The Portal

Skylanders is based on series of character tokens that enter and exit the world via a power portal. Game characters are sold as action figure tokens – the dragon in the image below.  To select a character in game, you simply drop a new token on the portal.  The switch is instant, negating the need to change classes or restart chapters.  Simply swap out your token and a different character appears on screen.

The characters come in eight different series – air, earth, fire, water, life, undead, tech, and magic.  Each series has, at present, four different character tokens, for a total of 32 different playable characters.

As your characters progress in the game, their stats, powers, and equipment are stored locally on the token.  Take your favorite token to a friend’s house, drop it on his portal, and play with all the same characteristics you had on your own.

More importantly, however, you can drop your token onto his portal regardless of whether you have the same game system.  You play Xbox but your friend plays PlayStation?  Doesn’t matter.  You can play head to head or cooperatively with your tokens on the other platform.

Why this Game is Important

There are several factors at play that mark this game as a critical marker in video game evolution.  For some time now, the concept of downloadable content has been seen as the great future of gaming.  The console would simply be a storage platform for games and future releases and expansion packs would be delivered via the Internet.  That model is flipped on its head by Skylanders, but it is also complemented by it.

The downloadable content model simply continues two inherent flaws in the console model.  The restrictive nature of consoles is such that you can only play with friends on the same console. I can’t play Call of Duty with my nephew because he has a PS3 while I prefer Xbox.

If we play split screen on his system, none of my achievements carry over to my own console.  Making my character portable, as Skylanders has done, divorces my game play from the console.

In addition, Skylanders has created expansion packs as tokens as well.  For instance, the Pirate Seas expansion (below) includes a pirate ship token that unlocks additional playable content.  Like the character tokens, those expansion worlds exist separately from the console.

If I take my token to a friends machine, we can play the expansion even if he hasn’t purchased it.  When I take it home, the expansion goes with me.

The folks at Activision have made great efforts toward solving the digital rights management issue by making your content token based.

The Big Problems With Gaming

The main flaws in the gaming experience today are the lack of console interoperability, the lack of character portability, and the means by which content creators can protect their product.  With Skylanders, Activision has addressed all three.

The ability to keep chatracters separate from the game, to unlock expansions with a token rather than the console, and to move both freely between platforms will be a model more game manufacturers adopt.

While making great strides in addressig these flaws, Activision has also created fairly attractive game collectibles.  As long as they maintain support for previous generations of character, as the develop additional Skylander games, these collectibles can become a lasting investment in the games you own.  I just wish my character from the the first Fable could have been carried forward into future Fable frachise games.

In addition, the tokens are relatively attractive figures in their own right, making your collection equally interesting as a long term collectible.

It’s not often that I am truly impressed by game innovation.  I find most experiments of this nature to be fairly uninspired.  In this case, however, I think Activision may have scored a big win.  I expect to see other games employing the same mechanics – likely in the very near future.

Why that Scares the Hell Out of Me

While I am very impressed with the game and the token system, I am also a bit nervous about it.

As I mentioned, there are 32 playable characters across the Skylanders universe, a handful of “special” character exclusives only available at some retailers, and two expansion packs.  Each character token costs about seven bucks.  Buy the game starter kit (with the portal, disk and three characters) and you’re out $60.  Many in-game items require accessing locked areas that can only be opened by characters from a particular series.  The minimum investment to have enough characters to open all areas is another 5 tokens or $35-40.  To collect all the characters, you would be north of $200.

That’s probably not a big deal when you consider the typical cycle of a game, the expansion packs, and other DLC.

A token scenario for a game like Call of Duty could look significantly less complex.  For instance, having a token that could carry a single custom loadout would allow you to port your best class to a friend’s console.  That could also allow you to carry the experience and weapons you gain back from that console to your own.  It would still allow Activision to sell additional classes as tokens, however.

If token based characters and content catch on, and I think they likely will, it could make gaming a more expensive proposition for the hardcore gamer or collector.

