These last couple of days I attended FSOSS, Free Software and Open Source Symposium. An excellent event with a terrible name. It was an energizing and fascinating congregation of some serious nerds for some conversations regarding what open source is about, for, going, being and doing.

I’ve now watched all the presentations (thanks to the brilliant AV staffers grabbing videos of all the talks) and it made me realize a great many things, certainly the most coherent among them - Facebook sucks.

Openness is not always a good thing, it can often lead to poorly focused, wishy-washy unusuable software - I won’t bother with examples but there are plenty. Not only can openness be a detriment, sometimes proprietary just does a better job of things or at least has done so far - Microsoft Office is still better than any free suite out there, it does more is easier to use and is more efficient.

However, software like Facebook, or moreover, platforms like Facebook demonstrate all that is wrong with closed software AND all that is wrong with open source. Facebook is a social networking site wherein people can connect with others and by creating a profile and linking that profile with others’.

What’s the value in this? Well, social networks are pretty popular as a concept these days and Facebook is the most obvious implementation of such a thing. What use does it provide to its users? It allows them to collect information on their friends easily in a centralized, digestable form. Facebook categorizes relationships, status changes and the like - alerting you, for example, whenever someone changes their musical tastes or current mood.

This, in effect, eliminates the need for you to ask how someone is doing and engage in real dialogue to find out about another person’s state. It is the ultimate provider of weak ties, which is great if you’re looking for a job, but there are sites that do that kind of things better - LinkedIn comes to mind.

Doesn’t Facebook foster communities by providing ways for friends-of-friends to connect without depending on (absent) intermediaries? While it’s technically true that I can read the friends list of my friends, there is little I can do to “connect” with them short of messaging them or inviting them to join my friends list.

Part of Facebook etiquette is that you should have met everyone on your friends list or at least be in close communications with them - thus Friends list, rather than “nodes” or some other less intimate title.

Thus connections are either made randomly (hardly better than meat-space) or are mediated by a third-party (which is how its usually done in real life).

Community, communication and interaction are the hallmarks of awesome web software. Facebook falls flat on all of those. It reduces your social ties to baseball cards which you must amass in intricately organized decks. Facebook communities are poorly implemented and the “cost” for creating one is close to zero - thus a staggering majority of facebook communities are vacuous.

Communication is limited to text messaging - something we’ve optimized elsewhere.

Interaction is left up to the application developers - which have provided some meaningless widgetry.

Still, the information facebook gathers from users could be used for lots of cool stuff. “How many of my friends like Chinese food?”, “Of all my friends that like Kill Bill, which also like Hero?” are questions that could be answered with the data Facebook has - yet NO TOOL yet exists to gather this kind of thing and generate reports on it on a user level. That to me, would be the primary selling point.

The Facebook platform promises to allow us to go out and build solutions that leverage their data-stores. That, to me, seems stupid, they did the easy part and are now foisting the hard work out to open development and profiting off it.

This is why Facebook sucks.

Sorry to the Facebook guys who attended FSOSS - I hope I’m horribly wrong and I’m welcome to be proven that way.

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Some usability expert needs to develop a decent 3D modelling platform system much like Adobe’s Creative Suite. Autodesk produces these two everything 3D swiss-army knife programs which are glutted with features and competing development goals producing an impenetrable mess of software.

Adobe broke the graphic design process into functional clusters and focused attention on each. Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, ImageReady, Premiere, After Effects, DreamWeaver and Flash. Granted the last two weren’t originally theirs, they realized that those products fit into a cohesive platform for creative professionals. Each is specifically tailored to its purpose but interfaces well with the others.

If one were to take this concept to Game Development, you’d have tools specifically designed for creating game systems, story and other game design paraphenalia such as universe bible, character designs, concept art pipeline management etc.

The next tool would be a prototyping station. It would use the design decisions made in the first aspect or allow them to be made on the fly for quick and easy prototypes of different game mechanics.

Then there would be a fork in the system, allowing for concurrent but separate content and systems development. This would probably most resemble the existing game development tools and pipeline management apps. Code, game features, every aspect of game development would be traceable to a real person.

A porting toolset could be used to make porting games to various systems would be important.

A testing system would need to built that allowed for programmer run integration test and low-level code testing as well as simple play-testing and reporting system that plugs directly into the pipeline.

Finally, tools to easily convert all of the testing, game design and development data gathered over time into user support documentation.

