neither of these things exicted me, and from this i think i’ve discovered that i’m pretty much over the newest mobile phone trend. i like having a phone on the go. i like having a handy camera in case i don’t have my real one. i like being able to text message and email. GPS is great in a pinch.

but the rest of it just doesn’t spark anything in me at all. the times i need or want web on the go is minimal. The only apps i use on my iPhone are iTick in case i’m missing my metronome, the facebook app because it’s sometimes nice to look at status pages without nearly as many quiz results, and Cribbage because it’s, well, cribbage.

additionally, it bothers me that touchscreen phones are becoming so mainstream. i can’t pinpoint exactly why, but i don’t think it’s merely my resistance to popular trends. it may have to do with the practical versus the flashiness for my own personal purpose. Touchscreen phones have their advantages in terms of ease of use – for things that i usually don’t use. On top of that, touchscreen phones have the distinct disadvantage of making me have to look at my screen to type numbers or letters or to find contacts, something that i don’t have to do with my enV.

But alas, everyone seems to think that touchscreen phones and smartphones are the coolest thing since light sabres, that internet on the go is now a vital part of their lives. and i sit here, usually an advocate of advances in technology improving the quality of life, sitting at home with two desktop computers and one laptop all of which i use on a regular basis, and i mentally scratch my mental head wondering what boat i’m missing and how much i care that i’m missing it.

that said, i probably should upgrade my phone from my enV sometime soon as some of the letters on the keyboard are starting to misfire from overuse and the battery life is starting to fail. If people have recommendations for what phone i should get, i welcome them. the most important features i’d *like* to have is both a numpad on the outside (which could be touchscreen) and a keyboard on the inside (which i would prefer not to be touchscreen). i don’t need or want internet on my phone since i already have it on my work phone, so an internet-specialized phone isn’t worth the cost.

originally posted on darkblog resonate. i prefer any comments there.

you sign up for the MyRate plan. They send you a piece of hardware that you plug into your OBD-II port. According to the rep on the phone, it tracks three things: time of day that you drive, total miles driven, and statistics on acceleration and deaccelaration (not speed).

every six months or so, that information is uploaded to Progressive who analyze the data and then can either give you a hefty discount (up to 25% i think) or an increase (up to 9%) on your car insurance when it comes time to renew.

it’s an interesting concept, and i’m not sure how i feel about it. the main issue is, of course, privacy and what the balance is between saving money versus handing over detailed information about your driving times and driving habits. i’ve done some basic research online about it and the attitudes are very divided between those that say, “it’s awesome because i’m a safe driver” and those that say, “this has potentially dangerous implications for the mere savings of $30/month at minimum”.

for me, there’s a part of me that feels like it isn’t a big deal, but there’s an instinct that tells me that handing over that data is important and shouldn’t be taken lightly. I remember a long time ago Laurel mentioned something about supermarket cards, about how for the end user it seems harmless enough and saves money on those key money-saving items, but what people don’t know is that those companies can sell the data collected about the groceries that you buy to the likes of health insurance companies who can then offer or modify offered policies based on the data they’ve received.

But again, that sort of instinct – how important is it in the grand scheme of things for that information to be Actually Private, especially given my generally not-so-bad driving habits?

let’s work it out in my head.

maybe the instinct comes from what the big picture message is. In forming a relationship with people or with a business partner or whatever, there’s various rituals that you can do that are designed to inspire and forge trust between both parties. I keep a friend’s secret, i help him/her through it, he develops more trust in me. This company signs a mutually beneficial contract with that company, they both profit, they both are happy, they develop trust in each other. Usually in those instances, the trust has to be some sort of exchange. “Trust us, and we’ll trust you back,” or “give us an opportunity to trust you, and we’ll offer you the ability to trust us back.”