A la carte for video games! Why should I have to buy the storyline just to get the multiplayer?

Since then, it occurred to me that there is a larger point to be made from that idea.  Everyone agrees that a disk based video game industry is on the way out.  As next generation consoles include more drive capacity, broadband speeds continue to rise; and optical drives fall aside in favor of downloadable content, the idea of a straight download model makes sense.

As delivery changes, the options for sales grow.  Services like OnLive, Steam and the Xbox Live Arcade clearly illustrates that streaming or direct to drive game delivery are models that work.  Given the removal of physical constraints that accompany disks, there is little reason game companies couldn’t provide three versions of a game – multiplayer, storyline, and a combo pack.

If they did, people like me would never buy the storyline again.  I simply don’t find the storyline game all that interesting.  Linear games are boring affairs and open-world can get just as tedious.  Multiplayer is infinitely variable depending on the opposition.  Campers (those cowardly rat bastards) aside, human players make a more interesting game.

If I could buy just the multiplayer for half the cost of the combo pack, I’d buy a lot more games.  My total contribution to the industry wouldn’t drop, but it would be spread out across a wider array of companies.  I suspect a lot of people would do the same.

The possibility of owning a larger library of games I would play (multiplayer) and keeping my drive from being all crudded  up with storyline crap, appeals to me.  I hope the game developers will realize the options available to them and consider breaking up the product.

That said, I’m not about to demand FCC acton to regulate game companies to make that happen.

(Cross posted at Digital Society)

In the early days of the Internet, the newspaper industry made a terrible miscalculation.  Under the belief that the first newspaper available on the Internet would own the space, publishers worked furiously to make content available – largely for free.

The trouble with giving something away for free is it becomes terribly hard to start charging for it later.

Even free evangelists like Mike Masnick understand that you are forced to make money off of things around the free, as opposed to the free product itself.  Masnick often cites musicians as the case study – just accept the fact that you’ll never make money off the music and instead sell concert tickets and t-shirts.

So the newspapers pooched the deal when they went online for free, undercut their own business, and now cannot move to a pay model.

The video content industry would be wise to learn from this, but often seems doomed to repeat the mistakes of both music and newspapers.  More and more programmers are handing their content out for free; and not just the broadcasters who have always been free.  They seem to be operating under the same ridiculous construct that killed news – “this is the future, so we better get on board or be left behind.”

But television isn’t music, nor is it newspaper.  There is an absolute glut of news and music in the world.  Anyone can create either with minimal effort.

Compelling, stimulating, on the edge of your seat video is something altogether different.  Any monkey can pick up a camera and shoot video.  YouTube has proven that. But very few people watch YouTube 160 hours per month. News doesn’t approach that figure and neither does music. Only TV generates that kind of consumption.

Video is different.

Programmers need to figure that out and do it quickly.  Giving away compelling video for free is a recipe for disaster just as it was for news.

Fortunately, programmers have a tool the music and news industries never did – the app store.  Just yesterday Warner Bros made news by releasing Inception and The Dark Knight as apps.

While The Daily is attempting to create an app based news outlet (and charging 50 bucks a month for it), I expect that pilot program will be dead by this time 18 months from now.  There is simply too much news available for free.

For programmers, however, it’s not too late.

Programmers should follow Warner Bros lead and immediately start thinking of ways to protect their content within their own apps.  Why give the content away for free through Hulu, or your own website, when you can do it through an app, and protect the content.

Video delivered via apps (whether desktop or mobile) would allow rights management, and provide a revenue stream, not a revenue hole. Want to watch Lost via your iPad?  There’s an app for that.

The High Cost of Free

The suggestion that content owners move to an app delivered model should scare the bejeezus out of the free radicals like Free Press and Public Knowledge.  They want content to be freely accessible to all.  This model flies in the face of that.

The fact is there is simply no business model in “free” for the video industry.  Broadcasters have come to realize this and are pushing four fold increases in retransmission consent deals so cables paying subscribers can underwrite the free viewing of others.

