One of the things I’m working on at the moment involves optics, and I’m having to research a lot of small lenses, ranging from really cheap phone accessories sent out by dropshippers, to luxury goods and branded optics. Here’s an Olloclip:

(CC photo by Warren R.M. Stuart)

It’s nice, and it began on Kickstarter. A lot more elegant than the ones with stick on magnetic rings. It also appears to be based on pretty standard lenses, with the 0.67x/macro and 180 degree fisheye lenses being quite common.

This kind of tickled me, and I’m not sure what it means:

Either a manufacturer messed up an order and is dumping useless inventory, or a factory is actually bootlegging based on the brand of a Kickstarter project. The former seems more probable to me, because they’re repackaged as generic FE-12 wide angle lenses. Given the massive successes appearing on Kickstarter this year though, the latter is going to happen. That’s strange and interesting, because it’ll likely happen before most established businesses even comprehend crowdsourced funding as a part of their environment.

Original credit for this goes to my friend Angus Taggart, who put a similar image on a keyboard Kindle years ago, but I’ve been wanting to do this since recently getting a non-touch Kindle 4. I notice there’s also a similar image here.

It took a while for a reliable method to appear, it’s still scattered around a bit, and I discovered a couple of quirks not documented elsewhere (at least, not in connection with changing the wallpaper). Sources are this YouTube video, and this forum thread. I found it annoying that so much of it is locked up in a low res video rather than out, so here’s a write up:

You’ll need to be comfortable with network settings and command lines to do this. You might also brick your device, for which I take no responsibility. To be extra specific, this is only for the non-touch Kindle 4, pictured above.

Step 1:
Enable debug mode on your Kindle.

Do this by connecting it to your computer by USB, then dropping a blank file named ENABLE_DIAGS into the root folder of your device. Make sure it has no file extension and your operating system is not just hiding it.

Eject the Kindle from your computer, then do: menu button > settings > menu button > restart. The Kindle will take a little while to reboot, then be in diagnostics mode.

Step 2:
Enable USB networking

From the diagnostics menu you should now be seeing, go to misc > utilities > enable usbnet. Select it, then click right on the 5 way button to get out.

I also selected disable diagnostics on the way back out of those menus, and the device deleted the ENABLE_DIAGS file I’d put on it.

Step 3:
Give the Kindle an IP address

From your network settings centre, select the Kindle and give it these details manually:

IP: 192.168.15.1
Subnet: 255.255.255.0

Apply and exit the settings.

Step 4:
Connect to it via SSH

You’re going to log in to your Kindle as the root user, then modify some bits of filing system to create a visible place to put new wallpaper. You can use Putty on Windows or a terminal on OS X. I have no idea if it would work on Linux, but probably.

Connect to this IP via SSH: 192.168.15.244

If you’re using Terminal, you may need to prefix with SUDO so that it logs you in as root rather than your normal username. The Kindle will ask you for a password, on some the password is blank so you can just hit enter when prompted; on some it is “mario” (without quotes, of course). The latter worked for me. More recent or future models may have different passwords.

Step 5:
Change the filing system.

Issue the following commands, one by one:

mntroot rw
mkdir /mnt/us/screensaver
mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt/base-mmc
mv /mnt/base-mmc/opt/amazon/screen_saver/600×800 /mnt/base-mmc/opt/amazon/screen_saver/600×800.old
ln -sfn /mnt/us/screensaver /mnt/base-mmc/opt/amazon/screen_saver/600×800
exit

Just in case my blog has put any linebreaks in that, get this text file, which I found via BigBob in the forum thread linked above. I added the exit command above, which should make it six lines in total.

What these do is make a new folder for the screensaver, move the old screensaver out of the way, then link the new folder you created to the old, hidden screensaver location.

That’s it. When the Kindle is connected by USB, you can now drop new wallpapers in the folder you created, though they have to be 600*800 .png files. Each time you add new wallpapers, your Kindle will need to be rebooted for them to start showing up. You can get an archive of the original Kindle 4 wallpapers here.

If you’re worried about leaving USB networking enabled, you might want to go back into diagnostics and disable it.