But in this instance, it’s not about mutual trust. Progressive is saying, “give us a reason to trust you, and we’ll give you money.” There aren’t any upfront promises about tangible reasons to trust progressive more as a result of the transaction. it’s as if Bob comes up to me and says, “I have a secret i want to tell you. Can i trust you?” And i come back and say, “i can’t tell you whether or not you can trust me or not, but if you tell me the secret regardless of that, i’ll give you $100.”

Putting it that way makes the MyRate idea seem like an amazingly unfair exchange. If i make no promises on what i do with the information Bob gives me, the allure of the money diminishes in proportion to the importance of the secret. If Bob says, “i peed my pants earlier today”, surely it’s embarrassing and could be the sort of thing i leak onto the internet with no real claim to truth, so the $100 may be worth that. But what if Bob tells me, “i stole money from the cash reigster” or “i raped this girl the other night” or “i killed someone” and tells me exactly where and how? Is the allure of money worth the lack of trust?

In this case, the implications and potential uses of the information we agree to share is likely invisible to us; again, a situation where the allure of the discount supercedes the need to question. Not only that, but the rules behind the terms of the discount and how it works is likely completely in the hands of Progressive as well; it’s not an agreement where i can say, “give me x discount if i only drive x miles and accelerate unsafely only x times a month.” it’s more progressive saying, “we’ll give you a discount in whatever way we see fit. we reserve to change this criteria at any time.”

i need to think about it more, but ultimately it feels like the wrong thing to do. i welcome any thoughts on the matter.

originally posted on darkblog resonate. i prefer any comments there.

a few people who know me pretty well said, “it’s funny to think of you with an iPhone,” and it’s true. i’ve stated a few times on this poor excuse for a blog how i distinguish between technology innovations that i feel are practical or useful or worthy of note versus technology innovations that are fluffy and uninspiring, and in my previous post i went off on how mobile and easy-to-access internet potentially creates a new psychological standard that is hazardous to our mental health. I’d used the iPhone a few times before, borrowing from one of my colleagues, and I was highly undecided about whether i thought the technology was of the practical and awesome category or of the fluffy and uninspiring category. Now that i actually own one, it brings to light how the question of which of the two category it belongs to is the the wrong one to ask; it’s not the iPhone itself that can be practical or awesome or uninspiring or fluffy, it’s how people choose to use it.

This is something i had already grokked when it comes to other uses of technology, most notably when it comes to technology with music. Finale was the pioneer of music notation software in the early 90s and as i started to use it as my main tool for music notation, i discovered how easily Finale could be used as a crutch if used the wrong way. Because of the kind of composer i am, the crutch of Finale for me was initially using it too often as a composition tool as opposed to a notation tool, meaning that I would do my composing directly in Finale and use the playback as a measure to “hear” how the piece was going.

I discovered that while there are times when that’s fine and effective for the kind of composition i do, more often than not it would a) limit my compositional creativity and space, putting that music into a particular kind of box that could fall short of its true potential, and b) potentially lock me into treating the crappy MIDI playback file as “this is how the piece will sound” as opposed to trusting how it would sound in my head. As such, i changed how i used the program, first by conceiving it to be the tail end of the process as opposed to the initial process by sketching my ideas out on paper first to get a big picture and some details of what the piece would turn into and then put the notes into Finale using it to fill in the blanks; secondly, by preferring to hear everything on a piano voice as opposed to their crappy MIDI instrument equivalents so that playback was used only to double-check harmony and pacing and not to represent the actual color, timbre, or overall feel of the piece.

Additionally, the training that i had as an electronic musician from two excellent professors (Larry Nelson and Jeffery Stolet) as well as some strong influence from Robert Maggio in one of my undergraduate compositions originally written for solo mallet player and electronic accompaniment taught me an important lesson about the representation of real instruments using electronic sounds, namely to avoid it as much as possible. Now if i’m going to write an electronic music piece where i want a piano or a flute sound, i prefer to use acoustic samples or live performers rather than try to emulate those sounds electronically; electronic music in that context is better suited to creating sounds not duplicatable by other means. Again, how someone uses the technology being the problem rather than the technology itself.

