Author Archives: Tom

User Experience round the bend

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Bastards.

You know what bugs me? Toilets.

Toilet flushes, specifically – and even more specifically, toilets where you have a choice of a big flush and a little flush. This choice is usually presented to you in the form of a big button and a little button; sometimes it’s an actual big/small button combo, sometimes it’s two semi-circular-ish buttons combined into one – anyway.

The thing is: I never know which one to press. One button does a small flush, for wee and spiders, and the other one does a big flush, for poo and larger animals (goldfish, say). BUT WHICH IS IT?

As a super-pro UX designer, I’ve designed many an interface where the user has a choice about what to do next. Often there’s a common action, or one we want people to take, and this button is made larger and more friendly than its less popular comrades.

Let’s be blunt: people wee a lot more than they poo. Therefore, in the interests of saving water, you’d expect that the common action in terms of flushing toilets would be the small flush, ergo that the small flush button should be the big (and therefore most pushable) one.

But the problem is is that toilet buttons are generally unlabelled – and without anything overtly declaring the function of each button it’s natural to assume that button size = flush size, in which case the button you probably want is the smaller one.

As a toilet-user I want to use the correct flush to save water, but without knowing what the buttons actually do I’ve only got a 50% chance of getting it right. What’s the system? Is it button size = priority or button size = flush size?

I think the lesson here is that just because you have a system for your UI – colour-coding, icons, anything else that your UX and Design team know like the back of their hands because it’s, you know, OBVIOUS – that doesn’t mean that other people understand it.

Unhelpful.

A nice friendly “big flush” and “little flush” on your toilet digital thing will go a long way towards helping people understand what’s what. It’s very easy to be too subtle when it comes to designing UI, especially with all this minimalism malarkey what is in fashion these days. Your audience are not going to spend any time thinking about what a mysterious button means; they’ll either press it without understanding it or just close the toilet site and go somewhere else.

Something something unblocking your sales pipeline, something something round the bend! Does anyone else think about toilets this much, or is it just me?

Thrills, spills and QTEs

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themepark

I watched The Hobbit the other day, and it was actually better than I’d expected, although that may have been down to my extended campaign of expectation lowering more than the film itself. It definitely felt a bit too long, especially any time the elves are on screen and… talking… very… slo…w…ly because they’re immortal and can speak as slowly as they like without worrying about wasting their lives when they could be doing something more interesting like slaying orcs or going on theme park rides.

And speaking of theme park rides (how convenient!), there’s a scene near the end of The Hobbit where Bilbo and Gandalf and the dwarves are enjoying some thrills-and-spills escapades – escaping from some goblins and their big-chinned king in a special effects bonanza, with dwarves and goblins flying from bridges which fall seconds later in a huge abyss while axes fly, acrobatics are performed and goblin heads become separated from bodies like a sudden flurry of dandelions – which goes on for a long time, and it made me have a thought, which was: this is boring.

Here’s a short snippet of it, possibly with an annoying advert to sit through as well:

This scene probably had millions of dollars spent on it, and was the work of god-knows-how-many people; storyboarders, artists, animators, CG-doers, camerapeople, etc, and it was certainly very flashy. The whole thing was most wonderfully choreographed and there were loads of bits where the dwarves did clever things like stab a goblin in the face one way, then reach over his shoulder and stab another goblin without looking before somersaulting backwards over a chasm and more stabbing blah bla

You get the idea. It’s a very typical modern chase/fight scene; the heroes are chased through an incredible set-piece, with enemies flying all over the place and hundreds of coincidental lucky escapes packed into a few frantic minutes of film, at the end of which they dust themselves off and come out with some pithy line or raise one eyebrow slightly as if acknowledging the ironic nature of the whole thing makes it OK.

There is no danger in these scenes, beyond mild peril and strictly choreographed CGI shenanigans. There is no risk to the characters, beyond having to recover slightly squashed hat. They’re theme park rides, with all the tension of a warm flannel and cucumber eye mask.

Here’s the hugely over-long wheel scene from Pirates of the Caribbean 2 or 3 (appropriately, I’ve forgotten and I can’t be bothered looking it up):

To be fair, these drama-lite sequences are most often found in what are essentially kids’ films – assorted Pirates of the Caribbeans, The Hobbit, Harry Potter – but as CG has become more prevalent, specials effects have got better and film budgets in general have got bigger then this silliness gets into films for all ages. This is a Bad Thing.

