Tag Archive: technology


Five Things I’m Thinking Right Now

Filed Under: games, ideas by seb — 2 Comments
Thu July 15, 2010

Alice did it, and from there I’ve found some more inter­est­ing people doing it. So to throw myself aboard a band­wagon (and break a long dry spell without post­ing), here are 5 things I’m think­ing about right now:

  1. Apps (espe­cially games) tar­get­ing a spe­cific device could be com­ing to an end soon. Google’s announce­ment of Chrome being able to run nat­ive code in a sand­box (cau­tion: really dry tech­nical presentation) is a game-changer. Bye-bye OS-specific applic­a­tions that you buy on (ugh) phys­ical media. Hello things that you open in a browser, which have full web con­nectiv­ity and pres­ence, and which will run on any plat­form sup­port­ing it. Yes, I’m well aware of the less-than-illustrious his­tory of thin-client net­work com­put­ing. What I think makes this dif­fer­ent is that Google have already got the plat­form in the hands of tens (if not hun­dreds) of mil­lions of cus­tom­ers. For free. All they need to do to enable it is flip a switch. Oh, and they’re about to release an oper­at­ing sys­tem based on this technology.
  2. Games are about to get big. By this, I don’t mean that people will buy more cop­ies of games, nor that main­stream game devices will become more pop­u­lar (though both are a given in the short term). No, I mean that more people are about to start mak­ing games. There are a couple of things that are bring­ing this about. The first is the massive ubi­quity of plat­forms that can play games, and the second is the emer­gence of content-creation tools that don’t require computer-science or art degrees to use. Unity3D, which coin­cid­ent­ally was announced as an early launch plat­form for cre­at­ing con­tent which runs under Google’s Native Code sys­tem, is just such a plat­form, but there are many more with sim­ilar aims, such as MIT’s Scratch.
  3. Which brings me to: the next big soft­ware revolu­tion will be in the cre­ation of inter­preted con­tent. What I mean by inter­preted con­tent is con­tent that the user does not have to cre­ate in painstak­ing detail. Instead, the user sets guidelines and para­met­ers for what they want, and the soft­ware inter­prets the user’s inten­tion and gen­er­ates con­tent. Procedural con­tent has got­ten us most of the way there, and there are some fant­astic (though lim­ited) examples such as Spore’s creature cre­ator, the MakeHuman pro­ject, and LaDiDa avail­able right now. However, the next wave will seam­lessly inter­me­di­ate between clumsy, inex­act humans and the rig­or­ous demands of con­tent cre­ation. I’d really like it if the inter­face to such soft­ware soun­ded like Jarvis from the Iron Man movies.
  4. Driving is an under-utilised plat­form for gam­ing, and could make roads much, much safer. Think net­worked vehicles with sensors that score your driv­ing accord­ing to how safe and green it is, with high-score tables, local and national leagues, full social media con­nectiv­ity, etc. Quite why the full extent of car man­u­fac­tur­ers’ use of game mech­an­ics so far is a tree that lights up green in one eco-friendly Honda remains an utter mys­tery to me.
  5. Talking of people that don’t get it… copy­right reform has got to hap­pen now. When every­one can make con­tent, and con­tent can go every­where, people will be remix­ing and cre­at­ing on a scale that utterly dwarfs the cur­rent Big Content indus­tries. We need to ensure a strong cre­at­ive com­mons and a legal frame­work that enables people to draw from the rich tapestry of our col­lect­ive cul­ture without fear of prosecution.

So that took a lot longer than expec­ted, mostly due it turn­ing into a stream of con­scious­ness that I had to edit down from about 11 dif­fer­ent ideas that sud­denly occurred to me. More on points 2 and 3 com­ing soon.

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BBC Made of Fail? No, definitely not.

Filed Under: rants by seb — Leave a comment
Mon December 10, 2007

A couple of days ago I wrote an opin­ion piece on why I feel that being forced to duplic­ate exist­ing soft­ware pro­jects due to an anti­quated and lim­ited infra­struc­ture is a large part of the reason the BBC is fall­ing far behind the rest of the industry in its inter­net offerings.

To put this in con­text, until two days ago this site has had about 100 vis­it­ors total, so I was a little sur­prised to find that within hours the art­icle was mak­ing its way onto the front page of Reddit, and being cir­cu­lated amongst tech­no­logy blog­gers. In most cir­cum­stances it was accom­pan­ied by under-informed and wildly inac­cur­ate com­ments and extra­pol­a­tions about the BBC from people who have either never worked there, or not worked there in the bet­ter part of a dec­ade. (I’ve also spent far too much time over the past couple of days delet­ing com­ments along the lines of “this is why we should abol­ish the licence fee”, strangely most of these com­ments com­ing from Americans.)

A lot of people missed the point of what I was writ­ing about, which I’ll attrib­ute to me not mak­ing myself suf­fi­ciently clear. I was not talk­ing about the BBC’s web sites, about the qual­ity of the corporation’s cre­at­ive out­put, nor about what the situ­ation was prior to the sell-off of BBC Technology sev­eral years ago. What I was talk­ing about are the reas­ons that today, in 2007, the BBC is stuck with an archaic tech­no­lo­gical infra­struc­ture, and how that ulti­mately hurts the BBC’s long-term strategy to be “part of the web” and not just a set of web pages.

You see, des­pite the crit­ical han­di­cap of its infra­struc­ture, the BBC does amaz­ing things with its con­tent. It takes a little longer than the rest of the industry to get those things out there, but con­sid­er­ing the size of the cor­por­a­tion, the all-encompassing nature of its audi­ence, and its risk-averse lead­er­ship, that’s not surprising.

It’s also true that the BBC suf­fers from mul­tiple per­son­al­ity dis­order, and that within the cor­por­a­tion not all things are equal. As was poin­ted out in the com­ments on my art­icle, BBC Journalism (what used to be BBC News) has its own infra­struc­ture that lies more within the con­trol of the BBC. The dif­fer­ence is clear — BBC News has to be able to respond in the most flex­ible and reli­able man­ner ima­gin­able as the chan­ging pres­sures of world events and audi­ences demand more of their infra­struc­ture than almost any other in the world. Waiting months for bug-fixes and code reviews to make minor changes would be the kiss of death for the BBC’s News offerings.

That’s really the crux of the mat­ter. The BBC cer­tainly can be slow to react to change, but over the past couple of years there has been enorm­ous pres­sure from within the cor­por­a­tion to move for­wards with this whole “inter­net” thing. It’s safe to say that the vast major­ity of the people work­ing in on-line con­tent at the BBC do actu­ally “get it”, and even the tra­di­tional lin­ear media people are catch­ing on. There are some truly excep­tional pro­jects com­ing out of the BBC in the near future (espe­cially on the CBBC and CBeebies side of things), and it’s not fair to tar every­one with the same brush.

A bril­liant example of what the BBC does right is described in Curtis Poe’s response to my art­icle. He says:

[T]oday when I got into work, I found a scath­ing email from one of the higher ups. He read the “BBC Fails at the Internet” post and rather than blow a gas­ket that internal details had been made pub­lic, he for­war­ded it to the respons­ible parties, said he agreed, and made it very clear that the prob­lem will be fixed immediately…

Now, wouldn’t that be a fine thing?

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