The iPhone has a large potential for abuse and fluff, and worse, a psychology that can convince people that these potential misuses are a neccessity. The easiest example is email accessability; the ability to check and reply to emails on the go has its uses, but for some it’s become an expectation, and it creates a newer kind of social structure that has staggering implications – and it’s not even necessarily an expectation of the person who receives email on the go, but an expectation of the sender who knows that the recipient has email on the go. They send the email and in knowing that the other person can receive it right away can then make assumptions based on whether they get an immediate reply, such as “oh, he didn’t reply to my email right away. he must be ignoring me.” While the social tension from that may be small in comparison to, say, not inviting your best friend to your birthday party, enough of that can start to create a pollution that is grounded on a particular understanding of email etiquette that could be completely false.

But again, while issues like that may be more easily brought to the surface because of the technology available, assigning the blame to those issues on the technology as opposed to how it’s used is an important distinction. The iPhone itself and what it has to offer is a pretty fantastic piece of technology in many ways both subtle and obvious, and while it has its share of issues, some of those i can temper based on how i incorporate it into my life. In particular, i’m very picky about how i use the internet on my iPhone, restricting myself mainly to email only, and then using the web only occasionally to keep up on livejournal and facebook, with the occasional wikipedia lookup when necessary.

After familiarizing myself with the iPhone and immersing myself more in the iPhone “culture” as it were, i can pick out what i feel is the strongest positive and negative thing about the whole deal. The positive is how the iPhone has helped revitalize the shareware paradigm that died after its prominence in the pre-broadband and pre internet 2.0 era. At first, the idea of applications that were “lite” versus “full versions” bothered me, but the more i thought about it the more i generally appreciated that the $1 and $5 application market exists as an avenue for basic apps and for the independent developers.

(Granted, i don’t know what sort of control Apple exerts over what gets put into the App store or anything else behind the scenes, and there’s the negative side effect of how some of those apps contribute to the overall fluff aspects of the iPhone.)

The strongest negative to me is that although i acknowledge that the iPhone is groundbreaking technology for the mobile phone market, i still feel that there has been too much value placed on the product rather than its innovation, and that has largely to do with Apple successfully marketing the iPhone to all demographics; as a power tool for corporate business folk, and as the new trendy technology fad for teenagers and college folk. As a result, AT&T can jack the price for a data plan and text messaging for the iPhone higher than that of other phones. This may be justified at some level due to the difference in the speed of the 3G network, but the extra price option isn’t sold that way, it’s sold as being “because you’re using an iPhone.” Those subtle forms of focus-shifting to increase the strength of the brand are the sort of thing that i both admire and loathe.

but more importantly, since the iPhone has defined the next generation of mobile phone technology, every other mobile company was forced to create their own copycat version of the iPhone in order to keep up with the trend. The best example of this haphazard copycatting was the LG Voyager. When the Voyager was first launched, it was basically a touch screen version of the LG enV; in other words, a touch screen phone in which the touch screen aspect added nothing to the functionality of the phone because the firmware was identical to the non-touch screen enV. Granted, they put out firmware updates and patches that started to use that, but instead of hammering all of that out and then releasing the product separately, they rushed the Voyager out hastily so they could boast that they had a touch screen too.

And as more of these touchscreen phones and 3g phones come out, i can’t help but feel that what the general consumer is starting to demand from its mobile phone is moving in the wrong direction, that instant connectivity at your fingertips, while having its benefits, will continue to enforce a set of values to this and future generations that i feel needs to be tempered or at least balanced.

as a post-note, i may blog a more technical review of the iPhone in the near future, as there’s a lot milling about in my brain about the effectiveness of the iPhone versus other mobile devices for what it is designed to do.

originally posted on darkblog resonate. i prefer any feedback or commentary there.

