Hello Digital Paper!

I've seen a lot of chatter about digital paper. And I'm excited. I'm easily excited about newfangled technologies.

But people are really freakin' dumb. They're talking about how nice it will be to hang it on the wall instead of having a TV, which is just the least appropriate use ever. Slightly more valid, they talk about how nice it will be that laptops will be so much lighter...

Um, yeah, it would be a perfectly valid use to make laptops lighter. If there were going to be any laptops.

But, sorry folks, digital paper actually kills the laptop. There will be no laptops once digital paper is perfected.

There are only two reasons to have a laptop instead of a PDA. 1) better hardware. 2) better IO (bigger monitor/keyboard).

GGGGggggguess what?

Digital paper solves the second one flat out. When you can roll (or even better, fold) your screen into arbitrarily smaller sizes, the idea that you'll carry it around in a laptop-sized case is stupid. You'll carry it around in an ipod-sized case. More likely, you'll carry it around as a bracelet/watch which has basic functionality when on your wrist and is a full touch-sensitive screen when it is unfolded to its full square foot of glory. (That should be read in a Strongbad voice. "UNFOLDED TO ITS FULL SQUARE FOOT OF GLORY!")

Digital paper doesn't have any computation built into it, at least not in the forseeable future, but that doesn't mean that you'll want a laptop-shaped device to provide for serious hardware. There are many other shapes that are at least as good, including the idea of several small, wearable devices that contain specialized computation and network. Any way you run it, "laptop" isn't going to be there for you. We'll probably come up with a new name for it, like "black boxes" or "minicomputers" or something. "Weenies", if you buy the Nintendo version. They won't have screens, they won't have keyboards, they won't have speakers.

Laptops are going to be killed, but don't worry: nobody will miss them. Just unfold your watch, prop it up with the microframe, and get to work.

DRM yay

_{This is kind of silly.}

I stumbled across this DECE thing: digital entertainment content ecosystem. Read: a push to make all hardware DRM compliant. Read: a push to make everyone re-flash their hardware to use linux.

I've been meaning to write another DRM-related post for quite some time, so I guess now will do.

I am not worried about DECE. I am never worried about any DRM attempt.

My whole life revolves around this new information age: I am a creature of information. My work is taking, twisting, and showing information. My hobbies are all related to information gathering and wrangling. The least information-intensive thing I do with my time is read books.

That's how it's going. More and more people are becoming creatures of information.

To us - and to the hundred million children now growing into this information age - the DRM attempts are somewhere between hilarious and depressing. If they do bite us, we dismantle them within a week and continue doing things as we've always done. And, yes, that means piracy. The children of information are pirates, all of them.

Buuuut, the other day I was on the other side of the continent. My cousin wanted to listen to a DVD's audio on her new iPod. So I tried to help her out. I couldn't get it to work: the copy protection stopped me cold, and short of installing a variety of tools, it wasn't coming off the DVD.

When I got home, I looked it up. I can torrent the thing unprotected in whatever quality I prefer. Zero pain. If I had been the one wanting to listen to it, it never would have even occurred to me that there might be DRM. And at no point would I have encountered it as it made its march to my MP3 player. Legally, of course.

DRM doesn't work. We're not complaining that it doesn't work in some kind of cunning attempt to get the fat cats to stop getting in our way. We really aren't affected. Literally the only people who are affected are the actual customers. I don't even notice DRM any more. Doesn't matter how strict, how high-priced, how official... anything I want, from high-end circuit design software to the latest song by my favorite band, is available for free, not that I would ever take advantage of that omnipresent fact. Even flatly illegal information is easy to find.

Now, what do I think of that?

You hear a lot of talk about how bad it is for "the industry". And, despite their hilariously inflated figures, I reckon that's true. I reckon pirates are actually destroying the personal software industry. That's not really something I would consider good.

On the other hand, it's not something DRM can solve. Period.

Period.

DRM can't fix it.

Specifically, I don't think anything can fix it, because history shows that this same trend happens whenever there's a rise in technology. You can't really stop it.

