would say planning controls of any kind) is attractive to live in. The question of precisely which cities become attractive to live in for these young creative types and why is an interesting one. There is a book to be written on the subject, I suspect.

The list of smaller cities attractive to creative individuals features an impressive number of Southern and Western cities, but interestingly enough we have Allentown, Pennsylvania at number 4, the city most of us know from Billy Joel's

Well we're living here in Allentown
And they're closing all the factories down
Out in Bethlehem they're killing time
Filling out forms
Standing in line

Other than the fact that cities with lots of layers built over the top of one another are fascinating (especially if a layer or two are industrial), and probably that proximity to Philadelphia and New York is a good thing, what do we make of this? Joel Garreau's Edge City actually referred in passing to Allentown, along the lines of "Unemployment was dropping to 3 percent just as Billy Joel was writing the song". By the way, Edge City is easily the best book I have ever read on why American cities have developed the way they have, and is quite informative about why the American economy is the way it is in general. The book is now 12 years old, but exceptionally worth a read.

It's also interesting to read Sterling's thoughts on Indian movies, in particular:

But! As a necessary consequence of globalization, Bollywood is finding a growing audience inside the USA. I'm one of them. Nothing odd about that -- it's like my wife's fondness for Hong Kong costume dramas, or my daughter's ferocious need for anime cartoons. The question is: as we globalize, is India Westernizing, or is America Indianizing?

(The answer is both , and the consequence of this is that we end up with two cultures that remain distinct from each other, each of which is more complicated than what existed before). This makes me wonder certain things. Firstly, where can I get a wife who loves Hong Kong costume dramas and a daughter who has a ferocious need for anime? (Applications are of course welcome). Secondly, why do so many cool people like Sterling come from Austin, Texas. (A long and involved discussion as to why the
very Americans that European left-wing elites consider to be cowboys and rednecks are in fact much more sophisticated and better educated than the European left-wing elites are should be taken as read here) . Thirdly, and only somewhat related to this, I went to see Monsoon Wedding last week. This contains a lovely portrait of middle class life in Delhi, but is a very conventional film: basically Father of the Bride or (even more
closely) Betsy's Wedding in an Indian setting.

What is interesting of course is that this is the most successful Indian film with English speaking audiences in North America and Europe. It has a certain "We will make a very conventional non-Hollywood movie and put it in art-house cinemas and people who think that Hollywood movies are beneath them will go to see it" quality about it, but it still isn't bad. I still think it is a sign of what is coming, but not perhaps as direct a sign as I had hoped from reading the reviews and feeling the buzz.

To be truthful, given the nature of Indian cinema, I was expecting something a little lusher. Not lusher, necessarily, in terms of the performances or the setting, but lusher in terms of art direction and cinematography. The fact that most of the movie was super 16 Steadicam took me a little by surprise. Super 16 Steadicam worked fine - and gave a little more intimacy to the characters I think, but still, I was expecting something a little more of a genre film. Something a little closer to a musical perhaps, given the nature of a lot of Bollywood's output. That's not to say that Monsoon Wedding is entirely not a musical, but it is largely not a musical. And, amongst other things, Bollywood is about musicals.

Despite this film being not quite what I expected, Indian popular culture is clearly rumbling towards us, and this film is none the less part of it. Indian cinema , and Indian pop culture more generally but mostly Indian cinema, is coming into the western mainstream. "Which country in the world makes the most movies per year?" (India) has long been a Trivial Pursuit question, but it has been little more than that. This was popular culture that until recently fell into the category of There were some things that westerners are not meant to see . Maybe, or perhaps even probably, you can blame this on India's four decades of deliberate economic isolationism. The film output of India has been more or less completely divorced from the rest of the world. The films have not generally been seen outside India, or even in English dubbed or subtitled versions, but this seems suddenly changing. Maybe it is the DVD, and the format's near mandatory subtitles, or the end of Indian "self-reliance", of maybe, just, as Sterling says, just the inevitable spread of globalisation (although I think that's more a way of restating the question than an answer). In any event, things related even tangentially or directly to Bollywood seem to be everywhere. Bookshops suddenly contain novels set in the Indian film industry. A stage musical called "Bombay Dreams", a co-production of Andrew Lloyd Webber and A R Rahman, and set in the Bombay film industry, is playing in the West End stage in London. The British part of the Indian diaspora is suddenly making
movies about the cross cultural Indian/British experience, and they are outgrossing "The Scorpion King" at the UK Box office.

