So while I’ve spent the last few years trying to find a way to get some sense into circles of business leaders and politicians, I’ve never thought much about the consumer side of the same coin. It makes perfect sense in hindsight, but I didn’t see it at the time: many consumers are just as clueless about the changes we are going through. I don’t mean that as a slight to anyone — we’re living in a social and political revolution brought on by a technological leap forwards. It’s hard to understand this new world.

So let’s take a look at that statement from the consumer side then: It no longer makes sense to sell copies of digital culture. The music and movie industry is extremely reluctant to realize this, but pioneers in those segments still have, which is why we see things like streaming music services and donation-funded movie productions, generally from newer artists not already settled in old business models.

It has excited me then to see a some of the big game publishers move towards newer business models. EA is notable with things like Battlefield Heroes and other new models. Others are hellbent on locking in their old “sell-copies” mentality by introducing DRM that requires you to be online all the time, for instance.

I mentioned in the post on Project $10 that game resales are causing much of the same problems as piracy for publishers. This is tightly related to the fact that the industry is used to selling copies of things and that consumers are used to buying copies of things.

Fundamentally, though, a game is not a tool or a utility which you are bound to keep, or a consumable that you use  up — a game is an experience. It makes sense then for the consumer to trade in the disc, since he or she has already “used up” the experience on it, but it still has value for someone else.

When a publisher fights for the right to sell copies or when a consumer is fighting for the right to resell a game, they are both doing the same fundamental mistake: they’re mistaking the game as being a plastic disc rather than as an experience. Back when copying was hard and game resales not much of a deal, the game basically became the disc (or cartridge), just like the music tightly associated with the CD it came on.

As soon as this connection is broken, old business models fail, and people inevitably complain. Publishers complain that people copy or resell their discs, consumers complain that publishers are greedy and think they have some sort of “right” to be paid more than once for each game.

What is happening now is a rough period of trying to invent new ways of making game development business work. It does not involve companies thinking they “have the right” to be paid, but the simple fact that the companies need to be paid or they will go out of business, which would be bad for everyone involved.

The problem now is that we’re in the middle of the transition. We’re in a world where we cannot expect everyone to be able to download a game from the net, which means we need to sell copies. At the same time, hyperdistribution is a fact and game resale is abundant.

From my point of view, seeing EA try to find a way forwards with a middle ground of things like project $10 to earn money off resales and more “free downloadable content” included with the boxed products to start an ever so slight move towards providing services.

To see retailers complain about the move is expected — after all, they must know just like we know that we’re moving fast towards a world where music and games are not distributed on pieces of plastic anymore, which means that there wont be a need for a store to buy the pieces of plastic in.

Still, I said this in one of the posts I started off referring to, The future of PC Gaming:

Then he fails to grasp the core points of what makes Steam popular: It gives something back to the customer. It’s that simple — the other DRM schemes are all for the benefit of the producer, while Steam has loads of nifty features for me as a consumer that have “Future” stamped all over them.

This also goes back to the other post and human nature. People have come to expect being able to trade games back in for a part of the value towards a new game.

There is a disconnect here really, since the problem for publishers is that the same disc is used twice (which means disc != experience), but the problem for the consumer is that not letting the disc be used twice would stop his or her ability to hand in the game disc, essentially making games more expensive.

I’ve suggested that a solution to this would be to include a game disable function in a Steam-like digital distribution system to fill this need. Once you’re done with a game, you could disable it for a piece virtual currency. You could then use the virtual currency to buy new games if you have enough, or fill in with regular money.

Even more likely though, I think we’ll see more transitions towards games being cheaper content platforms and that part of what you get is tied to an account. Transitioning from a producer of boxed game products to service providers needs to happen for game publishers to survive, but I’m sure we can find ways to do this with both sides benefiting.

Of course the middle men are unhappy, but as soon as they’re out of the way we can live in a happy world where the price of games isn’t so outrageous.