So, bad or good, the industry is going to have to adapt.

And that doesn't mean getting better DRM. It doesn't mean legislating. These things cannot even slow the tide. We're getting exponentially more capable - anything you think of today, no matter how airtight, we'll punch holes in it by next Tuesday.

Welcome to the future. It can be a little bit chilly at times.

But tell you what, we children of information promise to make it up to you. In exchange for utterly ruining your industries, we'll give you some new industries. How about advanced space travel, radically improved health care, and ecosystem integration for starters?

Tactical Crazy!

I recently picked up Rondo of Swords, a DS game. (maybe originally PS2? Feels like it.) It's a tactical RPG, one of my favorite game genres. But it's SO WEIRD.

I mean, it's completely normal and average in every way. Except... you don't attack and defend. Instead, you move through people. It counts as attacking them. And you can move through any number of people, as long as you end in an empty tile. So the classic "warriors in front to protect the wizards" doesn't work: the enemy just sprints through them. Instead, the dominant "formation" is a knot of people at the edge of the enemy's movement range, followed by a rapid scattering as you close.

The amount of difference this rule makes is mind-blowing. It's actually infuriating at times, because it goes directly against my long-honed instincts forged in the fires of the thousands of other tactical RPGs I've played, all of which use the typical "close and clench" tactic rather than the... I have no idea what to call it. The tactic this game uses.

But it got me thinking. It's enough of a shakeup to be really interesting, at least in theory. (In practice, I seem to suck at it...)

So it made me wonder: what other perversions of typical gameplay could you do? Pick an old, standard genre that's so inelastic that just saying the genre immediately tells you everything about the game. Tactical RPG is one such type. What changes could you make to completely change the way they work?

Here's an example: in FPS games, the standard is shooting at enemies at various ranges while moving through the level. How can you shake that up? Without, you know, turning it into a platformer. How can you use the same fundamental controls, but come up with a radically different dynamic?

Or how about a platformer? You know, without turning it into a shooter. What changes can you make that aren't already in Braid?

I think these questions are important to ask, because just when I feel like all the options have been explored, I pick up a game which is exactly the same but completely different: FPS games where you have a camera, not a gun. Platformers where moving left or right makes time move forward or backwards. RPGs where you don't play an angsty teenager.

Any ideas? Any fond memories? What do you think?

Leaf Ninja Village

Okay, a while back I bought and played the Naruto game for the 360. I'm probably the only non-fanboy who bought it, certainly the only one who beat it, but I think it may be the absolute best "design teaching" game I've ever seen. Since it's usually available in discount bins, I would suggest you pick it up and play it if you have some time.

This is not an endorsement of the game per se, since it is unplayably bad at parts and extraordinarily dull at others. But it has the clearest good and bad points of any game I've ever played. There are no mysteries behind the design, no muddy parts, it's very clear what the pressures on them were, why they chose to do X or Y, and what the final result is in terms of gameplay and audience approval.

I'm going to give the example I like best: the Leaf Ninja City. You spend a lot of time in the city, although all of the plot and interesting stuff actually happens outside the city. The city is just there for you to run around in.

And it is hands down the best multi-tier revisitable level design I have ever seen.

In the beginning, you run around the city in the streets. You get some coins, painstakingly scramble up onto a few roofs, find a few stores, and get a few people to hate you slightly less. Of special note is that the city is extremely immersive in its way: it's quite pretty and packed chock-full of people who will call out to you as you go by. It also fits the IP well, as Naruto is widely disliked in the city at game start (people will call out rather nasty things), but as you do little side quests they come to like you.

It's all well and good, but not particularly awesome.

Then you start getting additional ninja powers. I don't remember what order you get them in, but you gain double-jump, sprint, and wall climb. The city never changes, but you flawlessly - utterly flawlessly - find that it is far more interesting to navigate. You aren't finding new "areas", like in Metroid: you're literally just a bit higher up than you were before, running along a different path.