Everytime you see your cable bill rise, thank “free”.  But that’s an unsustainable model.  More people will get tired of price hikes, and switch to free.  As more people switch to free, and fewer people pay, more content will go away – unable to pay the bills on a declining number of subscribers.

True A La Carte

Moving to an app model should be cheered by anyone who advocates for a la carte.   Under an app model, programmers could make all of the content from a channel available (which would likely be very expensive) or have different apps for different shows.

Buying all of the content from a channel would be the realization of those who pursue a la carte cable.  Alternately, you could buy all the episodes of a show under something like the Kindle model – that is the app is free, and you buy content within it on a per show basis.

But wait, you say, doesn’t iTunes already do that?  Yes, but as GigaOm notes in the article linked above, iTunes movies are available in fewer countries, so apps open up a whole new market for content creators.

Net win for the programmer.

Granted, programmers would need to pull their content from sources like Hulu and Netflix, and invest in the development of proprietary applications, but the cost of that over the long term is significantly less than the cost of going out of business.

After six years of great foreplay, #Lost becomes an inconsiderate lover – rolls over, turns off the lights, leaves me unfulfilled.

What has been so great about the show, and the reason I have been such a dedicated fan, is the fact that the show often left me feeling…  off.  It often wasn’t until I had spent some time discussing it (usually with my friends Paul and Anne), that I found deeper meaning in the show.  Sometimes I was introduced to someone else’s theories, which forced me to reconsider my perspective and brought me to a new way to see each episode and each story.

It’s fitting, then, that last night was the same.  Immediately after the show, I sent Paul and Anne a message about my overwhelming sense of disappointment in the show. My take was that those who found love or peace on the island made out fine, but everyone else got screwed.  Further, I wanted more answers than the show was willing to provide.

But like almost every other episode, it was the discussion with friends that changed my reality.

Paul pointed me to a post by Doc Jensen.  It contained a simple throwaway sentence that began to refocus my thinking.

Some people think [the sideways world is] an illusion like The Matrix, or a group delusion, or even ersatz pocket universe created by The Monster’s magic designed to give himself a happily ever after — a twist on Joseph’s theory. This theory differs from the more conventional and commonly held theory that the Sideways world is the next life epilogue for all the Island world castaways — that after their death, the castaways will be reincarnated into the Sideways world.

The post was actually put up before the show aired, and it turned out to be quite prescient.  What struck me, however, is that they were both right.  It was a next life epilogue, but at the same time it was also a group delusion.  A next life born from the shared connections of the castaways.  Still it seemed out of place.

I have seen some on Twitter, and I made this point to Paul, that they all were dead all along, and the sideways world was all that mattered.  But then I realized that’s not quite the point.  Everything that happened on the island was the real story, and the sideways world matters hardly at all.

Climbing Jacob’s Ladder

In retrospect, there are two movies I believe Lost has drawn heavily from for inspiration.  The first is Heaven Can Wait (the Warren Beatty version, not that Chris Rock aberation.)

In Heaven Can Wait, Beatty “dies” and is brought to a weigh station.  His escort explains that the weigh station isn’t the final destination, but a gateway to the final destination.  The rules of the weigh station are a collective vision based on Beatty’s idea of the afterlife, and those who share his idea of the afterlife.  In this was, the sideways world is exactly the same. It is a world the castaways created through their shared experience, and where they meet to move on.  It is “their” weigh station – the implication being different groups of people share different visions, and create different worlds.

The sideways world, is the weigh station for this particular group of friends.

The second movie is Jacob’s Ladder (which Jensen mentions in his post.) If you have never seen the movie, I highly recommend it.  I also recommend you do so before finishing this post because the rest of it deals with similarities between Lost and Jacob’s Ladder.

In the movie, Tim Robbins plays a soldier who underwent medical testing during his tour.  His platoon were hopped up on drugs to make they hyper-aggressive.  The film deals with the mystery of those drugs, Robbins discovering the nature of the drugs, and finally coming to the realization that his fellows turned on each other.

