2011 in review

Another year gone by. What did we get up to in 2011?

* We did our best to promote Goblin Camp, with a let's play kind of thing and a bunch of other posts. The game is still a going concern, and although there hasn't been an update for a while, I'm assured there will be. Eventually. Back in February, I put together really epic camp. The website is here; if you haven't tried it, do.

* There was an election in Finland, that led to no noticeable changes in Finnish politics. We have some really good-looking athletes, though.

* They killed 'Usāmah; I was skeptical about that being the death-blow to terrorism. Sadly, terrorism took a different turn shortly thereafter with the senseless attacks in Norway, the background to which we discussed. Steve Jobs also passed away, and we felt that his eulogies went too far.

* Throughout the year, we were alarmed by the police, as despite the death of "Osama", new threats to our precious bodily fluids continued to emerge. To combat these, we got everything from American police UAVs and the German police going all Gestapo on the German Pirate Party to the Finnish police hacking your phone. I also lost faith in Radley Balko, of The Agitator, for hithcing up with the Kremlin's propaganda machine, and my post on the topic inspired a TV show host to discuss my underwear.

* There was a lot of Minecraft. At the beginning of the year, I was still hanging around Epic Island, and we were impressed by music. We also weighed in on the Mojang - Zenimax legal battle.

* Apart from Minecraft, we liked Harms Way, but were disappointed by Mass Effect 2 being a sexist white supremacist game and by EA's various antics. The future looked bleak. In other media, we liked Detroit 1-8-7 and Sucker Punch, as well as the fantastic Robot.

* We all enjoyed some excellent music!

* Some memes were participated in, and scientology was addressed. We also started a series of posts on the Bible.

* There was, of course, a lot of hockey. At the very beginning of the year, the wrong guy was made MVP of the World Juniors, and later on Winnipeg got an NHL team. Sadly, our favorite NHL player called it quits. However, there were the world champs. In my preview, I had a good feeling about Team Finland, and even though Mats Sundin assured us it was impossible, Finland actually won. We were a little disappointed by the overblown coverage given to one particular goal, though.

Sadly, in the words of Jonathan Toews, the summer of 2011 was the worst ever for hockey. Not only did three NHL players pass away during the summer, but the plane carrying the KHL's Lokomotiv Yaroslavl team crashed, killing the whole team. Earlier this month, the New York Times published a series of stories on Derek Boogaard, an NHL enforcer who died last summer. I highly recommend reading them.

**

Maybe that's a bit of a sad note to end this post on, but as the new year comes around, it won't hurt to take a moment to remember those who aren't around to see it happen. Having said that, though, I'd like to thank everyone who read this sorry excuse for a blag over the past year, and wish you all a happy new year! See you in 2012.

The Steve Jobs thing is going too far

I freely admit I write provocatively, and sometimes I've even been rude, but this time around, I genuinely do not want to offend anyone. However, the beatification of Steve Jobs is getting so far out of hand that I have to say something.

A blogger for the Economist pushed me over the edge with this:

Prospero: Beautiful gadget, no manual necessary

He put Apple's great achievement better than anyone I've heard, and so I paraphrase it here: it used to be that when you got a computer or a gadget, you had to read a long manual or spend forever fiddling with it to learn how to use it. One person in the family might take the time to do so, and then spend the rest of the Christmas holiday teaching everyone else how to do the things they wanted to do.

Apple changed all that.

He then goes on to claim that the success of Nintendo's Wii console is due to Apple and Steve Jobs:

The Wii game system has made Nintendo a fortune in recent years. How did Nintendo know it would be a hit? Elderly members of the company's board delighted in picking up the controller and simply moving it around to play the simple, intuitive games. I've never heard someone from Nintendo say they got this from Apple, but the influence is clear enough. These days whether you're a Mac or a PC, an Android or an iPhone, you play by the delightful rules Steve Jobs set for us all.

Okay. Stop.

First of all, the Apple Macintosh was introduced in January 1984. The Nintendo Entertainment System that we grew up with was introduced in Japan in 1983. Remember how with the NES, you had to read a long manual and spend forever fiddling with it to learn how to use it? You know, until Steve Jobs came along?

Steve Jobs, or anyone else at Apple, did not invent usability, intuitiveness, the graphical user interface, or really much of anything that goes on on your game console, PC or smart phone. Neither did he "revolutionize" any of the above. Obviously he's influenced the entire computer industry, but it's getting a bit too thick to give him credit for everything.

Most of the really innovative things Apple "came up with" for the Macintosh, such as the easy-to-use GUI, were stolen from Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. These days, whether you're a PC or a Mac, or anything else, you're operating within a framework invented at PARC. If you don't know that, you have no business blogging about Steve Jobs's or anyone else's impact on the computer industry. Let alone claiming that the Nintendo Wii is influenced by Apple.

In general, it would be nice if more people read, say, this Gawker piece on Steve Jobs. It reminds us, among other things, of the human cost of those nice, shiny devices. Here's a quote from a Daily Mail article from last June's launch of the new iPhone:

Daily Mail: Revealed: Inside the Chinese suicide sweatshop where workers toil in 34-hour shifts to make your iPod

Yet, amid all the fanfare and celebrations this week, there was one sour, niggling note: reports of a spate of suicides at a secretive Chinese complex where Jobs's iPhone, iPod and iPad - Apple's new state-of-the-art slimline computer - are built and assembled.

With 11 workers taking their lives in sinister circumstances, Jobs acted swiftly to quell a potential public relations disaster.

Stressing that he found the deaths 'troubling' and that he was 'all over it', the billionaire brushed aside suggestions that the factory was a sweatshop.

