stevenberlinjohnson.com

Drive, He Said

I've been playing Mafia for the past few nights -- it's a driving-based crime game set during the Depression, basically a Grand-Theft-Auto-meets-The-Untouchables kind of thing. Like GTA3, it has a mode where you can just drive around in a cab, picking up passengers and taking them to their destinations: no shooting, no prostitutes, no running over pedestrians. I find this part incredibly fun, and strangely calming. The combination of a force-feedback steering wheel and the amazingly vivid city graphics makes for a convincing simulation of what it feels like to drive in an urban environment. I drove everywhere when I was in LA last week, and was reminded how fun driving can be, if you're not pressed for time, or stuck in a traffic jam. I missed it a little on my return. So these driving games are a perfect antidote for NYC-dwellers who never get to tool around in their own cars. Maybe they'll make a crowded subway platform simulator for the LA residents and the circle will be complete.

THINK again

Just as support for the Daniel Libeskind design seemed to be reaching critical mass, Herbert Muschamp comes out with a thunderous endorsement of the THINK proposal for ground zero: "It is a work of genius, a towering affirmation of humanism in modern times." The THINK plan had been my initial first pick as well, but I'd started to come around to the Libeskind design, since everyone seemed to be talking about that one, and I generally change my opinions about these things based on what the cool kids are saying. (Muschamp himself had written of the Libeskind plan: "If you are looking for the marvelous, here's where you will find it." Is this the Peter Travers Syndrome?) But apparently, the THINK proposal has been the top choice overseas, at least according to Muschamp. The Lower Manhattan Development team is scheduled to pick one or two plans tomorrow, so we'll just have to wait and see....

SimCity redux

Two months after the epic launch of The Sims Online, which for a while seemed to be dueling with the Iraq situation for national magazine cover treatment, Maxis quietly unleashed SimCity 4 on the world. Now, I know there are a million reasons why open-ended multiplayer games like TSO are more interesting than old-school simulators, but the truth is I've building cities furiously since I got my hands on an early copy of SimCity, while I haven't found myself wanting to check in with my online Sim since the beta. For whatever reason, SimCity is the great love of my gaming life: I find it hypnotic in the way that Tetris is hypnotic, and yet it has an amazing intellectual depth to it as well. I like to play the game with my seven-year-old nephew, just to relish the moment when we start arguing over the merits of increasing the commercial real estate tax rate.

That said, I'm a little disappointed with this release of the game, even though I've been playing it incessantly. Sure, it looks a little nicer than the last version, but anyone who last toyed with SimCity in 1994 will instantly recognize 99% of the gameplay. You zone out your residential and industrial regions, connect them to the grid, build some roads, and suddenly your neighborhoods are teeming with virtual residents. After that, it's all about tweaking the details: building a police station, raising tax rates on the wealthy, and so on. There are a handful of new features in SC4, like being able to track the history of individual Sims, and the ability to simulate entire regions of interconnected cities. But on the whole, I really feel like the title is stagnating. You should be able to experiment with radically different models of urban design (a city of Segways and pedestrians, where cars are forbidden); you should be able to encourage different kinds of businesses in specific neighborhoods; you should be able to create new forms of urban government. The title is also ripe for historical nuance: the buildings age architecturally as you play the game, but there's no way to build a medieval citadel, or a 19th-century Coketown.

If you ignore the graphics, there's not much in SimCity4 that wasn't present in the version released ten years ago. Compare that to the evolution we've seen in multiplayer networked games: ten years ago the state of the art was text-based MUDs. Now we have entire economies thriving in virtual space. If the SimCity franchise had evolved at the same rate -- well, let's just say I wouldn't have found the time for this post right now.

Friends of SBJ.com

So Salon rolled out its new big-ads-or-subscription model, which seems like a perfectly reasonable approach for a magazine with dozens of people on staff and paid writers -- precisely the kind of thing we all might have tried to do years ago if the dot.com tsunami hadn't been so insistent on lifting all the boats (even the upscale, literary ones.) I continue to find as much interesting and valuable stuff on Salon as I do anywhere on the web, so I encourage all of you to head over and subscribe. Or at least click through a bunch of giant ads.

On the other end of the spectrum, how great is Gawker? I know a) I'm biased, because I know Nick Denton and Jason Kottke, and talked about it with Nick a little before it launched; and b) I live in New York, so the content naturally appeals. But it's pretty great content, perfectly suited for that first-cup-of-coffee morning surf. The site was down for me thanks to some kind of domain issue earlier this week, and I realized that I'd become completely hooked. The morning didn't seem right without my daily gawk.

