Yesterday, I bought Fallout 2 and played it for like one hour or so. During the session, I managed to go through trial, and almost killed one plant and then finally made my way into woods to find a dog. I found dog, tried to come back and then gecko killed me. It was man-size gecko. Fast bastards.

I don’t know what happened to the dog, but then I encountered a game over screen showing bones of a dead human. Text indicated that it was bad thing for mankind too as they were not saved.

Then I saw the start menu.

Then… I started wondering if there was auto-saves, but heheee, there were no such things as autosaves in ’99. Nah, I should have saved the game and not mess with the gecko.

Okay, I realize that now.

Now, I might suck at Fallout but do I have to go through the damn trial again? I found a great strategy of fighting which consisted of “hit & run”. Hit once, run 4 squares away. Wait spider to follow and hit again. Repeat for a long time.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I like Fallout 2. It was game I never played in my childhood and I want to correct that error.

But, I started thinking stuff from game designers point-of-view. I encountered a permanent death. All my progress was lost, and I have to restart.

I started thinking: “does this make game more fun?”

I doubt it.

Okay, if there would have been auto-save… then I could have wanted to continue from that point and try saving the dog bit differently. Or, since there was no in-built autosave I could have just saved the game every 15 minutes.

…but that sort of breaks immersion to me. I’m going on a mission and tribesmen there and I can have ask guidance and all, and then trout slap to my face: “HEY, I GOTTA SAVE NOW” my brain reminds me.

I think permanent death works great in games where rounds are short. For example, Rogue Spear multiplayer was great. One shot and you could have to wait for the round to end. It was pure genius and added to thrill.

(And to clarify: permanent death means all your progress is lost and hell no your next character can pick up your experience/items/stuff/anything and no loading either. It’s one shot thing: if you die, you must start game from zero. That’s permanent death. Period. Everything else isn’t.)

Fallout’s (okay, it’s decade old game, I know) lack of auto-save – in my humble opinion – does NOT add to the gaming experience. I’d rather have one slot that I cannot save/load whenever I want, but so that it would autosave like every 30 minutes or at critical points (like just before going to critical area or something).

I think that way no much immersion is lost since I don’t have to go to pause menu & save the game… and it would still offer me meaningful choices to make. I would know that I have to make good decisions, since I’d have just one slot where the game is saved. No fooling around, but thinking what to do next.

Don’t get me wrong: the game’s just great. I’m just thinking out loud about permanent death & auto-save.

What you think?

First, I must point out that I dislike piracy.

But if censorship is the alternative “solution”, then I welcome piracy. If I have to choose between “piracy is ok” and “censorship is ok”, then I choose “piracy is ok”. Besides, in this case, censorship has zero effect on actual piracy. Which means my tax payer money just got wasted in Finnish court, thank you very much.

Today, it was reported that Finnish court decided that ISP must block certain domain which parrot lovers use to search illegal stuff, and this is pretty shitty thing to do.

(sarcasm) I would link to the page but my site might get to the Finnish block list so I won’t (/sarcasm).

The fact that Finnish Court can order ISP to block domains, that’s bad. Really Bad. Don’t get me wrong. I’m quite against piracy, but censoring domains is not the way to fight piracy (if you are into that sort of thing).

Now, the court ruled that one of the Finnish Internet operators (we have few major ISP) must block it’s customers access to thepiratebay.org.

The people who use TPB can do the following though:

• They can use thepiratebay.se
• They can use google.fi for illegal torrent search
• They can use million other similar search sites to find the stuff they want. Blocking 1 site has absolutely no difference to those who wanna pirate stuff
• They can use OpenDNS (thanks @taboobuilder) or whatnot to get to thepiratebay.org

What now happens is the following:

• TBP just got more fame.
• The copyright owners who started this court thing, don’t realize that they do more harm to themselves with this. Now TBP and other sites just get more publicity when different medias cover it, and more people might start to think “hey, I wanna pirate too!”
• We might be entering in censorship era here in Finland.

I talked with one pirate who never buys movies (he buys music instead) who said that he actually uses google for searching torrents. He says it’s much better search engine system than TPB.

So, the next logical conclusion is that Finnish Court also blocks Google. And who knows, some people might share links via Facebook or Twitter, so let’s block those as well.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not supporter of piracy.

But I hate this sort of stupidity.

Censoring site this way is wrong way to fight piracy.

And we really should not be “anti-piracy” but “pro-customers”.

We can try stop people who never buys our stuff from getting our stuff for free, but I think better idea is to concentrate on giving absolutely superb stuff for those who want to buy our stuff.

Just saying.

This poll is relatively simple, and will show that we are damn good customers!