We just fought off SOPA and PIPA. ACTA is, immediately, the next fight. EMI have gone batshit crazy and are suing the Irish Government for not passing abusive laws fast enough.

Against this backdrop, The Pirate Bay have added a category for things. It’s probably a strange blip to people with their heads right down in the media industries, but as John Robb says:

The copyright battle over the control of 3D printable designs/shapes is going to make current fights over copyright look tame

and DanW:

“You wouldnt download a car” https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6960965/1970_Chevelle_Hot-Rod_3d_model (TPB, contains impolite popup ads)

It has me thinking about the way we consume stuff, right now in 2012. Shaping Things is six years old. Bruce Sterling’s lovely vision of cradle to grave recycling seems a very long way away, but his vision of the trend for objects to increasingly become information is spot on. There are important things to do with it right around the corner. At the moment, thanks to my being a member of Nottingham Hackspace, I have access to Repraps, laser cutters and CNC machines. There’s a lot of digital stuff I can draw from scratch myself then make, like this Darth Vader snowflake:

Or I can just download and make things designed by other people, such as this parametrised Lego by Philipp Tiefenbacher:

It’s kind of wobbly and imperfect, which reminds me of this knockoff Lego USB key from Hong Kong:

It’s made of softer plastic than Lego, and it’s not the same height as a real Lego Brick:

It’a also not molded to the same tolerances. The studs are slightly bigger and slightly differently spaced. When you put it together with a real brick, the whole assembly tries to force itself apart. Usually, the real brick will just ping off:

Late last year, I got a chance to play with injection molding. It’s kind of fascinating, and there are all kinds of things that make it much less straightforward than you’d think. Depending on the weather and the plastic you’re using, a twenty millimetre product might shrink by one millimetre over its length. The knockoff and the parametric brick both pictured above are noble stabs at making something close, but Lego have been doing it just right for decades, making sure every single piece feels the same as it’s pushed together with others. A fraction of a millimetre difference makes it feel and behave like an inferior product. Staying inside those tolerances is impressive. It’s one of the reasons their molds can cost a quarter of a million Euros, whereas a RepRap costs about five hundred.

Since the patent expired, all kinds of copycats have been appearing in shops, from forgettable non-brands lying around in shops like Wilkinson’s to heavily licensed things like Character Building:

and Megabloks:

The licensing deals really let the other brands go for the throat, flinging words like “Authentic” around. Some are advertised as “Lego Compatible”.

Lego‘s lawsuit and subsequent appeal over Mega Bloks was dismissed. Now they’ve lost their monopoly, their work is essentially going to be about design, branding and fan service. Bigger Lego geeks than I am tell me that they’re pretty good at all of those things, and that’s what will really give them legs in the 21st century. They have a beautifully designed and gridded system, and some very powerful licenses in place. It would take a long culture of development and design to catch up with that, even if Lego pissed on their fans. Which they don’t; they have a small army of fans making digital Lego stuff and are ensuring the route to market for it goes through them.

If only other companies had that kind of awareness and foresight. It was a strange thing when technology caused copyright laws originally meant to protect publishers from each other to suddenly be aimed at consumers. With a product as ephemeral as the breeze, those industries had their licensing agreements locked down tight before there was even a hint of trouble from people selling dodgy CDs at car boot sales, let alone peer to peer. A lot of people suddenly got very litigious and abusive (or at least widened their focus), and haven’t changed much. We’re on the cusp of the same thing happening with manufacturing of simple products, then increasingly complex ones, because the design processes for these things are all about software and data now.

Digital photography just took out Kodak without it ever seeming like piracy. I don’t think it crossed anyone’s mind to suggest that technology was violating a moral right of an old business model. It was just this amazing new thing and of course a company rooted in camera film was struggling. It won’t be the same for everything. Object piracy is just around the corner, and significant chunks of the commercial world are likely to unite against civil liberties to try and preserve monopolies. To some of those actors, services like Thingiverse and Instructables, as well as our ability to design, make and distribute things ourselves, will just be acceptable collateral damage.

