Bioware/EA turn DRM up to 11

Bioware/EA have decided to employ a hugely draconian DRM system on the forthcoming Mass Effect, which rather aggravates me, given that it was a must-have purchase for me until the SecuROM anti-piracy gubbins was revealed this week.

In a nutshell, after the initial Internet activation (fair enough), the game needs to perform further Internet checks every 10 days, otherwise the game will cross its arms and sit in the corner in a huff, refusing to play with you until you do what it says. Ethical and privacy issues aside, the pracctical flaws in this system are pretty self-evident, with the only potential result being a) an increase in piracy and b) a drop in sales. Surely not quite what Bioware/EA wants?

Interestingly, it's extremely similar to the oooold anti-piracy system we used at FXhome, although ours was only turned up to 8-or-so on the Annoying-O-Meter. It required an Internet check every 6 months-or-so (can't remember exactly what the time interval was), otherwise it would cease to function.

The results?

1. Our software was pirated almost instantly anyway.

2. Many of our legitimate customers were inconvenienced when the check occurred.

3. Customers without the Internet were simply unable to purchase our products.

4. Many customers simply didn't purchase because they objected to the system, for various ethical/practical reasons. Reasons that, in retrospect, we agreed with.

There were literally no benefits. At all.

And so we dropped the system. We still have anti-piracy systems in place on our software, but it is much less intrusive and doesn't do silly timed checks and lock-outs. Piracy of our software hasn't increased - in fact, it would seem to have reduced a little, if anything, despite our current products being more popular and well-known than our old ones. I suspect this could be because we're no longer provoking them with a 'challenge', and because we're no longer pissing off potentially legitimate customers.

If there's one thing more annoying that the bastard pirates that cause this problem in the first place, it's short-sighted publishers resorting to dubious Orwellian tactics to try and 'solve' it. As with most aggressive, retaliatory action, all it tends to do is provoke.

The Guardian knows stuff

The Guardian recently ran a rather inciteful piece on gaming, which you can read here. As you peruse the article, you'll no doubt notice the worrying lack of sensationalism; the clearly misguided lack of panic and fear; the disturbing amount of understanding and genuine research that has gone into Bennett's writing - in an unprecedented move, the woman actually played some computer games before writing about them. The deeply concerning conclusion is that a professional journalist has actually had the gall, the sheer rudeness, to treat gaming as a serious subject!

Still, The Guardian being The Guardian, the article will no doubt be completely ignored at best, or outright dismissed at worst, with the rest of the mainstream media sticking to their mission of demonising the medium of games. The politicians, after all, do need some kind of material to get their teeth into in order to rile up the plebs.

What never fails to amaze is the inability of politicians and journalists - both, presumably, enjoying at least a basic knowledge of cultural history - to identify that this has happened over and over again. It's happened at the dawn of every new form of art/entertainment. The poor old world of music has to suffer it again and again as new, 'threatening' genres emerge. And every time - every single time - the usual process of hegemony absorbs the new upstart and within a few years it is either diluted beyond recognition or entirely accepted. That those making all the noise fail to recognise this fairly obvious trend makes you wonder why anybody listens to them at all.

Anyway, all this is a prelude to me saying that I'm intending to stick my nose into gaming journalism a bit more this year. I'm not entirely sure how yet, of course, but it's something I'm going to investigate. Time to broaden my readership, methinks.

Northumberland 2008

Northumberland 2008

We returned on Friday from our week's holiday to Northumberland, where we had travelled to see castles, walk through gardens and take in some refreshing sea air.

As you can see from the photo album above, we certainly got our fair share of all of those. First we had to contend with a 6-hour drive from Norwich to Dunstan, where we were staying. Twice as long as any drive we'd attempted before, I was a little intimidated by the distance but, in the end, if wasn't a problem - especially with Leiali taking up a good 2 and a half hours of the journey time.

While the cottage we stayed at wasn't anything special (and which had a kitchen so miniscule that it managed to make our one at home seem large in comparison), it was ideally placed as a central HQ for exploring the area. It proved to be a packed week, but here are the highlights:

Lindisfarne - A bit further north, this island is only accessible by a causeway that spend half the day submerged beneath the sea, thus requiring careful checking of the tides so as not to get stranded. The drive across was consequently rather exciting, as we timed our arrival to coincide with the causeway's appearance. On the island itself is an old ruined priory and the castle itself, perched up on a rocky hill. Intriguingly it had been used as a holiday home during the early 20th century.