This feels like the way in which we were deluged from a variety of directions by greater Chinese cinema a decade or so ago. Admittedly, Hong Kong film was never quite as isolated from the west as was Indian film, which is fitting, as Hong Kong was (pretty much as its raison detre) never tried anything like self-reliance, and Hong Kong films always found their way into the west in a way that Indian film never did. Film geeks in video stores have at least since the advent of VHS spent far too much time talking about badly subtitled Hong Kong gangster films. Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige were suddenly arthouse darlings. A generation of Hong Kong stars suddenly gained at least some recognition in the west (Jackie Chan of course, but also people like Maggie Cheung, Chow Yun Fat, Michelle Yeoh). Taiwan had produced a few films familiar in the arthouse world, but suddenly there was Ang Lee, an interesting cross cultural Taiwanese/American cross cultural film. Somehow everything seemed to merge together and take over Hollywood. John Woo was making films in Hollywood. Jackie Chan was making hit Hollywood buddy movies. Michaelle Yeoh was the most kick-ass Bond girl in history. Every film being made in Hollywood suddenly had huge Hong Kong influences. Quentin Tarantino had a big yen for all this. The Matrix ripped off everything in sight. More films were made containing Hong Kong action stars in movies that ripped off the Matrix. Ang Lee managed to move with extraordinary adeptness from straight Taiwanese projects (Eat Drink Man Woman most
notably) to Jane Austen to the American Civil War. The language of Hollywood cinema suddenly had Hong Kong's syntax running through the middle of it. Then finally came Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: filmed in mainland China
with Mandarin dialogue, directed by the Lee, the great Taiwanese cross-cultural director, using the conventions of mostly Hong Kong action and starring two great stars of Hong Kong Cinema (Maggie Cheung and Chow Yun Fat) and a mainland Chinese actress discovered by Zhang Yimou. (If there is going to be a break-out star come from all this, maybe it will be Zhang Ziyi. Maggie Cheung speaks much better English, but is probably too old). This film did of course gross an enormous amount of money worldwide and in America, and also received a pile of Oscar nominations. The mixing of Chinese cinema and Hollywood was complete, or at least mature. Hong Kong people and their style of film-making had infiltrated Hollywood.

With India this is a way off I think, but I think it is ultimately coming. And who knows. If we are lucky this will revitalise the musical.
This might be confusing for audiences of those countries that could never cope with the concept of the musical anyway (the Sound of Music was apparently released in South Korea with the songs cut out), but possibly Bollywood has spread the concept further into this part of the world. Maybe not quite to somewhere as traditionally culturally isolated as South Korea, and maybe not to Japan, but certainly everywhere else.

The musical hasn't ever entirely died, even if it seems impossible to actually call a musical a musical. As an example, get the DVD of
My Best Friend's Wedding (1997) and count how many times members of the cast burst into song. The film was never promoted as a musical, but it is one.

Of course, Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet has moments in which it seems about to veer this way, although given that the main actors were restricted to Shakespearean dialogue, the music could never take over the music. However, in my mind, the choir singing Prince's "When Doves Cry" in this movie was a sublime movie moment. Plus we have had Moulin Rouge, and Evita, and for what it's worth Woody Allen did one too.

As for Sterling's description of Bollywood as being run by gangsters, I think most industries are at some point run by gangsters. Whether Hollywood is run by gangsters or not depends on how you define the term. However, Jet Li and Jackie Chan (and John Woo, and ....) seem to have no trouble working in Hollywood today, whether or not they have past connections with the triads. The point I think is that Hollywood and Wall Street have lawyers and money men who are more than capable of, at a minimum, doing deals with
unsavory people in Hong Kong (and, I suspect, Bombay). Hollywood has more money, and when it comes down to it this is sufficient to draw the talent out of these places and into the more conventional world of Los Angeles. If Wall Street and Hollywood could run the mob out of Vegas, then they can deal with Bollywood.

So here is my prediction, I suppose. Devdas will gain a bigger audience in the west than any Bollywood movie before it, although it will not quite yet be Crouching Tiger. In six or seven years time, directors and stars presently working in Bombay will be making and starring in Hollywood movies. Some time in the next 10 years, a movie made in Hindi will gross more than 100ドルm at the American Box office, and a movie made in Hindi (not necessarily the same one) will be nominated for the Academy award for best picture. Some
time in the next five years, a film directed by someone who made his or her name working in the Indian film industry, will make 50ドルm at the American box office. This might be an American film directed by an Indian, or an Indian film aimed at international audiences. That is, it will either be the Indian Broken Arrow or the Indian Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon or the Indian not quite either. But I think we shall see it.

