Book launch, Wednesday

My friend Andrew Losowsky, star of the Le Cool guides among many other achievements in the field of publishing, is having a UK launch for his book, The Doorbells of Florence, this Wednesday, 1st July, on the top floor of Stanfords, the Covent Garden travel bookstore.

It's the usual launch sort of thing - glass of wine, reading by the author, possibly some canapés - actually, I'm not sure about the canapés, so don't quote me on that.

It's £5 to get in, although there may be a way to get onto a list - email me at daniel at danielnyegriffiths dot org for more on that. More on Stanfords itself is here. It's a really nice little book - originally printed by Lulu, Internet service fans - and it should be a good reading; the episodic form certainly lends itself.

Phones

After years rocking the combination of a Sony Ericsson W810i (still a classic) and a Palm TX (a beautiful device aimed at a market that even at the time of its release no longer existed), I am starting to succumb. Oddly, this surrender was kicked off by a phone that has not yet been seen on these shores, and for which there is no arrival date, the Palm Pre. The mere existence of a Palm smartphone that did not involve borderline humiliating hardware or Windows Mobile (never again) induced the Hunger, which cannot, I think, now be put off until the damn thing gets here. Also, I suspect a Centro-style hard keyboard may be even less use than a soft keyboard for those of us with huge, flapping hands.

I am havering currently between the iPhone 3GS and the HTC Magic. I suspect I'll end up with the iPhone, but I really want the Magic to persuade me otherwise.

This is partly an instinctive distrust of dominance. Nick Richards says that interesting things tend to take place on the margins of telephony, and if there is a margin for touchscreen smartphones, it is pretty definitely not on OSX for iPhone. The same applies through the app stores and the availability of apps more broadly: the Apple store may be huger and more satisfying than any other, but the control Apple has over it - for good technical reasons as well as Cupertino control freakery - leads to issues like the long unavailability of alternative browsers. Put simply, that doesn't exactly smell right.

Right now, the position on tethering is what has me pulling for the plucky (gigantic, continent-spanning corporate) underdog. O2, sole carriers of the iPhone, have announced swingeing costs to build tethering into your contract. A hack exists to tether your iPhone for free, but O2 are clearly unhappy about this and will look for ways to block it. Meanwhile, on the Vodafone forums, Vodafone staff are telling people that they don't offer tethering out of the box, but encouraging discussion of how to hack it or recommended third-party apps, only warning users that a tethered phone will take them over their data limit much more quickly.

Tethering is important to me on a functional level, but it's the philosophical difference that makes me want this to work out.

(Incidentally, in case anyone is actually reading this and feels I am dissing the best phone on the market, I agree absolutely that the iPhone is just as Fry-ticklingly wonderful as you think. In fact, one major argument against my owning one is that I would feel just dreadful if I dropped it, as I would. I once dropped a Nokia 5110 down all four floors of the Porterhouse on Maiden Lane. It survived. I doubt the iPhone would do as well.)

If I ruled Iran (every day would be the first day of Spring)

Specifically, if I were trying to claim that the protests going on in my country (literally, my country) were being whipped up by the evils of the Zionist Western media, I would probably mention that helpiranelection.com's creator, Arik Fraimovich, until recently mentioned on his "about" page that he was a consultant for the Israeli Ministry of Defence. No longer on the page, but still in the Google cache and Linkedin. I'm starting to wonder if the Supreme Leader is even checking Twitter, much less Google - there's a convoluted conspiracy theory there just waiting to happen.

(Although, curiously, Miriam Shariv, writing in the Jewish Chronicle, endorsed the incumbent, on the grounds that Moussavi is far too reasonable-looking without being any less determined to develop Iran as a nuclear nation. It seems that this is not the paper's editorial line, however.)

The role of social media in the current ongoings in Iran is uncertain - it could be a driving force of protest, or it could be not. It certainly seems that the gatherings are being organised by a mix of social networks, mobile phones and individuals speaking to other individuals, but which technology - tweets, texts or throats - actually gets bragging rights at the end of this remains unclear.

Twitter in particular is providing some interesting developments, about Iran and also about twitter. The viral spread of Fraimovich's green wash is clearly intended to communicate a belief and to have an effect, but it's not clear, at least to me, what the effect is supposed to be; it shows the immediacy of Twitter, but also some of its limitations.

