I read this GamaSutra editorial with some head-nodding and some thoughts that it was a shame the author couldn’t have centered his critique more tightly on the idea that game designers need to get more creative (by looking for something better to make than just Yet Another FPS) because the maturation of the medium demands it.

His central premise is that while super-violent video games are fun, watching increasingly realistic depictions of human murder is probably not all that great for the human psyche. By the time that complete photorealism is possible in games (he pegs this to be about a decade away), the average gamer will be involved in tens of thousands of acts of simulated murder, torture, etc.

Eventually, he says:

If the video and computer game industry doesn’t begin to show concern over widespread and flippant depictions of realistic human violence, game publishers will soon be asking players to regularly murder scores of astoundingly realistic virtual people, enjoy it, and defend the practice from critics of the art form. (Actually, they already do, but I digress.)

But the industry shouldn’t be asking this of its loyal fans and customers. This is not just a financial issue between publishers and their wallets; it’s an ethical issue that will increasingly affect our laws, culture, and society on a deep level.

I agree. But I also agree that censorship isn’t the answer. I think what the industry really needs is a healthy combination of shame and aspiration.

Murder isn’t the point – evolution is.

Blowing things (and people) up in video games is just super fun. That’s why there’s so many FPS games out there. But let’s face it — lots of them suck. You have to ask yourself if the designers could possibly be doing other, more interesting things with their creative/programming prowess. Perhaps if there were a more permeating ethos of pride in the variety and quality of things tried in games, if game designers looked at their medium as a method for creating societal commentary and art as well as entertainment, the way filmmakers do, we’d start to see something different.

Edwards focusses on murder in this article, but for me it’s less about the psychic damage of playing violent games than it is about it being simply boring as shit to have most blockbuster titles revolve around killing. As far as I’m concerned, the game industry is guilty less of promulgating psycopathy than they are of simple lazy thinking. Edwards touches on this slightly:

I can’t help but feel that such a profound and tragic event as human murder or even “justified” human killing should be a rare and powerful statement in games, not a common theme. With the ever-increasing power developers have in their hands to rip apart virtual lives, I think it’s time to re-examine the use of death and killing as a core game mechanic.

Perhaps the public is already beginning to tire of wantonly violent gameplay with its enthusiastic embrace of both casual games and the Nintendo Wii’s lighter fare. Many players are flocking to innovative, less intense games that make the “hardcore” (read: “mostly violent and/or realistic”) gaming world shudder.

I’m not sure I want to have to wait for the public to get there though. I want the video game industry to develop a sense of pride that says “when we make any game (even FPS games), they will be works of art. And we will look for ways to push the limits of creativity, wonder, and fun as well as artificially induced adrenaline rushes.”

I guess what I’m saying is that if I were on the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare team and I went out and played Little Big Planet, I’d probably want to sit down and cry 15 minutes later, wondering why the hell I’d made yet another borderline-shameful simulation of the pain and death of real soldiers instead of something profoundly cool, beautiful, artistic, and novel.

In other words, gore won’t ever feed the soul. And it’s becoming time that game developers look upon that objective as, at least in part, their job.

Props to this guy’s post.

Some parts are kind of confusing, but it’s a testatment to how much code he posts that I didn’t even realize he was French until I sat down to write this post and read it more carefully — he communicated mostly in code.

He gives a good Rails application.js file for you to start out with — basically it provides a bunch of handles for things you want to remote w/ XHR. They use the new-ish jQuery method unbind to make sure that regular events on items designated as AJAX get overriden. Pretty slick and a good way to think of jQuery’s usage in an app context. So far, I hadn’t really used it for AJAX beyond a thing I wrote to enable cross-domain MX record validation.

Example: remote links

Rails provides the link_to_remote helper to let you create links that will trigger a GET over XHR. This application.js defines a jQuery function for that and then binds it to a certain class of links — “get”:

Which is then set with this:

Now any anchor with class “get” on it will result in a remote call to the URL in that anchor’s href. Combined with a respond_to block in your controller to handle Javascript and a Javascript template file, you can use links like this to (for instance) load ActiveRecord objects into a page using AJAX. Instead of “show.erb.html” your controller’s show method is handled by “show.js.erb”. This block in the show method of the controller ensures that it is activated correctly:

Because the call came in over XHR, the controller sees the format as being JS and responds with the instructions set in the block passed to format.js. Rendering without layout ensures that nothing but the rendered data plus the template is returned.

