Amazon knows I just bought a Kindle.

So why do I have to fork over more than $10 per book I already own?

The only sensible way to go here, is to sent customers their Kindle already preloaded with all the books they’ve ever ordered on Amazon. There simply is no other alternative.

And mostly, I agree with the Pete, in that companies certainly wouldn’t want anybody to comparatively weight the Likes versus the Dislikes on their page. In a way, I think it’s somewhat short-sighted of them (as getting feedback from consumers is the golden rule to improving how you are perceived), but on the other hand, simple Likes/Dislikes don’t give out much information, and I’m pretty sure Facebook comments cannot be considered as constructive feedback.

To sum up, a Dislike button may or may not be in Facebook’s and in advertiser’s interests, from a business perspective.

But how about the user perspective? Here’s a quote that I strongly disagree with:

Like buttons are about connection; Dislike buttons are about division.

No they’re not.

Disliking something is just as connecting a statement as liking something. Electric car activists are not connected to one another by their fondness of electrons flowing through copper wire: they are because they dislike fossil fuel cars. The Wikipedia team brought hundreds of thousands of contributors together because of their collective distaste of the old way of doing things (too restrictive, not evolving fast enough, etc).

And this is how social signaling works, too: who we are is defined by what we dislike just as much as it is by what we do like.

Facebook is still about social interactions, right? Or has it morphed into an advertising platform already?

Anyway, there was this one time I was at the movie theater:

I was definitely late, and my movie was about to start. Only one register opened, maybe 30 people ahead of me, this wasn’t looking good. As I was (not-so-patiently) waiting, I checked out the schedule: 3 movies were starting in the next few minutes, while the rest didn’t start for another half-hour. Based on people’s attitude, you could definitely tell the ones in line for a movie that was about to start apart from the ones who weren’t in a hurry.

And then this clerk came up the line, asking people if they intended to pay by card; if they did, he’d take them away to another counter and would speed things up, which was a good idea (whether if was a spontaneous one or not). However, using the means of payment seemed like a somewhat irrelevant criteria. What he could/should have done, is simply walk up to people and ask them what movies they were about to see; if it wasn’t about to start, politely ask them if they’d mind waiting 10 minutes to help expedite things for those in a hurry.

And you know what, I could have done it, too. But we’re not used to putting ourselves on the line like this, and I just waited, hoping the situation would somehow fix itself. It didn’t, and I missed my movie. And this is an important shortcoming: to put it in Seth’s own words, a linchpin doesn’t simply think outside of the box, he acts out of the damn box.

Guess I’ll have to wait for the next occasion to pin an orange lizard to my chest.

During my upcoming trip,  I’m going to make a half-dozen hops across North America. That’s as many flights to book. I went and used the portal I regularly go to (fast and clear interface, and, up to now, no problems). I started with the 2 flights with fixed dates. I got the reservation for the first flight immediately, and a mail regarding the other one: the fare I had selected wasn’t available anymore, and so I was supposed to call myself (and pay for the call) to fix the problem.

So I called, and the person on the other end asked me if she could call me back 10 minutes later, so they’d have time to recalculate the price of the fare (hum?). So I waited. And finally she called back.

Turns out the fare had increased by a steep 69€, so I promptly canceled the flight. It got me thinking, though: had the fare increase been only a couple of euros, what would have happened? Probably the same hassle, and only for a couple of euros!

I’ve been using this website for some time now, a fact they have to know because I log in every time. Out of good faith, this intermediary could pay the difference (with a limit of course) and just notify me. How I wish they’d sent this type of mail:

“Wow, just in time!

As you were making your reservation, the price of your flight went up by X€, but we’re covering that charge for you. Consider it a gift from our part. Please enjoy your trip to Y for us!”

This situation is probably a rare occurrence; not much money would be lost in the process, and wow! would that make a great impression! I’d be a customer for life, as opposed to the present situation, where I’m going to finish my bookings on a website with up-to-date pricing.