Consider older scenes like the dirt bike vs truck chase scene in Terminator 2, in which a young Edward Furlong rides his crappy little bike along a concrete flood control channel. There are no stupid backflips, or dwarves surfing wooden bridges down valleys, but it’s a great scene; there’s a sense of real danger, that he might not make it – you’re not sure what’s going to happen next.

Likewise, the epic scene in Children of Men where Theo runs through an old apartment block in search of Kee. There’s shit flying everywhere in this scene, and the whole thing is one long shot (it’s actually clever editing, but hey), but despite the judicious application of special effects it feels dangerous. Clive Owen, as Theo, stumbles and cowers his way through the building that’s being shot to pieces around him, and he’s a world away from the smug dramatic immunity of Jack Sparrow or Spiderman or Legolas.

This is a different, but equally good chase scene from Children of Men – contains SPOILERS, if you haven’t seen the film:

<not actually embedding this one because the thumbnail itself contains spoilers!>

I’m sure this scene was closely choreographed as well, but it comes across as chaotic and haphazard (in a good way!) nonetheless.

I think there’s a parallel between these kind of scenes and the semi-interactive scenes in games known as Quick Time Events, or QTEs. QTEs are segments where the player has watch a sequence while occasionally pressing a button to make something happen – dodging a bullet or throwing a punch, for example. They’re generally crap and annoying – “panned by journalists and players alike” – but they turn up in game after game.

Some modern games, like the new Tomb Raider, seem at points like they’re nothing but one long QTE. Some old games like Dragon’s Lair were actually nothing but QTEs; whole games were made where you did nothing but press individual buttons at the right time to make a character kiss the dragon, slay the princess etc etc, using the new-at-the-time LaserDisc format to maximise the amount of time you were idly watching stuff happen.

Tomb Raider

QTEs (and cut-scenes in general) are infamous for they way they remove all meaningful control from the player. The player-character often suddenly becomes either a super-skilled ninja or a fumbling incompetent, determined by the needs of the scene, and QTEs make this particularly grating because they force you to be complicit in whatever happens.

Developers seem to put these things in games because they’re meant to create drama and help the narrative unfold but what they actually do is remove any element of risk and kill any narrative stone-dead. In the same way as big CGI chase scenes, QTEs are tightly choreographed and there is only one way things are going to work out. If you make a mistake then you die and the thing starts again, usually making you listen to the same terrible dialogue over and over again; there’s no skill, no danger.

I fidget my way through QTEs, only half-listening, the same way I sat through most of the Hobbit. I’d like to see fewer QTEs and fewer pointless CGI-fest chase scenes. Give me danger! Give me uncertainty! Anything but more theme park rides…

CUBD: can you think in 3D?

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I made a game! I’ve been working on it on and off for about six months, between work and freelance projects, and it’s finally ready enough to be released.

It’s called Cubed, and it’s probably best described as a 3D action-puzzle game – think Bejewelled meets Rubik’s Cube. You have to turn sections of the cube to make groups of three or more cubes of the same colour, then click them to remove them from play.

More cubes appear to fill the gaps over time, and the higher your score goes the faster the cubes appear – then when the main puzzle is full you’ve got five seconds to clear some space before it’s game over.

It’s always hard being objective about your own projects, but I’m pretty pleased with it overall. I find that when I’m testing it I often start actually playing it for real, which I think must be a good sign…

It’s built in Flash using the Away3D library, which is powerful but seriously lacking in documentation; I spent a good few nights trying to work out the difference between project() and unproject() and figuring out how transformation matrices worked, with very little support from the library. Once you do find the right function to call, though, it’s pretty easy to set up cameras, light and textures.

I’m in the process of porting it to iOS, which has mostly been fine – the actual process of exporting it for iOS (after struggling through Apple’s ridiculous Developer Program nonsense) is pretty straightforward. What caused me several late nights, though, was the change from mouse events to touch events.

I don’t know if it’s an artefact of Air for iOS, or Away3D, or the specific interactions I was trying to create – or a combination of all of the above – but I encountered a really frustrating bug. I could touch and drag and lift, and that all worked fine, but when I next touched the screen the MOUSE_DOWN event registered at the place the previous MOUSE_UP event triggered.

