“It might be the youth trend that most clearly epitomizes an age of exhibitionism. All the elements are there: Cars, music, dancing and the potential to make parents very angry — plus, it’s a spectacle tailor-made for taping and posting on the Web.” The Post may be a little late to the party with this “trend”, but at least they showed up.

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Two Days Ago: “Social network Facebook plans to completely ditch its admissions policy, welcoming anyone with internet access. The major change was scheduled for today, but has now been postponed until next week while the company struggles to regroup from last week’s member revolt in response to new activity-tracking features.”

Today: When the News Feed and Mini-Feed launched last week, the Facebook community revolted. Complaining of privacy issues, Facebook members formed anti-feed groups and sent letters to the company requesting the feeds either be taken down or at least made optional. Facebook chose the ‘optional’ suggestion.

Signing into Facebook this morning, I was greeted with a news message from Facebook. In the past few days, word got out about Facebook opening up to the public, and students and alumni alike revolted again – the fear being Facebook would become just another terrible Myspace social-networking site.

So, learning from the recent news-feed debacle, Facebook decided to ask before it made any changes.

Before We Expand

I want to clear up some rumors and ask for your feedback.

Right now a lot of people want their friends to use Facebook, but they can’t get on. Soon, we’re planning on letting these people register for regional networks.

I know a lot of you are worried about this and how it changes the site. Honestly, it shouldn’t change much for you. College networks will remain exclusive to people from those colleges. High school and work networks will remain exclusive as well. Only your friends and other people in your networks can see your profile. This is what makes Facebook different, and we’re not changing it.

From reading a lot of your messages, it seems like some of you want more separation. Do you want to be completely invisible to people who aren’t in a college or high school? Do you want to make sure they can’t message or poke you? We like hearing from you. Please send us your thoughts on how we can make this work for you.

And just to clear some other things up: we’re not putting up more banner ads, we’re not charging anyone, we’re not letting people put random HTML in their profiles, and we’re not selling your information. Facebook is about increasing information flow and connecting people, not these things.

Please send us your thoughts here.

I for one appreciate this openness. They’re saying, “hey – we’re still going along with our plans to open it up, but how can we retain (or more accurately simulate) what makes Facebook special and exclusive?

My school was one of the first non-Ivy league schools to be on the Facebook, so I’ve learned to get over the loss of exclusivity. You think people were upset when they added a High School Facebook? We were just as upset when they were letting local universities join (well, maybe not as upset as long as some of our friends went there). Adding ‘Regions’ just made sense after a while, considering how many users had graduated.

And now for my editorial: I think there should be a right of passage to be on Facebook. Sure you can’t customize a Facebook page to look as awful as a Myspace page, but there are ways to ruin it just the same. Registering from college was a fairly good safeguard against the 14-year-old girl contingent. When high school was added it was perceived that it was just in preparation for graduating to the real college Facebook when the time came.

I propose that Facebook come up with a solution to ensure the quality of new members, perhaps through some sort of invitation process (flawed, I know – but that’s the best I have at this moment). Profiles should default to the most extreme privacy settings instead of the open settings they default to currently. Also, the privacy settings need a good visualization, like an AJAX illustration, so that the amount of text isn’t overwhelming.

Something also needs to happen socio-culturally to indicate that you don’t have to be Facebook friends with everybody you’ve ever met. There are some people we just don’t want to be friends with on Facebook and that needs to be deemed acceptable. This is perhaps the biggest hurdle and maybe the one that scares people the most. We’ve reached a point in our society when those of us using the Internet to maintan, form, and develop our relationships are suddenly bound by the structural determinism of the technology. If I don’t accept your add request on Myspace or I don’t have you in my “Top 8″ does that mean we’re not friends? Not necessarily. Before the Internet, we hadn’t really ever been forced to write down our friends’ names in a list for others to see. Sure, there were other ways we showed who we were friends with, but not on a scale as large or immediate as our current situation.

It’s a huge hurdle, I know, and it’s not a goal Matt Zuckerberg and his hardworking programmers and developers should be charged with. But technology is changing so rapidly that we haven’t had time to cope with our current state much less prepare for the cultural changes ahead.

My final suggestion to Facebook is to please hold off for a little bit. You shouldn’t worry about competing with Myspace because you’re in different markets. Cultivate your current community before you do anything else. Give it some time before you open up to the general public and do some market-testing and cultural R&D before you make the next big step. Thanks.