]]> http://www.spiffre.eu/blog/archives/handling-the-discontents/feed/ http://www.spiffre.eu/blog/archives/videogames-and-villains/ http://www.spiffre.eu/blog/archives/videogames-and-villains/#comments Thu, 01 Jul 2010 08:12:13 +0000 Spiffre http://www.spiffre.eu/blog/?p=1296 Found on Gamasutra:

Conscience Is But A Word: Why videogames need better villains, by Xander Markham.

Great article. Plenty of valid points are also made in the comment, but I’ll specifically second Jeffrey Wilson’s opinion: bad guys who do evil stuff just for the sake of being bad guys are flat out uninteresting  (and I’ll add, those who do it simply for their own good can get boring pretty quickly).

The audience needs to know enough in order to connect with them: understand what they want and why they want it, and then reject it.

Now let me be clear, this isn’t a request for more violent games. I’m fine with violent games - something ignorant people all over the globe think will be the downfall of mankind, but that’s not what this is about.

I was initially taken aback a bit when it became clear that the largest DLC for Mass Effect 2 (Overlord) was about Geth. I wasn’t sure why, but now that I’m going through it, it becomes clear that it isn’t the fiction bit that I have a problem with - the Geth are quite fascinating, but the combats themselves:

I feel nothing.

And yet I remember enjoying the ME2 combat system very much during parts of the campaign. As I recall those moments, however, I can only points out to combats against Organics. Because that’s what’s happening here: I don’t care that I’m mowing down dozens of Geth, because they’re only Geth to me; the times it felt like I was truly going to combat were those times I had to go through squads of screaming, cursing and oozing Organics.

And I guess this comes from what Mass Effect is about to me: an epic story about sacrifice - except it’s not always mine. As I’m playing as a 100% renegade, the fiction in my mind is as follows: I have a mission of supreme importance to accomplish, and the loyalty and secondary missions (those with mercenaries) were simply delaying my oh-so-important mission. So I slaughtered them.

And it was a great feeling to buy into this larger fiction, this tale of horrors done for the greater good. But dismantling 22nd Century tin cans is taking that away from me.

So please BioWare, make the next DLC a bit more fresh, will you?

When access to the Internet is free, most people regulate themselves: they’ll check their mails and facebook, maybe have a whiff of what’s going on in the world, and that’s about it. If someone is waiting around, the current user will let them take over.

When people are paying for their Internet access though, it’s different. You don’t want to throw money away (after all ,you paid for that time), so you want to make the most of it, and end up checking the special offers on Amazon. While others are waiting.

Take me for instance: I’m smack in the middle of a 3-week vacation in Japan, and here I am blogging about internet access and hostels, just to make sure I’m not throwing 20￥away.

Still waiting for my Splinter Cell: Conviction copy to arrive, so what do you think I should be doing? Well, I think I definitely should be playing the shit out of the demo. First time I went through it, I was a bit pissed it lasted only 20 minutes. Now that I’ve finished it 50 times over, I just don’t care: who would have thought it’d be so much fun killing the same 6 guys 50 times over?

One thing I noticed though, is that Sam Fisher seems to randomly comment on your actions “Not bad”, “I see the training paid off”, etc. If I simply grab a guy and pull him over a ledge (an action that only requires me to press a single button), Sam just might comment on that.

I think it would be better if Sam only spoke out when the player’s actions deserve it: say, if the player takes down 3 enemies in less than 3 seconds and without anyone noticing, for instance. These comments could also be modulated by the level of difficulty, and possibly on how well the player has been doing so far.

The tools needed to estimate how well the player is doing aren’t that complicated: a timer, and simple frustum, alert and kill checks. And in return, players would have the satisfaction of having a skilled assassin commenting on their actions; a formidable form of reward that seems underutilized in SC: Conviction.

That said, I’m itching for my copy to arrive: switching from pure gameplay to cinematic moves and back with variable granularity simply feels so great; the re-playability of this game must be insane.

Oh, and while I’m at it, I just witnessed the freakiest thing I ever thought I would in a game: after I finished cleaning up a room, I noticed movement on my latest victim. “Wow, they even added the nervous twitch of a guy who took a bullet in the head”, I thought, impressed. But as I got close, I watched in horror the dead guy - bloody bullet hole in the forehead, dead eyes to the ceiling - move his lips in a silent and never-ending litany. Pretty please, fix those facial animations: it’s just too spooky for a Splinter Cell game.