Other tools for generating fan site content, news releases / media kits and other game development necessities would be important.

The trick is to view game development as a process of media creation just like any other - with its own demands and needs. Rather than some frankenstein monster of film, animation, software, community and book creation methodologies.

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Dear Political Science 108 Class of 07/08.

Though I’m sure many of you are unaware of being so, I would request with all due respect that you all make the best directed effort you can muster to stop being dicks. Yes, that includes all those who are enthusiastic but clueless and those that are less than enthusiastic and equally clueless.

How many in this class know what the Massey Lectures are? What the criteria are to be invited to give them? They’re hosted by our university and I doubt more than 1/3 actually know what they’re about. Who in this class knows what the Order of Canada is? What it means with regards to an individuals accomplishments? What about the Royal Society of Canada?

Have any of you heard of the following organizations? National Academy of Sciences? United States Institute for Peace? American Association for the Advancement of Science? American Academy of Arts and Science? International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development?

My guess is VERY few. Most of you probably don’t know that Prof. Stein (CM, FRSC) is a member of the aforementioned groups and society and is not only a member but is an integral part of most of them.

We’ve got one of the most prestigious academics at UofT teaching us freshman and you have the audacity to burn through lecture time discussing whether hip-hop culture is a nation?

This is not to excuse the elaborate presentation of ignorance you seem unable to withold during Professor Deibert’s lectures. He too is a man of many accomplishments whose ramifications and influence will only grow (if any of you are even vaguely familiar with his ventures you’ll know what I’m talking about - if you aren’t then you’re comfortably seated amongst a thousand others of your ilk every Monday)

By the same token, Profs Stein and Deibert, I must take issue with your techniques of leading the lecture. This is a class of 1200+ students, trying to make the experience interactive erodes the quantity of content you can fit in the lecture leading to situations where one and a half hours of lecture time is consumed elaborating that the American Military is both very large and very expensive, especially when compared to everyone else’s. Such information shouldn’t be a revelation to the class - even the most inattentive glance at a newspaper will bring home the sheer overawing superiority of the American military and the difficulties and complications of the world’s purest bureaucracy.

When compared to my other classes, the level of intellectual rigour required to keep pace is trivial. I knew probably more about Economic concepts and sociological phenomena upon entering than I did about contemporary political science - the facility in those departments has been pushed and tested thoroughly. History and Poli Sci came in at about equal footing, whereas Prof. Smyth has smothered us in reading pushed our boundries of memorization, conceptualization, nuanced analysis and understanding of research you, my venerable professors, have reminded me that Multi-national corporations are both good and bad but mostly bad (because any other message would upset the preponderantly socialist student body), globalization is important because it is global and has many dimensionsions, the trajectory and ramifications of globalization aren’t well understood and networks are the ascendant social and organizational structure in contemporary society.

That seems more the content for one lecture and readings with a follow-up, not four whole lectures.

My esteemed colleagues, the professors we have are some of the best in the field - why do you want them to take it easy on you? We fork over piles of money hand over fist to attend these classes (well, our parents do) why would you then want to lose the value by filling the lectures with babble from your fellow classmates, I go to lectures to hear the profs, not some slacktivism T-shirt wearing semi-literate yahoo.

My accomplished professors, the class is unwieldy and underinformed. As desirable as a conversational, informal lecture may be for illucidating new and interesting ideas - it is poorly suited for such setting; save it for your upper-years and graduate students who have the knowledge and comparatively microscoping class-sizes to handle such a format.

Thank you, fellow students, in advance for your most concerted efforts to avoid being pants-on-head moronic.

Yours truly,

Jeremy

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This is, quite literally, based off a dream I had last night. I thought it was so bizarre yet bordering on plausible that it was quite disturbing:

It’s Tuesday morning in Toronto. The late November chill is lifting as the day gains momentum. Those fastidious commuters who like to arrive early to work are well on their way and the morning crush begins to gain steam. Office workers, labourers and students are busy getting to where they need to go.

No one notices the man sitting on a bench at the metro-station with a briefcase, nor should they. He looks just like any other commuter waiting for the subway to arrive to whisk him off to work. He pops open his briefcase and rifles through some papers inside and withdraws a small canister and leaves it underneath the bench. After glancing at his watch, he withdraws a lightbulb from his brief case, closes it and stands up. The subway arrives just as he walks up to the platform. He has a seat, withdraws a book from his jacket and reads.

