News - Gaming and Culture

With video game software now a $10 billion industry, video games are becoming central to entertainment culture, not to mention television and movies.

At the Nvision visual gaming conference in San Jose, Calif., CNET photographer James Martin met up with Tommy Tallarico, one of the most prolific video game music composers of all time. Along with co-producer and composer Jack Wall and their symphony orchestra, we join Video Games Live as they make a stop on their world tour.

Put down your controller for just a moment and take a historic audio tour through some of the most dynamic video game music written over the years.

Other audio slideshows:
Garage finds business ripe for hybrids
Connecting with Facebook at the f8

A week ago, I wrote a story about a morning and afternoon I spent in Seattle letting iPhone applications control my day.

A screenshot from the iPhone application Twitterific. Last week, I hadn't been able to figure out how to get Twitterific to work properly, nor did I know there was a way to take screenshots. Now I know how to do both.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

And while I vouched for the concept of turning my life over to the various apps--a couple for finding restaurants, one for finding music, one for playing Internet radio, one for AOL Instant Messenger, and so on--I also said that I'd had some problems with several of them.

I also got a lot of feedback from readers who pointed out that I hadn't needed to take photographs of the apps because there is a way to take screenshots directly off the iPhone. Simply clicking on the phone's home button and its power button simultaneously takes a perfect screenshot.

So, in the interest of being fair to the apps that I couldn't figure out, I decided to try them again once I was back home to see if I could figure them out or whether they were beyond that.

It turns out, of course, that it was basically user error. After spending a little more time with each of the apps I got them all working, though, in my defense, I think there were definitely some things about the apps' interfaces in each case that were extremely unintuitive.

First off is Urbanspoon, an app designed to help you find restaurants wherever you are that meet several criteria: neighborhood, type of cuisine, and pricing. It's designed with sort of a slot machine interface where you can "shake" it and each column spins and spins, finally resolving to a single suggestion.

What I'd not understood was how to get the app to give me a suggestion based on my specific criteria. Every time I chose to "shake" it, it spun all three of the wheels and gave me a totally random suggestion. If I wanted Japanese food, for example, it might give me Chinese instead.

Frustrated, I had finally given up and used another restaurant suggestion app instead.

To use the Urbanspoon app as I had wanted to originally, it is necessary to click on the lock icons below the columns for neighborhood, cuisine, and price.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

But now, I discovered that there is, in fact, a way to get it to do what I wanted, something I admit I should have been able to figure out before.

Below each column there's a small lock icon. It turns out that clicking on a lock sets that column in stone. So, by setting my criteria for each category, then clicking on each of the locks, and finally "shaking" it, it does indeed present suggestions based on my needs.

Next up on my list of apps I couldn't get working properly was Twitterific, an iPhone Twitter app.

I had had problems getting Twitterific to let me enter my Twitter account information after I'd inadvertently entered it incorrectly the first time. It asked me to enter it again, but I was stumped trying to figure out how to do so.

And, again, it turns out there was an easy solution, and one I missed most likely because I was in a hurry and wasn't thinking analytically. The answer was to click on the little wrench icon at the bottom of the Twitterific screen, which brings up the account information screen. I re-entered it there and sure enough, the app started working right away.

While I was in Seattle, I had abandoned Twitterific in favor of another app, called Twitterlator. But now I've started using one called Twinkle, and it seems even better because it offers more features, including the ability to view tweets from people in your immediate vicinity.

I'd also written that the tip calculation app I'd downloaded--CheckPlease--didn't look in any way like the screenshot presented on Apple's App Store. In fact, it had a very unattractive interface though it was simple to use.

The updated CheckPlease iPhone app is much more elegant than the version I downloaded originally.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

But a couple of days ago, my iPhone alerted me to the fact that there was an update available for CheckPlease. When I downloaded it, there was the interface that the App Store had originally promised. And indeed, it is now much better, more elegant, and more useful. Instead of unattractive sliders and results that give you a total restaurant check but not the specific tip amount, it now has a nice system with punch keys for entering the amount of the bill, a click wheel for the tip amount, and it presents the subtotal for the tip and the total amount for each person.

Much better, for sure.

