The new blog is up! I’ll be posting my “bloggish” type articles there from now on.

It’s available at http://patrickbeja.com

Note: I’m dating this article Feb 1st 2010 because I don’t think it should appear on the main page, as there isn’t any new content on the blog just yet. It was actually published on April 11th 2010, a few days after the blog went live.

So Apple announced its long awaited tablet this week, and many have commented, analysed, cried in despair and praised the oversized iPod. One thing that I have seen yet though is a deeper look at what it means for the computer world and computer users going forward. I’ll take a stab at it.

What Aunt Edna Needs

It seems that at least half the tech world is disappointed that they won’t be able to code C# or run photoshop on their iPad. I humbly believe that this is due to a very deep misunderstanding of the concept that Apple introduced this past Wednesday. Indeed, more than just a new device, they have created a new kind of machine, that many of their competitors will try to replicate in the coming months and years:

The ”easy computer”. Or “everyday computer”, or “home computer” or “casual computer”. I chose to call it the former, but this is what it essentially boils down to: in the past 10 to 15 years, many people have begun “needing” computers to do very simple things. Email, photos, the web, etc. They never needed computers before, and the computers we know weren’t designed for them, or even to handle these simple tasks. Computers as we know them were designed for intensive, professional, serious uses. Think of your mom, your uncle, your grand parents… They do not need, nor do they really want a complicated machine to do all these tasks. How long has your aunt Edna been using a computer, and how long has she stubbornly refused to learn how to install a program, how the file system works, or the difference between Internet Explorer and Firefox. More importantly, she doesn’t care about all this. She wants to answer her email, go to that cooking website she likes, and look at the soccer practice pictures you sent her. Remember: your aunt Edna is not you. You might care, but to her these are over complicated and useless headaches.

All these “new users” (who didn’t care about computers until 10 years ago) don’t really use a computer to its fullest. They only came to computers with these uses that have been created recently. Let’s take an arbitrary number: most, if not all of the time, they use 20% of the computer’s capabilities, and the other 80% are in the way. Well, an ”easy computer” will provide them with these 20% they need, hassle free.

The Easy Computer

Here’s the best analogy I could find: a PC can do gaming. Some might argue that it’s even the best gaming platform out there. Yet the real gaming industry is on consoles. Why? They are simple. You hook them up to your TV and you start playing. Sure, some games are huge on the PC, but most games will sell more on an Xbox or a PS3. I’m talking about “real” gaming (another argument could be made here about what the Wii is, but it would actually only support the point of this article). This comes to the great despair of the same purists who will belittle the iPad for not being able to achieve the same thing as a “real” computer: “a console isn’t as cool as a PC!” they’d say. That’s not the point. It’s not supposed to be. I’d encourage you to think of the iPad as the equivalent of game consoles, but for “casual computing”.

Don’t get me wrong: it is fair to criticize the iPad itself. No webcam is a disappointment, no Flash support is annoying, no multitask is downright painful. But make no mistake: your aunt Edna won’t care. She’ll see a nice, cute, easy to use tool that will enable her to do all these things she does on her big, clunky computer. And without the fear of messing something up. And guess what: you’ll be happy too, because she won’t have to call you every other week to fix something she did because she refuses to learn how to use that big computer (most of which she doesn’t need anayway).

The Netbook argument

Many people say they wanted something more akin to a netbook. A “real” OS that they can tinker with and use “like a mini computer”. But these netbooks fail: try as they might, they are not a real computer. They are small, they lack power, and their OS isn’t designed for that form factor. Again, I’m certain that some people have a need for them, but they are in the minority.
The point is: netbooks try to do too much, and they do nothing well. An “easy computer” will do less, but it will do it well. And for most people, that “less” is all they need.

The Concept

It might not be obvious, but I’m not really talking about the iPad here. I’m talking about the idea that the iPad introduces. It’s a new idea, that seems obvious once we’ve understood it: computers don’t have to be what we think computers are. They can be more simple, more usable, less capable, and more adapted to the uses that some (most?) people have. Apple isn’t the first company to try and achieve this. In a sense, netbooks were trying this also, and I’m certain many others have tried before. But they have failed, on the large, wide consumer market sense of things. Just like others had failed at MP3 players or smartphones before Apple entered the market. Will the iPad succeed? I think it will (it’s sexy, which is what matters to most), but maybe I’m wrong. What I really don’t think I’m mistaken about though, is this idea that they have  introduced a new concept in the tech world.
Easy Computers are here to stay, and Apple won’t be the only ones to make them…

Yesterday I got an email by a listener of The Phileas Club. I often get emails and answer them privately, but after writing this one I thought that it was summarizing my thoughts on the topic enough that I should make a blog post about it. So here is the original email, and my answer.
Quick note: the topic is sensitive, and in the past we have managed to keep these kinds of debates very civilized on this blog. If you chose to comment, please keep that tradition alive, thanks!