Craig Stevenson is like most guys his age. He’s going to university, Ryerson University, because he doesn’t have many alternatives and he’s already done enough menial minimum wage labour to avert him ever more. His lanky frame is usually covered in a t-shirt and jeans and he is usually found chatting on MSN, skateboarding or playing his Xbox. This morning Craig doesn’t feel so good. He wakes up, his head is throbbing and his muscles are stiff and sore. He just feels like garbage.

When he goes into his room, he will, after squeezing out a few zits and brushing his teeth, notice red star like dots on his cheeks and arms. Craig will curse his luck for being on Christmas holidays and getting sick now, rather than a week ago when he could’ve used it to defer at least one or two of his mid-terms. Craig will decide to head back to bed, he thinks that maybe he’s over done it these last couple of days and should catch up on some sleep.

Some time later, in another part of the city, Carla Bird is tired. She’s been a paramedic for twelve years and every year the Christmas season grinds her down. It just seems like every child waits until this time of year to get sick or have an accident. Everyone decides to forgo stress reduction and healthy eating dives straight at heart attacks. Of course, Carla is spending Christmas day as she always spends it – working. She’s sitting in her cab, sipping her coffee listening to the radio. There are already two house fires across the city, and a handful of chokings and poisons, some cuts, burns, fractures all the usual Christmas pain and misery. Then something Carla didn’t expect came through the radio – building fire, downtown, in a high rise, arson suspected, all proximal cars respond.

Craig’s red dots went away, they were instead replaced with pus filled sacs. These sacs began appearing all over his body – chest,
back, arms, even on his hands, feet and in his mouth and on his lips. His mum, flustered by his affliction drove him to a clinic to get examined. The doctor was flabbergasted by Craig’s condition, he biopsied one of the sacs. The doctor suspected Craig was covered in macules, which is a grave symptom indeed.

Carla can’t believe what’s happening. Four men have apparently infiltrated Mt. Sinai hospital, killed two security guards and are holding several doctors hostage. Someone must have pulled the fire-alarm as a way of getting people out of the building. The police have the entire facility surrounded and are preparing the SWAT team and are contacting the DoD to bring in JTF 2, the elite counter-terrorism squad in the Canadian Armed Forces. Carla is trying to calm several evacuees when she hears the unthinkable over her dispatch radio.

Apparently there is a fire, a bad one, in the Four Seasons. Someone had tampered with the fire system so the blaze had spread unhindered, heavy casualties are anticipated – reports indicate arson.

The courier to the clinic that Craig went to tells the receptionist and Craig’s doctor that all hell is breaking lose downtown. Apparently there’s a fire at the Four Seasons and some sort of hostage taking at the hospital. Craig’s doctor, Philip, curses not only the fact that he has several friends and colleagues in that hospital but that Mt. Sinai is where he sent Craig’s samples to for examination.

Philip knows what’s happening to Craig, but he doesn’t to believe it. That disease doesn’t exist anymore. Philip turns on the news to watch the coverage of the fire and hospital. Philip can see the patients arrayed behind the reporter, wrapped in thermo-foil blankets, their expressions shaken and their faces covered in pus filled macules.

The plan worked nearly flawlessly. The first tactical step was defeating the fire detection systems for the Four Seasons, it was very well designed but they knew if they had an agent on scene to keep the propellant up and destroy the extinguishing system. They hadn’t realized how long an entire floor could be without a hose or extinguisher without anyone asking about it. It had been expensive to get the initial sample, but once they had it, replicating and weaponising it was trivial.

They had anticipated word getting out faster, but perhaps bureaucratic oversight kept the staff from alerting the public and causing what was intended to be mass panic. Tripping the fire-alarm was pure genius – it forced nearly everybody out of the building and prevented a lockdown. Making the fake 911 call just perpetuated the rouse that much longer.

No one would have thought all those burn victims from the hotel were also diseased, but they put samples in every sheet, pillow case, towel and bar of soap. All those wealthy business men, the very paragons of capitalism, flying home to get the best medical care at the biggest and best hospitals money can buy – all over the world.

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This is an idea I articulated some time ago in a previous iteration of this blog. However, this summer a panel at Penny Arcade Expo reminded me of it and it has festered in my brain ever since.