That may seem a bit hyperbolic, but given the history of the entertainment industry dealing with the internet, I think not. If Lego were as zealous at lobbying as our media industries, and copying of physical products were as hot a political issue as copied media, the lawsuit against Megabloks would probably have played out differently. The technology to make it easy is shockingly close, so do not expect the coming fights over design to be settled so readily as they were with Lego clones. When lobbyists of not just the entertainment industries but also manufacturing see the expedience in banding together to draft things like SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA, then it’s going to become a much harder fight.

If you’re a UK citizen, you could start by signing these three petitions: [1] [2] [3]. More to do here, too. Beyond this sort of quotidian activism though, you should join your local hackspace and become a skilled designer and creator. The more of the world you can edit, and the more involved you are with the people around you, the more independent you can be of defective hardware and monopoly systems.

In a world where more people are like that, there are companies that would thrive on it, and companies that wouldn’t. The latter are going to put up a hell of a fight.

tl;dr version: The August 2011 UK riots were a very new thing, that tactically had far more in common with insurgency than with familiar types of domestic political unrest. If we want to start solving the problems that led to the rioting, we begin by eradicating the word “chav” from our everyday speech.

It’s been over seven days since the riots died down here in the UK. It was a tense and wearing week, especially for business owners.

Something really dysfunctional happened that week, and not just on our streets or in the minds of the rioters. A lot of people called for blood, including people who regard themselves as relatively liberal and non-disciplinarian. It discomfited me to see so much outrage on all sides, and relatively few humane responses. Here are a few of the latter, from Twitter:

Robert Florence:

“These young people exist. They’re not staying in Hamsterdam tonight. They’re visible. It needs fixed, they need a future.”
https://twitter.com/#!/robertflorence/status/100684779313307650

“All this casual “hoodies”, “chavs” and Cameron’s favourite “Broken Britain” speak – this is where it all leads. Exactly here.”
https://twitter.com/#!/robertflorence/status/100713446726836224

Marcus Brigstocke:

“I hate the feelings + thoughts that I have been having seeing young people in Clapham wearing new trainers. #thisisnothowiwishtobe”
https://twitter.com/#!/marcusbrig/status/101647168015835136

Conor Houghton:

“Rioting is not an answer, but the chorus denying that there is even a question has, I think, told me what that question might be.”
https://twitter.com/#!/conorjh/status/101607071220367360

Rare dialogue, even in the week and a half that has followed. I think, in all the bluster and rhetoric, very little has been achieved in even understanding what happened, let alone what might solve it.

These riots were a new problem. These were not like anything we’ve seen before. Effectively, they were a laboratory in which some highly destructive people experimented and learned. Nottingham got off comparatively lightly compared to London, Manchester and Birmingham, but it’s worth noting that as well as sports shops, the primary targets in Nottingham seemed to be Police stations. Watch this footage of Canning Circus Police Station being firebombed:

Quell any outrage you might be feeling and consider this: They didn’t do a very good job of achieving their objective. The damage they did wasn’t particularly noticeable the day after. They weren’t a militia, they were a mob. The few that moved forward to hurl things scurried quickly back to the dark and the others. Most missed altogether. They’re not very experienced at torching buildings, but they’re trying, and learning. They’ll have been disappointed the building didn’t go up, and some of them will be thinking about why.

A lot of people got arrested, but plenty got away too. The only people who actually fell afoul of Police tactics were apparently the EDL (n.b. Many have said this, but I’ve been unable to confirm it), a group of violent pricks who historically have just made trouble. The group started marching one night and got kettled. Whoever they were, they’re using obsolete tactics: Gather in one place, then move together. This is what Police tactics and equipment have been designed for:

(Nottingham, December 2009)

During the riots of this August, people cried for the use of watercannon and rubber bullets. Let’s assume those are the holy grail of riot control hardware: an effective and quick crowd control device that cannot possibly cause physical harm. Fantasy guns that fire good PR. Assuming that, then regarding them from a dispassionately tactical view of the situation, they’re exactly the wrong tools for the calamity UK cities faced. They’re for scattering crowds, and the rioters were already distributed. Communication networks allowed them to mobilise very fast each day, and keep moving during the night so that typical containment techniques employed by the Police were rendered obsolete.