B.’s email:

I recently started listening to your show and started from the beginning and have been slowly catching up to the recent shows. I was a little disappointed at the sara palen talk because of the anti religious tone it took but let it go because i figured that was going on in the media at the time as well. Then I got to episode 10 and was completely offended at the comment you made that something should be done to people that preach the young earth theory. Evolution is not fact, it might be the majority view but remember that the majority also thought the world was flat at one point. There are scientists that use the same research as evolutionist and show it to back the theory of a young earth. I don’t expect you to change your view on this subject but I think you should know that our comment upset me.

And my answer (I didn’t address the Sarah Palin comments or the other details, as I thought they weren’t really the core of the issue):

Hi B.,

First of all let me thank you for taking the time to write to me; I really appreciate it.

That being said, I’m very sorry but I’m afraid that I cannot subscribe to what you’re saying… The “young earth theory” is not a theory, it’s a belief. The people who support it aren’t scientists, they’re spokespeople for organisations that have other agendas. A theory is supported by verifiable fact, and no fact comes to support the idea that the earth is 6000 years old. No scientist worth their salt, and no one who understands the meaning of the word, will give any credit to it.

This is my whole argument: by treating this “idea” as a theory, we validate it and lead people to believe that there might be some truth to it. There isn’t, and we should stop indulging it altogether. Don’t get me wrong: you are of course free to believe whatever you want, but believing something like that is very simply ignorance and missinformation, not “just another theory”.

It’s very ironic that you would use the “flat earth” example as a comparison, because you are on the very side of the people who defended it for so long, and they did it for the exact same reasons! How saddening is it that hundreds of years later we have to be fighting the same fight against the same people in the same way? Thankfully no one is getting burned today…

Also, I have to say that I don’t understand why some people need to discredit evolution in order to be comfortable with their faith. I think this agenda comes from a very literal reading of the bible that some people need to maintain in order to follow other literal interpretations also. I guess their thinking is: “if you discredit this one, then maybe the other ones aren’t valid either!”. So they will do everything they can to maintain it, no matter how ludicrous or just plain silly. But why couldn’t have God planted, planned and even executed evolution? Why couldn’t he be watching our every move, tweeking and adjusting his creations and their DNA to take them where he wants to take them? He could, and that’s probably what he did.

Evolution is NOT incompatible with faith. It is only incompatible with a very narrow and literal view of the bible, which only the more extreme want to uphold. The bible is a guide and a light to help you grow, not an instruction booklet for mindless drones who should follow it blindly and be forbidden to think about the meaning.

I know that you won’t believe me and I won’t change your mind, and that’s absolutely fine. We can disagree and stay civilized, but I won’t treat that idea as just a theory, because it devalues us and our progress: if we indulge ignorance, we start regressing as a society. And by the way, even the pope says that this concept is ridiculous and acknowledges evolution beyond the shadow of a doubt… Who am I to disagree with the pope?

Anyway, that’s my two cents about the topic. I hope I didn’t offend you (too much) and I’d like to thank you again for writing to me about this. I might sound harsh but I truly appreciate the fact that you would want to let me know how you felt rather than just being angry at me in your corner of our beautiful (round) planet!

It’s been roughly six months since the last expansion came out, so I thought it would be a good time to give my thoughts about how the game has evolved and where it is today.

Short disclaimer: this is, as usual, a very long article that I’m pretty sure a lot of people won’t have the time to read. I’m ok with it; my short little fun blurbs have a much better home on my twitter page, and I aim my blog articles at some slightly more in depth analysis. My aim here isn’t to just state what I like or dislike, but rather to take a longer look at the hows and whys of the choices that were made, and try to understand the philosophy of this type of game design. I would recommend this article to any Wow fan, but also any MMO enthusiast who doesn’t have the time to get to level 80 in Wow and explore the intricacies of Blizzard’s designs.
So anyway, if you have a little bit of time to waste I hope you enjoy it and it brings something to your day!

Ok, here we go:

There are a few very obvious good sides and bad sides to the game today compared to what it was in Burning Crusade, or even Classic Wow. I think most people will agree on these:

The good includes the leveling process from 70 to 80. I think everyone agrees it strike an almost perfect balance between innovative quests and the usual “kill ten rats” ones. To the point that I don’t know how they could make it a lot better without completely changing the MMORPG paradigm. They involve you in interesting story lines, they don’t draw out the leveling as you get closer to 80, and each zone has epic events and characters that you will remember throughout… I really think you’ll be hard pressed finding people who dislike the experience.