The movie jumps back and forth in time between Vietnam and modern day.  As it does, it follows multiple different story lines in which different lives seem to be coalescing.  In the end, however, it turns out that Jacob died in Vietnam, and the entire mixed up world of the modern day was simply his mind trying to come to terms with how he died.

Lost is, if nothing else, the story of how Jack died.  It is his journey.

You Were An Awesome Number Two

If you assume that the entire story, from beginning to end, has been Jack’s story, in much the way Jacob’s Ladder was not a story about Vietnam or the drugs, but Jacob’s death, things begin to fall into place.  A few scenes in the finale provide great clarity.

The two scenes that stand out the most to me were:

• Hurley, seeing Ben outside the church, tells him “You were an awesome #2.”  And Ben replies that Hugo was an awesome number one.
• Christian comments that some died before Jack and some died years later.

We saw Hurley ask Ben to be his second.  The line at the church conveyed a sense that is exactly what happened, and the two worked well together.  That clearly has to have happened after Jack’s death.

The appearance of Boone and Shannon indicates that Christian was correct that some died before Jack.  The presence of half of the Ajira Six – Claire, Kate, and Sawyer – loop in those who died much later.

Jack’s last view was the Ajira flight carrying the six off the island.  Reunited with him at the party, Kate tells Jack she has missed him, implying it has been some time since they saw each other.  It has, because she lived well past him.

As for why Kate doesn’t look 80, or 90, or however old she was when she died, that simply doesn’t fit with the way the rest remembered her.  This was, after all, a collective vision, and they saw each other as they knew each other on the island.

The Unanswered Questions

For three years now, Paul and I, like many others, have discussed and debated which questions Lost needed to answer.  Today there are countless people who really want to know where the four-toed statue came from.  Who built it? When?

I have come to accept that questions like these are only questions for rabid fans.  The questions that were going to be answered were the questions important to Jack’s story.

While that may irritate some, it makes perfect sense from a storyteller’s perspective.  In any story, there will be things that are important and things that aren’t.  When telling the story, you want to paint a picture. You may mention that someone is wearing a red shirt.  Unless the story you’re telling is Star Trek, that detail is likely irrelevant.  To ask why a red shirt and not a blue shirt is to miss the point – it’s not about the shirt, it’s about the man wearing it.

The writers of Lost understand that, no doubt.

It will be sold via the Xbox Live Marketplace for about $15.  They hadn’t given out a release date, but yesterday they said March 3rd.  So don’t call me that day, I’ll be shelling some krauts.

It may be interesting to draw that analogy out a bit further.  It occurs to me that your ISP (and most other companies, frankly) are very much like your significant other.  And on a certain level, that has serious implications for consumer satisfaction.

When you are dating, most of your friends will never hear about how great your bf is on a daily basis.  When he screw ups, however, you’ll tell all your friends.  You’ll tell just about anyone who asks.

That’s actually very similar to your ISP.  Typically, most ISPs have tremendously reliable service. When that service fails – on the voice, video, or data side – you’ll tell everyone.  If the repair guy is late or doesn’t show, you’ll tell everyone you were stood up.  If he tracks mud on the floor, you’ll tell everyone he was a slob.  If it isn’t resolved when he leaves, you will tell everyone he left you unsatisfied.

Since everyone has similar experiences, they’ll commiserate, tell you that guy is just no good for you, you deserve better, it’s just a shame that there are no decent guys is no competition in the ISP marketplace.

A week later when you are browsing freely, cuddled up watching TV, or talking to your mom back home, will you mention that they’re taking care of you today? Will you talk about all the great things they do for you? All the great places they take you?  Probably not.

Most of your friends will eventually grow to think your boyfriend is a big douche who’s always running around and never makes you happy.  How many of them have ever heard you say anything good about your ISP?