1. First, count how many bought Steam games you have in your library. (If you are not sure, just take a rough guess)
2. Then, count how many games have you played at least for 2 hours

Divide “games played” with “games count” to get percentage, and answer the poll here:

I have about 30 bought games in steam, and less than 10 that I’ve played more than 2 hours. That’s 10/30, aka roughly 33%.

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Don’t get me wrong, I don’t necessarily like what you parrot lovers do, but I feel that there’s certain stuff that gets forgotten in all this piracy discussion. I’m taking economical point-of-view, and showing you in a pretty concrete way how we’d be screwed if there wasn’t pirates. (And, we’d might be in bad situation too if everybody would be pirating)

And no, pirating doesn’t make you as cool as LeChuck. Image googled and used without permission. I hope I don’t get into deep shit thanks to this.

I read one chap claiming that “pirates cost us (movie industry) 1 billion dollars revenues yearly” (figure that I just invented since I cannot remember the exact sum, but let’s say it’s 1 billion).

Now, pirates come and say “that’s not true!”.

But, I feel that’s pretty bad response. It’s somewhat irrelevant too. Let’s see what happens if we agree with the entertainment industry chap. That’s not necessarily a shinier future for the whole industry, or for technological progress for that matter. Let’s say that piracy costs for example 1 billion of lost revenue yearly to software makers.

1 billion is lost… but who have it?
Here’s the thing that these chaps fail to see:

the lost revenue from software manufacturers goes somewhere else, like to perhaps to hardware manufacturers

This is important, and this is also how software makers benefit. I explain.

The more revenue harware manufacturers make, the better computers they can make. More memory, more speed, and everything costs less.

That’s hugely important. I repeat the sentence bit differently, it’s that important:

if makers of hardware get more revenue, they can use that money to boost the development of computers

If CPU manufacturer gets more money, they can spend that money on research, and get faster computers at cheaper price which benefits software makers since cost of computers is getting lower, which means software makers don’t need to spend that much money to computers.

Let’s do an another example.

Let’s think of example world, called NormalWorld. In normal world, there’s pirates, non-pirates and something between. Here’s the population:

• 50% of population are Parrot Lovers, they spend 1 billion dollars to hardware and illegally pirate all the software, and spend 1 billion to Ship industry.
• 50% of population are Good Citizens, who spend 1 billion dollars on hardware and 1 billion dollars to software. But no money to Ship industry.
• In NormalWorld, software industry makers are spending 0.5 billion to buy better computers from hardware industry.

In NormalWorld, hardware industry is doing fine (2.5 billion total = 1 billion from parrot folks, 1 billion from Good and 0.5 from software), ship industry too is going strong (1 billion from Parrot Lovers), and so is software (0.5 billion total = they get 1 billion from Good but lose 0.5 to hardware).

Everybody praises how Good Citizens are moral and respectable people, and everybody loves them (expect the parrots, who like more the other chaps).

But there are people who say that we should see what our neighbour, SopaWorld does. In SopaWorld, there’s no piracy.

This leads to the following situation:

• 50% of population are Parrot Lovers there as well, forced to spend 1 billion to software industry, spending 0 billion to hardware, and ship industry gets 1 billion.
• 50% of population are Good Citizens, who spend 1 billion dollars on hardware and 1 billion dollars to software. But no money to Ship industry.
• In SopaWorld, software industry makers are spending 1.5 billion to buy expensive computers from hardware industry.

The hardware makers have less money on research, so they sell computers at 3 times higher price since they have got no technological progress which makes components cheaper. It follows that:

In SopaWorld, hardware industry is still doing fine thanks to higher prices (2.5 billion, 0 billion from parrot folks, 1 billion from Good and 1.5 from software), ship industry too is going strong (1 billion), and so is software (only 0.5 billion total = they need to buy 3x more expensive computers).

As you can see, the overall result is exactly the same as in NormalWorld. In NormalWorld, pirates bought so much hardware that software makers didn’t need to spend that much money, but in SopaWorld, pirates aren’t supporting hardware industry, so software industry needs to spend more money, as prices of hardware are higher.

NOTICE: these are imaginary numbers of course, and I’m not saying this would happen if governments introduce laws or if piracy stops. Just trying to explain that we cannot just look at one factor and forget everything else. I will be slowly be reaching towards the conclusions of this article. Read further.

Stopping piracy, might mean loss to other industries…
Then there’s also the DamnItWorld.