The bad includes the horrible horrible lag in some zones (Dalaran at peak hours, Wintergrasp and the whole continent when battles end, some raid instances when they are particularly populated…). Some of those have been / are being addressed, but it’s still a very clear shortcoming of this version of the game.
I could also talk about the fact that group dynamics have been murdered by the revamping of some gameplay mechanics: crowd control is a distant memory, tanking is a semi-mindless AOE fest, mana regeneration has become so overinflated that you basically never hear any healer saying he’s out of mana anymore… The flip side being that when you start an instance, you can be pretty certain that you’re going to be able to complete it, and in a reasonable amount of time at that (painful memories of The Shadow Labyrinth from The Burning Crusade come to mind). There should be a middle ground somewhere, or maybe some optional way to challenge players a bit more. I for one hope they find it at some point.
Lastly, the game has become more “arcady” and “easy” than it ever was. Some people dislike this and I certainly can understand why. I do however think this has more upsides than downsides, but that’s another story.

So all this is true and has been discussed at length in many forums. What I would like to point out here is the incredible mechanics and designs that Blizzard has managed to implement into this expansion and that are going slightly unnoticed, or at least undiscussed.

Fun specs

Not so long ago, a large part of the talent trees were uninteresting and / or inefficient in many situations. Yet you you HAD to spec into them for certain purposes. No more! Every single spec has some awesomeness to them. You might dislike one or the other because it doesn’t fit your play style, but all the specs now include the “concentrated coolness” principle that Blizzard is fond of. I would even go as far as to say that talent builds have become more difficult to create because 90% of the talents are appealing, which is quite an achievement in itself. Note that I’m not talking about optimizing and minmaxing your spec to be the best possible tank or raid DPS or PVP murderer, but just about the innate cool factor of each talent. They almost all seem cool and useful, and you want them all when you’re building your tree. It makes for hard choices when some of them were very clearly fillers previously. If you don’t believe me, just go take a look at the talent trees pre-3.0.

Gameplay improvement through procs

This mostly applies to DPS classes, which had very regular spell rotations they could repeat ad nauseum in almost every encounter in the game. Some had the fun of crowd controlling to spice things up (which has now disappeared as I said) but apart from that you could pretty much sleep through your raid nights or even leveling sessions.
One of the features that is being used a lot more today is the idea of one of your action or spell effect “allowing” you to use another one.
For example, an arms warrior will sometimes be allowed to use the Overpower ability when his Rend does damage, even if the primary condition for their overpower ability isn’t met. A mage will get an instant Pyroblast if two of his spells critically hit in a row. This is true throughout the classes and talent trees in the game. the benefit for the player is that it forces them to pay attention to what’s happening and gets them out of the incredibly monotonous process that DPS used to be. Great great improvement, makes the DPS role a lot more involved and a lot more fun. Now if we could just get a smidge of crowd control back also, it would be heaven.

Class Balance

I don’t think class balance has ever been as good as it is today, both in PVE and PVP. Some might disagree with me, but you need to understand what I’m saying: I’m not saying class balance is perfect, I’m just saying it’s very acceptable in most cases, and that it’s certainly the best it’s ever been.
In PVE, a tank is now a tank, no matter the class. It wasn’t always like that, and some groups would often misgidedly reject this or that class out of hand because “they’re not good enough for this instance”. I can also remember a time where groups would require a priest as a healer, and there were severe disparities in DPS capabilities. No more! ™ Sure, you can find some classes that will do better than others if you’re picky, but all in all they are mostly equivalent while staying different in play style.
PVP is a touchy subject. I certainly don’t mean to imply that classes are balanced against any other here either, because they are not. But all classes (and even most specs) are viable in PVP. Sure, some classes or specs are hopelessly underpowered in some situations (hunters in 2v2 arenas are at the bottom of the barrel) and some classes are still painfully powerful (no one can withstand the DPS and stun fest that a couple of rogues can instill with a well set up opener, and it’s some healers will survive for hours, even against two opponents). But overall, the situation has become largely acceptable and mostly very satisfactory in all PVP situations. Unless you want to be the absolute best you can be in a specific situation, you can pretty much go with the class or spec you like and have fun in most PVP situations. Again, pre-3.0, it really really really wasn’t the case.

