A Series of Tubes

The 2009 Game Developers conference in San Fransisco ended 2 days ago.  Last year one of the big winners was World of Goo.  The developers decided to release their game without any DRM.  It’s about a year since the games release and since then the piracy rate for world of goo is 90% and the World of Go Publisher went bankrupt.  I’m not sure how linked those two events are since 2DBoy, the developers of world of goo , is still doing fine.  If I knew that my game was getting a 90% piracy rate I would probably jump on the DRM bandwagon, but surprisingly 2DBoy is sticking with and encouraging their original decision.  The argument made by 2DBoy is that DRM will get cracked and will only degrade the experience for paying customers while the pirates and thiefs wind up with a better game experience.

An important point to note is that the 90% of the people that didn’t buy the game are not lost sales since only a percentage of those pirates would have actually paid for the game if they couldn’t get an illegal copy.  Also once a DRM scheme is implemented there are lost sales due to a degraded game experience, so one should be able to calculate a direct cost benefit for implementing DRM.  If someone knows of an impartial and well researched article, one not written by a game company or someone with an axe to grind in the argument, let me know.  I’d like to see if the 90% piracy rate is a number that is found across the industry, how DRM schemes compare at increasing or decreasing sales, and if this number compares to the music industry.

Read more

So after talking about Chiropractic care I realized that I was getting a ton of ads for chiropractors. The thing is that my reader base is probably less likely to click on ads to go get a chiropractor after I just discussed how chiropractors have a shady history and use pseudoscientific instruments to give them the illusion of technical and scientific knowledge. The only way someone would click on one of those ads is if the ads were for pirate chiropractors (come on google… show me some pirate chiropractor ads). “Yar! Yer spine be like the captain’s hook.”

The thing is that I’ve made various unflattering statements about many groups. One of these days I’m going to need something from a jehovah’s witness chiropractor who is married to a mormon that really likes homeopathy. That would be karma. Of course I don’t believe in karma either. And naturally I’m now thinking of a post that I could write about karma. I wonder if I would get ads on how to get better karma. I’m sure someone has written a book about it.

I need to make sure that my next post is about something that I like. That way the google ad gravy train makes its next stop right here on my blog.

So recently I have been using a computer that does not have firefox installed and instead only has internet explorer 6 installed. This is basically puts me in a computer user vortex of evil torment. I noticed that my blog does not display properly under IE 6. As a matter of fact IE 6 crashed completely about half way through writing this post. I might have to change my theme in order to correct the rendering errors. In the mean time I’m going to complete my post in the computer lab. What I really want to tell you about is not my  computer and browser difficulties but rather something that happened during lunch.

The area in front of the bookstore is the place where you get accosted to sign petitions, are given various fliers, and whatnot. Recently all the frats and sororities have their tables set up which is probably a topic for yet another post. Next to the fratties there is a guy with a demo for action chiropractic center. I always wondered if chiropractors were legitimate or snake oil vendors.

So I went to go talk to the person in front of the action chiropractic center demo, Dr. Ron Schmidt. According to his bio on his website, he graduated from Palmer west. This institution gets it’s name from Daniel David Palmer, the founder of modern chiropractic therapy. Palmer had previous experience as a spiritual and magnetic healer. From the wikipedia entry on the guy:

While working as a magnetic healer in Davenport, IA, he encountered a deaf janitor who he discovered had a palpable lump in his back. He theorized that the lump and his deafness were related. After a reported successful restoration of the man’s hearing^[2], it led to the beginning of Chiropractic history. His theories revolved around the concept that altered nerve flow was the cause of all disease, and that misaligned spinal vertebrae had an effect on the nerve flow. He postulated that restoring these vertebra to their proper alignment would restore health.

Also from wikipedia is the following juicy quote from DD Palmer: Read more

So I went to the GDC with a free pass. There were demos and things to see from the major studios, but the most exciting thing to see were some of the really cool independent games. There were two games that caught my eye, both of them had really cool game art, music, and sound. Since they are independent games it is hard to make a really large and impressive 3d world. Because of this the best indie games were of the 2d variety.

The first game I’ll mention is Iron dukes which is a game about pirates. From this initial description this game is already awesome. It runs on flash and actually requires you to be running a relatively new computer for it to not slow down to a crawl. Since you can run the game in a web browser, if you wanted to, you yourself could go check it out for free. Below is the picture of my crew during one of the games:

Another really cool game was world of goo. You basically use the goo to construct bridges and structures in order to get to your objective. If you preoder the game for $20 you can get the preview/demo right now while the game finishes development. The goo has a personality and you sort of think of them as you minions.

I should also mention that there was a game in the theme of guitar hero and rock band called guitar rising. Basically in both guitar hero and rock band you get really good at playing a plastic guitar. In guitar rising you learn how to play an actual guitar in a very similar format to guitar hero and rock band. It was pretty cool but also needed some development time (their website says that the release date is late 2008). You of course need a guitar to play the game.

This short animation from a VFS student has two very awesome things. The first is the pirate. The second is…the ending:

I noticed that there was a distinct lack of pirates on the front page now that my original pirate post has floated into the archives. To remedy this I will combine my love of pirates with my love of Christmas, and will throw in my card making in there for good measure.

So if I didn’t already have a brilliant Christmas card idea I would totally get these cards:

Yes that is Santa with a peg leg and an eye patch. If anyone is looking for a card to get me for Christmas…look no further.

Happy thanksgiving to all of my loyal fans who have been with me these long and hard past few days. You’ve been so good through the tough times of Monday and the slightly better times of Tuesday.

So news of my website spread through the family this Thanksgiving.  I must say that there was quite a lot of interest in the Pirates and farting.  My sister pointed out that the combination puts new meaning to the phrase “Thar she blows.”

Tomorrow I plan on ice skating, a good dinner, and a general avoidance of any place where people will be shopping.

Well I’m not going to generate my millions with those vacuum tube ads on the right which means I need to stop talking about them or else google with think that all I care about are things that predate transistors (notice my clever wording so as to avoid saying vacuum tubes again).

To fix this problem I have decided to write about things that my legions of fans, I’m looking at you Jess, will find enjoyable and that google will deem is the proper intent of this blog. That thing that I shall write about is pirates.

I’m hoping that by writing about pirates, ads for eye patches, hooks, peg legs and the like will start appearing on the right hand side. Everyone that visits the site will be drawn to this awesome assortment of vendors to fulfill their pirating needs and then the millions start getting delivered. Perhaps I can get that in doubloons. Yar.

Here is an example of the supplies.