This was such a weird bug that it took me a while to realise what was actually happening, and then even longer to try and work a way round it. I ended up dumping MOUSE_DOWN events altogether, and substituting MOUSE_OVER instead – when the user touches the screen the “cursor” jumps to that spot, triggering the event.

This worked fine until I installed the Air 3.5 Beta SDK, which broke MOUSE_LEAVE and MOUSE_UP events, and gave me another sleepless night until I realised the SDK was the problem and went back to 3.2. I’m probably missing out on exciting new functionality, but it just wasn’t worth the hassle of having core functionality broken!

UI-wise, I’ve tried to keep everything really stripped back and simple, focusing on interesting interactions rather than complex gameplay mechanics. One big challenge was working out the user’s intention when turning segments of the cube: there are three possible interactions for any cube, turning in X, Y, or Z, and since input devices only function in 2D I have to set rules about what happens when you move the mouse a certain way.

The game projects your movements into 3D space and tries to guess which way you’re trying to spin the cube. This is guesswork, ultimately, but I think the results are generally pretty consistent, and when I’ve watched people play Cubed they pick it up quickly. In general, the iOS version is even better at this, because it removes the mediation of having to interact with the mouse. There’s something really nice and tactile that makes playing on a touchscreen more immediate and more satisfying.

You can get CUBD for iOS here and the game has its own site here. Enjoy!

FTL: a voyage of self-discovery and lasers. In space.

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Shields are down. Weapons are down. Engines damaged, sensors wrecked, and cockpit a blazing inferno, my poor little ship is getting pummelled. The enemy ship is hanging out there in space, haughtily superior, all guns and drones and shiny shields.

My crew dash from compartment to compartment, fighting fires and repairing systems frantically, trying to wring enough power out of the ship for one last shot. Maxim tries frantically fixes the weapons console before asphyxiating – I’d previously vented the atmosphere out of the room in a desperate effort to repel some boarders. Notch, the only one of my original crew left, dies in a fire in the engine room. Left on his own, Geryk can do little except watch as my once mighty ship is taken apart piece by piece. He stays at the helm, a look of grim determination on his face, until a well-placed missile splits my cruiser apart in a fiery blaze…

FTL isn’t a game – it’s an 8-bit arena where battles are fought, victories are snatched and heroes are made. Superficially, of course, it’s a top-down, low budget indie spaceship roguelike, with only a few screens to its name. But take the £6.99 plunge and look beyond the simple graphics and interface and you’ll find a game with depth, replayability and more epic story potential than any AAA title.

There’s virtually no official story in FTL, but that just means that all the drama happens in the gameplay. The most memorable stories aren’t cutscenes or mo-capped dialogue sequences, they’re the ones where you scrape through a whole sector with one hull point remaining, or the battle where you win against all the odds, and limp, crew decimated, ship on fire, to the next jump – only to come face to face with yet another powerful enemy. Rock, Paper, Shotgun have run a whole series of diary-style entries about the dramas (and inevitable fiery deaths), so it must be good.

The interface is pretty stripped-back too, but hides surprisingly complex gameplay. Your ship is a flying balancing act, with a central pool of power that you can redirect towards shields, or weapons, or other equally important subsystems. A good engagement means shuffling power from system to system based on your enemy’s capabilities, focusing on your target’s weakpoints and moving crew to where they’re needed most. I like to think it also means shouting at the screen, demanding more power from the engine room, but your mileage may vary.

You can muddle through the earlier levels without too much micromanagement (or shouting), but when you reach the fabled Sector 7 your ship needs to be upgraded and organised to stand a chance – and even then, it’s surprisingly easy to bump into a single enemy who can lay waste to your best plans.

When you do die – and you will die – death is permanent, and you have to start from scratch again. It’s devastating to lose a ship and crew you’ve become attached to, but hey, there’s a whole new universe to explore every time. As a randomly generated world, there’s always a chance of encountering some cannoned-up flying fortress that kills you on your second jump – and combat can sometimes feel a bit pot-luck like that – but the payoff is a new and exciting journey every time, where you have no idea what’s around the next nebula.