Notice that the AJAX call in the above snippet from application.js uses the “script” datatype. This specifies that the returned data should be evaluated as Javascript, which is what we want, because the returned data includes the jQuery-based instructions we have inside show.js.erb, and those need to get evaluated (not just displayed) in order for the page to look right.

An aside: One thing that this makes me think about a lot is how important visual design is when you’re developing an application. Your design has to correspond concretely to a DOM with all sorts of manipulative handles (ids and classes) and all sorts of custom functions built to do various things to/with them. You’d damn well better draw a decent picture of this and give the elements of it some good names that make sense. In fact, I think a lot of the true work in programming involves drawing pictures (I still model some embarrassingly simple relationships with pencil and paper), but that might just be the way that my brain works.

Anywho, I took the above application.js and used it as the basis for a conversion from RJS to jQuery in a Rails app I’m working on. I’ll probably end up adding quite a bit to his stuff as I go, but having this file around made starting the transition process a lot easier.

I expect to do some more posts on the conversion as I go, since I haven’t found a whole lot of stuff yet that’s oriented toward “strategies for using jQuery with Rails” and wasn’t written in 2007. RJS kept me from dealing w/ JS directly as a major component of my app, but those days are over now that I’m committed to unobtrusive JS via jQuery, and a more thought-out approach will be necessary.

(Via Ars Technica)

There’s a new report out on US cyber security(PDF)

It’s a big-ass problem:

a growing array of state and non-state actors are compromising, stealing, changing, or destroying information and could cause critical disruptions to U.S. systems. At the same time, traditional telecommunications and Internet networks continue to converge, and other infrastructure sectors are adopting the Internet as a primary means of interconnectivity. The United States faces the dual challenge of maintaining an environment that promotes efficiency, innovation, economic prosperity, and free trade while also promoting safety, security, civil liberties, and privacy rights.

Yikes. So how does the government feel about this?

Leadership should be elevated and strongly anchored within the White House to provide direction, coordinate action, and achieve results. In addition, federal leadership and accountability for cybersecurity should be strengthened.

OK, good. I’m glad to hear that, because the last guy wasn’t really up on this stuff. He had this guy named Richard Clarke, remember? Right before 9/11 he got politely demoted for making a nuisance of himself by whining about a group called Al Qaeda. He asked to go to cyber-security, but wasn’t in the National Security Council anymore because oldster politicians think computers suck and wish they’d just go away.

So cool — glad that we’ve got someone in the White House who cares about keeping computers safe so that it’s easier for computers to Run All the Things of Man. Now that we’re down with cybersecurity, what are we going to do about it?

Well here’s an action plan from p. 8:

• Appoint a cybersecurity policy official responsible for coordinating the Nation’s cybersecurity policies and activities; establish a strong NSC directorate, under the direction of the cybersecurity policy official dual-hatted to the NSC and the NEC, to coordinate interagency development of cybersecurity-related strategy and policy.
• Prepare for the President’s approval an updated national strategy to secure the information and communications infrastructure. This strategy should include continued evaluation of CNCI activities and, where appropriate, build on its successes.
• Designate cybersecurity as one of the President’s key management priorities and establish performance metrics.
• Designate a privacy and civil liberties official to the NSC cybersecurity directorate.
• Convene appropriate interagency mechanisms to conduct interagency-cleared legal analyses of priority cybersecurity-related issues identified during the policy-development process and formulate coherent unified policy guidance that clarifies roles, responsibilities, and the application of agency authorities for cybersecurity-related activities across the Federal government.
• Initiate a national public awareness and education campaign to promote cybersecurity.
• Develop U.S. Government positions for an international cybersecurity policy framework and strengthen our international partnerships to create initiatives that address the full range of activities, policies, and opportunities associated with cybersecurity.
• Prepare a cybersecurity incident response plan; initiate a dialog to enhance public-private partnerships with an eye toward streamlining, aligning, and providing resources to optimize their contribution and engagement
• In collaboration with other EOP entities, develop a framework for research and development strategies that focus on game-changing technologies that have the potential to enhance the security, reliability, resilience, and trustworthiness of digital infrastructure; provide the research community access to event data to facilitate developing tools, testing theories, and identifying workable solutions.
• Build a cybersecurity-based identity management vision and strategy that addresses privacy and civil liberties interests, leveraging privacy-enhancing technologies for the Nation.