The transcript of Bruce Sterling's speech at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference is really worth a read. There is some good stuff on Bollywood and intellectual property, but the best bit is at the end, on the motivations of the Bush administration, and this is worth reading on its own. This is the bit that starts with

So. After having expressed my partial sympathy for Mr. Eisner's point of view, I'd like to add to your cognitive dissonance by saying some warm and supportive things about the Bush Administration. Because, like a lot of CFP people, I too have been hanging out in Washington with spooks, lately. I've been covering the war. I saw the Pentagon. I saw Ground Zero. By my nature, I'm a whimsical, paradoxical sort of fellow. Those two sights didn't make me a happier guy.

and goes through to the end.

And we have a User Friendly cartoon about Provigil. The geeks are clearly excited about not having to sleep. The rest of the world seems ambivalent. Personally, I want some of this stuff. (I wonder what it proves about me that I am writing about this at 1.36 am).

After about 2000 years in which the medical profession didn't really achieve very much, it has over the last 50 years got to the point where it has started to do remarkable things, thanks largely to the pharmaceuticals industry. Disregarding the remarkable drug Losec (which makes it possible for me to still enjoy fine red wine despite having recently had an ulcer) I today read two important medical discussions on the web. Firstly, Natalie Angier and Atul Gawande's discussion of Botox in their Breakfast Table discussion in Slate: I had no idea that we had reached the extraordinarily moment in the history of technology when it was possible for Hollywood stars (and presumably other people as well) to avoid ever getting wrinkles. Secondly, Plastic pointed me to an article about the drug Provigil, which apparently makes it unnecessary to sleep. I suspect one test to determine whether you are a geek is which of these things you find more impressive. I don't know about you, but being able to live without sleep strikes me as being really cool. Imagine all the extra blogging I could do. And perhaps this is Andrew Sullivan's secret.

Okay, I perhaps overstated the differences between book and music markets. For one thing, there are very active collectible markets in both places. For the record, I am excluding these, and I am talking about people who buy books with the principal purpose of reading them, and people who buy records and CDs with the principle aim of listening to them. And I am possibly influenced by the fact that I have very esoteric tastes in books and not so esoteric tastes in music. I think the basic point holds, though. The number of books published is vastly more than the number of musical recordings produced. My behaviour is to some extent a consequence of the difference between the industries.

There is a very interesting article in Salon discussing the subject of user 'mods' in the PC video game world. The point is that game writers make it easy for users to redevelop games into new games, and a world has been created in which the line between writers, publishers and users has been blurred (with people constantly moving from one category to another). Lots of profitable revenue splitting models have sprung up to cope with this. I particularly like that fact that Counter Strike, the mod of the game Half-Life, has sold over a million shrink-wrapped copies, even though the same game can be legally downloaded over the net for free. I like a world in which everyone is free to make their own creative, derivative works. In the event that they make money from it, yes, the authors of the original works deserve to be compensated, but a world in which the use of creative works is tightly controlled is a very sterile one. The movie industry in particular likes to argue that they must have complete control over how their properties are used forever, otherwise there will be a terrible deluge of cheap copies of their work that will degrade the value of their work forever, and the only way to ensure derivative works of high quality is for them to retain complete control. Disregarding the fact that they often seem to think that parody and criticism (two long standing legal reasons for allowing fair use) are amongst the worst examples of things they must control, I think this argument that shows contempt for their own customers. It ignores the fact that properties controlled by big media conglomorates are generally the fusion of a myriad of sources in the first place, and ignores the fact that users are potentially interactive, creative individuals. The PC game industry is an impressive demonstration that users can often do weird and wonderful things if you let them. The barriers between creators and consumers is being blurred. I want this to happen everywhere, because the unleashed mass of creativity is potentially so exciting.

By the way, if you have ever walked into an internet cafe with lots of high bandwidth connections, heard lots of loud shooting noises, and observed that a section of the room is poorly lit and devoted to people playing a game that involves characters who look like terrorists or riot police running down dark coloured corridors and shooting one another, you have seen people playing counterstrike. (These sorts of cafes tend to be found in suburban shopping malls rather than tourist areas. To be familiar with them you have to either be a hard core gamer or the sort of person who explores suburban shopping malls in foreign countries. I am more the latter than so much the former).