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“If you made it through second grade, chances are good you’re familiar with kickball. Now tens of thousands of adults are forming kickball leagues for grown-ups. The World Adult Kickball Association (which charges players $60 to join) boasts 20,000 players who compete in tournaments and win prizes. “

I’m going to go ahead and whole-heartedly throw my suppor in for a kickball association. I would love to get together with a group of people and play kickball on Saturday after a long week at work. In fact, I was hoping to get some kickball action going at school this past year, but I couldn’t get together enough friends to make it happen.

Could kickball become the new softball? After all, it’s nearly impossible to strike out in kickball and thus makes it so most everybody is involved in the offensive progression of the game. Sure, plenty of people will get thrown out at first… but at least you get the satisfaction of creaming a playground ball with your foot. In the end, however, it comes down to who can kick the home-runs and who can take multiple bases at once.

I’m proud to say that my sixth grade kickball team went to the sixth-grade championships. There were probably ten teams involved and we climbed our way up the d-squash ladder to play in the final game. Unfortunately, we will never know who the best team really was because we got rained out three times. I’m still convinced that my team would have been crowned champs, of course.

Visiting the WAKA (World Adult Kickball Association) website, you can find out if there are leagues in your area. Two pieces of bad news: the website only works in IE and a lot of it is out of date. Still, if you’re interested you can find your way down the right alleys to kickball glory. I’m fortunate to be in an area that has a number of teams. They just better not play when the Skins are playing…

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“Bob Borchers, who is the senior director of iPod worldwide product marketing, told CNET that Apple is interested in making the use of iPods in cars much easier.”

Who would have thought that MP3 players in cars would take so long to get off the ground? The lawyers, that’s who. As a generalization, before the iPod showed up the term “MP3″ had negative connotations. MP3 was associated with illegal file-sharing, not with audio compression for the mass-market. With the advent of iTunes, the mass-market had a way to get a wide variety of legal MP3s easily online. Apple again helped break down the tenuous relationship of online music and legality. Perhaps, then, they should be the ones to really pursue the automobile market for MP3 audio.

I say this because my first instinct was to chide Apple for shutting the competition out of the car audio market. But it’s a much harder market to get into than one would expect, as illustrated in Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture.

“Your investment [in MP3 audio] buys you not only a company, it also buys you a lawsuit. So extreme has the environment become that even car manufacturers are afraid of technologies that touch content. In an article in Business 2.0, Rafe Needleman describes a discussion with BMW:

“I asked why, with all the storage capacity and computer power in the car, there was no way to play MP3 files. I was told that BMW engineers in Germany had rigged a new vehicle to play MP3s via the car’s built-in sound system, but that the company’s marketing and legal departments weren’t comfortable with pushing this forward for release stateside. Even today, no new cars are sold in the United States with bona fide MP3 players. …” [5]

This is the world of the mafia—filled with “your money or your life” offers, governed in the end not by courts but by the threats that the law empowers copyright holders to exercise. It is a system that will obviously and necessarily stifle new innovation. It is hard enough to start a company. It is impossibly hard if that company is constantly threatened by litigation.”

So maybe a big company like Apple is doing a long-term favor to all of the non-disc based audio innovators. Though Lessig wrote this in 2004, the state of the market has not evolved much. We’ve seen a few manufacturers who have taken legal risks by getting involved. Audio-jacks and FM transmitters are currently the most common way to listen to MP3s in the car. The 2007 Infiniti G35 will come with a hard drive to store audio files on but it is the rare exception to the rule.

If Apple can get its foot in the door with a few car manufacturers, the gates might open for others to claim, “our car is ready for all of your audio devices.” It seems risky, but if anybody has the pull right now it’s Apple. We’ll see.

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“Mark Raby’s article, on TwitchGuru, asks if games are easier compared to older games like in the 1980s.”

Actually, he doesn’t so much ask as bemoan the loss of the “good ol’ days” of gaming. The problem with Raby’s logic is that it doesn’t allow room for evolution and doesn’t frame the days of more difficult gaming in anything but a positive context. In response, I will proceed through his argument point-by-point and explain the possible flaws.

1) “In spite of the rapid growth in technology and the ability to make games more intricate, game have become fundamentally less challenging than they were 20 years ago.”
Intricacy does not equal difficulty. My overarching theme is that Difficulty was little more than a building block of teleology in games (goal-oriented tasks). Due to limitations in technology as well as economic forces, Difficulty was used to extend gameplay. In the arcades, Difficulty meant more quarters. Difficulty allowed programmers to reuse the same scenario because programming space was limited. The reason many early NES games were challenging is not because Difficulty is a natural part of gaming, but rather it was a hold-over from a previous mindset. “Game Over” is a tactic for replay, not a principle of gameplay.