If you can’t tell, I really, really like this game. I’d never have played it were it not for a chance recommendation from a friend, and I’m very glad I did. And for all its charm, depth, and ability to make me write about spaceships like a teenage Trekkie who’s just discovered slash fiction, it’s only £6. Get it!

Reviewed: Darksiders 2

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They say that in games only two things are certain: death and sloppy console ports – which makes Darksiders 2 something of a karmic inevitability.

What was a surprise, however, was that despite my avowed hatred of half-baked console ports, the stupid name and even the gamepad-optimised interface, I actually quite like it. Even the snoozeworthy story isn’t too offensive, and strong voice acting keeps the otherwise forgettable cutscenes watchable.

You play apocalyptic scythe-wrangler Death, on a quest to clear his brother’s name and save the world – predictably, this involves lots of jumping, stabbing, being sarcastic and more fetch quests than you can shake a stick at.

The best bit by far is the combat. It’s a whirling, frenetic experience, and it’s simple to button-bash Death into all kinds of flashy combos and execution moves, making him snip the heads off skeletons and mutant cave things with great aplomb. The casual combat is great fun, but boss battles are more hit-and-miss; while there are a couple of memorable fights against giant enemies, just as many are spoilt by gimmicky weak spots and infuriating controls.

Outside combat, Darksiders is a mix of puzzle-solving platforming and a free-roaming world that you can explore to hoover up the hundred varieties of collectible coins, pages and magic stones that are scattered around. Death has a nice line in climbing and jumping, but the platforming feels a bit simplistic; even the more complicated puzzles are just extended sequences of simple jumps and climbs, and the jumping and collecting and fetching soon start to feel like padding that stretches out what’s already a too-big game.

As you progress you’ll earn more loot, more combat moves and a few unlockable abilities. These let you solve more puzzles but don’t really add much to the gameplay, and occasionally shabby movement controls combined with a lack of signposting means that it’s frustratingly easy to spend ages trying to crack a puzzle that’s actually impossible until later in the game.

That’s the thing about Darksiders: despite the obvious graphic and audio polish it feels strangely unfinished. At launch, players had to contend with minimal graphics settings and no keyboard remapping, and even now after several patches there are still problems: it’s easy to get thoroughly stuck on various pointy bits of the scenery; menus are clunky; things in the shop are sometimes labelled $assetName; mouse sensitivity fluctuates wildly between different menus.

Thankfully the combat is satisfying enough that even despite these niggles I kept playing, looking for one more fight before bed. So is it worth it? Well, if you like slightly generic console-style fun and quantity over quality, then go nuts. But if you’re looking for something that’s original and consistently good, rather than flashes of fun amidst the mundane, I’d go elsewhere.

When working groups… don’t

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The internet has become such a powerful and fundamental part of modern society that you’d think the people in charge wouldn’t leave it in the hands of idiots. But (familiar sigh) that’s exactly what’s happened.

The EU working group whose aim is to “reduce the impact of terrorist use of the internet” have come up with a list of recommendations which has been leaked, possibly by dastardly freedom-hating terrorists. While I have a lot of sympathy for people whose job is essentially trying to stop up all the holes in an globally distributed network of sieves, some of the recommendations they’ve put up for discussion are just beyond stupid.

Just to be clear: I did not make this.

For example: “internet companies” –meaning providers of chat boxes, domain registration, email services, social networks, web forums and VOIP services, among others – must allow only real names for their users. Social media companies should allow only real pictures of users.

There’s the suggestion that police should patrol social networks, quaintly reminiscent of bobbies on the beat – but somehow magnified to compensate for their beat being the information superhighway instead of the local high street.

And there’s a whole leaky raft of other nonsensical, impossible-to-implement suggestions there too. Due to some administrative oversight, apparently terrorist websites don’t currently have a button you can press to report terrorist activity. But that’s ok, because Clean IT have recommended adding a “police button”, so now terrorists can easily report illegal activities with one click. Although frankly, if the reporting process is anything like as long-winded as the one to report a site for misusing cookies then I doubt they’ll bother.

Whether it’s a nasty case of design by committee or actual ineptitude I don’t know, but the overall impression is of people who don’t really know how people use the web. It’s more than likely the only effect of a “police button” would be an enormous pile of admin generated by stupid people reporting the Al Jazeera site. Familiar sigh.