Bamburgh Castle - The best thing about a castle-based holiday is that it doesn't really matter what the weather does. If it's sunny, great; if it rains, then it just makes everything more atmospheric! Bamburgh was a good example of this, as the fog rolled in off the sea during our visit and had entirely enveloped the place by the time we'd finished looking around its plush interior. This resulted in some great photos and a spooky walk over the dunes to the beach. Standing on the beach, looking out to sea, with all your surroundings past about 50 metres blanketed by a thick white fog is quite a memorable experience. It would have been easy to get entirely lost, if it weren't for the useful navigational hint of the roaring waves!

Alnwick - In contrast to the authenticity of Bamburgh and the ruined history of Lindisfarne, Alnwick felt more like an attraction created by Disney. The gardens, which have apparently received a huge amount of lottery funding lately, were a largely soulless affair, with most of the garden rather sparse and dead, with spring having not yet reached Northumberland. As such all that remained for viewing were a series of elaborate water fountains - which were, admittedly, extremely spiffy. Each highlighted a particular behavioural aspect of water and they were really quite fascinating, particularly the 'vortex' whirlpool. Overall, though, it was all a bit gimmicky and antiseptic. Alnwick castle was better, with parts having featured in the Harry Potter films, but there was still something rather staged about the whole thing. Rather too many photos of the current owners and inhabitants, lounging about in their posh, inherited luxury, for our liking, too! :) I did have my best Cake of the Week at Alnwick, however.

Cragside - The major highlight of the week for me, Cragside is an astounding place built by one Lord Armstrong in the 19th century. Armstrong was a highly innovative engineer and entrepreneur and the house and grounds show this at every turn. Most notably, the house was the first in the world to enjoy full electrical power, thanks to Armstrong's harnessing of hydro-electricity via the multiple lakes dotted about the grounds. Remarkably the building also featured a three-storey elevator! The grounds were equally impressive, including a 6 mile drive around the perimeter that reminded me ever-so-slightly of the tour in Jurassic Park - though less deadly, thankfully. An inspiring place that unfortunately can't hope to be properly represented in our photos.

Howick Hall - Earl Grey tea was invented here. Which may not sound like the most exciting of facts, but I'll admit to the tea being extremely good - and I'm by no means a regular tea drinker. The massive gardens were refined and tamed in comparison to Cragside's exciting wilderness but were nevertheless most enjoyable, with the Silverwood rohdedendron forest being particularly beautiful (it also sounds like a location in World of Warcraft, which makes it instantly cool). We had a particularly relaxing river walk here, aided by the sunny weather.

Warkworth - The final castle of the holiday is a generally well-preserved site on the coast at Warkworth, a pleasantly picturesque little village. Although the motte and bailey had long since collapsed, the keep itself was in good condition. With the help of a fantastic audio guide the place really came to life and was a satisfying conclusion to the week.

All we have to do now is win the lottery, thus enabling us to buy Cragside and go live there.

Evinden update

Time for an update on Evinden, I think.

Current word count: 77,905
Current page count: 221

Start date for project: 11 April 2001, allegedly. This is the oldest file I have archived on the computer relating to the project - a file called 'Ideas.doc'.

Rather terrifyingly, that means I've been working on this damned book for seven bastard years. Seven! That's quite clearly utterly ridiculous - there are children out there whose entire lives encompass seven years, and yet I've somehow managed to take seven years to write a book; in fact, to write half of a book, it's nowhere near finished yet.

One thing's for certain: if Evinden turns out well and I write more books, I dearly hope that they prove to be rather less ponderous in their creation. Of course, Evinden went through a bit of a funny early development in that it was originally to be a screenplay and had an entirely different structure, before before restructured in (I think) 2004 as a novel.

Still, with James providing spiffy feedback and a few select other people having read and enjoyed the book, I'm rather more spurred on to finish the damn thing than I ever have been before. The Eastercon 2008 convention also rather invigorated my writing spirit - I couldn't help but think this is where I want to be. Once I got used to the lingering nerd smells and the Klingon guy, anyway.