It was a panel regarding the future of MMO’s, the panelists included creative leads for a nother of MMO studios including Flying Lab Studios, Red 5, NCSoft / ArenaSoft and a designer from CCP (of EvE Online fame). It was presided over by a former WoW developer.

The consensus from all the developers was that the future of MMOs was player created content. It was interesting that although the panelists tried to make a semantic distinction between MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games for those incoming martians amongst you) as defined by Ultima Online, popularized by Everquest and “refined” by World of Warcraft and MMOs as a general family of games, the audience members seem to have difficulties divorcing the two.

The recurring question raised by both panelists and audience members was “how can other MMO’s compete with World of Warcraft?” and the unspoken but still addressed question was “why should they try?”

The response from the developers was pretty universally - content is king for MMOs and the cost of including new content in games is a function of interaction complexity, graphical complexity and quantity of simultaneously interacting content. Creating a rich game world gets exponentially more costly the more content you introduce - so to compete with the Blizzards of this world you have to be able to create a richer, experience so that customers get more value for their time rather than more value for their money.

There are several ways of addressing this. CCP figured out early that procedurally generated content within a well designed gamespace can enable that nearly infinite scalability whilst minimizing development overhead - EvE Online is inarguably the largest MMO to date, and probably therefore the largest virtual gaming world ever conceived short of the fictional realms of tabletop RPGs.

The issue is dodged however; we’re not talking about the length of breadth of experience - the selling point will be the density of gaming opportunity. The feeling of being “productive” by engaging in several different activities simultaneously will be a defining feature, I believe, of successful MMOs. Getting more for each minute of gameplay in character advancement.

This content density is simply outside the realm of feasibility for most gaming studios (despite MMO studios generally being smaller than other AAA developers). The solution? Open it up.

How would you do this?

One concept would to to create a supply chain system using NPC inputs and outputs with player characters providing the processing abilities. A less abstract example using World of Warcraft-esque playspace would be along the lines of:

NPC named Habbard Kane offers a quest to a player, the player will get 100 XP and 3 gold leafed goblets of trustiness. After some convincing explanation Habbard Kane tells the player he needs 20 hens teeth and he’s willing to trade these gold leaf goblets.

So, the player heads off to the woods, slays some unsuspecting were-chickens to retrieve the hens teeth (whilst also gathering some rooster combs) and comes back to Kane and exchanges it for the Goblets.

These Goblets are part of this players greater quest for a rare piece of armour, but the grocery list of items for it is quite long.

Another player gets into the game and wants to create some new content.

They decide to create a character, they want him to be some doddery old craftsman. The name him Haggard Kane, customize his in game avatar using some of the built in tools. After that they specify some of his behaviour. He spends his days making gold leafed items, he purchases items at the market, takes them back to his workshop and godleafs them with magical goldleaf he makes from materials he collects or purchases. He’s a universally friendly NPC, so they give him some quests to offer to players of different levels. One of those quests is the Goblets for hen’s teeth quests (hens teeth are a material component in his magical gold leaf that he can’t collect since he’s a frail old man unable to slay beasts).

A different player notices that there aren’t a lot of creatures that give out hen’s teeth in the area of the game around Haggard. So he decided to create werechickens, so using the games tools for creating enemy creatures he defines the spawning areas and basic behaviour for the werechickens and what kind of things they drop.

Some earlier player created the item class “hensteeth” as a very rare, difficult to obtain, magical component which provides some basic luck enhancements to the possessor of the item but is more valuable as a material component in other combinations.

The system keeps track of the quantity of all items, xp consumed and produced in the processes within the game. Based on qualifiers for the item (such as “rare”, “super rare”, “unique”, “rumoured to not actually exist”, “pure fiction” etc) it will increase or decrease the drop-rates and other probabilities to keep the market non-exploited but flowing. The system “director” would also adjust the level of XP handouts for question completion, and enemy killing. It would also adjust the level of the creatures appropriately.

This would all encourage exploration, specialization, cooperation and market deviation from the players by having a diminishing return on certain quests based on ease of completion. Ease of completion is inferred by the frequency of quest completion, average level at completion, and host of other variables.

Again, the qualitative nature of item, enemy, NPC and player interaction would be defined by player-generated content but the exact quantitative effects of all these elements would be arbitrated by a combination human operator and automated system given a specific ruleset.

That’s my concept for an Open Source MMO.

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