This is tightly linked to what I once said about under-delivery in business-related matters, and it very much applies to movies as well : as long as a movie delivers on what it set out to do, it’s a good movie, period. It means that it can be nothing more than an action-packed flick without a “message” and still be really good.

This does not mean that any meathead movie gets a pass, though; even action needs to be a bit original to be off the hook.

]]> http://www.spiffre.eu/blog/archives/over-promise-under-deliver-2/feed/ http://www.spiffre.eu/blog/archives/bullshit-addiction/ http://www.spiffre.eu/blog/archives/bullshit-addiction/#comments Wed, 28 Apr 2010 18:51:10 +0000 Spiffre http://www.spiffre.eu/blog/?p=1164 Sounds like sooner or later, an entire section of this website is going to be dedicated to people missing the point. Here comes another one of those so-called “studies” “demonstrating” that the youth is plagued by an “Internet Addiction”.

These people are trying to assimilate the absorption of drugs to the use of Internet, making fools of themselves in the process. Hey, the more they’re wrong, the more I laugh.

With drug use, the end is the absorption itself. Nobody gets high on an Internet connection, watching bits go by or something. Internet is a tool. A means to an end. And in the context of social websites, what is this end? Connecting with people. Wow, how wrong is that? You were just trying to be more social, and you’ve just been slapped with a disorder.

Humans are social animals. Lock someone up for 24 hours without any connection to the outside world, and we’ll see if he doesn’t show any disturbing symptoms. We’re so much more social now than our cave-dwelling ancestors, so doesn’t it seem natural that our well being is tied to the tools that allow us to maintain these social interactions to the level they’ve reached?

And that’s just the social network angle. More bullshit is distilled across the article:

In one extreme example in South Korea reported by the media, a couple allegedly neglected their three-month-old daughter, who died of malnutrition, because they were on the computer for up to 12 hours a day raising a virtual child.

Wow, really? That’s scary. About as scary as when people forgot to take care of their child when their ass was stuck in an old fashioned couch, facing a good ol’ TV. Just not much more, though.

And then there’s this:

The center’s website cites various examples of students who ran up large debts or dropped out of college due to their obsession.

Yeah? Wouldn’t that be a gambling addiction then? You know, something completely unrelated to Internet?

And finally, a very touching quote from a student:

I clearly am addicted and the dependency is sickening

Well, that’s too bad for you then, because it seems you’re sickened over nothing but air. What would you say if this quote read something like “I can’t go anywhere on foot, I have to take a car. I clearly am addicted and the dependency is sickening”?

Evolution is natural.

Evolution means tomorrow doesn’t look like yesterday.

I suggest you start getting used to it.

]]> http://www.spiffre.eu/blog/archives/bullshit-addiction/feed/ http://www.spiffre.eu/blog/archives/not-what-you-were-looking-for/ http://www.spiffre.eu/blog/archives/not-what-you-were-looking-for/#comments Mon, 19 Apr 2010 07:07:56 +0000 Spiffre http://www.spiffre.eu/blog/?p=1122 Funny that. Somewhere in the wordpress tools, I installed a plug-in to track traffic on this website. Turns out somebody wandered around my Heavy Rain post after googling “heavy rain strip”. Imagine his disappointment. Oh yeah, no doubt, he’s a ‘he’.

Okay, let me help you:

There.

Interestingly enough, you know what I did to get this screenshot? Yup, I googled “heavy rain madison titties”.

And the world safely goes round and round.

That fucker, how dare he?

A lot of people have been asking about why they’d put the boring stuff in Heavy Rain. I think the goal is simply to lower the Emotional Baseline: most games are all about the shooting (or the action of some kind). Now there might be some more subtlety in the storyline, but it’s usually told through cinematics or non-interactive means, so every time the player does have the controller in hand, he’s always right there in the middle of the action, killing dozens, business as usual. By resetting the Emotional Baseline to a lower (mundane) level, the developers made it so that when something out of the ordinary happens, it does feel like something out of the ordinary to the player.