The calls for deployment of bigger hardware were nothing but indignant middle class rage driven by a poor understanding of the situation. Having a force multiplier on hand could indeed change situations like this:

(London)

Even assuming things like watercannon would be mobile and ubiquitous enough to be put somewhere useful though, such tech would be useless for overall resolution of the situation. Here are some of the looters getting caught by riot cops in Manchester:

Traditional tools are not for intercepting looters and vandals who are agile, networked and distributed. Nor are they any use when mobs are more interested in smaller, vulnerable targets or flanking police, and you can bet those are just a few of the tactics that will emerge from such mobile and fluid riots.

These are a much more organic form of trouble than we’re used to. Despite having a consumerist common cause rather than any ideological motives we’re familiar with, they have more in common with insurgency than they do with civil unrest of the 20th century, and you can bet that within them there have been people carefully observing and honing the craft of trouble-making and destruction, as well as making reputations among gang members and rivals.

As one well connected friend put it to me, this was “just gangsta shit”. It was not your average gangsta situation though. Rather than fight each other, in a somewhat indiscriminate way the gangs targeted businesses of all sizes as well as infrastructure. A creeping tendril of fourth generation warfare met English middle class outrage for the first time.

Fourth generation warfare is a lens by which to understand modern conflict, not just by the open source weapons and tactics it adopts, but also as something that exists around and beyond traditional ways in which we understand conflict and politics. Guerilla forces of the 20th Century were forerunners to this model, yet now those organisations look geriatric in comparison. Hierarchical control structures and approval processes themselves came to be understood as a vulnerability, so mobilised cultures minimise and dispense with such constructs. Not that gangs are consciously adopting this as strategy, but the environment and technology they have at their disposal enables it.

Rather than “Shia rule of Iraq” or “Chasing out the infidel”, the plausible promise uniting them was materialism, so they pillaged as well as destroying. If only a reaction like that could be as simple and cliched as “a few bad apples”. Here’s a particularly distressing interview with two drunk girls:

When they see even small business owners as “the rich”, and can conceptualise those local people as “THEM NOT US”, something is deeply, tragically wrong, and it did not spring from nowhere. It does not exist entirely in the heads of those girls or people like them. It’s not an ideology, but it is a mass communal current borne of sociological pressures. In what further ways might it articulate itself? Politically and socially, there’s a lot of work to do to even wrangle it into something non-toxic, let alone anything constructive.

Titus Chalk:

“The establishment can count itself fucking lucky it has bred them to seize shoes and shit jewellery rather than political power.”
https://twitter.com/#!/tituschalk/status/100838052863279105

Here is a map, overlaying the locations of rioting in London with the degree of deprivation. The same correlation is easily observed in Nottingham. In Nottingham, people knew exactly which neighbourhoods the trouble was going to emerge from: The poorest ones. The ones where, if middle class people pass through them at all, they pop the central locking without even thinking about it. The Meadows and St. Anns, neighbourhoods that once gave Nottingham a reputation for gun crime, were where the mobs largely came from.

The press have held up poster children as if to start building a narrative that there was nothing class-related going on, but it didn’t get very far. Almost universally, the rioters were poor. There are many, many more people from the same areas, equally deprived, who didn’t riot, and who aren’t in gangs. The best they’re going to get from this is a pat on the head and being told they’re a credit to the working class. That’s a problem, and we don’t really have an answer for it.

I elicited anger and confusion from a few people by retweeting this: “If there’s nothing political about these riots, then we need a new word for political”. I wish I’d been able to find the full quote at the time. Here it is:

SymeonBrown:

“It is true these young people do not have a manifesto but if their actions are not political then clearly we need a new word for ‘political’”
https://twitter.com/#!/symeonbrown/status/100635072964726784

Sorry if I disrespected your heritage and the movements you’ve been involved in. Protest as we knew it was rendered obsolete in 2003 when millions marched in the U.K. and U.S., yet were ignored by governments that went on to win extra terms. Please shelve your outrage for now, because we have the same enemies and there’s important stuff to get done.