I would be much happier if everyone could start creating flash-free websites. Anyway, today’s ordeal made me think back to the fine old days when everything was a table. HTML wasn’t made to display layout. The nice things about HTML, hyperlinks, worked just fine in regular text documents with some simple formatting, like bold and italic, its creator figured.

The nice things turned out to be really nice though, sparking an incredible development where pages got increasingly sophisticated layouts. The original HTML text format included tables, a fact which was quickly used to hack together all kinds of pages. A table could be used as a grid to stuff things into certain places, and a table inside a table could be used to create more interesting layouts, not to mention a table inside a table inside a table.

Because tables were meant to be (you know…) tables, different browsers rendered them slightly differently. Fine, if all you want is a table of text. Not so fine, if what you wanted was a pixel-perfect design. The solution to this was to add a whole slew of properties to each table, row and cell.

So after hacking together a sophisticated web site layout using table, the result was predictably a complete mess. The tables holding the text in place was mixed in with the text itself, making sites a nightmare to update or maintain, to not even mention changing the design.

A solution was clearly needed, to separate the design from the contents of web pages. So, why not adopt a language that wasn’t meant as a design language either? Sure thing, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a language meant for styling rather than layout was adopted during a long and slow process full of bugs, browser incompatibilities and new hacks.

Today’s standard of “good” for the web means using HTML strict (which few do) and control the appearance using CSS. The result is slightly less convoluted than the tables approach, but takes about 20 times as much effort to understand or write correctly, involves just as much hacking and is so fraught with peril that most people simply avoid it, going back to tables or mixing in horribly ugly JavaScript. Or, as seems to be extremely popular with games companies, insist on making the entire website in Flash, even though there’s absolutely no need for it.

So the page we were looking at today needed 3 columns of the same height. Let’s do it the old way with tables, for nostalgia’s sake:

<table>
  <tr>
    <td>Column 1</td>
    <td>Column 2</td>
    <td>Column 3</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Okay. Not too bad. So how to do this with CSS? Generally, you’ll need 3 DIVs next to each other, all with float: left. This makes them each have an individual length though. There are several ways to get around this, but none of them are good. The first involves stretching images across the DIVs as background images, which means you’re now bound to the color of those images instead of a color value. Also, you can’t have borders.

The second way we tried involved a very complicated set of maneuvers using three extra panes and shuffling content out the left side of the screen and then back in. The description for how to do this was about 10 pages long. And oh, it turned out to not work with borders either. Sigh.

So finally we found one way that seemed to work with borders. Only it didn’t, since you didn’t get any bottom border that way. The good part is that you could hack around that by using an image.

So for the old horrible table version, you substitute a mess of nestled DIVs and several pages of CSS, and it doesn’t even work fully without adding a picture where you essentially paint the entire bottom of the border along the page (yes, you actually paint a snapshot of your entire webpage, 1 pixel high). Way to go.

<style type="text/css">
      #container { float: left; background: url(images/example-6.gif)
          bottom center no-repeat; padding-bottom: 1px; }
      #inner { float: left; overflow: hidden; }
      #inner div { float: left; background: #ccc; border: 1px solid #000;
          width: 200px; margin-right: 5px; margin-bottom: -1000px;
          padding-bottom: 1000px; }
      #inner .col2 { background: #eee; }
      #inner .col3 { margin-right: 0; }
      .clear { clear: both; padding-top: 10px; }
</style>
...
<div id="container">
  <div id="inner">
    <div>Column 1</div>
    <div class="col2">Column 2</div>
    <div class="col3">Column 3</div>
  </div>
</div>
<p class="clear">

That seems like a great way to code! Not to mention that part of your design is now locked up in the image.