Context is king in mobile optimisation

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There’s a war going on for the mobile web.

“War” is probably a bit dramatic though. To be honest, it’s probably more of a playground squabble. Always nice to start with a bit of exciting conflict though, eh? Anyway: to business!

How do you make a site suitable for mobile devices? Do you make your site responsive, so it changes layout as the browser window size changes, or make a separate mobile website that’s entirely optimised for mobile browsers?

Here’s an interesting article here that compares the two different approaches, using US presidential candidates as examples.

Image from Smashing Mag

So evangelising about different technologies and comparing implementations is all well and good – but decision about which solution to go with needs to be led by content and UX rather than design or technology. The article points at a super-long page on Obama’s site as an example of where things can fall down – but there’s nothing inherently wrong with long pages with mixed content on mobile; whether they’re appropriate depends on the content and the users.

Mobile technology is something the rest of the team may well have an opinion on too – as shown by the statement “the Web design world is entrenched in its own debate about how to address the mobile Web” – but they may or may not be aware of it. Without an objective overview you might end up with one or the other by default just because no-one thought about it properly.

I’ve seen a lot of stuff like this before, where someone has heard about the big new thing in web design and wants to build something with it – regardless of whether it’s actually the right tool for the job. That’s how you end up with mobile mega-menus that replicate a load of content that already exists on the page in a mobile-friendly format, and that’s likely why Obama’s site has that humongous page: no-one considered the impact of the technical decisions on the user experience.

These are some of the hardest decisions to get involved with as a UX person – partly because designers and developers like making their own decisions, but also because a lot of these kinds of decisions get made unconsciously. People often have an unconscious bias towards certain technologies or solutions and will make any number of strange decisions without really thinking about it if left to their own devices.

And how do you get involved at the right time? Well, that’s something I’m still trying to work out. I get asked about whether buttons should be red or green or blue or whatever all the time, when frankly I don’t really care. What I do care about is the hidden decisions that are being made, the small discussions within the team that affect whole pages – the ones that are decided before anyone realises and shut off discussion by virtue of being the “obvious” choice for people who prefer one technology over another.

So how do you keep tabs on what’s going on and stay involved without smothering the rest of the team? Where does the middle ground lie? I’ll let you know when I find out.

Technology and Tony Nicklinson

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In the news today, Tony Nicklinson lost his legal battle to be killed. Tony is a victim of locked-in syndrome after suffering a stroke seven years ago, and is almost completely paralysed. He’s been campaigning for the right to die – or more specifically, for the right for someone to kill him, in accordance with his wishes, without being punished for it.

Assisted suicide is when someone is helped to kill themselves. It’s currently illegal in the UK, so usually when someone wants to end their own life they travel abroad to somewhere like Dignitas, in Switzerland. Even helping someone travel there is technically illegal, although no-one has actually been prosecuted for it – yet.

Sadly this isn’t much help to Tony: because he’s completely paralysed he’s unable to take his own life, even with assistance, so if he wants to die he needs someone else to do it for him. As Cathy Newman said on the Channel 4 news tonight, if he could but lift his arm enough to take some pills then he’d be able to take his own life – but as it stands he’s a man caught at the sharp end of a blunt law.

As I watched the report I thought about how advances in technology have helped paralysed people interact with computers, and then I started thinking about whether any of that could help Tony die. There are all kinds of eye-tracking products out there to let people control a cursor using just their eyes – and if you can control a cursor, presumably you could press a button that triggers a lethal injection.

At first glance it seems a world away from the normal accessibility issues you deal with – generally you don’t want your users to die when they click something – but in practical terms there’s little different between clicking “buy” and clicking… well…

I’d guess that setting up the apparatus of a lethal injection or other device would still leave you on the wrong side of the assisted-dying law, even if Tony himself was the one who activated it, but that’s surely better than a murder charge.

I think it’s disgraceful that Tony has been left hanging, unable to take his own life and unwilling to place his family or friends at odds with the law by killing him; as usual, the law is lagging a long way behind advances in medical technology. I hope that in five years’ time we can look back on Tony’s case in the same way we look back on slavery and other barbarism, and wonder why it took so long for society to realise that people should be free to end their lives when and how they want. Maybe in the meantime technology can ease the pain of the people waiting for the law to catch up.