There is a rather snarky attack on Harry Knowles and Ain't it Cool News by Stephen Metcalfe over in Slate. Basically, it acuses Harry and his minions of being obsessed with "generic" Hollywood movies, and being basically a generator of the sort of hype that causes people to overlook quality, and that the site has a "trivial, scoop-grubbing mentality".

Harry Knowles has his faults, and an overblown style may be one of them, but I don't think being obsessed with the trivial is one of them. Actually, what I find interesting about the site is that as a source of information on obscure, foreign, interesting, and esoteric movies, it has few rivals. In the world of film, there are mainstream Hollywood movies, then there are what might be referred to as "festival" films - films that might get shown at Cannes or Toronto or Sundance, and if they are any good might then get a release in (probably non-multiplex) cinemas. Between them, these films are what most mainstream critics will see, and most critics end of year best lists will feature films from these two categories. Then there is the pop cultural detritus of the rest of the world: gangster films from Hong Kong and greater China, Asian animation, weird post-communist stuff coming out of Eastern Europe, and lots more. Harry covers that stuff, and throws everything in together to get excited about. In doing so, he lacks the (sometimes odious) snobbery of a lot of the art film crowd, and he enlightens us about stuff we wouldn't see otherwise. Look at his list of the best movies of 2001. You find a few Hollywood movies, a lot more animated and foreign language films than on most lists (particularly foreign language genre movies), plus the odd eastern European science fiction film or the odd piece of Taiwanese glove puppetry. It's a much more interesting and eclectic list than from most of the film snobs.

Well, I see that Jeff Bezos is now defending the sale of used books. My experience of actual authors, as distinct from publishers and bureacrats, is that most like it when people produce old, dog eared, clearly purchased second hand copies of their books, because they mean that their books are being read. If books to read are available at cheaper prices, the market is expanded and people buy more books - it is that simple. Authors are generally book lovers themselves and know this.

It's interesting to compare the second hand book market with the second hand music market. Yes, it is possible to buy second hand records and compact discs, and yes you can save a little money by buying them. However, the market isn't anywhere near the size of the second hand book market. The reason for this is that music recordings, on the whole, do not go out of print with anything like the speed and frequency that books do. The total number of albums released by the major labels over the past couple of decades is in the tens of thousands. The total number of books released over the same period is in the millions. Your average record store can obtain any CD the vast majority of customers are going to reasonably want. Whatever the music was that my mother listened to in the sixties, if she wants to get a new copy on CD, she probably can. Except for a small number of classics, with books she probably can't. The big advantage of the second hand book market is that it provides more shelf space for books, and this drives the book market some more. CDs on the other hand don't need the extra shelf space, so it isn't really there.

Of course, the second hand book market is really a distraction. e-books and the like don't seem very successful so far, but imminent technological change still lurks, and isn't going away. Again compare with the music industry. Traditionally the music business has operated on an economy of scarcity: we charge a substantial amount of money for a physical product (an LP or CD). This economy was all based on the idea that distribution is hard, and that you can only store so much of it on the rack in your living room. What the internet did (with help from Napster) is change all that. Suddenly you have the ability to listen to almost any piece of music ever recorded whenever you like. This is a million times better than just having a few CDs. You hear a song you like on the radio and you find it catchy. However, you don't know what it is. However, you grab a few words of the lyrics, you do a quick search for those words in a lyric database, find out what the song is, and then you download and listen to all the other songs recorded by that artist, or by that songwriter. This is so much better than the traditional model that it is ridiculous. If you can persuade users to pay the same amount of money they pay for CDs and you have the same number of artists (and the same number of hangers on demanding their cut) as before, then nobody is any the worse off. (Of course, if you can eliminate the hangers on, then everyone who actually matters - ie the artists and their fans - can be much better off). It appears that the value of music has gone down - after all people are paying an average of a fraction of a cent per song they listen to, whereas they may have once been paying a couple of dollars, but consumption has risen so much it makes up for it. However, the value lies in the convenience. The value lies in the ability to search and listen to exactly what you want right now: not in the actual downloading of the music. This is quite convenient for artists, because searches can be relatively easily centralised, monitored, and royalties can be paid accordingly. Indexing and charging naturally go together. Monitoring and regulating large centralised indexes is much easier than monitoring downloading and copying.

