Monthly Archives: August 2010

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Bill Gates sez: screw university, study online

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In case any of Mister Gates’ lawyers are reading this, the above headline is a deliberately overstated paraphrasing (it’s how we write on the intertubes, y’know). But the nugget of truth is there: Ol’ Bill spoke at the Technonomy conference last week, and suggested that in another five years or so, more people will be studying online than in universities and colleges [via SlashDot].

I presume he means colleges and universities in the US, though I’d suggest that “first world” nations like the US and the UK will actually have the slowest rate of take-up for online study, as university attendance has the weight and kudos of long tradition to prop it up. But as distrust of the higher and further education systems grows, and more and more new graduates come to realise they’ve put themselves deep into the debt hole for a piece of paper that makes little or no difference to their employment prospects, a shift to what we might call “entrepreneurial learning” is pretty inevitable. Take me as an example: I build websites for a living, but have never had so much as a minute of formal tuition or education in the field; I just googled my way into it, found out what I needed to know as I needed to know it.

But the more important factor here is motivation: as the cost of formal education soars, people will think more carefully about why they’re studying. A degree is much less a means to an end than it used to be, and much as I’ve repeatedly considered doing a degree by distance learning, it’s for the satisfaction of the accomplishment rather than any illusion that my employability would be significantly enhanced. Hence “entrepreneurial learning”: skills and conceptual frameworks acquired with purpose in response to direct needs, rather than abstract knowledge sets accumulated toward a set of targets that may well have no equivalent in the employment marketplace.

The bad side to this, of course, is the lack of clear metrics for employers as to what a potential employee knows. But from anecdotal evidence that’s as least as old as I am, that’s been a problem with the existing system for some time. Perhaps we’ll see a return to competency testing in job interviews? The rise of a sort of zaibatsu-apprenticeship system? A greater percentage of freelance workers in a greater range of industries?

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DRM may suck, but avoiding it is no panacea to piracy

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As a fellow-traveller of the copyleftists, this is the sort of story I’d rather not be reading. But it’s an important one, because it underlines the problem that all the optimistic rhetoric in the world can’t sweep under the carpet: the point-and-click adventure game Machinarium was released without DRM, and despite (or perhaps because of) great reviews, suffered from an estimated 90% piracy rate. The developers are now having a “pirate amnesty” where they invite people with pirated copies to cough up $5 – a quarter of the original asking price – to legitimise their installation.

So much for the myth (albeit rarely stated directly) that DRM-free games are less likely to be pirated because they give the players their oft-demanded flexibilities of installation and migration; disappointing, perhaps, but hardly surprising.

However, it’s worth bearing in mind that the piracy rate would probably have been similar even if DRM had been baked in to Machinarium. So what’s the way out of this bind? My guess (and it is a guess) would be a lower price point – maybe if the asking price had been $5 from the outset, more people would have coughed up in the first place. The counterargument to that usually goes along the lines of “but that won’t cover the overheads of making the game!”; the counter-counter-response is “well, charging $20 obviously hasn’t achieved that either”. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Then there’s the MMO/metaverse model: charge very little or nothing for software and access, and make your rake-off through in-game items. We know this one works, because if it didn’t there’d be no goldfarming outfits in developing nations… but how to adapt it to single-player gaming experiences? Or maybe you have to look at sponsorships, in-game advertising and product placements… none of which sound particularly appealing, but would probably become accepted by players pretty quickly once there were no other options…

… and given the way things are going, that might not be too distant a day. What this story makes clear is that DRM is a blind alleyway: whether you include it or not, you’ll still have your work pirated. The web burgeons with suggested alternative business models for computer games, but to my knowledge no one has yet made one of them really stick.

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World of Statecraft

I try to avoid reusing the headlines of articles I link to, but in this case I just had to let The Guardian‘s choice carry through, because it’s just too good to improve upon. The story: there’s an MMORPG in the pipeline that essentially models and recreates the European Parliament.

The game will allow players to gain points and move up levels by proposing legislation, amending laws, writing articles for an online newspaper and other tasks. The developers are in discussions with journalism schools and secondary school teachers to incorporate the game into teaching modules.

The game will allow for fictional pieces of legislation to be crafted and track real bills making their way through the European legislative machine. The game’s developers, the European Service Network, a Brussels communications agency that until now has mostly been responsible for producing EU brochures and websites, saw the popularity of online games such as World of Warcraft and thought they could make a sort of legislative Middle Earth out of the European parliament.

“It’s completely out of the box. It’s an experiment as a means of bringing together the best trends in the internet to stimulate discussion about Europe,” said ESN’s manager of the project, Ahmed ElAmin.

“World of Warcraft was one of the inspirations. It’s the biggest online role-playing game there is. It shows there is a huge audience for 3D online worlds.”

Well, yes, there is a huge audience for online 3D RPGs… but most of them involve goals and rewards of a more visceral kind than ramming through (or blocking) some obscure but important chunk of legislature. And I’m docking you ten points, Mr ElAmin, for your use of “out of the box”. Tsk..

Snark aside, it’s an interesting attempt to open up the mechanics of European democracy to the layman, and I think I’ll be giving it a look at some point (time permitting, natch). But it rather begs the question: once we reach a point where we can simulate a large-scale consensus democracy online, why the hell don’t we abandon the pretense of simulation and let it run that way for real?

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Server migration completed

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Hi folks; just a quick public service announcement to say that I repointed Futurismic‘s domain name to a new server yesterday, and that the migration appears to have taken without a glitch (touch wood). If you notice anything janky or broken, please let us know… but hopefully all you should notice are the things that finally work the way they were always meant to, such as proper 404 pages for broken links, images loading properly, reasonable page load times, contact forms that actually function as advertised, and so on.

It’s a move I should perhaps have made long ago, but the webmasters among you are probably aware of just how true the old “devil you know” adage can be when it comes to hosting companies. But on the strong recommendation of a few friends in the business, I’m now working with an outfit called 34SP, and if they can maintain the level of service they’ve shown so far, it’ll have been the best decision I’ve made in years*.

Enjoy!

[ * To be fair, some of my bigger decisions of the last eighteen months make that an easy contest, but so it goes. ]