In the end, then, I have to give props to the designers of each of the apps I'd said I had problems with. I suppose I would encourage them to make their interfaces a tad more intuitive or to include helpful directions. But then again, I have to also take some responsibility for not employing analytical skills to solve the issues I was having when I was having them.

Either way, it's nice to see them working properly now. Which, ultimately, reinforces my notion that spending a day letting iPhone apps run my life was a worthwhile and fun experiment.

Japanese game maker Nintendo raised its outlook for its annual profit by 23 percent, due to soaring sales of its popular Wii and Nintendo DS, prompting its stock to jump nearly 8.4 percent on Friday.

Shares of Nintendo, which trades on the Osaka Securities Exchange, closed at 51,800 yen--up 8.368 percent and marking its largest one-day gain in nine months, according to a Bloomberg report.

The company said it expects to post net income of 410 billion yen, or $3.8 billion, for the year ending March 31, surpassing Wall Street's expectations of 382.6 billion, according to Bloomberg. That anticipated performance marks a 59 percent increase in profits over the previous year.

Nintendo's increased outlook is driven by stronger-than-expected sales of its Wii console, which are expected to increase 42 percent for the year, as well as a reversal of its projections for its DS game player. The company now expects its year-over-year DS sales to rise, rather than drop, according to the report.

A billboard for Electronic Arts' 'Spore,' which launches Sept. 7, on a wall in downtown San Francisco.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

SAN FRANCISCO--If you're a video game fan, you are probably quite aware that Electronic Arts' evolution game Spore is just days away from launch.

You've played with the Creature Creator, you've read the stories, you've watched the videos. Maybe you've even had a chance to see Spore's creator, Will Wright, give one of his famous talks on the subject.

But if you're not a gamer, you might not have any idea what Spore is. Until now, that is.

As I was returning from lunch Wednesday, I noticed a giant billboard on the side of a building just down the street from CNET Networks' headquarters with the phrase, "Tired of your planet? Flights leaving daily at Spore.com."

So far, this is the first advertising for the game that I've seen in public. But I can only assume it's just the beginning of what will be a very large ad campaign.

After all, EA has a ton invested in the game, and the stakes are high, both for the company and for Wright, the highly regarded designer behind SimCity and The Sims among others.

And while I'm sure I'm a couple days behind on this--I was out of the office since last week--I haven't heard any other talk about Spore billboards, so it caught me by surprise, especially since I've been following the progress of the game so closely and also since the billboard is just feet from my office.

Either way, I'll be very interested to see how this presumed ad blitz takes shape: Will there be TV ads? Big glossy spreads in magazines? An alternate-reality game?

If you happen to run across something interesting, please do consider dropping me a note. I'd love to hear about it.

After initially demanding that Twitter shut down the accounts of users who were posting unauthorized updates based on the 'Mad Men' characters, AMC was persuaded to let the accounts be reactivated.

(Credit: Twitter)

It looks like wiser heads--or at least those who could be made to recognize a great PR opportunity--have prevailed at AMC.

If you're one of the many hooked fans of the cable channel's hit show, Mad Men, which chronicles the goings-on at a fictional 1960s New York ad agency, and you're also a Twitter user, you might have found yourself eagerly following tweets from folks like Don Draper, Roger Sterling, or Peggy Olson.

And getting people to follow the show's characters probably seemed like a clever way of using Twitter for marketing.

Except that AMC had nothing to do with it. And after discovering that somebody out there in the badlands of the Internet was appropriating its characters without permission, the network filed a DMCA takedown notice with Twitter, forcing the microblogging service to suspend the accounts.

Which, if you think about it, doesn't make a lot of sense. Why would you stop someone from driving interest in your content, especially when they're doing it for free--and not damaging your brand?

Surely there are some copyright issues that AMC's lawyers were worried about, and indeed, I'd be very interested in knowing what those issues are.

But according to Silicon Alley Insider, AMC has decided, after being "gently nudged" by its Web marketing agency, Deep Focus, into changing its mind and letting Twitter reactivate the accounts.

And by "gently nudging," I hope they mean they screamed and yelled and threatened to quit if AMC didn't see the value of letting fans promote the show on their own.