I point to a fictional game imagined by author D.B. Weiss. “Lucky Wander Boy” (which is also the name of the book) is an old arcade game cherished in the memories of the main character. The game never obtained any popularity, however, because it had no challenge. “Play” was in exploration, wandering, and collecting. Weiss uses “Lucky Wander Boy” as the comparison for blood and gore of modern gaming. It wasn’t just a way to articulate old versus new; Weiss sought to compare modes and mindsets.

Difficulty can be fun, but difficulty can be frustrating. We play games to enjoy ourselves. If they’re too easy we might not enjoy our progression. But just because it is easy does not mean the act of acomplishing the task isn’t entertaining. Difficulty is not law.

2) “Game Over” Drives Satisfaction of Goals Acheived
Raby wrote, “I’ve had Super Mario Bros for about 12 years and every time I pass that final Bowser stage, I still get a great sense of satisfaction. In contrast, when I conquer a game from this era, I just feel relieved that it’s over. I rarely get the feeling anymore that I won because of hard work and determination.” Sounds like he shouldn’t be playing new games. The claim here is that unless you beat something that was not meant to be beaten, you haven’t earned victory. He is right that the name of the game has changed – games are designed to be finished. That way, they can tell the full story if that is their goal. Or, perhaps the story is inconsequential and experiencing the whole world is the real payoff.

Raby writes that game author want to show you everything they’ve done in putting the game together. The difference between his view and my view is that he criminalizes this action; it’s as if programmers who want players to beat the game are “showing off.” If you worked extremely hard on a creative piece, wouldn’t you want your audience to see every bit of it? A game filled with puzzles wants the player to try their hand at everything. A game with an interesting weapon half-way through wants you to play with that weapon. Raby’s logic would claim that the Gravity Gun in Half-Life 2 should be some sort of pay-off rather than a piece of equipment handed down from on high. But, those of us who have played Half-Life 2 know that merely playing with the Gravity Gun is satisfying; just because we didn’t get five game-overs in between does not change that fact.

3) LucasArts adventure games force you to think on your feet instead of just giving the soltuions to you.
This is true. This is very true. The Secret of Monkey Island is a difficult game that requires a lot of problem solving and a lot of brainpower. But not everybody is cut out for this and we certainly shouldn’t force it upon people. Games don’t have to be “thought provoking” to be enjoyable. Once again, I refer to the satisfaction of play. The Secret of Monkey Island, as well as other adventure games along the LucasArts style, bore me. This is just a personal preference, of course, and I know that despite my dislike for the genre they are indeed good games. But they’re not for me. So why force that down my throat? This is why genres exist – to act as outlets of creativity and cater to audiences of differing tastes. Raby claims that if game publishers think games which are too difficult will drive the market away. His solution? Force players to challenge themselves; just suck it up and deal. Doesn’t sound like the kind of publisher from which I want to buy.

Also, I believe his claims that strategy guides are stifling creativity on the designers’ end are unfounded. Not everybody turns to a walkthrough the moment something looks challenging.

4) The Final Boss
I disagree with nearly everything Raby says in this fourth section. Has he played Pain Killer? Resident Evil 4? Devil May Cry 3? Ratchet and Clank? God of War? There are plenty of bosses that are way harder now than they ever were in the NES and Genesis era of games. Bowser wasn’t “tough” in Super Mario Bros. All he required has a good job and a solid landing on the bridge’s axe.

The reason you can make “several flubs” when fighting today’s bosses is that you aren’t expected to do everything without getting hit once. The life-meter was one of the most important inovations in gaming, yet Raby does not acknowledge its existence in reference to boss fights. People (aka my roommate third year of college) do not break controllers because bosses are too easy.

5) The Paradigm Shift in Popular Genres
Raby cites the “Casual Gamer Genre” as one of the big problems with modern gaming. If The Sims is such a problem, why is it the best selling PC game of all time? He’s worried that “Casual Gamers” (a problematic term, if you ask me) are softening the market for everybody and that designers need to strike a balance to keep both sides happy. If you ask me, those types of gamers are still drawing the short straw when it comes to games.

Perhaps Raby just needs a new genre himself – that of the Difficult Game. That way he doesn’t have to exert any effort to find the difficulty burried in most of the good games released in the recent past – not like that’s a challenging task.

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