If you want an example of how to design a "home" level that will change over the course of the game while always being the same, this is probably the best example you'll ever find. By the end of the game, you and your city have grown very close. It's actually quite good.

Of course, there are still a lot of weaknesses, probably due to the target audience. The city is full of random side quests, but they are all particularly boring and repetitive. There are very few places that make you stop and say, "wow!", which is a requirement for any exploration-based game. Oh, and the rest of the game is really irritating.

But if you're looking for a game to learn from, this is probably the right choice. In terms of revisitable multi-tier levels, it even beats out Crackdown, which has always been one of my major examples.

Community via Augmented Reality

_{I just deleted the first 90% of this essay, which was a long essay on why community is important. Let's just pick up from "community is important" and...}

The big-city non-community we've created is largely due to the sheer size of our communities. When you see the same people every day, you'll probably get to know them okay. But when you go downtown, there are thousands of people milling around, and they're different every day, every hour, every minute. They're all either going somewhere or doing something, and you can't really get to know them even if you want to.

With that said, let's assume augmented reality. Actually, let's assume brutally limited augmented reality. Let's assume that our augmented reality consists only of audio from our iPhone (or other 3G device). No video, no added devices, just sound, either to a headset or not.

Everyone playing this little game builds a sound for themselves - not a specific song, but a basic progression and instrument. When they are near to another person playing the game, that person's phone synthesizes their progression into a song, combining it with any other virtual sounds nearby. The strength and prevalence of the progression is based on your proximity to them. So if you're inside, and people playing the game are walking around on the street, the song you hear has haunting little "improv" bits with their progressions. If you're sitting next to people, you hear their sounds combining into a coherent song.

So picture this. You're sitting on the bus, and you hear a beautiful song. You're still quite big-city American, so you look around a bit to try to figure out who it could possibly be, but you don't approach anyone. You big coward.

The next day, you hear the song again.

And the next.

That person isn't unaware of you, either: they are hearing your song. Day after day.

You hear the song walking down the street... it's obviously that girl over there with the jacket, you've seen her on the bus every time. What do you do?

Sheesh, it's giving you every opportunity to connect to someone. You'd have to be an idiot not to talk to them.

Moreover, as you get used to hearing people's songs, you'll start to get an idea of who people are the instant you hear their song. If someone's got a Mozart-like sound, they are a very different kind of person from someone with a Beastie Boys sound. You can also get the feeling as to who it is by triangulating and playing "hot/cold" like when you were a kid. It's probably that guy looking around for you.

Standing in line at the coffee shop, you hear a new song. Smile and wave, maybe push some buttons to change your song around a bit, do a little interactive songwriting...

This is possible with the utter lowest grade of augmented reality. This technology is available right now, and affordable to the majority of people living in big cities. In fact, many of them already have a compatible device.

Could be interesting, don't you think?

Personalities as Problem Solving Aides

Last post I talked about personalities in computing, but I only briefly touched on the idea as to why we may want personalities in computer programs or robots.

Aside from the obvious applications where a personality is necessary - robot pet, disabled care bots, sex bots, etc - the idea of putting a personality into the equation doesn't seem like a good one.

The most obvious example is Clippy. The basic idea of Clippy was that Word was getting rather complicated, and MS wanted some way to have a human-feeling tutorial system. A "smart guide".

Of course, it was a travesty, and is a sterling example of why NOT to make your programs have a personality. After all, if the solution or path is clear, the user doesn't need someone popping up and getting in their way. And, usually, if the solution or path isn't clear, it's easier to do a keyword search rather than clumsily interact with some primitive personality program.

But I think there are situations in which personable programs are required. A personable program may not have an overt, anthropomorphic personality, but there are times when even going that far might be useful.

First off, the basic idea of a personable program is that it understands the user better than current programs do. As time goes on and our need for context-sensitive data increases, our programs are going to have to get better at handling that. One example is a music bot that would pull music off the internet for you to listen to. Right now, the music bot software that's out there can be customized to your overall preferences, but it doesn't understand that sometimes you feel like listening to reggae, sometimes pop, sometimes filk. Humans have moods, and the current generation of software is only dimly aware of that fact.

