LifeGame

Ahh... it's so nice to see the huge storm around wikileaks. What I find amusing is that most of the debate is about whether it's a "good" thing or a "bad" thing. I don't really think about it that way.

Is it a good thing to tell your Aunt Martha her orange dress makes her look like a pumpkin? It might be good in the sense that you are being honest. It might be bad in terms of social ramifications.

We live in a world of ritual and expected behavior. The problem with wikileaks' actions is that they violate social norms. Laws be damned. There's very little in those docs that is TRULY shocking. Wait... Saudi Arabia doesn't want Iran being a huge regional power. YOU JEST! US officials are concerned that Pakistan might not have a stable government. TELL ME IT'S NOT SO!

The problem is that you can't say those things during negotiations even though everyone knows you are thinking them. Just like poor pumpkin-like Aunt Martha. Once your private statement has been made public you can no longer play both sides of the game, and THAT is the REAL problem with the wikileaks thing.

It's also an asymmetric leak. If EVERYONE'S secrets all came out at once, it might not really be a bit deal. Or rather, everyone could point at each other telling them that they said the obvious thing that is in violation of a social norm.

The great irony is that we might have some major real-world fallout: war, huge steps backwards in relationships, etc. because of something that is the equivalent of calling your fat Aunt Martha fat.

Future of Media Rights: iPhone vs. Droid. Droid will win...

...so sayeth the Woz.

http://venturebeat.com/2010/11/18/apples-wozniak-calls-the-winner-in-mobile-race-spoiler-it-isnt-apple/

For a while I wasn't sure what I thought about this, but I believe that I agree. Droid will win (or rather open platforms will win).

Here's my logic... please argue :).

Apple dominated personal computers in the 1980s and then lost market share once PC clones came out. Apple has always had a really polished look and high quality products. That was true back when I had my Apple ][. The problem is that they were also more expensive and they were closed systems to developers. That's fine when there's a large qualitative difference between you and your competitor. Once that gap closes to where the difference isn't so big, other forces take over. For platforms I think a major force is the openness of the platform. Apple protects the platform very tightly which is great from a qualitative point of view, but as more developers make more things for open platforms (like Android) it draws consumers slowly but surely into it's wings. Why would I want to jump through all the hoops of a closed platform when I can just develop and publish and let the open market decide on the quality of my application. As a consumer I am wooed at the promise of "all these cool things." Apple's quality control will inevitably miss some critical apps that open platforms will vote up. I'm not saying one is better than the other, just that open platforms win over closed ones once price and quality are non-differentiating from a customer point of view.

There's no indication that Apple can't compete in the price war for iPhone, iPad, etc. But that's not really their culture.

One major wrench in this theory is iTunes. I have A LOT of iTunes stuff and it makes it hard to transition. iTunes is a kind of natural monopoly, but, again, there are some minor annoyances that make it weak to competitors of near-equal quality. For one thing, you can't re-download. Once Unbox got stronger, I stopped buying movies from iTunes. Although there are competitive music services, such as Amazon's MP3 service, they haven't really hit their stride yet... but I think that's coming as well. iTunes kind of holds me hostage, which is a steep price to pay for a very high quality, easy to use service. Once they're a almost as high quality, almost as easy to use service... why should I buy from iTunes... especially if that service is compatible with iTunes!

I can see the world of media moving to a floating-license-in-the-cloud type of environment. I buy a movie, a book, a piece of music or whatever and the RIGHTS to it are stored in some giant repository and then I can watch or read or listen to that media forever on any device anywhere at any time. I can't imagine this NOT happening. LIcensing is a huge barrier to customer satisfaction. Why should I have to buy a movie over and over again as technology changes and new devices replace old?

If I made "License Cloud Media, Inc" which promised you unlimited rights to any media on any device once you buy the rights to yourself one time, wouldn't you want that? Of course media companies and distribution companies don't want that, but that won't matter - they didn't want NetFlix or Tivo either. They will bend to the customer demand or break fighting it.

I want MEdia - things that I have that are mine forever and are versatile even within a changing technology framework. Thus, the companies that try to lock me into a platform are ignoring the future, in my opinion.

So how can Apple avoid this? Just make Apple MEdia Cloud and open up the platform, unify the digital rights and own the media universe... you can do it Apple!

 

Farmville, Treasure Isle and Reciprocal Altruism

It's true. I believe that nearly all behaviors can be linked back to evolution in one way or another. This includes the success of games like Farmville and Treasure Isle. "The Internet" has been rife with theories about why this is. They talk about social connections, the power of spam, low barriers to entry and so on. These things disturb me because they do not have an evolutionary slant.

To take a step back. Why do we play games? It's because they are a safe way to practice things that are otherwise dangerous. Play fighting teaches lions how to fight without dying. This gives them a huge advantage when they enter the "real world." Perhaps we've outgrown that need, but the biological impulse is still there.

So on to altruism. When you get that pop-up that says "Person X needs help on their farm" that is what's going on. It's a prompt that is engaging your sense of reciprocal altruism. It's very hard to say "No. I don't want to help!" Then once you help, the other person is told you did so and they are obligated to help as well. This allows game makers to take advantage of your engagement to grab you in other ways. I found myself doing this just the other day. I couldn't resist. Then the person I helped asked me "Why did you help me harvest my gem tree" and I said "Because it said you needed help." Bam. Both of us had played through this click, whirr automatic response.

Now how can this possibly be an evolutionary advantage. Easy. Bugs. Imagine you are a family of chimpanzees and you constantly fight all manner of pests crawling around. There are some areas you simply can't reach on your own. Some strange mutation caused some chimp to help his brethren remove these pests. Note he didn't do it to get something in return because there was no precedent. Later on the other chimp would do the same for him. Although neither gets an immediate, personal benefit, as a group they are less likely to get disease, less likely to die, and the gene spreads more successfully. TECHNICALLY, this isn't totally altrustic because you could argue that the helper chimp isn't reducing his own fitness, but I would argue that there's a danger involved with removing bugs and cleaning others, so I'll make the argument that it is potentially a reduction in fitness. 

Thus we have a nice (albeit far to simplistic) explanation as to how evolution leads to the basis of moral behavior - and, subsequently, how moral behavior can be initiated by game developers to increase the engagement of their products.

It truly is a strange world...