Reading over this Ideas.doc file is really quite enlightening, reminding me of where I was coming from in the first place. While it's changed vastly and become infinitely more detailed, some of the early notes make for an amusing list of "Fantasy Clichés 101". This was back in the days when I hadn't read any fantasy, and before Fellowship of the Ring hit cinemas. A different age!

Check it out:

Basic ideas/concepts

• Magic
• Sword-fighting
• Flying (flying characters, or flying vehicles?)
• Hero’s Journey
• Epic
• Huge, towering cities
• Demonic creatures
• - invasion?
• Dark/light? How ‘serious’ are we getting?
• Mythology
• History
• Flawed characters
• Characters have past connections
• One character appearing to several, drawing them together?
• - Mentor/wizard character?
• Must protect somebody?
• - on a journey?
• - both physical and mental?
• - Extending swords?
• - must have!
• - huge variety of extending cool weaponry!!!!!!!!
• - Girl from above rescues Cut from work?
• - City perched atop clouds (hidden)
• - Waterfalls!
• - Cut can save his people from the tyranny of the Telladors.

Not a particularly auspicious start.

I'm really not sure what I was thinking calling the lead character 'Cut'. I mean, there's no way a typo could have made that one embarassing, eh?

The wise words of Mr Gaiman

Neil Gaiman wrote an interesting thing in his journal recently:

"The worst thing in writing something for someone else, and I've found this several times over the years, especially in movies, is where you talk to an editor or an executive and you think that you're talking about the same thing. Then you go away and do what you thought you were talking about and hand it in and find that you were quite wrong, and while you were describing (say) a romantic comedy with ghosts in they were buying a scary ghost story with perhaps some love in, and nobody is happy and the project is doomed."

A very similar thing happened on a film project I've been working on since last Autumn. Having wrestled through four incarnations of the script, plus another two written by other people, we seem to finally be getting somewhere. Unfortunately my scripts were rejected, but that's how it goes sometimes (though that actual rejection process was...interesting, to say the least!).

So, yes, we're now on track, it would seem, which is rather damn exciting. The team is slowly coming together and some of the people lined up to be working on the film are awesome.

The project will be announced officially soon, at which point I'll be able to say more...

In the meantime, time to write some more of Evinden.

s04e01

Battlestar Galactica is back with season four. Remarkably, it is still extremely good. In fact, it remains quite clearly the best thing on television - at least in as much as I am aware. It's also the best sci-fi for about two decades, irrespective of TV or cinema.

So say we all.

Creative madness!

The creative process is a pretty bonkers thing, especially if you're attempting to work in a group, with everyone bringing disparate and conflicting ideas to the table of what the finished article should be. As part of a film project I'm working on, this week has seen the most intense example of that process I've ever seen.

Remarkably, given how slow and ponderous I tend to be when writing creatively, I've completed three screenplays in the last four days. One was in collaboration with another writer while the other two were off my own bat. They're shorts, of course (I'm not that fast), but that's nevertheless the most creatively prolific I've been for a while.

It's partially helped by it being related to a larger project, of course, so that, rather than it just being for my own amusement, it's also intended to provide a solid foundation for the work of everyone else. Whether it gets to that stage or not remains to be seen, of course - I'm very happy with the third script, but I know other members of the team have their doubts.

It's an interesting exercise, to throw yourself into a script only to have it torn apart by peers. Painful, yes, but it most cases it does end up with a better final result, as long as you can pull yourself back together and look at the task from another angle - which is exactly what I did with this third script, abandoning the structure and characters from the earlier interations and retaining only the setting and themes.

I call the third script 'Katabasis', which is a vague attempt to sound intelligent. As I understand it, Katabasis has multiple meanings, all generally along the lines of 'going down' - most commonly with regards to going from the centre of a country to the coast, or a descent into the underworld. All quite apt, for numerous reasons.

You'll no doubt have noticed that I've not dropped any specifics about the project or the scripts - alas, until the project is officially announced that's the way it has to be! But with luck I'll be able to say more soon.

In other news, it's suddenly started snowing again. Time for jumpers.