The best part about all of this is that it’s presented as “without CSS hacks”. Well, if having to use 6 nestled divs, large-number positive and negative margins and all kinds of bullshit like that isn’t an ugly hack, then I don’t know what is. The fact that the art of web design has advanced to the point where the normal thing you have to do is one big hack isn’t encuraging. And then they add the hacks on top of that…

I never liked tables, but at least they worked. In one of those memorable IRC quotes (in Swedish), someone said:

<sycon> imagine 1000 ants, tables are like the cage that keeps them in place, in the right place
<sycon> css is like a child with spasms trying to poke them all into place with chopsticks.

After spending countless hours trying to do seemingly simple things, I think I agree. Something’s still broken with the web, and no one seems to care to fix it. Well, other than inventing more workarounds.

But hey, at least you can draw Homer Simpson with it. So, ok, let the flak begin. Look, a Parrot.

Anyway, retailers have spoken out against the so called “Project $10″, saying it will cause consumer rage:

“The person you’re pissing off the most is the consumer,” McCabe told GamesIndustry.biz. “This affects [them] directly – they pay the same amount of money and yet the resale value is much reduced. From a retailer’s point of view, they’ll just readjust [the price] bearing in mind you have to buy the voucher.”

This is an interesting development. For those who aren’t familiar with the concept, the $10 project essentially puts a code in the box to unlock additional content online for the game. The code can only be used once, which means that buying the game new has additional value over buying the game used.

Consumers who buy a used copy can still choose to buy the online content, but for a fee (one would imagine $10, considering the name of the “project”, but I think it’s actually $15 for the current titles). It’s been done with a few recent games including Mass Effect 2 this far (awesome game by the way, I’ve been having a blast with it), and will be done for future titles, including Battlefield: Bad Company 2.

“EA’s project $10 move is aiming to stifle pre owned games sales, but what they don’t factor in is the damage this could have for them in relation to new sales,” said Day.

Wow, what a complete misunderstanding. This has nothing to do with publishers wanting to stop resales — it’s simply a business model where publishers can earn some money off of resales.

There are interesting parallels to be drawn for me, between the console and PC markets. Pre-owned games pose much of the same problem on the console market as piracy does on the PC market. The end result of both is the same: people play our games without a single bit of money ending up with the people who made the game. In the worst case, we end up paying a lot of money to keep servers online, while getting no money at all from the sale.

There has been a lot of whining from publishers and developers about both issues. Those of you who know my stance on piracy should not be very surprised that my stance on pre-owned games is very similar. Whining about it or blaming people for it is not going to help — yet you cannot deny that the fenomenon in itself is causing major problems for publishers and developers (just as piracy is) — there is no getting around that.

However, trying to “clamp down” on used games sales or piracy is pointless. Piracy is illegal, but unenforcably so which means that it doesn’t really matter. Resale is simply a business choice. While you might think that it is a bad business choice and that retailers would be better off long-term by staying clear of business practices that will kill their providers, they are making a ton of money short-term. There is no way they wouldn’t fall for that temptation, and in the end, any business choice that works for them is a valid one. Whining or arguing about it isn’t going to help.

This causes an interesting problem for publishers. One way would be to move to direct online sales only, but this excludes large chunks of consumers who can’t download large games or who aren’t connected at all. Another version would be to require online activation and to bind the game to a certain console or live/psn account, which simply wouldn’t be fair to the consumer and would cause a never-ending stream of problems and well-earned gamer hatred.

The middle ground, then, is to sell a full game to people through retail, but to provide extra value with unlockable content to people who buy the product new. It should come as no surprise that retailers dislike this — it will certainly cut a chunk of profitability out of the resale market. It will lower the value of a game for resale, which means it’ll be worth less to trade in. Will this annoy some customers? I’m sure it will.

Many people seem to be taking this as the publisher wanting to be paid twice, which I think comes back as the default gamer response to anything developers or publishers do to earn money being horrible and bad. It sometimes gets to me to see this kind of attitude with gamers. We can’t make games as a charity, and making these games on bleeding edge tech is extremely hard work, and the people in the industry are incredibly dedicated to their art.