Lost Hours

Saw The Hours this weekend. I haven't read the book, but the ur-text that the book and movie are based on, Mrs. Dalloway, is one of my all time favorites. With all the incredible reviews and awards, my wife and I were really looking forward to the film. But in the end I think we were both pretty disappointed. It's in that genre of films in which every single character is having a Really Bad Day, like maybe the worst day of their entire lives. So the film maintains this taut intensity throughout, which ends up being oddly monotonous: there's no dynamic range, no rise-and-fall, just a dozen or so people on the verge of a nervous breakdown. If you'd never read the Woolf book, I think you'd assume that it was similarly dreary and that Mrs. Dalloway herself was borderline suicidal. In fact, the original book is filled with great moments of affirmation, and while the book contains a vivid portrait of madness, it's limited to the character Septimus, who is somehow never mentioned in The Hours. Clarissa Dalloway herself has none of the movie's world-weariness.

The Phillip Glass score in this respect perfectly fits the movie: the arpeggios churn in the background, like some kind of manic drone. Which reminds me: the sound in the version we saw reduced all the sound channels -- dialogue, atmosphere, music -- to a monophonic center speaker. It was pretty horrible -- I got up after about twenty minutes to complain, but it never improved. (For me, this was like showing the movie in black-and-white, and having no one in the theater notice.) I suppose it's possible that they didn't record it in surround, but this didn't even seem to be in stereo. I talked to the manager afterwards, and while he couldn't confirm that something had gone wrong, we did get two free passes out of it. That might have been the most satisfying part of the whole evening.

In which the blogger announces his new gig

I've made a few hints about this over the past couple of months, but as the first issue has officially hit the newsstand this week, I can finally put up a real announcement: Discover magazine has asked me to write a monthly column on "Emerging Technology" for them, which launches this week with a look at what might happen when GPS location systems and open hypertext markup collide with one another. As you might imagine, I'm very excited about all of this -- the column gives me a wonderful opportunity to develop a number of the themes that I was exploring in Emergence, in this case the overlap between information networks and urban space.

As Discover's Steve Petranek explains in a very flattering editor's letter about my involvement, I'll also be writing a three-part series on the brain and emotions, starting with a feature on the neuroscience of fear that runs next month. That series is partially based on the research I'm doing for the next book, but that's a whole other story. For now, go pick up a copy of Discover (or order a subscription) -- it's great mag and these columns should be a lot of fun.

Why pay for videogames?

Slate has just posted a little piece of mine explaining why grownups should never pay for videogames, thanks to the proliferation of free demos online: "The game companies' willingness to subsidize the market for free demos suggests that they think the primary appeal of video games is narrative: completing all the objectives, making it through all the levels—in other words, getting to the end of the story. This may well be a major attraction for younger players who have endless time and patience for this sort of thing. But for an elderly gamer like myself (I'm 34), making it to the end of the story is overkill."

Sounding the keynote

So I've now spent a few hours messing around with Keynote. Feature-wise, it seems pretty close to PowerPoint to me -- it's definitely got more depth than the iApps. (Which may be why they're actually charging for it.) And of course it looks great: the OpenGL transitions are so cool that you probably can't use them in a speech for another six months, because the gasps from the audience will be too much of a distraction. And the type looks exquisite as well.

My only real beef is with the included "themes." They're all very polished -- clearly put together by actual designers. But what's interesting about the range of designs presented -- and this is true of iDVD's themes as well -- is that none of them have Apple's design sense. There's no presentation theme in Keynote that looks of-the-moment the way the new iMac or the iPod does. There's no translucent plastic or titanium in any of the designs: it's either folksy chalkboard or upscale sandstone. Which creates a strange kind of disconnect: the professionally-designed presentation on your screen doesn't have as fashionable a design as the box it's created on. I say Apple should let the rest of its design team loose with Keynote for a week: I'd shell out another 20 bucks for the Jonathan Ive collection of themes in a heartbeat.

PS: Be sure to check out Kottke's very smart piece (with mockups!) on the idea of combining Sherlock and Safari. I don't use Sherlock very much myself, but I was struck on this last vacation by the fact that my mother-in-law and her husband both used it -- for stock quotes, movies, and the occasional airline flight check. (Neither of them are particularly hardcore computer people.) From a brief survey of their digital habits, I would wager that Sherlock got more use than Internet Explorer did. Maybe they actually like its distinct identity, separate from the browser. Or maybe they'd be using it even more as a sub-section of Safari. I really don't know...