Tangent: George Myerson, in "Heidegger, Habermas and the Mobile Phone" (which already seems quaint and dated - a cavalry charge up the M5) contrasts Habermas' theory of communicative reason with the way people communicate (or, the argument goes, don't communicate) over mobile phones. According to the Habermeister, reason exists in dialogue - when people talk, they talk to generate a mutual position of understanding. It's potentially tricky to do that in 140 characters. It's easy to communicate that you support Moussavi, or a recount, or the protestors, but from looking at the automated message and the green tint it's hard to know where that support is coming from.

Is social media making a difference to Iran, and, if it is, is it also a difference in Iran?

Trapped in the Closet meets Love in an Elevator

A particular New Yorker article caught my attention recently, after I missed it on release in 2008. I'm not sure why, but in the detail it was able to go into, the layering of time upon time, it really to capture the experience of being trapped for 41 hours in a lift, without any sense of whether this would end in a meaningless, undignified death by mechanical failure. Specifically, the smallness of the actions that lead to vast consequences - the life-or-death blow-ups of the immediate regret experienced after the decision to balance the laptop on the pile of books - and the difficulty of reconciling that smallness afterwards; the trapped man couldn't go back to work, because it would give the impression that he had not been ruined by the experience.

Nick Paumgarten's Up and then Down got me, maybe for the style, maybe for the depth, or maybe just because I spend a lot of time in lifts.

I didn't realise at the time that the video of the inside of the lift was also available on the New Yorker's Youtube channel, here. It's quite marvellous that the New Yorker has a YouTube channel. The law of YouTube comments remains dominant, alas - most of the discussion seems to be about whether and how the incarcerated might have gone to the toilet.

Apart from the deadly gravity of YouTube comments, what struck was that the breadth provided by the article, and the way it was put together, made for a better and perceptually more accurate picture of a man trapped in a lift than the actual video of a man trapped in a lift. Score one for print media. From, admittedly, my highly subjective viewpoint.

Cheating and emergence

In a game like chess, cheating is a very digital proposition. You can try to make a move or sneak a piece off the table when your opponent is not looking, but that is certainly cheating and is also pretty easy to identify. There are a very limited number of variables: 32 pieces, 64 squares, two people whose turn to move it might be.

The more complex a system becomes, the harder it is to separate cheating and emergence. If a majority of the players in Risk team up to eliminate the others before slugging it out between themselves, it isn't cheating, even though it certainly radically limits the enjoyment the people on the outside of the alliance might get out of the game. The ability to negotiate your way inside this kind of alliance, or to prevent it from coming into being, is part of the meta skill set around the game, effectively, and so the annihilated minority is getting the sharp end of a gaming mechanic, in some form. One problem with this, if it's a problem, is that it turns your skill set into your entire life. To be a successful player, you need to make friends and generally conduct yourself in a way that makes people want to play Risk with you and to team up with you against others on the board.

Maybe the Parker Brothers got into game publishing after their brother-brother team gibbed all comers at Monopoly. Who knows?

Where this is all going is that the bigger and sandboxier games get, the more it is possible to play cat and mouse with the developers - to see if they have anticipated a particular response to stimuli, or whether unexpected actions can have a positive effect on gameplay - cheating without cheating, in effect.

There's a reason, for example, why characters in games are often employees of some sort of law-enforcement, military or shadowy government agency, beyond generic expectation: it makes it much easier to create a world where you can expect to be told to do things, often dangerous and profoundly unwise things, and be expected to do them. In Grand Theft Auto 3, conversely, it might be perfectly in character to ignore the plot and just wander about, turning people over for money, and the game allows for that, although it limits how much of it you can see. In order to follow the plot missions, you have to buy into the motivation of the character, who is doing all this often time-consuming, difficult and tedious slogging in order to protect his family, avenge same, and ultimately transcend the narrative of gang violence and police corruption that has constrained his life (admittedly, by killing all the gang members and corrupt policemen in a series of scripted incidents - in a proper sandbox, you could just follow them home, murder them and be done). In ludological terms, the development of the narrative is both the object and the reward of following the story missions, and at the end of the story missions the "reward" is being able to wander around the environment at liberty - that is, to do pretty much what you could to start with. If you time it right - after the gang warfare starts but before the green Sabre, you could live a perfectly happy if limited life in Los Santos - unmolested by the police and still convinced that your homies are loyal and trusted allies.

That isn't cheating, but it is making a choice to interact with the game in a certain way - specifically, by abstaining from "story mode" at a given point. This thought was inspired by discovering that administrators were kicking players from Left 4 Dead servers for speedrunning - abandoning their companions and making a dash for the safe room. Likewise the opprobrium aimed at "campers" - people who find secluded, covered positions and hide in them in exactly the way you might if you were trying to fight off waves of undead. Is this cheating, or just ungentlemanly conduct, or simply good environmental awareness? It feels to me as if a game where racially abusing Louis is potentially considered less offensive than holding down the W key and ignoring the screams of your companions is not so much mirroring the end of human civilisation at the hands of a mass of mindless, rage-filled monsters as modelling it.