The other side of things is that buying the game used will be cheaper, creating a much better “try before you buy” environment, where you can potentially buy the game used and try it. If you like it, you can buy the DLC that you would’ve got from the new version. This is sort of a win-win situation for the publisher and the consumer, but of course not that great for retailers.

To publishers, this is the option that provides the best value to consumers while moving to a new business model that allows us to actually start making proper money from games again, which could halt the current trend of studios closing and developers being fired.

I’m sorry if that takes money out of retailers pockets, but I really do think that the talented people who sweat blood making these games deserve the money more than people who only know how to push people to buy used instead of new. It may have been a good dream for you, but it was still a dream and now it’s time to wake up.

And yeah, retailers claiming to stand up for the consumer is nothing new. But just as with music labels claiming to speak for artists, they are simply middle men that are slowly losing their value.

The column seems to present a very optimistic view of the Internet, a liberal view seldom seen among politicians today. Between the urge to stop file sharing and combat terrorism and child pornography, censorship and mass surveilance among the western nations has taken our Internet connections several steps closer to what the average Chinese user sees when logging on.

Sweden has traditionally been a strong country for new technology, so why wouldn’t the fight for a free Internet take root here? Indeed, Sweden is the birthplace of a political movement focused on saving the free Internet, the Pirate Party, so why not? I feel the need to offer up a report from within the country governed my Minister Bildt’s party.

The column in the Washington Post was preceded by a similar column (google translated) in one of Sweden’s largest newspapers and a blog post on Minister Bildt’s own blog. Sadly, the Swedish columns are less clear on this issue of what freedom means.

Here is a translated quote:

“It is obvious that the international rule set is far too weak and that the means that are available to ensure adherence to the rules in place are insufficient. The users have ended up trailing far behind the abusers.”

I wouldn’t call that obvious. The summary of Minister Bildt’s columns appears to be “more freedom will be had by introducing more government control”. This matches the actions of the government he is part of as well.

It is easy to criticize the Chinese government for their surveilance and censorship, yet the last year alone the Swedish government has put in place a law breaking a long tradition of free communications, ordering a mass surveillance of all Internet traffic that crosses the nation’s borders. Knowing how the Internet works and considering the small size of the country, that works out to just about all Internet traffic — all emails, IMs, chats, you name it.

This caused a wave of protests through the country and an online protest now known as the “blog quake”. Google declared that after the law was passed, it would no longer place any servers on Swedish soil, due to concerns for user privacy and integrity.

The same government has given media companies rights that go further than the national police force when it comes to hunting file sharers, and is preparing a new law mandating that every cell phone call, text message or other communication be logged, together with the position of the device at the time, essentially turning every cell phone into a tracking device in the state’s service.

The columns caused an outcry among Swedish Internet activists and supporters of freedom. The minister responded on his blog, showing just how ignorant the government is:

I do not understand that Christian Engström and others are upset about what I have said. Do they not think it is good that Sweden has a government that wants to defend freedom on the ‘net? To whine about FRA (the governmental body tasked with the mass surveilance of the Internet, my note) and our intelligence agency has nothing to do with it. Sweden does not restrict freedom of speech on the ‘net or anywhere else.

I would applaud Minister Bildt’s call for Internet freedom in the Washington Post, had I seen it in isolation. However, all is not well in the state of Sweden. While I would love to see the Iranian attempts to silence protesters fail and the great Chinese firewall break down, an easier political target would be to respect the rights of the people in your own country.

And sadly, the Swedish government has failed to take even the slightest account of it’s citizens’ right to privacy on the Internet. I would not trust a pest control company with roaches inhabiting its offices, and I will not trust a government that censors the Internet to tear down any walls against Internet freedom — in China or elsewhere.

Something interesting happens here. Maryland police has no legal juridistiction to subpoena things from Blizzard (situated elsewhere). The subpoena is more to be seen as a kind request for information. Months passed, and eventually Blizzard provides a chunk of information. Among others, the police gets an IP address that can be located and used to coordinate an apprehension together with Canadian police.