Or at least I think. Can somebody get me a PS3 over here ?!

It’s actually done only every single time in movies: rare are the ones that start with action right off the bat; it always begins with the hero living his ordinary, everyday life, right before the terrorists/aliens/bad guys show up.

A second went by as I tried to process the thought. I blinked. Spam? Those things our ancestors used to fight with bare hands? But I thought they were extinct!

And that’s the beauty of virtual worlds; the world we see is the one we choose to make. Remember the annoying web pages of yore, the ones that tried to hypnotize you with a sea of  ridiculous animated GIFs? Well, they’re probably still out there. The difference is that no one sees them anymore, because we collectively (yet unconsciously) decided we didn’t want to suffer their sight anymore; they got buried by the magic of Google’s PageRank.

If Internet was a physical world, our cities would be build on top of heaps of crap. Thank God it isn’t.

“I heard that when a malicious change is made, it only takes a couple of minutes to fix it; but if someone changes Napoléon’s D.O.B., the person responsible for finding out which is which doesn’t necessarily know the right answer.”

It used to be, we dreamt of a monolithic computer that would know all (hello, Multivac); you’d walk up to it, and ask a question either directly or through a punched card (depending on the decade you were in). And the computer would know the answer, the way you know how to conjugate verbs or an academic knows what Napoléon’s dates are: by referring to an academic source of information. You can look around all you want nowadays, you won’t find such a thing. We do, however, have a system that gives the same result, except through very different means: by simply indexing the whole world, we have a statistical source of information.

As an example, we’ve tried for years (decades) to teach word processors to correct our mistakes: typos, orthographic mistakes, and grammar errors. A 12-year old could do it. And yet a computer still can’t, not really (admittedly, a lot of progress has been made, but programmers still took decades to achieve this).

Now on the other hand, if you simply google “napoleon 1769 1821″, without a doubt (and without even clicking on any result), you know you have the right, official, 100% certified dates for Napoleon. As another example, let’s say you’re not sure whether “unconstitutional” or “inconstitutional” is the proper spelling; just type in both, and see for yourself, again, without accessing any specific website other than Google.

Does Google know what Napoléon’s dates are? Does it have any clue as to the proper orthography of the word  “unconstitutional”? Has it been taught any grammar rules? Absolutely not. And yet you can have certainty through 2 indicators: the number of results, and the type of results - are the top links leading to official, commercial or academic websites?

The interest of this, of course, is that a single, authoritative source of information can be mistaken, voluntarily corrupted, involuntarily biased, unavailable, etc, while a statistical source - a mass of information stored all over the place - is a distributed, incorruptible source of information.

For an in-depth explanation, there’s an entire chapter in The Long Tail by Chris Anderson (some of it can be read here, in case you’re too lazy and/or cheap to by the book).

What’s the series’ synopsis again? There are dolls into which you can blow your darkest, most secret fantasies.

What kind of theme does that bring about? Identity. The separation of mind and body. What if the same mind ended in two different bodies? What if someone ran away with an active to try and live a second life? What would a long-term engagement look like?

There are enough stories to tell about our weaknesses and who we are to fill a couple of seasons right there. And yet the first 7 episodes are nothing but action tales of super-duper agents – hostage negotiator, kung-fu expert, high-end thief, etc; this looks like a string of unrelated episodes of The Pretender. You could strip the whole “dollhouse” concept out of the first 7 episodes and still retain 90% of the storyline; that’s how intricated the themes are to the episode writing.

I can’t believe the writers failed to identify the question of Identity as the main theme of the series. So why is it that the only way they found to express identity crisis was through a whole lot of action, global conspiracy or even apocalypse (in the feeble “Epitaph One” episode)?

That’s exactly what happened with True Blood, as well: supposedly a vampire story, it’s like the writers had so little to say about vampires and their society, they had to throw in a psychic protagonist and what? Shape-shifters? Damn. Whether it’s about designing a product, a service or writing stories, if you fail to identify what you’re about, you’re guaranteed to end up into a wall.