But there’s a distinction i make between technology that i feel serves as positive enrichment versus progress-hindering. A while back i wrote a reaction to the Robotic Drumstick Haptic Guidance System, and i still stand by its thesis that such a device is poorly conceived as a pedagogical tool and that anyone who uses this as the basis for their musical knowledge and understanding could become an excellent “note player” but would become a poor musician.

i’ve also gone off on why i further disliked iPods when they could start playing movies and i still find value in that stance, although i think it needs to be refined somewhat. There’s no doubt that sometimes kids need attention and sometimes a parent needs to focus on other things. Distractions are a good answer to that, but i think that distractions need to be approached cautiously, first in the kind of distraction involved (i like to think that some degree of cognitive distraction is better than nonsense distraction), and secondly in the mindset that distractions of that sort of nature should never be an excessive or complete answer to everything (like if the iPod runs out of battery during a long car ride, the parents have no idea what to do beacause they’ve never actually talked to their kid in the car before). In that sense, the use and/or abuse of technology has to do with degrees and where to define the threshold of something moving from enriching/harmless distraction to harmful and potential long-term negative effects.

And now there’s a new technology trend that i feel is teetering dangerously away from its initial positive enrichment to progress hindering and backwards thinking: too much accesible information.

In the decades in which the World Wide Web continued to develop and grow, there were various stages of mindsets. In the early days, it was a “i can find useful academic information” mindset. As the internet became more mainstream and information outside of academics started to gain presence on the web, the mindset evolved into, “I might be able to find some of the answers i need on the web.” And then in what i consider the post-Google era, the mindset evolved into, “I can find anything on the web!”, or slightly more sinister, “Why can’t i find everything on the web?”

in a lot of ways, i think the easy access to any sort of information or opinions and the ability for so many people to connect in ways that weren’t possible before is fantastic and has a lot of potential to be more on the positive enrichment side of things. the problem is that there’s as much useless information as there is useful information out on the internet, and the ability to pull up any information at any point can make it too easy for people to transfix themselves on trivial information that ultimately serves no real purpose, and with the recent surge of mobile internet trend set by Apple and the iPhone, people can now increase their habit of merrily finding out whatever they want whenever they want whether they need to or not.

Let’s take a hypothetical example and compare mentalities:

You’re walking in the park or in a long car ride or whatever with a friend and you’re discussing the three live action x-men movies. In trying to compare the three movies, you remember that in the last movie, Kitty Pryde has more of a spotlight role than the previous two movies and that triggers a question, “wasn’t Kitty Pryde played by a different actress in the second movie? maybe even the first?”

in today’s Mobile internet world, finding the answer to that is a snap. pull out your smartphone, go to IMDB or wikipedia, find the answer you’re looking for instantly.

in yesterday’s world of internet-houses-all-information, you have to wait until you’re in front of a computer to find the answer. So one of two things happens: a) after the long car ride, you remember that this was information you wanted to know, so you find a computer, find your answer, and receive satisfaction for having answered an unanswered question, or b) you completely forget that you were curious about this tidbit of trivia and the question never gets answered which is fine because you didn’t remember that you asked the question in the first place.

in the pre-internet era, finding the answer would be damned difficult. likely it would involve more thought than the information really warrants; trying to trigger a memory, calling up someone else who has seen the movies on the offchance that they know the answer, or something similar. And eventually in your head you discover the answer (or what you think is the answer) or else you let it go or shelve it for later and move on with your life.

What’s striking to me about all of these scenarios is that i feel that the end result doesn’t actually change anything or fulfill any sort of enrichment. Whether you discover the answer to that question or *any* trivia question or not, the path that your life is taking remains the same. You could say that now you know something that you didn’t, but that doesn’t say much about how well you will retain that information (and in a world where the information is readily at your fingertips, there is less incentive to retain it on your own) nor does it speak to the value of the information.

So then you may argue, “if the end result is the same, then why does it matter? If immediate access to the information is a different means to the same sort of end, then i don’t see the problem.”

