Digital Cream

My son Dylan urged me to play Portal, a new game contained in Valve’s “Orange Box“ product. I already had good reasons to check it out– an amazing design riff; a Cinderella story of birth as a student project at DigiPen; and I heard bizarre rumors that it exhibited a real sense of humor. However, watching Dylan fall through an infinite chain of portals while flipping the gravitational axis made me fearfully recall a childhood viewing of The Man With The Golden Gun which put me off the hall of mirrors for years. Dylan assured me that it was not nearly as confusing as it looked, but as he gleefully recounted to his friend Harry yesterday, I once got lost in a single room in BioShock. (I crept around a bloody lab table, came upon the door through which I entered the room, exited through it thinking it was a new door, and then wandered in confusion wondering why everything looked vaguely familiar.) In any case, I screwed up my courage and gave Portal a go. I was delighted in all the ways that the game’s many fans have already extolled, but I want to especially point a prophetic finger at a feature of the game which I predict will soon be commonplace, and the game world made all the better for it: Portal has optional commentary by the game creators, much like a DVD commentary track. This is very cool and I am bursting to tell you why. (continued »)

From MediaPost: Awww yeah… come to me, little ones…

TORONTO-BASED NEW PARADIGM, WHICH IS spending $4 million to study the global “Net Generation,” reported that 77% of the world’s online 16- to-29-year-olds would rather live without television than without the Internet. (continued »)

This article on sweatshops for virtual items makes the quote:

There’s a world of difference between making sneakers and watching bots fight all day. However, they are underpaid, or as Smooth Criminal puts it, “They get paid dirt. But dirt is good where they live.”

I think it’s all bad, and a sign of how badly exploited so many people are in those parts of our world surrounding very lucky people like us who can live and work with dignity and hope.

And it’s worthwhile to keep in mind that even worse, more dangerous, and more unhealthy exploitation is going on right now to make our clothes, electronic equipment, food, and so on.

A tiny but defensible bright spot is that slowly, very slowly, the world may be becoming a better place in this regard. As horrid as this is today, fifty ago I believe it was much worse. But it is shamefully slow and spotty progress that makes me, for one, feel guilt about doing so little to help. As a far luckier society, do we speed this improvement by making minimum living conditions a requirement for trade with a country? Or do we trust the market to slowly improve their lot as competition for workers creeps upward in the developing world?

I really like playing World of Warcraft in Warsong Gulch. Between that and the latest Battlefield 1942 demo, I’m convinced that these big team-vs-team games have a big future– with plenty of room to grow. WoW is not really built for PvP so all this is just a start…