The fact is, like relationships, telecom can be messy.  You may not always get what you want.  You may feel you just can’t count on them.  You might think you’re putting a lot of yourself your money into the relationship, and they just take you for granted.

But like relationships, we’ll get through this together.  Let’s just get a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, browse the web, or just settle down to watch Sleepless in Seattle OnDemand.

You may have the flu if you have some or all of these symptoms:

• fever *
• cough
• sore throat
• runny or stuffy nose
• body aches
• headache
• chills
• fatigue
• sometimes diarrhea and vomiting

*It’s important to note that not everyone with flu will have a fever.

Very helpful. If you sometimes get fever, but not always, and you sometimes get diarrhea and vomiting, but not always, that leaves:

• cough
• sore throat
• runny or stuffy nose
• body aches
• headache
• chills
• fatigue

In other words, the Swine Flu could look just like any other non-specific illness. That’s not terribly helpful at all. Maybe the CDC should provide more of a narrative description:

On Day One, you will notice giant red spots on your forehead. Those will grow into huge sweaty red welts. The coughing will be uncontrollable, and you’ll wish you were dead. Then the real fun will start….

At least then I’d know what to look out for. Instead, I have non-specific symptoms and no real way of knowing whether I have the Swine Flu without a tedious trip to the doctor.

So I did a little digging and found some more useful information. I dug through blog post after blog post and compiled these actual, specific symptoms from first hand accounts. If you have any of these, seek medical attention immediately

Swine Flu Symptoms

• An urge to watch Babe and Charlotte’s Web over and over again.
• An overwhelming sense of cannibalism from eating bacon.
• Smelling like Des Moines, IA.
• Random snort and oinking sounds (separate and distinct from your normal Tourette’s).
• Developing a random stutter.
• Falling in love with frogs (or general inter-species romance).
• A tendency toward Stalinism.

So there you have it. An actual, helpful list of warning signs. Now you can consider yourself prepared.

P.S. (For those who missed them, the stutter joke is a reference to Porky Pig and the Stalinism crack is a reference to Animal Farm.)

A priest (Donald Pleasence) summons a professor (Victor Wong) to an old church to see a canister of liquid Satan.

If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll recognize that the description is technically accurate, but fails to capture the real essence of the film. A better description might have been:

Trapped in an old church, a priest (Donald Pleasance) and a professor (Jameson Parker) try to prevent Satan’s return to Earth.

Not much longer, and yet it sells the story better. But I don’t get the sense that the TV Guide writers are trying to be accurate or sell the movie. They’re just cranking out copy.

Anyway, this got me thinking about TV Guide and whether it may actually be challenging to sum up a movie that badly in one short sentence. So I figured I’d give it a try. Consider this my audition to write for TV guide. (Feel free to leave a comment with your own movie summaries.)

• The Bourne Identity – A man with memory trouble (Matt Damon) kills people.
• Top Gun – A pilot with daddy issues (Tom Cruise) flies Naval aircraft recklessly.
• Jaws – Three men (Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider) who need a bigger boat go fishing.
• Titanic – Two young lovers (Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet) experience extreme moisture.
• American Beauty – A man (Kevin Spacey) and his wife (Annette Bening) have marital problems.
• Jurassic Park – A team of scientists led by Sam Neill visit an amusement park accompanied by a lawyer.
• The Day After Tomorrow - The adventures of a climatologist (Dennis Quaid) studying weather.
• Rocky – A boxer (Sylvester Stallone) who may be mentally disadvantaged and has an aging coach (Burgess Meredith) tries dating.
• Forrest Gump – A mentally challenged man (Tom Hanks) waits for a bus and tells stories.
• The Silence of the Lambs – FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jody Foster) deals with a difficult inmate (Anthony Hopkins).

I have read the excerpts of Latimer’s book and frankly don’t find all that much wrong with it. I’ll likely buy the book and consume it all simply because I liked the way the excerpts were written. His publisher is right. He has an engaging style. Was he in the room or across the street at the EEOB? Who cares. He was clearly closer to the President than 99.9% of Americans will ever get in their life, so let him have his say. We might find it interesting.