Either way, it's good to see that Draper, Sterling, Olson, and other show characters are once again letting us know about their latest comings and goings.

The main characters from AMC's hit show, 'Mad Men.'

(Credit: AMC)

Of course, this is likely to be a test case of sorts for all kinds of new Web 2.0 fan marketing. Who's to say, for example, that fans won't take it upon themselves to create accounts for each of the cast members on Project Runway or Desperate Housewives?

More likely, it seems to me, is that once the networks notice that fans are getting excited by things like the Mad Men Twittering, they'll take it upon themselves to set up their own shows' characters on Twitter.

But, to me, there's something much more genuine about it when fans are doing it. Though perhaps a bit of mystery about who's behind it is good.

At the same time, however, companies like comic book giant Marvel seem to have much less of a sense of humor about this all. As my colleague Josh Lowensohn noted Tuesday, Marvel forced Twitter to take down a user's account that was being employed to tweet about the storyline of an as-yet-unpublished graphic novel.

Of course, Marvel is the same company that sued video game publisher NCSoft to get it to stop allowing users of the online superhero game City of Heroes to create characters based on Marvel's characters. Marvel was forced to settle the case on unsatisfactory terms, a resolution that may or may not have had something to do with the fact that the visual evidence Marvel presented in the case was created by its own people, not random players.

On the flip side, an early example of a company trying to leverage social media to promote entertainment properties was Friendster's 2004 partnership with DreamWorks, in which characters from the studio's film, Anchorman were added as profiles on Friendster. The seminal social network's users got up in arms about the arrangement because it had been shutting down "fakesters," fake profiles set up by real users and some felt it was unfair that the film's producers were able to go down that path.

That was a long time ago, however, and it's nice to see that AMC was finally able to see the value of letting its fans do what they want.

Now, I just have to go see what Don Draper is up to.

Via Dale Larson.

In 2006, Wired magazine reporter Jeff Howe published a story about a phenomenon he'd been following in which the power of large numbers of people was being harnessed to make things happen that hadn't been possible before outside the auspices of corporations or other big institutions.

He called the phenomenon "crowdsourcing," and the term quickly caught on, joining others, like "tipping point," "wisdom of the crowds," "the long tail" as household phrases for the ways that things were changing all around us, often thanks to the democratizing reach of the Internet and the commoditization of tools, like high-quality digital cameras, that had previously been out of reach of most.

Jeff Howe's new book 'Crowdsourcing,' explores the power of people who collectively work on projects even when they're strangers to each other.

(Credit: Daniella Zalcman)

One of the elements of Howe's defining crowdsourcing was a new understanding of how, when brought together to utilize collective intelligence, big, disparate groups of people working on a common task can be extraordinarily productive and deeply creative.

That, maybe, was the chief differentiator of Howe's discovery from James Surowiecki's Wisdom of the Crowds: that far-flung people are able to achieve great things outside the box.

He likes to talk, for example, about how a large number of people are now able to take great photographs, thanks to their high-end but relatively inexpensive cameras. This enabled a new kind of stock photography world to emerge--one that seems to be doing away with the traditional model in which only a select few photographers could have their work collected by stock photo agencies.

On Tuesday, Howe published his first book, appropriately titled, Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business. And as he prepares to storm the book world on a promotional tour, he is also giving interviews far and wide about the topic. On Tuesday alone, he writes on his blog, he will speak on 27 different radio programs around the country.

Howe's book publishes on Aug. 26 and is based on a 2006 article he wrote for 'Wired' magazine.

(Credit: Random House)

Last week, Howe and I spoke about where this crowdsourcing phenomenon fits into our world. I had hoped to ask him to spell out the differences between his book and that of Surowiecki, but before I could, he had to leave to be with his family at his home in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Dell receives about 9,000 ideas, and some 500,000 people vote on them. And what those votes do is drive the best ideas up to the top. A lot of those ideas suck, but you don't have to read them, and Dell doesn't have to take action on them.

The essence of crowdsourcing is to take an overwhelming task, and by breaking it up into little chunks and distributing it to a large number of people, it becomes feasible. The good ideas rise like cream to the surface.