There have been plenty of reactions to the story, with comments like “if you don’t fancy prison life, you shouldn’t be selling drugs”. This is some form of the “if you’ve got nothing to hide” argument and thus misses the central problem of it all. You get caught on a quite common, but still quite false, line of reasoning that equates the possibility with the action. The problem here isn’t the action itself, it’s the possibility; not the result in itself, but the span of potential results that are made possible by the action as it is.

Let me explain that further. When the police nicely asks for information this way, Blizzard ends up in a problematic position of power. The company now has to take a moral position and in principle act as an authority of law. Maybe this had been a clear-cut case if we had been dealing with something that was illegal everywhere, and which everyone agreed constitutes an illegal and immoral action, like violent crimes.

Now it’s about the war on drugs. Regardless of how you feel about narcotics, you have to realize that laws about them are different in different parts of the world. So, now it’s suddenly up to Blizzard to decide if these sorts of laws also apply in the virtual Azeroth, regardless of where the people playing are in the world, or relative to where the police who’s asking the question is. Has Azeroth signed an extradition treaty with the United States of America?

In and of itself, it’s not a major problem, but the fact that Blizzard doesn’t answer “no” to any such requests as a policy is somewhat dubious. It opens the door for enforcement of any law in any country around the world — in the online world.

This is what I mean with that the possibility is the problem, not the specific action in the case at hand — what happens when Chinese authorities want some information? There are a whole lot of Chinese World of Warcraft players out there. Is that request equally much ok? The matter could concern different crimes there, and most of us agree that it would be less than pleasant if all the laws from all countries could potentially be applicable online, internationally. Is the next person who hides in Canada a Chinese dissident? What will Blizzard’s decision be in that case?

Of course I realize that Canadian police may not be very helpful when it comes to the Chinese government wanting to hunt dissidents, and that it’s very likely that Blizzard would take a different decision in that case, but there are issues in the decision to hand out information that are decidedly unpleasant, regardless of if you find the effect in this specific case upsetting. It’s a path that doesn’t look brushy, but leads deep into the djungle undergrowth.

Image credits: jluster.

My respect to Azarimy for some awesome comics, and my gratitude for his permission to share them with you here.

Awesome stuff. Azarimy’s got more coming, so if you like them, head on over to his thread on the forums. And on that note, I wish you all a happy new year.

(I’m a ninja, I’m a ninja, I’m a ninja, I’m a ninja!)

Funnily, the exact same bug has apparently been a problem on wordpress before, on version 2.5, in a different file.

Anyway, I fixed the problem. If anyone wants the fixed file, here it is:

Download file.zip

Download the archive, unzip the file.php inside and replace the one in your wp-admin/includes folder with it.

As we are finally getting a bit settled in (at least the living room is free of boxes now), I’ve started thinking about a new audio and video setup for the entire house.

One thing I’m missing about the apartment we moved out of is my sound system that covered the entire place — living room, bed room, kitchen, even bathroom. The whole thing was a DIY thing involving two amps, a partially broken speaker selector, lots of wiring and speakers everywhere. I could select what rooms I wanted music in, which was awesome, but it had its issues. One thing was that there was only one input, so if one of us watched a movie there was no way to listen to music in another room, another that… well, there was lots of wiring.

The house is a much larger space, and with it far longer wires to put up all over the place. I’m going to install a wired network that covers the place, but I’d rather not install any more wiring. Still, I’m going to want to send video signals from the digital TV box to the new TV in the bed room, which I might solve with a Slingbox PRO-HD and SlingCatcher, which seems like a cool combo with a bonus of access to my TV anywhere — if I can only figure out if it’ll work to remote control my box or not (my cable TV provider is probably Sweden’s most hated company not involved in public transport – com hem).