In DamnItWorld, things are bit different. DamnItWorld was exactly like NormalWorld, but then a new way to punish piracy caused the following change in the population:

• Since Angry Parrot Lovers (they were like Parrot Lovers except they really had no intention of buying never any software) were no longer getting software free, and had no intention to get faster hardware (since they could no longer brag about how they saw in their goddamn expensive home cinema all the newest ripped full hd quality movies). These people had no absolutely any reason to continue purchasing better computers. They weren’t going to buy software anyway, so they stopped buying hardware too. Instead, they took their fishing gear and started buying ships. In DamnItWorld, the ship industry gets 2 billion
• Good Citizens still spend 1 billion to hardware and 1 billion to software, but they are using worse computers than their neighbours (since computer technology is not profitable here, so no much improvements are being made) and since computers are shitty, their games also have worse looking graphics than in the neighbour countries (that might be a good thing though).
• Software industry here uses 0.5 billion to buy from hardware, but gets crappy quality computers. Software industry is blaming hardware industry for high costs, hardware industry is blaming software industry for crappy quality products – and they both are whining that ship industry should be taxed so that some money would go into technological research which would help technological progress.

DamnItWorld has 1.5 billion hardware, 0.5 billion software and 2 billion ship industry. Tons of ex-software people nowadays manufacture ships.

Then there’s the LetsSavePaperWorld where people store 2 billion worth of paper under their pillows, hoping that after 30 years, somebody will be willing to buy that paper with some good price. Like, when for example all trees have been cut and there’s shortage of toilet paper. Then those might come handy.

The point
What I’m trying to show you here, that stating something like “movie industry is losing 1 billion or 10 000 jobs thanks to software piracy” also means that some other industries have those 10 000 jobs. (Since movie industry is losing, it means there’s buying power).

If movie industry arguments that stopping online piracy creates jobs, that indeed is true. It sure creates jobs to the software industry. What they fail to point out, that jobs are lost from some other industry.

It works globally too: sure, if random Finnish person (not that we honest citizens pirate, but for the argument, let’s say we do) pirates your US movies and shares it freely here, the US movie industry suffers (compared to situation where Finn would have spent 500 eur to buy stuff). But what the movie industry fails to notice is that the nasty imaginary Finnish pirate is buying your TV electronics that helps your TV industry. If our imaginary Finnish parrot lover is forced to “spend money to US movie industry” or “spend money to US tv industry” (as you see, we like your industries), then to US as a nation, it’s quite irrelevant. Finn is willing to spend 500 eur to your country, and you can choose which industry (tv or movies) gets that money. That Finn is too lazy to work more, so he won’t have more than the 500 eur to spend anyway. That’s all there is for you. And if you cut the piracy option, our imaginary pirate just might start go build ships instead – and then the US movie and tv industry is actually getting 0 eur.

And it works locally too, here’s an example:

If our Regular Joe american is spending 500 dollars yearly on hardware, 0 dollars yearly on software and 500 dollars yearly on shoes – and now is forced to buy software (since movie industry is losing), it means that Joe will spend 500 dollars yearly on hardware, 500 on software and 0 dollars on shoes. So yes, software industry wins, but shoe industry loses.

(Unless of course Joe takes another job, gets +500 dollars to spend on shoes too yearly, and then receives burnout at the age of 29 – then all other industries win, and Joe’s health suffers.)

So, shouldn’t we all become pirates! That way everybody wins, right?!
As said, this is a matter of balance. If everybody would be pirates and nobody would spend a dime in software industry, that industry would die.

If nobody would spend a dime in software industry, then it would mean that other industries win and software industry loses. If software industry dies totally, then it might lead to a scenario where hardware industry gets taxed to support software industry. Or, it might mean that after everybody stopped making software, nobody is buying any more hardware and we are all making ships.

The key point here is that, piracy is not just about “what is wrong and what is right”. This is a matter of allocation of resources.

What do we want to support?

• Hardware makers?
• Software makers?
• Ship industry?

… or health care, or parrot food, or wood leg industry or what. And of course we must remember that nowadays the different industries are so connected that it’s quite damn tough to say how things really affect. For example, if you like this article so much that you go and order my $1 ludum dare mini game thing from year 2010, the following happens:

• Transaction handler industry receives their share of that dollar
• I get my share of that dollar
• Indirectly, Finnish government benefits from that dollar too, as I pay taxes
• And as my taxes support public health care, there’s some finnish hospital worker who gets his share of this transaction (or the tax money can be used to support roads building or library, or whatever they might do with it)
• Website server bandwidth thingy receives their share indirectly (as I need to pay that too)

And that’s at the expense of your dollar, which you could use to buy for example sweet cold drink.

It’s your call.

The final point
Please notice that all these numbers are fictional. I think there’s no person living in this planet who can accurately draw the flow of money in gaming/movie industry – and all connected industries. This doesn’t mean it would be irrelevant either. This simply means that “cutting piracy” has effects that affect various industries and arguments about “lost jobs” are shaky at most. I find this sort of legislation quite dangerous to be honest.

If there’s pirates, then there’s more support for example to hardware industry (or any other non-software industry for that matter, since pirates have more money left to spend on hardware, rest of us spent it on software you know). If we stop pirates, then they might take their money to some other industry. Or, if they are forced to buy software, then it means all those *other* industries suffer (like the drink industry which didn’t get your dollar when you chose to buy my game).