However, this has not happened at all. The music companies were and are so attached to selling CDs for 15ドル that they missed the change in paradigm, and to them anything other than paying 2ドル a song is theft. Or perhaps they didn't, and they just realised that the new paradigm spelled the end for their monopoly on distribution. The internet has had three great killer applications. The first was e-mail. The second was Usenet newsgroups. The third was the World Wide Web. Napster should have been the fourth. Something like Napster again will be the fourth.

How does this all relate to books? Well, if I was given the ability to electronically search through every book in print in order to find what I wanted and then to download the books I wanted for a flat subscription fee or a small charge, then I would pay a decent sum for this. And I would download an awful lot of books. (It is hard to say how many of them I would read a significant portion of, but the key issue is that I would have a far better opportunity to choose the books that were of most interest to me). Again, the value is transferred from the individual books to the central database. Potentially, consumption is increased dramatically. The paradigm is shifted.

On the author's guild's objections to Amazon providing links to used booksellers (objections that surely also apply to libraries), and their request that people should therefore no longer link to Amazon I will simply make a couple of observations. When I was a teenager, I borrowed books from libraries a lot. I also bought many books from second hand booksellers. The reason for this was that I did not have very much money but I did have time to seek out the books I wanted, and both these ways of obtaining reading material were cheaper than buying new books, although the hassle was greater. Now that I am older and richer, I usually buy new books, because they are nicer, because I often want them immediately after publication and because buying them is less hassle. Even when Amazon provides me with links to used booksellers, I still tend to buy more expensive new books, because an order of half a dozen books comes in one box and I only have to pay one shipping fee, and I know exactly what I will get.

However, if I had not had access to second hand books when I was younger, I would likely be a far less voracious reader than I am now and I would spend less money on books in total. If I had not had access to second hand books when I was younger, there are a great many authors who I would not have discovered and whose new books I would not have subsequently bought.

The point is an obvious one: for books there are a variety of channels through which I can obtain my reading material: new hardcover, new paperback, second hand, library. Within these channels there are a variety of tradeoffs between cost, hassle and control on the part of the author and publisher. The free and cheap channels have certainly expanded my total consumption, and I am now prepared to pay to reduce the hassle. Copyright law gives authors and publishers a monopoly on the right to produce premium products to reduce my hassle. I think that is enough. Becoming so paranoid about intellectual property rights that you reduce convenience for the user is likely to reduce the size of the market, reduce economic utitlity, and be ultimately counterproductive.

One more argument in favour of second hand books (although admittedly one that the authors guild is unlikely to have a problem with) is that books go out of print. Even if a book has gone out of print, I still have the right to read it if I want to. I don't think the writer or publisher should have the right to take this right away from me. (I find online markets in second hand books such as abebooks to be wonderful - almost nothing that has ever been published is now unavailable). The doctrine of first sale is crucially important. The right to be able to use published intellectual property is very important to me, whether or not the author and publisher still exist, is very important to me. I don't want to lose it for music, DVDs, video games, software, or anything. Attempting to add complicated licences to regulate intellectual property, and to abolish to right to onsell intellectual property is the beginning of taking these rights away.

By the way, let me link to Amazon again. (For the sake of disclosure, I am an Amazon associate. In the unlikely event that people do actually click on the links to Amazon on this page and then buy things, I will be paid a commission).

big apple blog bash; click for details


It seems that the bloggers of New York are having a little do on April 19. And while I'd love to meet the wonderful Asparagirl, sadly I think I am not going to be on that side of the pond. Still, if she and the bloggers of New York want to come over to London some time, I am sure I can provide beer / pizza / copies of the Guardian for them to hurl across the room in disgust etc whenever they like.

Actually, I think I would like to go drinking with the bloggers in New York on April 19, and then return to London to see Sigur Ros at the Barbican in London on April 21. However, I it seems like I am going to do neither of these things, because the Sigur Ros concert was sold out before I discovered it existed. Oh well.

Well, when I today went into Borders in Charing Cross Road in London in order to sit in the cafe and browse books and magazines without actually paying for them, I discovered that the cafe was closed and being refitted as a Starbucks. Apparently all the cafes in the UK Borders outlets are being turned into Starbucks outlets. It seems to be a multinational thing, too, as all the cafes in Borders in Australia were in the process of turning into Starbucks when I left Australia in January. (The one Borders in Singapore, was still just a cafe at that time, but it may have changed too).

When I was last in the US in summer 2000, it was Barnes and Noble and not Borders who had a deal with Starbucks. Have Borders in the US done a deal with Starbucks as part of some momentous shifting of alliances between multinational retailers, or is this just something for the international stores? Perhaps someone in the US can tell me.