However. This entire tangent was started by Robin Burkenshaw, who is doing interesting things with game mechanics. Most of the attention is going to Alice and Kev, in which he has by building a home for his Sims with no walls or roof created a homeless family. Who are, predictably, having a lousy time. It's the poverty challenge, basically. There's another level here, where Rod Humble is supervising the creation of complex systems to simulate human misery and making tiny games around married life and Half Moon Bay in his spare time, but never mind.

However, in terms of emergent gameplay (because you have to work pretty hard to create a homeless family, and even then they are not homeless -their home just looks like a park) I was more interested by the experiment in Space Rangers 2: Dominators. One goal of the game is to become the highest-ranked space ranger in the galaxy. The expectation is that you do this by competing with your peers - who can make the most money, defeat the most enemies, generally behave in the most rangerish fashion in a spacey context. Burkenshaw adopted the more direct method of tracking down and murdering everyone ahead of him in the rankings. This is a lengthy process, and involved a lot of time spent hiding and reloading, but is still a lot less lengthy than the path of relative virtue.

Because of the persistent universe, this has consequences - the bad guys the Space Rangers are supposed to be fighting speed up the conquering. However, the game also heals around it - the Space Rangers academy pumps out new rangers, and the balance of power shifts back. The game's incentive to you to behave as expected, along with goodness, achievement awards and the rest, is that its world is weighted towards plot-directed actions being significant over the longer term. Almost exactly unlike real life, the evil that men do is interr'd pretty quickly; despite the absurd odds, the mechanoid psychosis of the bad guys and their stated intent to dominate (the clue being very much in the title), the desire and encouragement to do the right thing is woven into the physics of their universe.

The geek in Parliament

Tom Watson has yet to mention his departure from Government on his blog, which is uncharacteristic, but I suppose it's been a bit of a heavy week. I'll be sorry to see him recede, although the awful state of the Brown premiership he worked so hard to institute must be pretty dispiriting. Whatever his politics, he gave the impression of having some sense of how technology worked.

Compare this with the also departing Jacqui Smith, who sometimes gave the impression that she felt the Internet could be better managed if the people writing it all out slipped some carbon paper under their easels and passed a copy of every web page they drew over to the Home Office, along with the names of everyone who had checked out each page from the Internet Ledger.

In their coming absence, who's going to step up to the plate? I have a good feeling about Vernon Coaker (who got from reading Animal Farm a real feeling of hope - no, really). After a couple of practice swings, I think he might be ready for the big leagues.

Lessons learned from Rocky 1 to Rocky passim

And already I have received excellent advice - to wit, that maybe the link to Tumblr is not such a terrific idea, since all it really communicates on a professional level is that I am partial to otters. This is exactly the kind of advice one needs in these formative, before-the-Earth-cools blog moments.

The things that will end up in the right-hand column

So, right. This is all the stuff that will probably ultimately reside in some sort of list over to the right, telling you roughly about me - who I am, what I do, the like.

Of course, where this falls down immediately is that there is every chance that you already know, at least at this point, because why would you be here if you didn't know who I was? I suspect it's going to be quite a job getting my nearest and dearest over here, blogs being a touch last century. Nonetheless.

My name is Daniel Nye Griffiths - the "Nye" primarily because there are an awful lot of Daniel Griffithses out there, my parents selfishly not having anticipated Google. It's the Welsh equivalent of John Smith, really, isn't it?

I've been blogging and buzzing around bits of the UK tech community for about a decade, in various different ways. I've been doing some freelance writing work, and since a couple of things I have written should be appearing in WIRED UK issue 3, when it comes out at some point this week, this seemed a good time to stick something up on the web space that I have been failing to do anything with thus far, rather than continuing to try to cleanse my former blog of links to Transformers fanfiction.

If the Blogger-Marsedit combo smacks of rush, that's very much because it is; doing something a little shinier is certainly on the to do list, but there are an awful lot of things on the to do list, so we'll see how that goes.

So, hello, whether you already know me or you have arrived here randomly. There will no doubt be a lot of procrastination. Things that are rejected soundly by every paying outlet will go here, as may longer remixes of things I would like to devote a bit more space to. Realistically, the Twitter feed over on the right there will get a lot more action than the blog, but who knows? Maybe there's a long-form resurgence right around the corner.