Different avenues to get gear

We’re leaving the realm of gameplay mechanics here and entering “game design land”. Giving you options to get gear is a designer’s way to not force you to do something you don’t want to, which is absolutely brilliant. In Burning Crusade, getting the best pre-raiding gear required you to go through hours and hours of farming, repeating the same instance to either get the piece of armor off this one boss that dropped it, or to get your reputation up with the specific faction that would sell it to you. Here’s a list of how you can get great pre-raiding items in Wrath of the Lich King:
- Running a dungeon in the hopes of getting that one item you want from that one boss you need to kill. It usually won’t take more than three of four tries (keep in mind that an instance is takes only a fraction of the time it did in previous versions of the game, and it has become easy enough that you will complete it 99% of the time). At the same time you will get badges and reputation for the faction of your choice, so it never really feels like you’re wasting your time even if you don’t get the item you wanted. What’s more, you can run a variety of instances while still getting these benefits. This is a well known part of the puzzle, but bare with me.
- Running entry level raids with random people has become very possible, especially at this point in the game where people are geared and know the encounter strategies. It is very easy to keep an eye on the general or LFG channel and spot a “need one last <insert your role here> for Sartharion”, jump in, get your loot and leave. Same goes for Naxxramas, or even Ulduar in some cases.
- Buy from faction vendors. Even at lower reputation levels you’ll get some decent rare items, and getting to the higher levels that will allow you to purchase epics is way easier than it used to be.
- Buy from badge vendors. Again, you get these no matter what, and the equipment you can purchase with the badges is comparable to the epics you would get in entry level raids.
- Buy craftable epics. Each class / role has at least two pieces of armor they can use, plus one or two weapons, a neckless and a ring. With this alone, you’re already well on your way.
- Do your weekly Archavon / Emalon run. A pugable encounter (yes, even Emalon is largely pugable if you have a slight idea of what you’re doing, and it will become increasingly so as people get geared up). This is a simple process that requires no planning and that even the most casual players can benefit from. It will provide you with some of the best gear in the game, both for PVE and for PVP. By the way, I disagree with people who say that giving you good gear through this easy avenue was a mistake on Blizzard’s part: the weekly timer ensures that you won’t get geared to fast, but it still gives everyone the feeling that they are achieving something. And by the time you’ve actually gotten some nice drops, the next level of gear has been introduced in the game anyway.

So this is a summary of the ways you can get gear for PVE, and the list of improvements to the ways of getting PVP items is almost as long, so I won’t get into it here. The point is that while it is still a reasonably long process to get to where you want to be in terms of performance with your character, the trip has become a far less repetitive and monotonous one.
Some people think that giving casual players the same powerful gear that you give hard core players is a mistake because it devalues their achievements. While I certainly understand the concern, I have to say that after a few months of actually playing the game I find I’m having a lot more fun / motivation / satisfaction in the gearing process (which is a core component in the game) than I ever did. And I suspect that a lot of the large casual player base agrees with me. In the end, making the game more enjoyable for as many players as possible is what really matters. These concerns were very valid ones in theory and they were discussed at length before the game came out, but I would submit that in actuality you would be hard pressed finding people who enjoy Wrath of the Lich King *less*than they did Burning Crusade.

Hard work for little optimization

This might sound like a bad thing, but let me explain: in previous versions of the game, you had a linear path to optimisation with, let’s say 100 “time units” to get the first tier of enchantment. Then you’d need to spend 400 “time units” to get the second tier of enchantment, but it would be so much better than the first tier that you basicaly needed to do it if you wanted to be taken seriously. Today, the time structure is the same, but the benefit from going to tier one to tier two is minimal. This is true for reputation enchantments and regular enchantments alike: a very expensive weapon enchantment or an “exalted” reputation enchantment will only be slightly better than the trivial “cheap” or “honored” variety. The difference is not negligible, so people who want to be the best at what they do will still be motivated to go the extra mile, but it’s not so much better that people who didn’t invest this bigger amount of time aren’t able to compete.

Profession benefits

Last improvement that I was skeptical about but turned out to be very beneficial: the professions philosophy revamp. Before WotLK, professions provided you with pieces of equipment that only you could use, giving players the motivation (and sometimes feeling of obligation) to level up their craft. Today, you can sell almost any piece of equipment you can craft, which helps pretty much everyone gear up. The unique benefit that you will get for leveling your profession will come in the form of very powerful or very easily accessible enchantments: spellthreads, special gems, gem sockets, shoulder enchantments, armor kits, etc.
This is brilliant because, once again, it provides a very clear advantage to the people who invest the time and effort in their craft, yet it doesn’t give anyone the feeling that they need to do it in order to be competitive.

Well, I guess that’s it. If I’m forgetting a couple I’ll update the post, but what I take away from all this is that the designers at Blizzard have made a clear play for the “don’t force anyone into anything” path. Wrath of the Lich King could have been subtitled “do what you like”. Sure it has its problems, there’s no denying that. But in my opinion, the good far makes up for the bad. I can’t wait to see how they will manage to top themselves in the next expansion…

“Again with Twitter?!”
Yeah I know… Twitter is here, get used to it.

Alright, so what does Twitter need? First one who says “a business model” gets a cookie. Yes, they do need that, but let me take a detour through the user side of things for a moment and I’ll get back to that in a minute.

As I have said before, Twitter’s simplicity is its strength. I don’t think they should give it up for anything. Others have tried to “enhance” the user experience by adding threading and things like that. An interesting idea on paper, but it does take away some of the product’s usability. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a hater; let’s just say it’s different and the crowds seem to be gravitating towards more simplicity.
So Twitter has to stay simple, but there is still room to expand. And I think topical conversations is indeed something that could enhance the user experience tremendously. If done right, and in the spirit of the product.
In comes the #hashtag. We all know that you can use these to specify what topic you are talking about. This is incredibly useful and I strongly believe Twitter should make it its next big push. So to put things clearly:

@notpatrick thinks @twitter should embrace #hashtags and make them the second arm of the community.