The audio setup is a different problem — I want a system which can play music from my media server in any room I’m in, can sync music in several rooms at once and which can also play audio from a separate input (like have the audio from a live music DVD on the PS3 on in several rooms at once). That last one seems to be tricky to pull off…

I’ve looked at several network media players, but most seem content at simply streaming media from a computer to a home entertainment system. Sonos S5 ZonePlayer seems like a popular geek choice, but sadly doesn’t do an external input (like my PS3).

The Logitech Squeezebox series seems to do (almost) what I want, but the component I’d need for the living room, a Squeezebox Transporter has some drawbacks. First of all, I can’t seem to figure out if it can stream its digital input out to other squeezeboxes — a make or break feature for me, but hardly mentioned out there on the ‘net. Second, the price tag! Holy crap, $1999? I’ll be upgrading my audio equipment, but I’m not really an audiophile of a class that needs that kind of equipment. It’d easily be the most expensive piece of equipment in the set.

I could even consider building my own system from scratch. It’d be kind of cool with a compact computer hidden away in each room, and a touch screen display system to interface with the thing. It’d probably end up cheaper than the Squeezebox option, but with a lot more work involved. Fun work, but frustrating at the moment as I don’t really have the time needed. If there’s a cheaper product out there which satisfies my three demands above, I’m a sale waiting to happen.

Do you know of any good network media player systems that fit the bill? Or do you have any experience with systems like that, good or bad? Please share any knowledge you have in the comments. I would also be happy to hear from anyone with experience of the Slingbox products.

Now we suck at verifying user input from web forms. The current state of code that verifies user input has both managed to take us back to the kindness of the command line when it comes to freedom of input and manages to check all the wrong kinds of things. Why is it so hard to write these checks? I suspect because people don’t really think much about them, and I bet there are more interesting things out there than to write user input verification.

These problems aren’t some beginner coder errors either — they’re rampant on even the biggest sites out there like paypal.

The most common field to get me snared is the phone number field. In 99% of all cases, the site assumes that all phone numbers in the entire world are formatted like US phone numbers. Not, as one could imagine, because I’m claiming to live in America — I clearly just told the site that I live in a European country. So anyway, inputting my actual phone number causes an “invalid phone number” error. Not that there is any mention whatsoever on the site about what the correct format of a phone number is (there are, in fact, even several ways of writing a US phone number).

This sets off a wildly unamusing guessing game of how to “convert” my phone number into a format the site will accept. This practice often costs the sites money as I end up giving up and going somewhere else, frustrated and unable to make a simple online purchase that didn’t really require that phone number anyway, did it?

Passwords

Another highly amusing game is the one where web sites try to force users to choose “secure” passwords by enforcing the formats of passwords. “You must have at least 6 characters, with at least one letter and one number”. Sounds good, except in general these passwords are restricted to only contain letters and numbers. Hold on, isn’t it common wisdom to include at least one non-alphanumeric character in a secure password?

As such, out of my set of passwords, the only password which tends to pass most password verifications is my least secure one. The idea that you could fix a social problem through technology is somewhat funny anyway — “password1″ is not more secure than “password” in any way that really matters.

The same thing applies to the old trick of forcing your users to change passwords every month. This can have two potential outcomes — users append a counter to the end of their password, and increment it every time they are forced to switch, or they keep a post-it note taped to their monitor with their current password. Neither outcome is a net gain in terms of security.

Some sites even let the user set a password which is then considered invalid when the user tries to log in (ebay, for instance,  has done this) — causing a prompt for a new password and much annoyance.

Format wars

Parsing stuff is what computers are good at. So forcing me to input something in a strict format is always a loss. Either separate the fields and force me to select the individual parts of a date separately or actually use all that computing power at your disposal to do your user a favor. Telling me you have no idea what I mean by “2009-12-21″ because you expected “20091221″ is annoying the user for no good reason, even if you told me to not include dashes.

If you find yourself in a situation where you need to verify input  from the web, take an extra minute to consider how you could make things as convenient as possible for the user, which ones of your assumptions only hold true for the region you live in… and when you’re done, whatever you do make sure you tell the user exactly what the expected format is.