A more advanced music bot would try to track your moods, trying to determine if, for example, you generally like funk in the morning and rap in the evening. A more physically present robot would probably try to determine your mood by scanning you - facial expression, body temperature, what clothes you decided to wear, whatever.

At this point the software can't be said to have an anthropomorphic personality. There's no pair of glasses with a mouth popping up and saying "it looks like you're trying to listen to Aerosmith. Would you like some help?"

But, despite that, you can see that the program is developing some rudimentary personality. In trying to predict your personal preferences, it will show personality, at least as far as you are concerned. Today it played military marches all day. Why? Yesterday it seemed to like the B52s. How interesting. It's got a personality, although not a clear or deep one.

Now the issue is that you've got this thing with a personality, but your interactions with it are extremely limited, largely consisting of fast-forwarding through songs. So, when it gets some weird idea in its head, you don't really have any way to (A) figure out why it's doing that or (B) get it to stop doing that.

On the other hand, if we do have a pair of glasses with a mouth pop up, we can see why it thinks what it thinks. Obviously, a cutesy icon is not what I'd choose. I'd probably either go for a blinking cursor or a sexy librarian, but we'll stay neutral for the moment.

You are fast-forwarding through songs it really thought you would like. Instead of flailing around randomly to try to determine if you're in a shitty mood or have a guest or something, it can gently pop up and say "Hey, what's the deal? You in a bad mood or something?"

And you can type back - "entertaining guests" or something. The software will understand, or at least fake it, and try to find a mode of music that fits your interests better.

...

Now, at this stage, I've only covered about a quarter of the reason that software may require personalities.

The other half of the first half is that, as time goes on, this kind of contextual data feeding will become more and more critical and overwhelming. What sounds like a cute little semi-feature will become much more necessary when you're, say, trawling through Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and whatever comes out next trying to siphon out today's trends.

The second half happens on the back end - the side that doesn't face you. The programs require a personality because the data they'll be filtering - and how they filter it - is based on personalities.

If you don't have a personality, how can you form a meaningful opinion on whether a cute cat video is fun or not? On whether your friend (another piece of software) would like to hear this news from an earthquake-destroyed city? On this insider detail about a specific game developer...

As the volume of our media increases, we'll see a corresponding increase in the number of agents (programs) trawling through it, trying to make sense of it. Because the media is fundamentally based on humans, it's easiest to judge if you have some semblance of human in you. A personality.

This is especially true when it comes to creating and navigating the semantic net that will arise from all this data filtering...

So, in long, I think that we're going to see a rise in personality-filled programs because we're going to see a rise in the number of programs that have to interact with personalities.

For Love of Robots

I've been thinking about Nintendogs, and Tamagochi, and Animal Crossing - all these games which feature the player nurturing some kind of pseudo-realtime entities.

A lot of people really like these games. But that's not terribly surprising to me. What is terribly surprising to me is the reason they like these games. And one of those reasons is the same surprising reason that people like The Sims, even though a lot of people who like the Sims don't like Nintendogs and visa-versa.

When you talk to these people, they talk about how their dogs or citizens or whatever other characters there are feel. They enjoy "keeping their Nintendog happy", and they notice that "one of my people has a grudge against another".

In regards to how I feel about it, maybe I dive a bit too deeply, a bit too quickly. My drive is not to figure out how these characters are feeling, it's to figure out how they feel things. So, when I dive into Nintendogs and The Sims, I am rapidly disappointed by the shallow simulation and brutally predictable responses. But the satisfied players either don't notice or don't care about that sort of thing.

I think it might be a race between how quickly a character can establish themself in your mind and how quickly you can tear their mind apart. The question in my mind is whether the characters could establish themselves even after I've figured them out. What I mean is this: I stop playing Nintendogs and The Sims because I figure them out, so I get bored and close up shop. But if I was forced to play them every day for a month, would I grow to have personal emotions about the characters?