Here’s how it would work: you follow @people the way you always have, and you can also follow #conversations. These would work pretty much the same way: if you follow #grammys, anytime anyone says something in that topic (with a #grammy in the message), you see it in your feed. Thus following the global conversation that you’re interested in.
Of course, this has a huge potential for overflowing / making your feed unreadable. Just separate the two: add a tab on the front page for your conversations feed, and make it an option to merge the two.
It also has a potential for spamming: the one internet vice that Twitter is spared from because you choose who you follow. If anyone can add a #something and be on 20.000 people’s feeds, it will happen fast. But there are ways to control it (you need to sign up to be on twitter) and a clever use of crowdsourcing (a “signal user as spammer” feature) would pretty much smash the issue on the spot.

And just think of how much we would get out of it though: the Twitter dynamic mixed with information you care about and opinions from around the world. Discover interesting people, learn new things… A new world of possibilities opens. Now that the Fail Whale is nothing but a distant memory and that Twitter is a reliable tool, I think the team should concentrate their efforts and get this integrated into the service and API.

So what’s the upside for them you ask? Well, not only would that be a great for the users, but I think it would also hold the key (ok, a key) to the long awaited business model for the service. Sure, they could make the general API a pay-for acess as other have suggested, but I think this could also be an avenue worth exploring.
We have been promised no advertising in our regular feeds, not now, not ever. And I agree that it would be both an inconvenience and a sort of invasion of privacy. Not so in the #conversation feeds. These are general conversations that no one really has ownership over, hence no sence of privacy. As long as your regular @people feed is protected, I think most people wouldn’t mind seeing an ad an hour in their #conversation feed.
Now if we agree on this, think about how insanely tailored those ads would be! Not only do they already know all about you (your tweets, the people you follow), but now they would also know precisely what you’re interested in (the conversations you subscribe to). This would be Google Adsense on steroïds and would sell like virtual hotcakes.

There you go Twtter, problem sovled. Get on it.

And baring that, third party clients like the wonderful Twhirl from the Seesmic team should integrate that functionality. Like, right now.

[Edit: People are noting that this is already possible in some third party apps, which is great. But this is only a stopgap; having it integrated in the stardard site and API is the only way to make it truely universal and push the feature's use. And the only way to allow for monetization of course...]

[Edit 2: Another possible monetization: I would actually pay a buck or two a month for an added service like that, and I'm sure a lot of other people would too.]

Alright, so everyone has heard about it. Some of you probably use it. But most people have a very hard time explaining what the heck Twitter even is…
So I’ll try my hand at this. The aim is to write a short description of why so many people love Twitter so much, and explain why it is a major new form of communication, just like email and instant messaging were in their time.

If I do things right, next time your friends ask you about Twitter and you go insane trying to explain it, you can just send them to this article and they should have a vague idea of why it’s such a great tool.

Ok here we go.

What twitter is

First let me do a brief description of how it works:

1) You create an account and send short “status updates”. This creates a page where all your status updates are displayed chronologically (twitter.com/yourname).

2) You chose other people to “follow”. The updates from all these people will appear on your twitter home page when you log in (twitter.com/home).

3) Consequently, all the people who follow you (friends, family, fans) will see all your updates.

4) If you include “@nameofperson” in your message, that person will see it whether they are following you or not.

5) You use the site and third party software on your computer or phone to read your page and send updates in the easiest way possible. Some will allow you to attach location and picture.

That’s it.
It might seem simple and obvious, but this tool effectively creates a way for thousands and thousands of people to communicate effectively without talking over one another.

“Dude, it’s just like Facebook” – “Hey, I can do that with Messenger!” – “But email works just like that!” – …

First of all, don’t “dude” me when you’re talking about Facebook, it makes you sound like Myspace. And second, I can assure you that whatever you think it’s like, it is not.
Twitter is very unique for a great many reasons. Understanding that is important. So to that effect, now that you know what twitter is, let me tell you what it’s not.

What twitter is not

- It’s not email:
If you want to send information to your friends via email, you will have to manually select each of them. Here, one “tweet” will instantly go out for everyone to see with no effort. It also has an Instant Messaging quality to it, so people don’t need to “check” their email, they will most likely get the update instantly.

- It’s not Instant Messaging:
You are not required or even expected to see and / or respond to anything on Twitter. If you’re there to read it, fine. If you’re not, cool. You can read those later anyway. Sort of like you would on Facebook: you check it whenever you have time to keep up with your friends.

- It’s not Facebook:
Social networks are typically symmetrical, meaning that whoever you are friends with also has to be friends with you. You hear what they say, they hear what you say. So no one person can reasonably claim to understand anything if they’re above a couple hundred friends (oh, and I don’t care what your friend Casey says, she doesn’t actually have 346 friends).
Twitter is asymmetrical, so if you follow someone, they won’t automatically follow you too. This means that one person can be followed by hundreds or thousands of people and not be clogged with all the constant updating they will do. Great for famous people. In a way it’s kind of what happens on a forum: you put something out and lots of people can read it.