(Technically the Starbucks stores in B&N in the US were cafes "proudly serving Starbucks coffee" rather than actual Starbucks outlets, which presumably means that the employees were employed by the B&N store rather than employees of Starbucks. These ones in the UK and Australia seem to be actual Starbucks outlets. (I have however seen the "proudly serving Starbucks coffee" trick in the UK, in cafes in cinemas rather than bookshops).

Back to my thoughts on that Atlantic Monthly article about pre-Columbian America. At some point in my schooling in Australia - probably in my first year of high school in 1981 when I would have been twelve - I was taught about the concept of a number system having a base. We were taught to convert the usual base 10 into base 6 into base 4, into binary, into octal etc. It was mentioned in passing that computers used binary, and programmers would often use octal. (Neither my teacher nor I, nor I expect the author of the textbook, had ever used a computer at that point, so this was taken on faith. I wouldn't find out about hexadecimal until later). However, the mathematics textbook had an interesting aside. It mentioned that the Mayan civilization had invented numbers based on place value around the time of Christ - well before they had been known in Europe and possibly before they have been known anywhere in Eurasia. It also had some pictures of what the Mayan numerals looked like, and it discussed how they used base 20 some of the time but that the base could vary from digit to digit. (This is not as strange as you think. When you write out the time as 11:22pm, you are effectively using a mixture of base 10, base 6 and base 12 and probably don't even realise it). I thought that this was absolutely fascinating, and in retrospect I think I must have been using a remarkably better textbook than I had thought at the time.

Of course I had no idea whatsoever who these Mayans were, other than having some vague idea that they had lived in the Americas somewhere. If I had had access to the internet at the time, then I could perhaps have found out more, but this was 1981. There was no chance whatsoever that I would learn anything about the history of the Americas in any other part of my schooling, so I was left with this tantalising glimpse of something . Of course, like everyone else that age I had seen Star Wars, and I had therefore seen the temains of the Mayan city of Tikal, which George Lucas thought looked just like a rebal base on a far planet. However, I did not put this together.

Other bits and pieces slowly came together: yes, there were a great many agricultural plants from the Americas, beans, potatoes, tomatoes, and in particular corn (the domestication of which was seemingly a vastly more complicated process than most of the staple food crops with a Eurasian-African origin (wheat, rice, sorghum etc)

Yesterday, I caught the train up from London to Cambridge to attend a banquet at St John's college, where I completed a Ph.D. a few years back. It was nice to catch up with friends I hadn't seen for a while, and to go through the whole ritual of a formal dinner: a candlelit dinner in a 500 year old dining hall, graces in Latin before the meal, wise (but possibly quite eccentric) men and women sitting at the high table and so forth. If you grow up with a certain sort of English life, I believe you attend this sort of dinner a lot: at public school, at Oxbridge, when qualifying to be a barrister. For me, coming from Australia, Cambridge is my only real experience of it.

What is interesting of course is that we now have another point of reference. A banquet in Cambridge is almost exactly like a banquet in Harry Potter, except that the candles do not actually fly in the air. Also, I suspect that Harry, Ron, and Hermione do not drink quite as much wine as I had last night, and possibly end up feeling somewhat better than I did this morning. The ancient, funny eccentric school is one of the cliches of English life. JK Rowling did not attend that kind of school or university herself, but that somehow doesn't matter. She could still draw the picture easily enough. However, I must assure everyone that the cliche is quite real.

And of course there is the peculiar fact that to get to Cambridge, the ancient, funny, eccentric university, you go to King's Cross station, and you board a train on platform 9. This is believed to be a complete coincidence.

The Atlantic Monthly has this irritating habit of not puting most of its content online until a month after the magazine appears on the newsstands, so this has been around for a little while, but I think the cover story in the March issue on the question of how large and complex were the civilisations of pre-Columbian American is very interesting.

The story that has been gradually building over the last two to three decades is that there were many more people and much more sophisticated cultures than previously realised. (The key point is that Europeans arrived, gave diseases to the locals, and then took a couple of centuries to explore the Americas, by which time most of the inhabitants and cultures were dead or greatly reduced in size. The lack of indigenous domestic animals in the Americas seems to be the main reason there were many more contagious diseases in Europe than the Americas). There is nothing in the article really new (for one thing, while Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel attempts to be about global issues, Eurasia v Americas is really the key question) but it is the best summary I have seen on a truly fascinating subject.