The treatment Latimer has received in the last 36 hours, however, has left me perplexed. It reminded me a lot of McClellan’s welcoming reception and that reminded me of something Peggy Noonan wrote.

William Safire, himself a memoirist of the Nixon years, said to me, a future memoirist of the Reagan years: “The one thing history needs more of is first-person testimony.” History needs data, detail, portraits, information; it needs eyewitness. “I was there, this is what I saw.” History will sift through, consider and try in its own way to produce something approximating truth.In that sense one should always say of memoirs of those who hold or have held power: More, please.

Noonan, and by extension Safire, were spot on. I think that every White House staffer should not be discouraged, but rather should be required to write a book, and tell the story of their time there. Our history demands that those making it (whether the President or his secretary) should provide us with as much detail as possible. When these books are written we should not denounce the writer, we should simply ask for the next installment from the guy who sat next to Latimer so we could see how he remembered the events.

One of the most interesting conversations I have ever had was with the woman who sat next to Monica Lewinsky in the White House. She once gave me her take on the woman behind the blue dress and it meant more to me than any ABC News special report.

Do I buy the caricature of Latimer as an opportunist trying to parlay his brush with fame into a financial windfall? Absolutely. Do I also believe that much of what he says is probably exactly as he remembers it? Absolutely.

That’s why we need more of these books, not less. We need to be able to compare notes and make our own determination about what happened, who these people were, where they made mistakes and where they proved they were only human.

Now, the latest to weigh in against Latimer in protecting the Bush years is James Carville.

This little dweeb needs to be glove slapped… People that have the honor of working in the White House ought not be going out and publishing this…

I couldn’t disagree with Carville more.

The people that need to be glove slapped are Carville and his ilk for attempting to silence future tomes. If Dana Perino, Tony Fratto, or Ed Gillespie recall events differently, let them write a book and give us their take. By the time all the ink dries, we might have a semi-complete picture of life inside the GWB administration.

As with most topics I write about here, the subject of zombies has prompted some interesting discussions with friends and colleagues. In the case of World War Z, my only complaint about the book is its reliance on the slow moving, arms raised, schleppy zombie made famous by George Romero films. I, as a matter of preference, would much rather have seen the speedy, violent zombies of 28 Weeks Later / 28 Days Later or the Xbox 360 game Left 4 Dead.

I firmly believe that when the zombie apocalypse (ZA) finally comes, it will look more like the rage virus. Honestly, it would have to. The fact is a slow zombie is simply not that hard to defeat. They’re kind of like cows. You could hunt them with a dent mallet. Granted, if you were set upon by a pack, it may be harder to fight off. However, the spread of the contagion would either have to be immediate or a single mass event would have to hit most of the population at once.

In World War Z, the contagion is slow to spread. Brooks gives the impression that a year or two passes between the first outbreak and the pandemic. That’s simply too slow for a zombie virus to move unless the zombies themselves are so fast, and so hard to kill, that they can rapidly turn new zombies. Compare Brooks’ approach to that of 28 Days/Weeks Later or even the disaster of a film called Quarantine. (If you haven’t seen Quarantine, think of it as the Blair Witch Project of zombie movies – shaky handicam story telling that rapidly becomes painful to sit through.) The contagion in those movies spreads rapidly enough, and the zombies become fast and violent enough to quickly become a problem.

What has been interesting to me is the almost universal agreement on the topic of fast versus slow zombies. Just about everybody I have raised the issue with agrees that fast zombies are much scarier, much harder to kill, and much more likely when the ZA is upon us. I have to wonder, then, why franchises like Resident Evil or the remakes/knock-offs of Romero films generally portray the zombies as stupid and slow.

It seems to me that the future of zombie films has to lie with fast, violent zombies. Purists may disagree, but the only movies I can see remaining true to the schleppy zombies would be flicks like Shaun of the Dead that actually mock the speed.