- It’s not a forum:
A forum is complex and very segmented. If you want to talk about this, you need to do it here, in that thread, or you will disturb its flow. Twitter has no real categories per se, deep meaningful conversations isn’t what it was designed for. Sure there are ways to categorize your tweets (#topic will classify your tweet as related to that topic), but in essence it’s more “short bursts of conversation” that die out rather fast. It’s like having a constant giant chat room along with you all the time.

- It’s not a chat room:
Chat rooms are impossible to moderate when you go above a certain number of participants. Not so with Twitter, since you yourself chose who you listen to. If someone is bordering on spammy, just drop them and you’re fine.
But at the same time, other people will listen to different people, and the whole network is pervasive. For example, you follow A who says something awesome (Chinese Democracy rocks). You repeat it in your feed, and B and C hear it too, and respond (Chinese Democracy sucks). A might follow C and say something to that response (Eat crap you Celine Dion lover!)
Like I said, a giant room with thousands and thousands of people having conversations at the same time and not talking over one another. And believe it or not, it’s both civil and interesting most of the time. It has to be: when it’s not, you just stop listening. It’s like magic, really.

So as you can see, Twitter is a little bit of everything else but not quite the same as everything else. It borrows from the ways we use to communicate today, blends them together, leaves some things out, adds some things in, and comes out as something completely new.

And it doesn’t replace the old things either! It just adds to the mix. No one stopped using email when ICQ came out and IMs became popular. No one stopped calling people on the phone when email arrived. New tools just make some things easier, very rarely are they supposed to replace the old ones. So I can assure you that Twitter is not supposed to be Facebook or email, nor should you not want to use it because you already have those.
Twitter is another tool that lets us stay in touch and communicate and exchange ideas and knowledge (and essential information about the number of cups of coffee you’ve had today) in a new and wonderful way…

In closing

So I guess I’ll stop there; by now you hopefully have an idea of how and why Twitter is as innovative as it is cool. But to really understand the beauty of twitter you have to try it for yourself. I’m sorry, I know it’s what everyone says, but it’s because it’s true… So please give it a try and see if you like it. You might not, but at least you’ll know what all the fuss is about.

By the way, you can follow me at twitter.com/notpatrick. You won’t be sorry.
Well, you probably will, but it’ll be too late.

Democracy isn’t a perfect system, it’s just the best one we’ve found yet. And as with anything that’s not perfect, you’ve got issues that can become pretty freakin’ annoying after a while. On the Internet, which is probably the most extreme form of democracy we have, everyone can express their opinion equally. And it seems that most of these are: “THIS SUCKS!”

I’m sure you’ve come across this idea yourself: whether it’s on the net or in real life, it sometimes seems like people are never happy. About anything. “People” will bitch and moan all day long, and all you hear about in the news is controversy. And from there it’s easy to go to the conclusion the rest of the world is a bunch of dumb saps that will always be unhappy, no matter what the topic is.

Well, while I agree that most people are probably dumb saps, I still think that this view is a sort of optical illusion. The thing is, there is no idea in the world that will get a unanimous approval. And I mean none, like, ever! Go with me on this: try to think of an idea that would garner universal approval in a modern western society. Even the brightest, shiniest, happiest proposal would get a couple of groups of people who would violently oppose it. As long as it’s something “realistic”, it will make some people unhappy.

- Universal healthcare is a great idea in theory (give medical care to the sick), but you get the obvious and valid question of “who’s gonna pay for it?”
- Stopping the wars and the horrors in the world would be awesome, but who has the right to decide what’s right for other people? Some will say “why the hell aren’t we doing something?!”, and others will aswer “you had no right to go in Iraq”…
- Let’s give condoms to teenagers so they don’t get STDs! “Oh yeah, but they shouldn’t have sex in the first place!” Well, let’s prevent them from having sex then. “Dude, have you ever met a teenager? They will have sex no matter what, seriously.”
- Let’s tax cigarettes and prevent people from smoking indoors, surely noone will opose the idea of not getting sick. “Hey, you’re taking away my freedom to do whatever the hell I want!”
- Give free puppies to every sad little boy and girl in the world. “Yeah, and who’s gonna clean their crap off the floor?”
I guess you get the idea.

So  my premise is this: there will always be some people sincerely opposed to any idea you put out, no matter how great it sounds to you and yours.
Now think of a world where everyone can express their opinion. We don’t actually have a lot of experience with this concept. When democracy was first conceived, it was very loose on the definition of “everyone has a voice”. But in a modern democracy, for every single idea in the world that is expressed in a public forum you will find a group of people that will be very critical about it.
And they will have the rights (democracy) and the means to express themselves (Internet or traditional media).

Is that really a good thing? Is there such a thing as too much democracy? Boy is that a can of worms…

So anyway, from there it’s very easy to think that “people” criticize everything. Of course, in reality you only have one have a fraction of the people actually complaining about each topic, but the result is that every idea and opinion gets shot down and criticized. And this gives the impression that “people” in general are never happy.