The field has changed, and politics bleeds out further than it used to. These were twenty-first century riots, and they need a modern response, both in the moment, but also the wider political and economic context. To misrepresent arguments in this manner is to exclude important bits of that context.

This is not where I “speak for working class people”. I’m a middle class boy and always have been, and four years living in St. Anns didn’t really change that. I won’t go on about my experiences, just what they added up to: Visiblity of something I couldn’t really comprehend when I first moved there.

There was a palpable sense of non-integration, particularly among teenagers and young adults. An aspirational wedge was being driven between different groups. Skin colour, religion, politics were largely irrelevant to it; the divide sits instead under a complex web of differences in wealth and culture. Those differences mean that inheriting a bit of RP English can become the deciding factor in whether people will hire you or not, even for things like bar work. Your postcode largely defines whether your peers will encourage or mock you for wanting a job.

The relative poverty in these areas has been set against a middle class recently awash in cheap debt, media that idolise property and fame, plus technology that becomes obsolete so fast Bruce Sterling could state “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from trash”. In this context, you can begin to understand why simplistic imagery of wealth and non-political power gains aspirational meaning. In the most powerless communities, such symbols become idols, especially when they’re compatible with the gangster identities that can flourish in poverty. This pressure cooker of poverty and consumerism is then politicised by a single word: “Chav”.

I used to use it, until a friend pointed out my prejudice. It was a comfortably middle class form of it, even for a lot of lefties. It felt like it was enough to simply not be racist, homophobic, or sexist. From a mixture of both our material aspirations and our social guilt, us middle class people really like to not see class divisions. It can become pleasurable to pretend they don’t exist, because on paper meritocracy is a lovely, reassuring ideal. It simultaneously assures us that all those impoverished people in Britain simply aren’t trying hard enough, and that also the upper classes are open to everyone, like a bunch of hallucinated family members during a near death experience.

As I’ve learned more though, I’ve been increasingly delighted that the response to prejudice by the resulting underclass has been to take status symbol after status symbol, then use knockoffs or rentals to mulch them into simulacra. This is no more intentional than the rioting had an agenda beyond materialism, but regardless, Burberry and limousines just don’t mean what they used to.

All of the problems feeding and related to this are neatly swept under the carpet by words like “Chav”. It’s an everyday political fulcrum that drives the income gap ever wider. Middle class people keep on pushing the lever, while the bottom percentiles don’t realise that now their pensions have been vapourised by the banks and their homes aren’t bottomless ATMs, they’re definitely not going to reach Chequers or a Royal Garden party, and their children may well be headed to the same estates they so eagerly castigate.

“Chav” is not a term applied to people on the basis of their behaviour; it’s an aesthetic term levelled at people because they’re from a poor neighbourhood, are young, dress in particular types of clothing and speak a certain way. They will never achieve the glory, acceptance or life you would think they deserved if you got to know them. That’s far more to do with their aesthetics and where they’re from, than with who they are.

This is not about gangs or a few bad apples ruining it for everyone. It’s bigger than that. It’s culture, not in the sense of fishknives and keeping your elbows off the table, but in the sense of social dynamics within and between groups of people. Culture, balled up and shoved in poor people’s faces one day after another. The politics of neighbours demarcating and affiliating as tribes, and what gets passed onto and reinforced in their children.

Young, poor people aren’t even working class in the way people were once understood to be. In Haringey, the London Borough that contains Tottenham, where the riots started, there are ten thousand unemployed people. There are fifty-four applicants for every vacancy that arises. Those jobs are not the jobs middle class career people think of, not “Software developer” or “Packaging designer” so much as “Cleaner” and “Factory temp”.

In the face of fifty or so people per role that the middle class regard as menial, the anodyne term “jobseeker” becomes horrific. With large chunks of the jobs that made these people “the working class” now outsourced, they’re not so much working class as something more approaching the idea of a subaltern. They may have the right to vote, but in the chasms between elections, not many people listen or give a shit.