You write in the book about the success of the low-budget Web TV show, The Burg. Does that success create more opportunity for people working outside the mainstream system?
Howe: Absolutely. We're seeing the emergence of a different kind of complex ecosystem where some shows have the very highest production values but other shows look better with lower production values, and so it just an aesthetic, and the fact that aesthetic exists means that people without a big budget can exploit that.

So there is more opportunity?
Howe: There's enormous opportunity for amateur filmmakers with talent. The bar is no longer, "Do I have access to 16-millimeter film or enough money to get it developed?"

It's really exemplified by MDotStrange, who literally created a feature-length movie that got screened at Sundance in his little studio apartment in San Jose, using software that he'd presumably pirated and with a budget of zero dollars. It was simply labor, and that means that the game is open to anyone.

If you have the talent, you can make it. This is one of the central themes of crowdsourcing: There's a meritocracy, where people count no matter whether they have the connections or the budget or expensive equipment. And it's everything from astronomy to science to graphic design to photography to writing.

Since this meritocracy is opening up doors to everyone, how can endangered businesses like journalism save themselves?
Howe: By thinking creatively and streamlining. Journalism faces a lot of challenges. The advance of the crowd is only one of those. But smart news organizations are realizing that having their readers engaged in the media production process--in a richer, more sophisticated way--is its own end. It sells papers, it sells Web sites, it brings readers in.

You talked about Gannett being one of those news organizations, right?
Howe: I think Gannett has done smart stuff. It's the largest newspaper publisher in America, and it has made some smart community-oriented moves. But Gannett just laid off 1,000 people, so the fact that it's engaged its readers doesn't make it immune from market forces.

One example you talk about where a business is getting it right is the Netflix Prize, where Netflix offered $1 million to the first person who could improve his or her recommendation engine by 10 percent. What makes that your favorite problem-solving network application?
Howe: Because it got such a robust response very quickly, and it showed what brilliance was out there in the crowd. It's got all the elements of crowdsourcing. I was only theorizing about this two years ago, so to see practice mimic theory in this case was gratifying. And it was great to the see that the contestants were collaborating with each other, despite the fact that they were helping competition.

How will crowdsourcing change in the next few years?
Howe: We're seeing Crowdsourcing 2.0 emerge, a more intelligent form of crowdsourcing. Dell is using it intelligently. But I see a lot of the early adopters getting out of it.

Suddenly, every corporation wants the crowd to create their own ads, and that's often a disaster. Everyone wants to throw out a shingle and create a social-networking site.

We saw like Wal-Mart try to do this, and it created fake entries about kids who were buying Wal-Mart products. Any of us who track stuff like this thinks, "do you have no one smart in your entire organization? You're the largest employer in the world."

And the fact is they probably don't. So those companies will get out, or they'll get smart. As crowdsourcing continues to penetrate the mainstream, more companies will use it, but only the smart companies will succeed at it.

You wrote that diversity of experience trumps expertise. Why is that?
Howe: Well, these aren't my ideas. I'm merely re-presenting what are pretty standard collective-intelligence principles. A diverse group of problem solvers will almost always beat a homogeneous group of problem solvers. The reason is, very smart people tend to come from the same institutions, and they tend to try to solve problems in the same way. And sometimes that works, but often, it doesn't.

What diversity of experience brings is, even if someone may not be well-versed in that subject matter, she is able to apply her expertise from another subject matter entirely and say, "Well, you know, but wait, what if we try this?" And when you have a crowd, because you have the power of large numbers, there are times that taken as a whole, they excel because they are trying so many different things all at once.

What are the best industries for crowdsourcing?
Howe: It has totally transformed stock photography. So the question I pose in my book is, "Is stock photography the canary in the coal mine?" We might be beginning to see this with graphic design. I don't know yet because I haven't done the reporting on it, but it's at least something similar.

You have a lot of people who can do low-end design. You know they can create a logo. They can lay out a Web page, even though they're not professionals. They're adequate enough that they can make a supplementary income doing it or do it for fun, which is why photography works: because a lot of people love to take pictures.

Crowdsourcing is also having a big impact in corporate science, through companies such as InnoCentive and YourEncore and, you know, my suspicion is that it will continue to migrate into other fields, especially creative services.