I think I would. They would probably be hate, though, because it'd be a real bother to have to play the same boring game day after day. But... could it be another emotion? Could I grow to like a character whose actions and emotions are painfully transparent?

Well, research suggests yes, but the dynamics are a bit more difficult. In order to make it so that I like the character, the character has to serve some useful purpose in my life. That purpose could be almost anything, but it can't be "to waste your time".

The problem is that software isn't really advanced enough to do useful things on a personable, semi-automated level. For example, we could theoretically make our calendars management software a character - a virtual secretary - but it turns out that interacting with our virtual secretary is more difficult than simply filling out the raw calendar ourselves. So, even though she theoretically exists to help us out, in actuality she just wastes our time. Example: Clippy.

But I think the solution can't be applied because the problem doesn't exist yet. Right now, there aren't many applications that require a "personable heuristic", so there aren't many spaces to put one.

There are a lot of hints of this kind of thing on the horizon, though. An example are the elderly care robots you might see in Japan. These robots are pretty bad, not due to any design problems, but simply due to the fact that interacting with the real world is quite difficult and our techniques aren't quite there yet. The end result is that most of these robots are close to useless. We can imagine them growing more capable over time, however, and it stands to reason that they will get more and more common until they might be ubiquitous.

Another possible example of a hardware sort are prosthetics or meta-prosthetics. For example, if you're deaf, I can see a personable piece of software detecting all the sounds around you and regurgitating the important ones as text. It would need to be personable because what sounds any given person wants to be alerted to at any given time will change, as will the "expression" they should be reported in.

A prosthetic arm is fairly straightforward and probably wouldn't require a personality of any sort. But what about larger meta-prosthetics such as cars, houses, and computers as they become ever more closely linked to us? It makes sense to give them a personality that can not only adapt to the mood of the the owner and situation, but can also express its own "mood" to easily reveal the very complex details of the system's state.

Pure software is also an option. Right now it doesn't seem to make any sense to have a web browser with a personality: we've restricted our use of the web to that which Google can provide us. However, even in that limited term, Google's search engine attempts to adapt to our requests and even do some contextual analysis. In essence, it's a primitive version of personable software.

Is there any reason to think this will do anything besides advance? Let's look at a version that could be made today:

What if we had a Twitter aide? A virtual character who exists to feed us twitters. By knowing the sorts of things, people, and places we're interested in, he could bring us relevant twitters and, judging our responses to them, give us more twitters along the same line or even send us out to web pages with more information.

Moreover, such an aid could "time-compress" Twitter. For example, if I want to watch someone's Twitter, but a lot of it is crap, I could have the character give me a summary, or at least filter out the crap.

Right now all this stuff can be done manually, of course, but the point is to give you a hint of what might come in the future. The amount of data spooling out of Twitter is a microscopic fraction of the amount of data that will spool out of the social networks of tomorrow, and the idea that you'll spend time manually going through all those entries is silly.

"But, Craig, why would these entities need a personality? Sure, I understand for things like pets and nursemaids, but why would a super-Twitter aggregator need a personality?"

Well, I think that the next tier of software is going to have to have a personality because it will allow the users to psychologically deal with the complexity of the software. That was the idea behind Clippy, after all: create a simple interface to the complicated parts of Microsoft Word.

Microsoft Word isn't complex enough to require that kind of assistance, but high-volume data filtering very well may be. As users, we have to "understand" why our entity is bringing us this particular data, and we have to not get upset by the communication difficulties we're going to have with these entities. Both of these things are easily accomplished by a carefully chosen avatar, and that's quite apart from the fact that our software entity (whether strictly software or partially hardware) will need to empathize with us and our moods.

In some regards, this can be seen as depressing: oh, old people cared for by soul-less ro-bots instead of hu-mans. People making friends with ro-bots instead of hu-mans. Pretty sad! Or is it?

I think it's a cultural artifact. I think that once we're there, we'll find it's not sad at all.

ANYWAY, I think I'll wrap up there.

What are your opinions?