That’s the context around these distributed consumer riots. That’s the political dimension to them, even though the majority of those running rampage had no political agenda themselves.

The vandals and looters have done an incredible amount of damage to their own communities; communities that were already suffering the continual, long-term economic damage of deprivation. I’ve been grieved to see not just the short term destruction, but the construction of a bigger stick to beat the poor with. People who had little future, and now have even less. Beyond the judiciary, wider and more abstract punishments are going to be wrought on their entire communities, in everything from urban planning to everyday prejudice. I cannot imagine how the older and wiser people there must feel right now.

We face a complex problem running the length and breadth of Britain’s class politics. The answer is not more prejudice, more deprivation, or yet more simplistic discourse. Those things are what many created in the week of the riots, and the behaviour that could avert such thinking is exactly what people like Boris Johnson are shutting down when they decry sociological context as irrelevant and try to paint it as attempted justification of the rioting (From 2:00):

I will generously interpret that as misapprehension rather than the vicious rhetoric it could be. Beyond that, mistaking the pertinent issues to be ones we’ve faced before is also woefully misguided. This doesn’t have similar symbolism, history or obvious differences comparable to other social issues. Wealth is the differentiating factor, not gender, sexuality or ethnicity. The problem is not something middle class people can solve by raising awareness or engaging in positive discrimination. No one is ever going to claim “Some of my best friends are chavs” at a dinner party. I don’t think a lot of us have a very good understanding of the label we created. Solving that starts at the crunch point of simply not being shit people.

If we want to stop things like the riots from happening, we have to build better culture. The very first thing you can do as a British person is stop using the term “chav”. It’s an us and them narrative, and it wasn’t created by politicians or newspapers even if it was encouraged by them. It was made by the people. It’s something grotesque that a large mass of us brought into being, and we should take pains to undo it in our minds and our speech. That would be a start.

There was little sign of this during the riots. Some things heartened me, like the community cleanup that spontaneously emerged from Twitter. This, easily the most heroic image I’ve ever seen of the Police. The only thing that made me cheer though, was this tweet by @McGazz:

“A short sharp shock! National Service! Boot camps! Sorry, my monocle fell out as I was masturbating.”
http://twitter.com/mcgazz/status/100851929621610496

It was the very first sign I saw of someone else not allowing themselves to be drawn into tabloid thinking. Polarised, emotive debate has set itself solidly into British public discourse, and the week of the riots created the most intensive bout of it I’ve ever seen.

In England, generalised outrage in search of its next target is one of the few things we have that successfully traverses class boundaries.

It’s the first glimmer of something that occurred to me few years back: Given that my last few phones have been way more powerful than my first desktop computers, how long before I can plug a keyboard and a display into one and run an OS designed for that as well as mobile?

What’s also interesting is that one of the main people driving it is the head of a UK games studio. There’s history to that. An important chunk of the history of UK debate between game developers and games academics looks like a long chain of buck passing and PR baiting. This was a further part of what I heard during the years I ran Games:EDU:

From the initial rhetoric of graduates not being good enough for studios five years ago, lecturers further stated that the quality of A-level and college graduates that were applying for University courses was also not good enough (For U.S. readers: In the UK, college and A-levels are a part of education that occurs roughly between the ages of 16 – 18. University follows). When college lecturers got involved in the discussion, they in turn said that the school-leavers they were getting weren’t sufficiently versed in relevant subjects, and the secondary education (High school) should be targeted.

That may sound like a lot of shirking responsibility, but there are serious structural problems. One year, I polled a number of secondary educators and the answer that came back was almost universally: “We’d love to be pushing these skills, but between 14 – 16 we’re tied to the National Curriculum and and shooting for the exam results that will keep the school afloat”. Secondary educators simply don’t have time to shoehorn in some Computer Science, so a repeated point at Games:EDU this year was more strident: We target after school clubs with CS.