Ambitious — especially the public awareness campaign. How should they go about doing that? My vote is for a public viewing of the movie Hackers in every city.

Now that Arrington has weighed in, I’ll place myself in his rarified company by writing the obligatory blog post about why I think Apple is doing a tablet.

Because I am a loser, I have no access to Arrington’s clandestine sources, so I’ll content myself with doing a plebian version of trying to break down the reasons why it might make sense for Apple to do this.

Why would they do this?

People cry wolf on the Apple tablet thing almost every year:

• 2007
• 2008

Why would 2009 be any different?

Well for starters, netbook sales numbers are getting pretty huge. Apple hasn’t made a netbook yet, but why not? Well one reason is that Tim Cook thinks that netbooks suck. But a better one is that Apple has to know it could just do something a hell of a lot cooler if they made a device with the functionality of a netbook but the form factor of a a giant iPhone.

Why do I think this? Because Apple hasn’t entered the netbook market yet even though they have the expertise to own it. The iTunes Store is a juggernaut engine of adoption, and Apple’s also sitting on some badass multi-touch patents that they’ve hardly begun to make use of yet, not to mention supply chain prowess that is the envy of the industry and the cash/demand to ensure they can get whatever they need from overseas suppliers. I think they’re going to enter the netbook space in a major way, and that when they do, it will be a tablet.

What would it look like?

I’m thinking something like Amazon’s Kindle, but with the capabilities of an iPhone, and most of the look — big, flat tabula rasa touch screen. The size would be really important, because you would want this thing to be able to be a book or a control panel for your home media center, but also have a netbook-like capability set.

It’d probably have to have a better version of OS X on it than the iPhone does — more bells and whistles. This could be why OS X Snow Leopard has support for 3G. (I don’t think that the Air sells enough to be the reason. If that’s why, then they’re going to severely lower the price of that badboy).

What it would do

In general, I’m envisioning an on-the-go “instead of the laptop” option for when you’re travelling light but the iPhone isn’t enough. Here’s a list of the potential use cases that get me excited:

• Touch-screen notebook/sketchpad/eisel (a bigger space for Brushes!)
• E-media reader a la the Kindle
• Home media remote control
• iPod with awesome capacity
• iPhone with magnetically-attached, Ive-designed earpiece (we can dream, right?)

OMG! When can I have it?

Supposedly this fall, but who knows? The intensity of the buzz has been building for awhile. Most people think that an announcement would come at WWDC next month. Let’s hope so — I’d definitely be first in line for this one.

Kicked up the site to start using Wordpress, because it’s just too hot. Mephisto is great for some things (prototyping, for instance) and it’s made of Rails, but OMG does Wordpress kick ass — it’s come a long, long way since I first used it in 2004.

Some things I like to use with it now:

• Code Colorer — get gorgeous syntax highlighted code blocks for a variety of languages. Comes with Blackboard, which is my favorite TextMate theme. Props to Sam Huckins for suggesting it.
• Textile 2 — get some Textile(markup_language) action for your Wordpress content. Vital to doing the next thing.
• Blogging from TextMate — not a plugin so much as a way of life, the ability to simply shoot posts at my blog is one of the main reasons I switched to Wordpress. Not having to go to the web to do something is really my kind of method. One key combo shoots this stuff right into the blog. Lovely.
• Easy-ass deployment — I love Capistrano, but it’s overkill for deploying a CMS. With Wordpress, I just have a tiny script on my server to update my wp-content folder, which I keep as a git repo.

I also made a TextMate snippet to make it easier to do code color blocks:

Oh boy am I an efficient blogging machine now…