The problem is two-fold:

First, the easier it is to discover useless information, the more useless information people will fill their lives with. In the above example, particularly with IMDB and wikipedia, it becomes too easy to start link-hopping to tangenting articles, statistics, and other random findings. Oh, that’s right, Kitty was played by Ellen Page in the last x-men movie. I wonder what else she was in? Ooooh, she was the one that was the lead role in Juno! I loved that movie! When did that come out again? oh, i didn’t know that John Malcovich produced it! That “Being John Malcovich” movie was so cool. Didn’t that have John Cusack in it?… and on and on and on, so that now a harmless curiosity with a simple ten second answer turns into a thirty-minute tangent filled with information that is likely forgotten a month later, and that thirty minutes could have been used in a different way. And sometimes that thirty minutes can turn into hours of wasted time.

Secondly, becoming used to a paradigm in which information is expected to be so accessible can resultingly cause a new kind of psychological anxiety when that information is no longer accessible or if a partiuclar piece of information is not easy to find. this is well parodied in the South Park episode Over Logging, and it’s also reminiscent of the reason why i decided a long time ago to never wear a wristwatch which i blogged about on oscillate in 2004:

many many years ago i wore a watch around my wrist and… I reached a point where i would look at the time every two minutes out of habit, and that evolved into a *need* to know what time it was every second. I remember distinctly the first time i forgot my watch or lost my watch and there was no time piece nearby. i was in a state of total panic. I felt so afraid and insecure and alone and kept on looking around everywhere for something or someone to tell me what time it was. After that i… vowed never to ever wear a wristwatch on a regular basis ever again, opting for some sort of pocket timekeeper instead. because of this, a) i’m a much more relaxed individual, and b) i’ve developed the skill of knowing pretty accurately what time it is when asked even if the last time i checked a watch was hours before.

While not exactly analagous, i think it’s a close enough resemblance: we’ve reached a point in our culture where the expectation of information is so great that any information gaps regardless of its value can cause stress.

Again, the issue i have isn’t really with the technology itself, it’s with how it’s being applied. And it’s something that i have to be particularly careful about because of my own addicition to information. i love absorbing a wide variety of information whether important or not, and it’s for this reason that i’ve determined that mobile internet and smartphones are something i need to keep out of my life or give myself strict restrictions on how and when it is used. i’ve developed enough bad internet habits as it is.

–

Originally posted on darkblog resonate. I prefer any thoughts or comments there.

As a loyal supporter of Apple computers since about 1994, the direction that Jobs has taken Apple gives me mixed feelings. On the one hand, it’s nice to see a company that was such an underdog to Microsoft bring itself back into the spotlight, and i admire the company for finding ways to evolve outside of its original box and continue to push technology innovation and trends. The iPod pretty much blew away any existing portable MP3 player at the time through its marketing scheme; the iBook (and now the MacBook) has helped make laptops of any sort more mainstream, affordable, and trendy, and the iPhone caused all of the competing mobile phone manufacturers to scatter like chickens with their heads cut off to develop their own touchscreen smartphones.

But a side effect of the growth and development of that level of iCraze is that Apple’s flagship product of desktop computers (currently the Mac Pro) has further distanced itself from the mass market.

yesterday when i went to the lakeside mall i decided to skim my way through the new Apple store that had only recently opened there. the last time i was in an apple store was a couple of years ago in san francisco, and at that time i was going in with the attitude of ‘let’s just wander around’ as opposed to this time, which was ‘let’s assess the situation’.

and as i walked around this particular store, i saw iPods and iPod accessories, iPhone and iPhone accessories, iMac and iMac accessories, and MacBooks – none of which i was looking for. There was no sign of the Mac Pro, no corner where a user looking for a more power computer user that has expandability out the wazoo could find information. It made me think that the store should have changed its name from the Apple Store to the iTrend store.