'You go in this place and it's a factory but, my gosh, they've got restaurants and movie theatres and hospitals and swimming pools,' he said. 'For a factory, it's pretty nice.'

His definition of 'nice' is questionable and likely to have his American workers in uproar if such conditions were imposed upon them.



For, as Apple's leader was taking a bow on the world stage, the Mail was under cover inside this Chinese complex. And we encountered a strange, disturbing world where new recruits are drilled along military lines, ordered to stand for the company song and kept in barracks like battery hens - all for little more than £20 a week.

In what's been dubbed the 'i-Nightmare factory', the scandal focuses on two sprawling complexes near Shenzhen, two decades ago a small fishing port and now a city of 17 million people.

This is the epicentre of operations for Foxconn, China's biggest exporter, which makes products under licence for Apple using a 420,000-strong workforce in Shenzhen. They have 800,000 workers country-wide.

And as Jobs was speaking in San Francisco, new measures were being secretly introduced at Foxconn to prevent the suicide scandal from worsening and damaging Apple sales globally.

Astonishingly, this involves forcing all Foxconn employees to sign a new legally binding document promising that they won't kill themselves.

Yeah. Isn't it funny how when Apple gets exposed for using child labor and sweatshops, the Western left reacts by sipping their lattes while smugly using their iPhones?

I'm not saying people shouldn't mourn, or that instead of eulogizing Jobs we need to vilify him. I'm just asking for some balanced coverage here. He was a man, not a saint. It's testament to the strength of the reality distortion field around Jobs that he's being given posthumous credit for inventing sliced bread, actual innovators like PARC are forgotten, and that inconvenient facts like the horrifying sweatshops that assemble your iPads are brushed under the carpet. Just because someone dies doesn't mean we shouldn't be honest about what he and his company did and didn't do. Eulogies are journalism too.

Screw you, EA

Earlier, my co-blogger suggested giving EA games a miss, because of the annoying nonsense with DRM and EA Online. I'm now going to make a firm commitment: I'm no longer buying EA games. If they come out with something fantastic that I absolutely have to have, I'll buy it used, but until that, I'll be boycotting them.

Why? Because this stupid DRM nonsense has gone too far. We recently got a new XBox, and transferred all our stuff over from the old one. It was remarkably easy: take a normal USB "stick", let the XBox format it and use it to move profiles and save games. All the Arcade games and downloadable content you can easily re-download, because anything you've bought from XBox Live you can download again any time you want.

Except, that is, if you bought it from EA.

What we found was that first of all, we were unable to redownload the Dragon Age: Origins DLCs via the game itself. Having then moved them over from the old console, what we now found was that only the person who actually downloaded them can play them. The rest of us get told by the game that the extra content is "corrupt", and we can only access it through an idiotic workaround. All other DLC for other games works just fine. Thanks, EA.

Why on earth can't they just use the XBox Live system for managing downloadable content and user accounts? Why do they persist with this nonsense of separate EA accounts and their own DRM systems? It's damned annoying. In multiplayer games like Army of Two, online multiplayer is only accessible if you have an EA account. Why? What the hell is wrong with my XBox Live gold account? Why do I have to jump through additional hoops? And why can't they use the XBox DRM for downloadable content, which can handle moving from one console to another just fine?

Further, EA and Bioware have known about this problem for as long as it's existed, and haven't bothered to fix it. Also, one of the patches for Dragon Age broke a couple of achievements, which they also know but haven't fixed. Nice after-market support, guys.

This may seem like a small thing, but frankly, it pisses me off. As long as they persist with this stupidity, I'm not buying their games.

Any way you want to play

I used to be a big fan of Electronic Arts. That old square/circle/triangle logo always promised good times, and their NHL line of hockey games were long my favorite.

Over the years, my appreciation for them lessened. Yearly NHL titles became little more than roster updates, and I switched to a competing franchise. Were I more of a football guy, that wouldn't have been an option, as EA secured exclusive rights to NFL titles. I didn't think that was very sporting, but if NFL was willing to sell it, and EA willing to pay, it wasn't any business of mine.

Since then EA has, along with Ubisoft, led the publishing field in the introduction of increasingly distasteful DRM schemes, which is why you won't find many recent titles from them in my PC game collection. I'm not a big fan of those things.

They managed to annoy me on console side as well, by requiring me to create an EA account to access some features of games I had already paid money for. Somehow, none of the other publishers had found this necessary. I found it not only annoying, but a worrisome development.

Requiring an EA account to play an EA game opens up some rather disturbing possibilities, like preventing someone from playing a game they paid $50 for if EA doesn't like what they're saying on forums.

The player's account has since been activated, and EA's PR people insist locking the game was 'a glitch'.

That wasn't the only controversy surrounding Dragon Age II's launch. Along with the usual rumors of a rushed release, and somewhat less common allegations of Metacritic score fixing, it was reported that DAII secretly installed SecuRom DRM despite earlier announcement it wouldn't be used. That was apparently a false alarm, though, and the SecuRom product being installed is Release Control, which BioWare had already said would be used. DAII will still require periodic online checks to play, though, which is bad enough.

The publishers will insist schemes like these are necessary to fight piracy, but making legal product less convenient, and thus less valuable, isn't really likely to work for games any more than it did for music. And when those schemes make it possible to prevent you from playing a game you bought if they don't like you, it's time to say enough is enough. It should be us, the players, who decide the way we want to play. We shouldn't be required to jump an increasing number of hoops just to have some fun.

The only way to get the publishers' attention is to vote with the wallet. How about giving EA games a miss for a while?

Don't be evil

Whoops.