There’s a petition here you can sign to try and hurry those changes along.

Games and sci-fi: here’s what you could have had…

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Games do a lot of things well: running, jumping, shooting stuff – but the genre’s Achilles heel has always been story telling. Most games have stories that sound like they were scribbled down on the back of a fag packet, and even the few that are celebrated for their narratives rarely rise above the level of bargain-bin fiction.

A good story is something to be celebrated, but with the bar set so low gamers and up holding up as good storytelling anything that’s even vaguely above par. One of those celebrated games is Mass Effect 3, an action-RPG space opera that tells a story of civilisation-ending cosmic horrors, titanic fleet battles and ethical quandaries on alien worlds.

It sounds pretty epic, in theory. But gameplay-wise, it sticks pretty closely to the tried and tested ME formula of walking, talking, shooting and shopping your way around the universe. Your mission is to gather a plucky band of ragtag adventurers to defend Earth and see off the cosmic horror that’s coming to eat everyone. You are all that stands between galactic civilisation and utter destruction. Or, you know, whatever. It’s not exactly space Shakespeare.

There’s space and shiny stuff and aliens with funny foreheads, but I can’t help but feel there’s a real lack of imagination in Mass Effect’s setting. The best of sci-fi tells a great story but also challenges you, and the joy of the genre is that you’re not constrained by the real world. When you can invent tales of virtual super-dimensional hermaphrodites salsa-dancing in a black hole (probably) why settle for your average mundane story but IN SPACE?

In ME, the aliens speak English, everything happens at the usual pace, you spend half the game collecting credits to buy new guns from a shop, and so on and so on; AIs are banned, guns still go bang and people seem to communicate via shiny holographic arm-sleeve cum digital watches.

Where’s the inventiveness? Where’s the interesting technology, beyond “shields” and “sensors”? Where are the alien aliens, rather than ones that are a slightly funny shape or have a deep voice or an eastern European accent? Mass Effect settles for a proud warrior race, a sneaky fast-talking race, some guys with big teeth, an ancient race who have disappeared, leaving behind nothing but a smattering of mysterious technology… It’s pretty standard sci-fi tropes all round.

I would love to see more challenging sci-fi games. So by way of example, here’s a few sci-fi settings that I think kick the crap out of Mass Effect’s mass-market Saturday afternoon telly soap story.

 

The Culture novels by Iain M Banks.

This series really is epic. The setting is a galaxy-spanning culture run by benevolent (we hope) and god-like (with all the capriciousness that implies) AIs; a post-scarcity, post-money, society where humans are left with little to do but twiddle their thumbs and try to retain a totally-unjustified sense of self-importance.

The physical world is just another inconvenience: gender is nothing but a phase, sexuality is basically “cool, whatever”, when you’ve lived as long as you like you can upload yourself and dilly dally around the cosmos or hang out in a psychedelic virtual world for as long as you like.

One book of the series is mostly dialogue between the AIs controlling kilometres-long ships. Another is about the struggle to escape a virtual reality hell created by fundamentalist societies to punish the dead. There sheer variety in the series means there’s some variation in quality (Look to Windward is sheer poetry; Matter is interesting but a bit over-long) but they’re all far more paced and nuanced than Mass Effect.

The first novel is Consider Phlebas, which drops you right in to the setting without armbands. The Player of Games is the second, and eases you in a little more. Either is well worth a read.

 

The Uplift series by David Brin.

The Uplift series follows the bewildered human race as we stumble, blinking, into a galaxy-spanning alien civilisation that’s been doing its thing for billions of years already. “Uplift” refers to the cyclical process of sentient species raising other species to sentience, creating a chain of Client and Patron races, so the idea of a “wolfling” species who evolved independently causes trouble – a lot of it.

There’s a bewildering range of aliens, from bipedal tiger-like empaths to sentient crabs with five mouths and gestalt beings made of towers of waxy rings. Each species is described with gorgeous detail about their lives and ways of seeing the world, and Brin does an incredible job of creating a weird and wonderful - and alien - world in which humans are just one insignificant part.

