Author: Shawn K. Quinn

The Flappy Bird saga, or: why some people shouldn’t make games

I was originally going to let all the flap about Flappy Bird sail right over my head and into wherever this stuff goes in cyberspace when it’s done being popular. I am, after all, someone who is very un-picky about exactly which games I play, leaning towards GPL software instead of the latest shrink-wrapped XBox One, PS4, or Wii titles. I thought this didn’t really concern me, but then I read Dwight Silverman’s post to TechBlog about Flappy Bird.

For some reason when I was about to read this, I had thoughts of recent articles about “rape culture” in my head. I had just finished watching a video about a human trafficking problem in Europe.

And then it all made sense.

I’m saying this as someone who never played Flappy Bird (and probably will never get a chance to thanks to Mr. Nguyen’s selfish actions).

This is why I’m leery about depending on mobile phone apps:

[Flappy Bird creator Dong] Nguyen said the main reasons for pulling the game were guilt due to its addictive quality, and the fact that the attention has made his life more complicated[…]

Games are supposed to make people happy. To Mr. Nguyen, making Flappy Bird wasn’t about making people happy. No, Flappy Bird, in the end, wasn’t really the game itself, but a piece on Mr. Nguyen’s game board. A piece due to the design of today’s mobile devices, he could choose to take off the board at his own whim. It’s about control, about the opportunity to impose his own morals on those who partook of the game for whatever reason.

Indeed, I think Mr. Nguyen is exactly the kind of person Richard Stallman is warning us about when he refers to the emotional argument in his essay “Why Software Should Be Free”:

The emotional argument goes like this: “I put my sweat, my heart, my soul into this program. It comes from me, it’s mine!”

This argument does not require serious refutation. The feeling of attachment is one that programmers can cultivate when it suits them; it is not inevitable. Consider, for example, how willingly the same programmers usually sign over all rights to a large corporation for a salary; the emotional attachment mysteriously vanishes. By contrast, consider the great artists and artisans of medieval times, who didn’t even sign their names to their work. To them, the name of the artist was not important. What mattered was that the work was done—and the purpose it would serve. This view prevailed for hundreds of years.

(Richard goes on in his essay to mention the economic argument, which I don’t think applies here, as Mr. Nguyen deleted Flappy Bird in spite of it making him a relatively obscene amount of money.)

What if Mr. Nguyen were an arcade game programmer in the late 1970s or early 1980s? It would be as if, say, Taito could have decided those who haven’t yet played one game of Space Invaders at a given point in time could never do so for their entire lives in light of a shortage of 100 yen coins in Japan. (Set aside for the moment the shortage didn’t actually happen, because it easily could have if Space Invaders was as popular in 1978 and 1979 as Flappy Bird, or even something like Angry Birds, is today.) Or if Atari decided something similar for Pong or Asteroids during those crazes. You get the idea.

And the probable result? There would be an outrage. The video game scene succeeded and became what it was, and rebounded as quickly as it did from the 1983 crash, because the companies knew their role. Once an arcade game was sold, it was sold and there was little the companies could really do regarding how many people got to play them.

So, based on what I have read, and as an electronic game player and historian with over 30 years of experience, it is my expert opinion that Mr. Nguyen has no business making games and for him to do so is a detriment to the entire gaming community. It isn’t proper in the least for any game designer to impose their own morals or value judgments over the players of their games. Nobody else has tried to get away with this, and for good reason. Mr. Nguyen clearly doesn’t give a shit about the gaming community. It is most unfortunate indeed that Apple and Google (and, I would assume should he make Windows Phone games, Microsoft as well) will keep letting him sell games in their respective online stores in spite of this, but again, they don’t have to give a shit either, they get their cut of the revenue.

The personality of Mr. Nguyen and the personality of the average rapist are one and the same. Rape isn’t about sex, it’s about control. Control over a rape victim, control over a Flappy Birds player… one and the same. If you really love a game you’ve made, set it free (GPL).

Coca-Cola’s “It’s Beautiful” Super Bowl ad

I know I have a backlog of about a dozen posts I’ve been meaning to write, but on this one I feel the need to strike while the iron is hot. It’s about this 60-second television commercial aired during the Super Bowl. In case you haven’t seen it:

Now, I know it’s primarily a right-wing crowd that’s ticked off about this commercial. I’m mostly left-wing but lean right on a few issues. It’s a no-brainer that we as a country benefit when everyone knows at least one common language. Now, the question then becomes what language should that be?

The Declaration of Independence was written in English. The Constitution was written in English. All of our laws are written in English. Our road signs are written in English. The majority of our broadcast media are in English. If instructions for anything are written in only one language, that language is English. It is technically true that English is not the official language of this country, but it really should be named as such by law.