My Apple wish list

I think Dan Gillmor's right that the Keynote and Safari announcements from yesterday's Macworld make it clear that Apple is trying to assemble a suite of applications that will enable it to survive Microsoft finally deciding to kill the Mac version of Office. With their new presentation software and browser, Apple's now just a word processor and spreadsheet away from making a plausible case that OS X users don't need Microsoft anymore. (By the way, I dropped down the Soho Apple store this morning to check out Keynote, but it wasn't due in until later this afternoon -- I'll post a report after I've had a chance to test drive.)

Presumably, this life-without-MS strategy was generated alongside the Switch campaign: Apple must have assumed that they'd start eating into Windows' market share this year, triggering the wrath of Ballmer, and thus leaving them without Office, IE, and Entourage. But of course it hasn't quite played out like that -- if anything, Apple seems to be losing market share to Windows. (You could tell the news wasn't good on this front by the fact that Jobs didn't really have anything to say yesterday about the effectiveness of the Switch campaign.)

Now, Apple can continue to make great products and solid profits with a 3% market share, but it's not a growth story, as they say. It seems to me that the real opportunity for them lies outside the Mac platform. I was struck by the figures they cited about the iPod being the number one MP3 player in the states, with a 42 percent market share in Japan. When was the last time you heard Apple throwing numbers like that around? That's why I was hoping that there would be another Digital Lifestyle Device in the Macworld keynote.

With the new 802.11g wireless standard, they have an opportunity to make something more radical than the iPod, and just as fun to use. I'd like to see a small, cheap box, maybe the size of the iPod, with video and audio outs, 802.11g, and infrared for remote control. No hard drive, just enough RAM and CPU power to stream high-quality audio and video. You hook it up to to your stereo or TV, and serve music and video over the wi-fi connection from your Mac. The whole box should cost like $200, and you should be able to run 3-4 of them at the same time in your house. So you keep all your music on your Mac; you plug your cable into your Mac, and then you just serve up whatever entertainment you want to any TV or stereo in the house. They can make it Mac-only for the first six months, as they did with the iPod, and then release Windows software after the Mac faithful have had their fun. Why isn't this feasible? And who wouldn't want one of these? (Or three of them?)

The FEED Diaspora

A number of folks have written in during the past couple of months to say that they've enjoyed this blog because it gives them a little taste of FEED again, after a nearly-two-year absence. But even though this site does a pretty good job of keeping track of what I'm up to (at least when I don't disappear to Florida for three weeks, like I just did), it's not good at all at keeping track of the rest of the FEED gang. The good news is that most of the people who were essential to FEED's success over the years are flourishing, and you can see their work all over the place.

Here's a cursory list of FEED alum and their latest work. Austin Bunn, who was an editor with us for several years, just had a great cover story in the Times Magazine on how distressed jeans get so distressed. Our culture editor for many years, Alex Abramovich, just published a collection of his wonderful essays, many of which originally appeared in FEED. Julian Dibbell, who wrote some of the best things we published in his "Idee Fixe" column, had a fantastic piece on the economy of online gaming in the latest issue of Wired. For a couple of years in the late nineties, Josh Marshall wrote some stellar political commentary for us; now he's helping to overthrow sentate majority leaders at his blog. Tim Cavanaugh, who must have written six thousand FEED Dailies for us, all of them impeccable, has revived Suck's old Hit and Run section, this time as a group web log, at the widely-lauded Reason web site. You can also keep up with two editors who pretty much defined FEED's sensibility from the start, Sam Lipsyte and Amanda Griscom: Sam's brilliant (and hilarious and dark) novel, The Subject Steve, is out in paperback, and Amanda has been the best thing going at Rolling Stone of late, with a series of fantastic roundtable discussions on environmental and other issues. There was even a FEED alum on prime time Fox the other night: Tom Perotta, who wrote some wry essays for us in the early years, had his novel Election adapted into the most excellent Alexander Payne movie of the same title. And FEED's co-founder Stefanie Syman is working on a really exciting project, but I don't think I'm allowed to talk about it...

Whew -- that's just the links off the top of my head. I'm sure I've missed a ton of people, so if there are other FEEDsters who deserve mention, drop a line or post a link to let me know.