And this reflects a particular attitude that Apple seems to have about their two lines of desktop computers. The Mac Pro is a powerful machine and has been generally received well by the critics, but Apple decided once it went Intel to make it such an Ultimate High-End Machine that it doesn’t pander well to the consumer market. The base model starts at about $2300 (without monitor) and customizing the machine to give it more oomph can easily put it into the $3500-$4000 range. For what you get that’s not unreasonable (from what i understand after basic digging) but the bottom line is still pretty steep and more computer than most people have a need for.

Which is fine because it’s nice that that option is available, but the problem is that the only alternative cheap option is the iMac. The base model of the iMac is $1200 (without a need for a monitor) and can be upgraded and oomphed up to a price that hits the low end of the Mac Pro specs for a much relatively cheaper cost. And i’d be completely happy with that except that the All-In-One design of the iMac restricts the kind of expandability that i’ve always had and still want with my desktops. i want multiple RAM slots and multiple PCI slots and multiple hard drive and optical bays. i want the ability to add a second monitor to my set up and then replace it if i get a new one or need to transfer my current monitor somewhere else. I want to be able to put in a RAID card or upgrade my graphics card. etcetera.

Ideally it would be nice if Apple brought back the PowerMac series as a reasonable compromise to fill that gap: consumer level processing options but with the expandability of the Mac Pro. I believe the audience is out there – the ones who want a compact and efficient workstation that gets the job done but can be modded as time goes by. A Powermac G6 could start somewhere mid iMac price range and ramp up to the beginning of the Mac Pro range, offering similar if not identical processor specs to the iMac.

But honestly i don’t see that happening any time in the near future. Apple’s desktop computers already seemed to be taking a backseat in development before the iPhone came out; now, between the newest MacBook Pros, the MacBook Airs, the iPhones, the iPods, &c., i think that the Mac desktops will continue to fade into a niche obscure market and fanbase comparable to that of Linux.

Which for me means two options: buy an old Mac Pro or G5 off of a distributor site that’s cheaper and more in line with what i want, or, for the first time in many years, consider buying/building a Windows machine as my main operating computer.

Buying a Windows machine as my main computer seems absurd because i’m much more comfortable with macintosh hardware and software, and i have all of these programs and files and archives of things that are Mac only. I hate Windows Vista, am not terribly fond of Windows XP, and don’t relish having to find a whole new suite of applications that will likely be unable to read my mac files.

And yet it still falls under consideration simply because of the question: “what do i really need in a computer and how much is that need worth?” against all other considerations it seems horribly imbalanced, but it’s a valid concern since there are many other things i should be using my money for other than a $4k computer and i bet i’d be able to build a PC that meets my needs for half that price (although i’m not sure if i feel like it will last as long).

But we’ll see. All this is moot until 2009 in any case, so when it becomes relevant i’ll look at the current offerings both present and recent past and then assess the situation then.

originally posted on darkblog resonate. comments are preferred there.

in its infancy, “video game” meant “arcade game”, starting (essentially) with Pong and then developing into a thriving arcade culture of individuals who plopped quarter after quarter gobbling pellets, shooting asteroids or space invaders, or jumping over barrels. And whlie my personal experience in arcades growing up didn’t match the stereotype of angsty/rebellious teenagers, society definitely bought into that impression on both sides of the fence, and as the popularity of video games started to rise so did the concern of parents that video games were a bad influence on youth. Video games are a waste of money, they make our kids not interested in reading, they make our kids violent or lose touch with the real world, &c.

It’s impossible to say where video games would be right now if the Nintendo Entertainment System hadn’t revitalized the home video game industry after the video game crash of 1983. I think it was likely a mixed blessing for arcade machine developers; on the one hand, the success of the NES console took people away from the arcades and more money into cartridges, but on the other hand, if the NES hsdn’t resurged video gaming back into popular culture, the arcade industry would have probably died on its own.