And this is why I think Coke’s ad fails as a piece of advertising. I am fine with showing different nationalities, different colors of skin, even those of differing sexual preferences. But if we can’t even talk to random people in the same language, how much unity do we really have? I have lost count of the number of times I’ve asked a stranger something like “what time is it?” or “which bus was that that passed by?” and got “sorry no speak English” as my response. So when Coca-Cola shows “America the Beautiful” being sung in different languages, and it is hard to tell if parts of the video were even shot in America (at 0:28 Coke bottles are shown which very well could be the Mexican version not necessarily imported into the US, at 0:35 all the signage is in Chinese and there’s nothing to clearly show that this is actually the US). I hope this isn’t the case, but if in fact any portion of this commercial was actually shot outside of the US, it was inappropriate to use “America the Beautiful.”

I’m not even sure what they are trying to communicate. It’s a video montage with a song whose melody I recognize, but most of which is sung in the language NotEnglish. (I say it this way not to offend, but in the same way that John Polstra used the term “the programming language NotC” to refer to a different and less-known computer programming language.) About the only things I can recognize are the Coca-Cola logo and some obviously American landmarks like the Grand Canyon. If there’s a message of unity here, I missed it.

The advertising would have been improved by showing the singers on camera–different nationalities, skin colors, sexual preferences, what have you–singing “America The Beautiful” in English and only in English. The video as aired could remain the main video shown on screen, with the singers in an inset, or the video as aired could be replaced with the singers entirely. Now the commercial becomes a more obvious promotion of unity behind a common language–and a common soft drink.

I’m disappointed as a Coca-Cola customer that they dropped the ball this badly on such a big stage. I’m not going to boycott Coke, but I’ll definitely be drinking a lot more Dr. Pepper over the next couple of months than I otherwise would have.

Officer doesn’t like your car? Go to jail, no drugs required

If you were partying hard during the last week of 2013, you may well have missed this story. It’s understandable as I missed it the first time through myself, but it’s fresh enough that I don’t feel terribly awkward doing a post on it.

The Daily Caller reports an Ohio man was arrested not for possessing drugs, but simply for having a car which had been modified to have a compartment which could theoretically store and transport drugs covertly at some future date. Ohio revised section 2923.241 effective 2012 September 28, but only now have they found someone they can charge under the relatively new law.

If this sounds outrageous to you, it should. In essence, it’s a license for Ohio’s law enforcement officers to detain anyone they don’t like if there’s been any modification to the interior of a vehicle at all, maybe even if there hasn’t. John Whitehead, president of the civil liberties group the Rutherford Institute, seems to concur (as quoted in this article on dailyprogress.com):

Although Norman Gurley had no drugs on his person, nor in his car, nor could it be proven that he intended to conceal drugs, he was still arrested for the ‘crime’ of having a hidden compartment in the trunk of his car… This is what a world without the Fourth Amendment looks like.

I’ve spoken many times on the absurdity of drug prohibition. It took almost 14 years for us, as a country, to figure out Prohibition (of alcohol) was a failure (1920 January 17 – 1933 December 5). How long must the so-called “war on drugs” go on before we admit it’s a lost cause and all the “war” has done is make more crime?

Disney’s cloud-based video subscription shenanigans

Is it just me, or is the whole point of buying seasonal videos (Thanksgiving, Christmas, Yule, etc) to watch them during that season?

In a recent story on TorrentFreak (originally reported on BoingBoing) which I unfortunately missed during the holiday season, it was reported that Disney temporarily pulled several Christmas-themed videos from the Amazon Instant Video service during the holiday season. The reason? So the videos would be exclusively available on Disney’s cable TV channels.

From the article, quoting a customer only identified as Bill:

“Amazon has explained to me that Disney can pull their content at any time and ‘at this time they’ve pulled that show for exclusivity on their own channel.’ In other words, Amazon sold me a Christmas special my kids can’t watch during the run up to Christmas,” Bill notes.

“It’ll be available in July though!” he adds.

I think Disney has hit a new low here and has unintentionally brought a whole new meaning to the term “Mickey Mouse operation.” It defies pretty much any type of logic to sell a video intended for viewing during the holiday season, and then make it unavailable during said holiday season. In essence, it’s “thank you for your money, now subscribe to the Disney Channel which will require even more money.”

Disney needs to apologize profusely for this, if they have not already done so. Should Disney fail to do so, I can count at least one Star Wars fan who will not give Disney one red cent to watch the new Star Wars films. (I do plan to watch them; it’s a question of whether or not Disney gets any money from me when I do. How I watch some movies without paying for them is left as an exercise to the reader.)

Amazon has disappointed me as well. I would rather have seen Amazon not budge and tell Disney where to stick their “we can revoke access at any time” clause in the contract. Maybe that means that Disney’s holiday-themed videos wouldn’t be available anywhere (I am assuming Netflix didn’t have them). And maybe that’s a good thing, as it is paramount to giving Disney the figurative shotgun and shells to figuratively blast themselves in the foot.

Moral of the story: if you want to be sure it’s there when you’re ready to watch, don’t trust the cloud. Get a physical disc or DRM-free download.

Below the tip of the iceberg

I want to address an issue one last time this year. I may not really need to, but I want to. Some may think I’m beating a dead horse. It may appear that way at first, but that’s not the case. For better or worse, this issue is alive and well based on some conversations I have had recently.

There are those out there who like seeing me eat crow and apologize. If that’s you, congratulations. Today’s your lucky day. Again.