In a paper titled "It's Time To Take Games Seriously," Forrester analysts TJ Keitt and Paul Jackson came up with a new phrase to describe video games:

"The phrase the industry should rally around is 'serious games' to bring together the numerous disciplines. However, Forrester recommends identifying individual games with the underlying goal of the game, for example, calling Volvo Car UK's game an immersive learning simulation. We don't see this being an issue in a few years, as the old guard in the workforce is replaced by younger colleagues. As this happens, doubts about calling a game a game will subside. Future business leaders are already thinking in terms of games as seen with IBM's BPM video game coming out of a competition between business students at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill."

For the next-generation workforce, accustomed to virtual worlds and everything digital, it's not a stretch to imagine that work will be more game-like, with winners and losers at the core and multiple scenarios to follow and calculated risks. As long as the games lead to "serious" results, yielding increased productivity and employee and customer satisfaction, they will be embraced by management no matter what they are called.

An artist used a software program called Vocal Joystick to create this drawing of Mount Fuji. The software gives people with reduced or nonexistent use of their hands the ability to control a computer cursor by mouthing vowel sounds.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

SEATTLE--For many Iraq war veterans who have returned home with debilitating injuries that, for example, make it impossible to use their hands, doing anything on a computer is a hopeless task.

But a research project under way in the University of Washington's electrical engineering, linguistics and computer science departments could be the latest tool at such veterans' disposal, as well as for anyone who lacks the full use of their hands.

The project, known as the Vocal Joystick, is designed to allow someone to control a computer cursor using nothing more than their voice.

University of Washington graduate student Jon Malkin, who spoke at the Gnomedex conference here Saturday, described it is an extension of speech recognition technology.

... Read more

SEATTLE--Imagine your laptop is stolen.

Set aside for a second the likelihood that if it was you wouldn't be able to read this story and think instead about how you might go about tracking it down.

There are existing services, such as LoJack, that are designed to help find purloined laptops by identifying the IP addresses where they are subsequently used and through other assorted methods.

(Credit: Adeona, a project being run out of the Computer Science department at the University of Washington, aims to give people a way to track stolen laptops while also providing the kind of privacy that commercial services may not offer.)

But according to a team of computer scientists at the University of Washington, the price you pay for utilizing such services is a loss of privacy--as well as a reliance on a corporate third party to take care of you.

That's why the team has come up with its own alternative, which it is calling Adeona, the name for the Roman goddess of safe returns.

The idea behind Adeona, according to Tadayoshi Kohno and Gabriel Maganis, who gave a talk about the project at the Gnomedex conference here Saturday, is to give people a method for safeguarding their laptops that relies neither on proprietary commercial software nor the centralized servers of the companies that provide such software.

Adeona, they said, is the world's first free, open-source laptop-tracking system, and one that can be installed by users themselves, and which doesn't require a corporate intermediary.

The team is also developing a version of its software for iPhones, though it isn't ready for public use yet.

To Kohno, the danger associated with commercial laptop-tracking services is that it's never possible to know for sure that someone at a company that makes such software wouldn't exploit the company's possession of your personal information--and access to what's on your laptop--for personal gain. Or, he said, that information could be subpoenaed in court cases.

Tech journalist and author Sarah Lacy listens to a question from a Gnomedex participant during her presentation at the Seattle conference Saturday.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

SEATTLE--Since there is significant attendee crossover between the Gnomedex conference here and the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas, it's safe to say that when Sarah Lacy took the stage Saturday, a lot of the audience had some pretty strong memories of the last time they'd seen her.

Last March, it was Lacy whose SXSW keynote interview of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ended up in a Twitter-fueled mutiny by the audience. Many on hand in Austin had felt she conducted that session in an overtly flirty and self-promotional style that left little room for participation from a crowd eager to interact with the young billionaire.

With that recent history, then, the packed house on hand for Lacy's Gnomedex talk Saturday, "What happens when you get what you want: The growing blogosphere angst," was keyed up and wondering what kind of fireworks might erupt this time around.

And fireworks there were, though they came from uber-blogger Robert Scoble, who at one point during the session oddly got up out of his seat near the front of the auditorium and marched toward the back of the room to tensely confront author and entrepreneur Geoff Livingston.

But more on that later.