Well, I’m probably not saying anything that you don’t know already. I just wanted to formalize this a bit, because I tend to be very cynical and declare that “people always complain”. I should remember: it’s not that everyone complains all the time, it’s that there’s always someone that will complain.

And it’s just… Sometimes I wish they would just shut the fuck up. But they’re entitled to their opinion. And that’s the problem with democracy.

A few weeks ago, Bioware and Lucasart “revealed” to the world their next big project: a Star Wars based MMO called Star Wars – The Old Republic. Or SWTOR, for short (good luck on pronouncing that one).

Many companies have claimed to be building Wow killers in the past four years. And most have failed, some miserably. Even if some of them seem to remain healthy, I never thought any of them would actually succeed in rivaling Warcraft. And here is the reason why : they came from companies that made MMOs.
People get into patterns, accept rules and thought processes. The problems that plagued MMOs before Wow came along were numerous: tedious gameplay, penalty for failure, limited solo experience, and of course lack of polish. All these have been well documented and mostly adressed in the games that came out after Wow did. But that’s not enough to change the way people actually do things. You can’t tack a solution  on an already plagued process. To really make something new, you have to start with a blank slate, and none of these company could really do that, no matter how much they claimed they would. They came with their own experience, which was ultimately detrimental to the product. Sure; there were a few good ideas along the way, and some great ones even. But none of them really broke away from the “MMO model” they had inherited.

Wow is not an MMO first. It is, first and foremost, a fun video game. Blizzard thinks in terms of games. This one just happens to be an MMO. Companies like Tubine or Mythic think in terms of MMO, because that’s what they know.

Back to SWTOR and Bioware.

Some people might think of Star Wars and MMO and immediately go to Star Wars Galaxies, which was a incredible failure by Sony Online Entertainment. You might think I’m being harsh, but making an MMO in the Star Wars Universe that wouldn’t be incredibly successful was an almost impossible task. It was so deliciously geeky that the only thing more difficult to not make a resounding success out of was a Lord of the Rings MMO.
And Star Wars Galaxies was not a success. It didn’t breach the MMO ghetto when it so clearly should have. Because it was more of an MMO than it was a video game. But that doesn’t mean anything for SWTOR. Quite the contrary: the Star Wars loving crowds are still very much untapped, and the huge potential for success is still there.

Some people might think that Bioware is a small company that didn’t do much, and that they are no match for Blizzard. Again, they couldn’t be more wrong. Bioware has a lot of experience. Not making MMOs, but making highly praised niche video games. Note that the “not making MMOs” part is a good thing, as I said earlier. Where others would approach a new MMO with “traditional” vision and try to slap “modern lessons” on the formula, Bioware has the potential to start with a new vision altogether. And they know how to do that. I’m not going to list all the games they did here; suffice it to say that the Knights of the Old Republic series is widely regarded as the best Star Wars games ever. It was a vast and complex single player RPG, with storyline at its core. And they are being smart about this. Blizzard is a gameplay focused company, Bioware is an storyline focused company. I won’t get into the details of how they are doing it; you can go to their website to learn more. But while I’m sure they will do everything we expect from an MMO (good gameplay included), they will still focus on what they know and expend in that area, which is a great thing.

Finaly, some people might think that SWTOR is going to be “just another wannabe”. I see things differently: to me, Bioware isn’t all that different from what Blizzard was a few years ago. A second tier developer, with strong core values, devoted fanbase and highly praised catalog. I wouldn’t say something as silly as “Wow killer” here (especially since SWTOR won’t be out for a few years). But I have been following the industry pretty closely for the past few years, and I have never said this about any other company or MMO project before:

I see the potential for multi-million subscriber base here. Wow-like numbers, for the first time.

I’m not one of those people who clamors that greatness is coming every time something shinier comes along. I never believed AOC or WAR or LOTRO would rival Wow, because I knew the shortcomings of their developpers. But Bioware is different, and SWTOR might very well rival Wow… I’ll definitely keep my eye on them. And so should you.

PS: I know that some silly free to play MMOs have millions of players, I know that SWG is still going and has a player base, and I know that Blizzard had had major successes before Wow. But that doesn’t change the argument I’m making or what I’m saying. And if you think it does, I say you’re being argumentative on principle. So there.

I wanted to wait a bit before commenting on Proposition 8 and the banning of gay marriage in several states in the US. For those who don’t know, a few states now have it written in their constitution that marriage is only possible between one man and one woman. Which is ironic since the California campaign for this was heavily pushed by the Mormon church, in which men often (sometimes?) have multiple wives…

Anyway, that’s besides the point, but it does also state the obvious fact that the organizations supporting this mostly take roots in religious circles (though I imagine not all supporters are religious).