At his talk, David showed a disconcerting graph, depicting an increase in demand for CS graduates, and enrolment marching in lockstep until a precipitous decline some years back. Demand is, apparently, still increasing but not as fast. Anecdotally (it must be stressed), he correlated this to the first generation of kids that had ICT as a subject at school, citing polls asking “What’s your most boring subject at school?”. Apparently, before ICT there was quite a diverse spread of answers, but since, the answer has almost unanimously been “ICT”. That the way we’re teaching computing to kids is fundamentally boring is an interesting theory, and I hope David posts some sources for his argument.

He went on to less conjectural things. Namely, that between accessible tools like Game Maker and traditional game development skills such as C++, there is an enormous gulf and very few intermediate steps for interested people to work through. Raspberry Pi is aimed at bridging this. They’ve some ambitious plans to get them into the hands of kids, and I really hope they succeed.

Amusingly, he said he first wanted to call it the BBC Nano, after the machine that spawned a generation of programmers in the 1980s. For a certainty, a lot of people involved with Hackspaces want to have a play with them.

Here’s a bit of background, skippable if you’ve been involved in or aware of issues facing university level education for the game development:

Not long after the turn of the millennium, a lot of crap media courses from the 1990s had begun rebranding as “game design” courses. They were, of course, shit, and vanishingly few people who’ve ever done these courses have got a job in anything other than QA. The industry needs good 2D and 3D artists, good animators, good programmers, and good mathematicians. Increasingly, there are suitable, high-quality courses out there for all of these subjects.

Academia is also about research though, not just training. Not many game developers understood this, given that prior to good university education, the traditional route into the games industry was to teach yourself relevant skills throughout your teens and early twenties (i.e. sitting in your bedroom with a cracked copy of 3DS Max. Still is the way in, to an extent). Subsequently, even when applicable, non-shit courses started to turn out graduates, they “weren’t good enough”.

This has been the argument that has come up again and again between game developers and games academics, usually framed as vocational versus research-based courses. Each side has made defensible points, and dug in to an extent. The biggest concession made has been that the more approachable studios recognise that tools are so diverse, and so constantly changing, that no graduate will be ready to drop straight into their pipeline without extra studio-specific training.

The vocational versus research debate came up again at Games:EDU 2011. A volunteer for the conference, Tom Cole, stuck his hand up. I paraphrase:

“This entire debate is flawed from it’s first premise. Academia and industry simply wouldn’t exist without each other”.

Hero. Everyone nods silently for a second. Maria Stukoff from Sony puts her hand up and says (again paraphrased):

Yes, this is bollocks. This debate doesn’t happen in medicine, there’s no back and forth over whether or not something is research or not.

Kim Blake from Blitz Game Studios added (yet again, paraphrased, and I’d like to emphasise that Kim was careful to make clear that the negative judgment implicit in the word “thickos” was not her own):

“This has settled something that’s been bothering me for years. In my background, the word ‘vocational’ has always denoted the thickos at the back of the class. Given what it means to a lot of people, it doesn’t seem appropriate to the kind of training people need to make games”.

I’m going to be careful too here: I grew up surrounded by tradesmen. In my teens I worked as a labourer with electricians, plumbers, builders, joiners and shopfitters. They are not stupid people, and their depth of knowledge and level of craft can be stunning. The chances are you depend on them utterly. Nonetheless, these trades are what the word vocational usually refers to in UK education.

Game development bears no parallel with the kind of education that goes into those trades. So far, Game development HE has been modelled on other undergraduate degrees. The best parallels though, are subjects like medicine, law and architecture. Like them, game development is a subject that requires highly technical and specialist education. As a generation of crap games degrees dies and the best rise to the top, we’re only just beginning to find the forms that education will take.

Hopefully, from this year out, industry and academia can find their way through the maze of production schedules and funding grants to begin constructing some more positive and comprehensive options.

I read this piece the other day. Not only is it an intersting insider account of call centres in India, but it comes from a truly bizarre sounding place: Gurgaon.

It’s a town built entirely by corporations, to the extent that there’s just dirt instead of paving between the buildings. It’s like a gimmick from fiction that’s been slowly growing for real in Northern India. Look at it on Google maps and you can see the voids between the buildings, as well as utilitarian district names and the rather disconcerting “Police lines”.