There were flaws in my previous posts about WordCamp Houston 2010 and the Houston WordPress community, which I believe make the whole series fall a bit below the high standards I have set for myself. The specific flaws I am apologizing for are best summarized by that I could not see the forest for the tree standing in front of me. In short, I was so focused on the WordPress community in Houston, that I neglected to investigate the possibility other communities and sub-communities in Houston, many of whom involve the same people (but perhaps in most cases, different leadership), have these same problems. Problems best described as systemic.

The problems with WordCamp Houston 2010? The scholarship snafu? The missing videos? The website getting hacked due to neglect? I mistook them for the disease. No, these are just symptoms of much larger problems in Houston. I dug pretty deep. But I didn’t dig deep enough and I assumed it was just the WordPress crowd.

In my defense, I offer the following. First, I think some good did come of writing the posts, at least for the new people, and so this kind of thing won’t be so easily ignored going forward. I believe I know now why my posts were largely ignored, not because they were true, not because they appeared to be written in bad faith… but because to the people who have been active in the community much longer than I have, they simply weren’t news and what happened simply wasn’t surprising.

To borrow an example, my post was kind of like a blog post about cops disregarding traffic signals, stop signs, and speed limits, and yet happily writing a ticket to any “regular citizen” who does the same. Even if the blogger has video… it’s news to a few new people, it’s a bunch of crap to the rest. It really shouldn’t be, because silence is acceptance, and reading a blog post or a news story about something truly outrageous and choosing not to act on it is also essentially acceptance as well.

Second, based on what I knew, at the time, most of the community had just assumed the scholarship had been awarded (unfortunately, that “most of the community” did include myself for a time), and the videos were somewhere, perhaps online in a place they had just not found yet. On one hand I’m unhappy to have been the bearer of bad news. On the other, the community had a right to know, and other communities will hopefully learn from what happened here.

There are good people involved in good things in this community that actually take their positions seriously, even when working in a volunteer capacity. And I do appreciate them, especially when I work with them year in and year out. Most of them, when they do slip up, are approachable enough that I can tell them “look, I know you mean well, but (insert details of action here) wasn’t cool / does not put us in the best light / etc.” The groups I have spent the most volunteer hours with have not had many of these kind of issues.

The first step in resolving any dispute is for me to bring it to that person in private. That’s actually how I prefer to resolve things. But, there are people who decide that’s not an option. Emails get ignored, fake bounced, or whatever. (I usually do not do phone calls.) News flash: the issue doesn’t go away. Especially when the issue impacts the community, I feel a duty to let the community know what’s going on. In the case of the WordCamp Houston scholarship, there was a point where I considered actual press releases to local news media, possibly even to the national news media. A little part of me regrets not doing so.

Now that I realize there’s a good chance the problems are more systemic in nature, I’m not sure what to do. I don’t have enough information right now to really act on, and I’m not expecting much more given what I feel are unjustified attempts to ruin my standing (which is perhaps the most outrageous part of the whole situation). I’m not even sure just what I can do to fix the problems I have found, either by myself or with help from a few others.

Flagrant publicity sponging is something I find offensive. It becomes more offensive when the organizer status of an event like WordCamp Houston is wrongly awarded to someone who (at least in my opinion based on facts I have available post-event) had no business organizing such an event. It doesn’t help when I should have been the lead organizer to begin with, and things happened that I would never let happen on my watch.

Hiding behind a “we’re volunteers” shield when called out for doing a flagrantly piss-poor job is also something I find quite offensive. It doesn’t matter if the organizers themselves raise that shield, or an apologist for them such as Marc Nathan, raises that shield for them. Sitting on what’s supposed to be scholarship money for over two years is completely unacceptable, volunteers or not. If you feel compelled to defend such a flagrant deviation from minimally acceptable event organizer/treasurer standards, just because you’re friends with the organizers, then I hate to say it, maybe you have made a poor choice of who you call friends. Yes, this means Mr. Nathan deserves to look bad for defending Ms. Danna, Mr. Valdez, and others. Had Mr. Nathan started instead with “I’m not proud of what my friends did, and I’m not going to try to defend it” it might be another story.

That’s another mistake I made: most of my original apology post. That by itself was the single worst thing I’ve ever done as a blogger;  the more I think about it, the more I realize Marc Nathan was wrong. Accordingly I have updated that post to strike through the vast majority of it, and add a note at the top. I’m not really happy that I’ve had to, in effect, retract a retraction. It is something I do not want to make a habit of. The more often I go back and retract posts, the more credibility I lose.

The days of being able to virtually wave a community leader badge and make me nervous are now gone. I’m proud to be a Houstonian, and I want the best for Houston. (In fact I miss the hell out of the old “Houston Proud” ad campaign; anyone have a contact at the mayor’s office that could help get it relaunched?) I would like to help make 2014 about fixing the systemic problems. I can only do so much by myself, and I would like to think I’m not the only one that actually cares about what’s going on.

I’m willing to lead. The real question is: who’s willing to follow me?

Happy New Year. I’ll see all of you in 2014.