And before I talk about the ban on marriage proper, I just want to say that Florida not only banned gay marriage, but also pre-emptively banned any contract that would try to “emulate” marriage. While the language isn’t crystal clear, this pretty much puts a ban on civil unions too. This is just ridiculous… Marriage is one thing, and I can understand the debate. But this?!… Ok, let’s not derail the post.

So back to marriage. Contrary to what some might think, even a pretty liberal person such as myself was a little bit conflicted about the issue.
The idea many people (me included) went with was this: if religion wants to have their word, then let them have it. We can create a new thing, like civil contract or union, and if gay people have all the same rights it might do the trick, because that’s what’s really important. Right? Putting this in any constitution really seemed overkill so I wasn’t for that, but in principle I thought this would be a reasonable compromise. But the issue did force me to think about it and to try and define exactly where I came down. So here are my thoughts:

First of all, perception is important: we can make buses for black people, they will go to and from the same places. It will be the same thing, so what are they complaining about, right? Well…
Ok, that’s an extreme of an analogy, but you get the idea. So you can’t just say “we have marriage, you have civil unions, so shut up”. It just doesn’t work like that. Even not calling it the same makes it different, or less than, and yes, it does breed bigotry. So no go for me. That’s the first conclusion I came to, but it still didn’t really tell me why the word marriage is so important that gay people want in also.

So, maybe even more important than this, we shift the debate to the definition of the word. I think that the real problem with the term “marriage” means a lot more than we think it does.

I think the word “marriage” covers a concept that is larger than its definition.

The most common definition is that marriage is between a man and a woman, yes. This is what is changing, but for now it’s still the most common image you get.

But the concept that it really covers is different, older, and more universal. Our civilization, human beings, have this innate concept of two people loving and caring for each other. I think it’s pretty safe to say that this idea comes naturally to most of us, and it goes deeper than religion or language. Even if you strip away everything that defines us as a culture you’ll still find that primal desire to form a bond.
It is this dichotomy that makes it really hard to decide on the issue: historically, marriage is between a guy and a girl, but what the word truly appeals to is that core concept of two people committing to one another.

A while ago, the church formalized that idea, gave it a name, and gave it rules and bounds. They essentially trademarked the word “marriage” to make it apply to a certain set of conditions.
The problem is that this word encompasses the larger concept I was talking about. Defining a word is fine, but in the case of “marriage” it’s different, because behind the scenes it refers to that universal concept of love and commitment. And that’s what’s being trademarked here. And this should not belong to anyone…
In effect, when you deny marriage to some people, you’re telling them they can’t get in on that feeling.

So maybe it wasn’t intentional, maybe the church did come up with the word before others, and maybe the intelligent thing to do would be to find a different word for that concept, like “the bond” or “the union” or “the Jedi ceremony of life” or whatever.
But we can’t. For better or worse, “marriage” is now our reference to that core feeling, and that’s just the way it is. When gay people say they want to get married, they’re not trying to take something away from straight or religious people. It’s not an attack on marriage. They are just saying that, like everyone else on the planet, they feel this bond.

So to sum it up: I think marriage isn’t yours or mine to define. it’s a word we stuck on a universal feeling like a sticker, and having stuck the sticker first doesn’t make you the owner… The fact that someone got to it first isn’t relevant, and everyone should be allowed to label themselves with it.

This article is cloaked under a semi-funny title, but it is actually a pretty serious topic… Just a warning.

I want to talk about what makes us who we are for a minute. I will try to keep it to the point. Here is the premise: we have a few fundamental values that define us, as western societies. Freedom, equality, fairness… These are the ideas that world defining documents like the French “Human Rights Declaration” and the American Bill of Rights were written to protect. And the moment we start losing them, we start losing our soul. We start turning to “the dark side”.

Here comes the sadly funny part: millions of us have watched the Star Wars movies, and we’ve all heard the wise reflexion of the old green little Jedi master guy.

“Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.”

Everyone knows that line. Yet no one seems to understand how it relates to the attacks of September 11th 2001. Are you afraid? Are you sacrificing what they attacked you for? Then you are giving “them” what they wanted in the first place.

Indeed, this is how they win. They don’t win by killing us; they’ll never kill us all. Or even, as horrible as it sounds, they’ll never kill “enough” of us. They aren’t the nazis, they simply don’t have the military might to wipe us out. Instead, they win by making us afraid (terrorism, anyone?) and letting that fear make us do things like sacrificing what most precious thing we hold.

I’ll stop here; I don’t want to turn this article into a political debate. What I would like, rather, is that next time someone tells you the fight against terror demands you sacrifice a little part of your freedom, ask yourself this:

“Am I agreeing because it’s an appropriate response?
Or am I letting fear and anger dictate the answer?”

If it’s the latter, you’re turning into Darth Vader, and the Bin Laden is grinning in his cave…

We are nowhere near “defeat” here. I know we are still “ourselves”. But I think the horror of years past might have taken us on a dangerous path, and it’s never to early to realize it. They hate us for our freedom, we keep hearing. And it’s true. And we shouldn’t surrender our freedom to anyone… Especially not them.