Almost as if civil unrest has become so ingrained, it exists long enough for us to map it.

Which is an obvious copy of this…

… but appears in the top corner of my gmail account. Additionally, it doesn’t bug me with notifications from pointless games and apps. All the noise I’ve used FBPurity to mute in the past simply isn’t there. Delightful.

The phrasing on this is a bit creepy:

If they just knocked out the word "Live" it would be 100% less so.

The real thing that sells it to me is that it copies the asymmetric following of Twitter. I’d never post my Facebook profile online, but here’s my Google+ one.

Personally, I’m finding it great, but that’s largely because most of my friends and many of my work contacts have migrated and are using it. There is one serious problem related to psuedonyms that should be solved.

So I was perturbed to read this in the Page 45 mailshot yesterday:

We don’t open on Sundays outside of December but Emma Vieceli and her husband Pud were converging with their mates Lisa, Dan, Paul Duffield (artist on Warren Ellis’ FREAKANGELS) and Kate Brown (colourist on Warren Ellis’ FREAKANGELS vols 3 onwards) on Games Workshop HQ and its bar last Sunday and I really, really, really needed restocks of DRAGON HEIR. Also I had fallen in love with Kate Brown’s FISH+CHOCOLATE and was desperate to see the visual splendour that is Paul Duffield’s own SIGNAL. So I said that I’d open especially for them around 6-30pm on Sunday.

And I was happily writing last week’s reviews whilst keeping my eye out on Twitter when it emerged that they had been kicked out of Games Workshop’s HQ bar mid-afternoon for playing games there that weren’t owned/published by Games Workshop itself. Okay, there weren’t actually kicked out but told reluctantly by the rather apologetic barman that there was a new policy strictly enforced that you could only entertain yourselves in their bar by playing Games Workshop scenarios.

These comicbook creators had built up a tradition of converging there every few months, and when they did so they spent money on miniatures and booze while they played, and food to soak up the booze. Plus, of course, at Games Workshop HQ, you have a captive audience to whom you can advertise your own wares regardless of whether that audience plays your games already. And I know Pud does.

I am honestly struggling to find any strategy behind this new prohibition that is either pleasant, constructive or in any way financially intelligent.

Likewise.

Hearing this about Bugman’s doesn’t entirely surprise me, given how jealously GW guard their SPACE FASCIST and FANTASY FASCIST LEAGUE IPs, how prohibitive they were with videogame modders when Relic put out the tools for Dawn of War, how culty their shop staff are, and the stories I’ve heard from ex-employees who were too irreverent of GWs fiction and now cannot even get a hello in the street from the people they worked with. I’ve not been into one of their stores since I was 14, but to this day “culty” is the one word that comes up recurrently when I’m talking to people who no longer shop there or used to work there (including salaried positions at HQ).

No surprise here, just a creeping sense of horror at another piece of the expected. Bugman’s was their chance to get me interested again. Seeing those games from other publishers in there made me think that maybe Games Workshop weren’t so bad after all, and that maybe some of their games could interest me. Reaction to this from me and my friends at Gambling Lambs is generally “What the fuck?”. We liked Bugman’s, but we’re not going back now.

Rather than end this post with disappointment or bile, I have a couple of Nottingham recommendations. Page 45 (twitter) are, hands down, the best comic shop I have ever been in, and have broadened my horizons over the fifteen years they’ve existed. Mondo Comico (twitter) are my favorite board game retailer, and host regular gaming events. Each of those can introduce you to a load of stuff that is a whole lot more interesting and enriching than wizards or shooty men in armoured space suits, and they’re both run by real, lovely human beings that you can actually talk to.

Receipt Racer is a very whimsical way to waste paper, while *also* using electricity. The developers obviously despise trees, and the ozone layer, and the very forces that animate a laughing child, and the moments of silent communication that pass between lovers. Therefore, they must in fact want our planet to burn to an existentially bereft cinder dotted with fallout shelters inhabited by nothing but investment bankers and politicians… but their project still made me smile. Because I’m an enormous bastard and I hate plants, obv.