The technology can feel a little dated after reading Banks’ all-powerful AIs with their ability to read (and write) every bit of data in your brain from halfway across the solar system, but it’s still a fantastic setting.

The first book is a nice introduction to the universe, then it really kicks off with the loosely related Uplift War series, building to a galaxy-shattering climax that pushes the cast to breaking point. Just a few of the high points are a ship crewed mostly by uplifted dolphins and a sentient chimp who patrols a dimension made entirely of ideas. It all sounds a little bit Mighty Boosh when you put it like that, but then that’s the point of sci-fi, I suppose.

 

Blindsight by Peter Watts:

A first-contact tale that depicts the most alien aliens I’ve ever read – I won’t say too much because it’d spoil the plot, but the sheer mind-fucking weirdness of it all is equalled only by the amazement when you realise that everything he’s saying makes sense, and you start to wonder just how much we’re the odd-ones-out…

The cast of damaged, modified and just plain weird characters are fascinating – Watts takes characters with multiple personality syndrome and hemispherical lobotomies and turns their problems into gifts, of a sort.

It’s uncompromising in its vision and language, and it’s probably not for everyone, but I think that games (to get back to my original point) could do with a dose of Watts’ spirit of adventure and willingness to do something that challenges the audience.

 

Any and all of these books are well worth a read, especially if you’re bored of the tyranny of games written for mainstream audiences who spit their dummies out whenever there’s an ending they deem unworthy. I’ve never heard of an author changing an ending because the readership got all sulky, and frankly I think that’s a good thing.

It may be malware – but at least it’s OUR malware

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We think of computer viruses and malware as inconveniences; pesky programs written by hackers and geeks in basements to either steal money or just cause trouble. They’re the online equivalent of pickpockets and opportunist thieves, and installing anti-virus software is the virtual equivalent of putting a lock on your front door. Some intruders, however, have darker motives than others.

Stuxnet is a piece of malware whose goal is to damage centrifuges used by Iran to enrich uranium. It was created by a join US/Israeli project as part of Operation Olympic Games, a  wave of cyber-attacks intended to slow or halt Iran’s nuclear project. Stuxnet’s more complex follow-up Flame stole documents and information, and was remotely instructed to self-destruct when it was discovered – it seems almost certain that Flame too was the work of nations targeting other nations.

Which somewhat changes how we should think of malware. Now the guy trying to slip his hand into your pocket might actually be from the CIA or Mossad, with all the resources that implies – so where does that leave anti-virus makers?

Cyber-security companies have a choice to make– if they’ve not silently made it already. Are they neutral watchmen whose job is to stop malicious attacks, whatever their country of origin and intended purpose? Or are they obedient servants of a national government first and cyber-sheriffs second?

Kaspersky is a Russian AV company whose founder is an ex KGB member; ESET is from Slovakia; Symantec are an American company known for working with the FBI. Software from just those three is installed on millions on computers around the world, ostensibly protecting them against all malicious intruders.

What happens if the US government is developing malware designed to steal information that’s protected by a American company’s anti-virus software? It wouldn’t take a stretch of the imagination to think that the government might lean on that company to help out, say by providing a backdoor, or overlooking the signs of infection.

There are interesting consequences either way. If that happens even once – or even if the thought that it might happen is there – would the AV industry change from a global to a national one? Would Chinese users willingly buy into an American company that had shown it was willing to put its own national interest above their security?

And if AV companies don’t submit then they’re indirectly obstructing their government’s ambitions, not to mention putting themselves in the sights of whoever created hugely sophisticated malware like Flame. If, like Stuxnet, Flame was created by the American and Israeli governments then they were the ones who cracked Microsoft’s precious update process in order to spread their malware and sneaked past every AV product out there.

Flame and Stuxnet got through because they had enormous amounts of resources spent to make them that way. Most viruses and malware are simple, in relative terms; creating Flame would have required “world-class cryptographers who have broken new ground in their field”.

I certainly wouldn’t like to be the cyber-security company who has to be constantly on the lookout for the next attack of that magnitude, without any idea where or when it might happen. Is the only alternative to sell your loyalty to a government? Who knows.

It must be a difficult choice to face; but I think what’s going to be more difficult is telling who’s already made that decision and which way they’ve gone. Who’s standing up for your rights, and who sold out your security in exchange for their own?