The interesting thing to note about the arcade industry versus the home industry was how those competing yet co-dependent paths slowly diverged over time both in society’s attitudes about them and the experiences they tried to create. During the third and fourth generation of home consoles from the mid-80s to late-90s, home consoles were still “behind” when it came to replicating the arcade experience. The graphics weren’t as sharp, the home joystick didn’t have the same sort of “feel” as an arcade joystick, and more importantly, home consoles couldn’t match the social aspect of arcade video gaming, particularly in the early 90s when Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat brought people back to the arcades. But the home console market at that time was able to compete in a way that the prior home console market failed because they had a particular slice of video game aesthetic that wasn’t meant to replicate the arcade experience, it was supposed to stand on its own. Super Mario Brothers, Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Sonic the Hedgehog, and early RPGs like the early Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior games helped define the home market audience versus the arcade audience.

It was the next generation of video game consoles (Playstation, N64, Saturn) that started to shift the dynamics and attitudes in game development as technology and graphics for home consoles started to accelerate and create the market that still has strong influence today. The long platform/RPG and other “console specialized” sorts of games still had a strong following, but it was also around this time that consoles had advanced enough to create a truer arcade experience or create an experience that (in some views) *surpassed* the arcade experience in gaming. And when the next generation of consoles came out years after (PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, Dreamcast), the arcade video game industry had to change its tactic to keep the arcade experience unique, which is how games with non-standard controllers rose to dominance, particularly music video games like Dance Dance Revolution and other bemani.

Through these decades of video game history, the overwhelming majority of consoles and systems were still aimed at the everchanging youth. Video games that were smash hits in the 8-bit era were abandoned as a home market aesthetic in favor of games that emphasized graphic superiority and/or a greater sense of epicism. and as that philosophy of “better graphics! more dazzle! who cares about gameplay? just blow things up!” gained momentem and became a standard to uphold in entertainment in general (don’t even get me started on the Michael Bay’s Transformers), it created a separation between the older and newer generation of gamers, leaving older gamers in the dust.

Until a new video game aesthetic started to creep into the mainstream which in its infancy was pretty invisible to the likes of me but is now impossible to ignore: the online casual flash game.

I’m not sure when casual flash games rose to such popularity, but it’s evident how much it has a strong foothold in the new video gaming culture not just because of the popularity of sites like kongregate, yahoo games, the casual game apps that exist on facebook &c, but also how much prominence casual games have in the current gen. consoles. The PS3 and XBox 360 certainly still have the genre of hardcore gamers that are looking for games that make full use of their power to give them that Next Dazzling first person shooter/racing game/sports game, but there’s an entire online paradigm for both of these consoles that is dedicated to the downloading and buying of casual games not unlike what is possible to do on the internet. In fact, some of the games that are available through those consoles’ online services are ones that were found on the internet first and developed as an enhanced version, such as N+ and Flow.

In addition to this, you have the Wii. Nintendo’s whole marketing strategy for the Wii other than its innovative controls is that it’s the video game console for the whole family, and with launches such as Wii Sports, Wii Play, and the like, it’s clear that part of the new controller design is optimized to help enhance the casual game experience with the unique Wii interface.

When i think about how and why casual games have risen to such prominence, a few key factors come into play. First off, i feel that the online casual flash game was the first video game genre that was targeted towards older people, particularly corporate office workers. Even small businesses have integrated high-speed internet as a part of their infrastructure, and when people need a break and are tired of reading news or looking at pictures or whatever, more people find a casual flash game to occupy their time. it’s the new version of the newspaper crossword puzzle or word scramble, and it succeeds at grabbing that new audience because a) the games are generally simpler in concept and execution than typical video games (compare point and click or finding words as opposed to executing a haryuken), and b) the games are generally short to finish, an instant gratification/momentary distraction sort of thing rather than a long involved mission that involves more walking and random encounters than people want to have even in real life.

Secondly, there’s the ease in which any random joe can program and develop a quality casual game. As opposed to console games which require a team of programmers and artists and what have you to put together, flash is relatively easy enough to learn that basic games can be a one-man show, and with sites like kongregate, they can gain free and instant exposure to tens of thousands of people. It’s even hit a point where those that can’t comprehend Flash can go to sites like simcarnival where a special application exists to make that process even easier, requiring practically no programming experience whatsoever.

Third, and in my opinion the most significant, some of the casual games that have come out of this have risen to true brilliance, and this is where i feel the video game trend has come full circle. Because surely there are current more standard video games that have their own sense of brilliance and success such as WoW or the Final Fantasy series or GTA or Mortal Kombat, but it’s been a long time since there has been a video game in which the brilliance matches the sensibility of how Pac Man and Tetris and Centipede and Asteroids were brilliant, or how Legend of Zelda and the original Super Mario Brothers were brilliant: that despite its seeming simplicity in concept, gameplay, and graphics, they never get tiresome or old.

And because of all of this, i have a suspicion that the Big 3 console companies are on their last legs in the market of video games unless the momentum can be rebuilt up because of the likes of Rock Band and Guitar Hero. Otherwise, i strongly suspect that people will soon be more likely to buy a $5 texas hold ‘em application on their smartphone or pull up a game of chain factor or their favorite kongregate game than spend $50+ on a console video game.

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Originally posted on darkblog resonate. I prefer any thoughts or comments there.

at first glance it seems to have potential – the gap that we have in teaching anyone anything physical is the lack of being able to directly influence subtle adjustments of muscle memory. This robotic contraption has the potential to create a consistent approach to drumming between a lot of different players which has practical application to, say, marching percussion lines in which creating a consistent approach to playing the drum is paramount. But that’s a very particular context and one that i firmly believe doesn’t serve to create good musicianship in the same way that giving someone a step-by-step recipe instruction doesn’t in itself create a good chef. and as far as i’m concerned, good musicianship is what should be the ultimate end goal of even the very first steps of music pedagogy.

to me, the development of the mechanical skills should move beyond the process of physical imitation to a process of mental understanding. When serious students initially learn how to hit a drum or breathe into a mouthpiece, they’re translating what they’re doing physically into a cognitive recognition and experimenting based on internal and external feedback to find what will produce the best result. The more times they can say in their head, “this feeling makes this happen, that feeling makes that happen,” the more they can truly comprehend the relationship between what is happening physically, how that affects the sound and their perception of that sound, and what sort of mindset has created that effect.

Having a mechanical guidance system like this feels like it takes the mental understanding aspects out of the equation and reduces instrument learning to a physical process instead of a musical one. The article says that the subjects “learned how hard to hit the drum 18% more accurately than when they tried to mimic a rhythm after just hearing it.” If you treat it like a physical process only, you’re surely more likely to get instant gratification statistics of that nature, but why would we ever want to train a musician to not listen? How many problems do we have already with virtuoso instrumentalists who may be technically amazing but don’t know how to blend with the ensemble or stay in time or move out of time with an ensemble? How many of those who could hit the drum 18% more accurately will become better musicians than those that didn’t? How many could be potentially worse?

Some might argue that a tool like this can at least be used as a source of guidance for those that are struggling, but i think that the pedagogical approach needs to be consistent with what ultimately creates the ideal musician. Yes, there are people who have gaps in their physical technique, but a tool like this seems like it’s a) a cheap and easy shortcut that doesn’t create cognitive retention of the concepts, b) assuming there is only one technique or that that technique cannot waver, and/or c) promoting the notion that understanding the physical aspects of sound creation supercedes the need to learn how to listen.

ultimately i think it stifles the creativity of the performers and what sense of individualism they can bring to a piece of music. if i wanted to hear a technically perfect and literal rendition of a piece of music designed to be played by a live acoustic performer, i’d stick the music into my MIDI sequencer and call it good. i find that the use of this sort of technology in music is far more valuable in other paradigms, such as the silly but awesome Tsukuba Series. If that’s not a good use of music technology, i don’t know what is.