I wouldn’t be suprised to see more taxing of “industries that do well” to “support those industries that do poorer”, which practically would mean that we got rid of pirates yes, but thanks to taxation, things are (in industry scale) exactly the way they were before.

And after all, we are talking about entertainment industry here. There are much more important jobs in the world than making games or movies. Firemen, police, mental care, teachers, doctors, nurses, child care… all these are important industries.

I’m not saying that it’s somehow acceptable that certain individuals (or groups) have taken the right to share some one else’s invention without owners permission. Telling “it’s good for all” is simply not true, since it forgets the creator.

I don’t have no more so strong opinion on piracy, whether it’s right or wrong. I do not like the idea of government introducing laws and regulations into this industry. I do think that old copyright ideas might not be suitable anymore, but I do also think inventors should not be forgotten when we praise how good sharing of culture is.

I’m not fan of piracy, but stopping piracy is bit like fighting against windmills – and there’s some indirect benefits from piracy.

I think in the end, it’s an individual choice on how we respect each others effort, and how we balance everything. If we all support software industry, other industries suffer… which also makes software industry suffer (since there’s no good hardware). If we all support hardware industry, then software industry suffers (and then there’s no good software). If too many people join the pirate bandwagon, if too many think “I have the right to do this, as I support hardware industry – I let others support software”, then software industry will be facing bad times. It can mean poorer quality, or bigger lawsuits or other bad things.

I feel that as a person who supports both hardware and software industry – it would be equally nice if those pirates who do not support software industry, would re-consider if they too would like to have some direct support to software industry.

How do you vote?
Every citizen who spends their money to hardware and not on software is directly hoping of voting the following:

• Hardware quality must get better, therefore I support your industry!
• Software quality (and all other industries) can suffer!

And every citizen who spends their money on software and not hardware, is directly hoping of voting:

• Software quality must get better, therefore I support you!
• Hardware quality (and all other industries) can suffer!

By “hardware quality” I here mean “faster CPU, better gfx card, more memory, faster memory, better screens, etc”. By “software quality” I mean for example “better graphics, better gameplay, better innovations”.

To put other way around: those nasty pirates who don’t indirectly support software industry, gladly support hardware industry – which helps us makers of software industry too, indirectly (they help get cheaper computers, which means you and me pay less for CPUs).

I’m not saying this makes piracy legal or good in absolute sense. As noted earlier, if nobody supports software industry, software industry suffers.

Note to pirates who argue that “they pirate just because want better service”. There’s better way to get better service than boycott. It happens this way. (1) Buy stuff and (2) tell what you want. Sure, boycott might work too, but as a creator I know It’s easier to do better services when you have some money to fund the development of better service.

Naturally, this is only the direct support. As pointed out earlier, direct support to software industry might mean indirect support to various other industries. And of course directly hoping of voting here might not mean better quality products. For example, the maker of hardware might keep the profits and buy ships instead. That’s why you can only hope your money goes to making of better products. Long-term, I think it’s pretty safe to say that “industries that receive support tends to grow”, so your hopes might come true)

We need balance, and perhaps bit more respect towards each others work.

What is certain, that we hell sure should have much more respect for people who do some actual work (and not just watch movies or code magic numbers).

What is this shenanigan?

It’s about this:

• First you must spot a nice keyword, like used here or here.
• Then you write a blog post, that has the nice keyword in the topic title. That would be: fhriesoxpcdsuhwwnjrdchjdisowiquhfrdcsa
• And then you must also link to some relevant existing thing, such as this blog post: Why The Hell Minecraft Is So Popular Even When It Does Everything “Wrong”

And then search engines find the stuff.

And then you get traffic.

This stuff works also other than words like “fhriesoxpcdsuhwwnjrdchjdisowiquhfrdcsa” you know…

About a year ago, I promised several things that I shall NOT do. Here’s how things went:

• BAD GOAL: “no email on my main computer”. I still email on my main computer, it’s just convenient. It’s convenient for certain purposes. The good thing is I’ve used mobile devices to clean my email, so I consider this to be success. Goal itself was bit bad.
• SUCCESS: “no twitter on my main computer”. I have tweeted a few times, but 97% of the tweets are used mobile devices. That’s success for me and will keep it this way.
• SEMI-FAIL: “”no (too much) NHL11″ was my goal. What can I say. I bought NHL ’12… I think I didn’t waste too much time, and we had some good online gaming with my bro so it’s pretty ok. Less next year.
• SUCCESS: “ad sales hunting”.: I stopped this. I did accept some ad offers when people contacted me, which is fine. Will keep this way.
• SEMI-SUCCESS SEMI-BAD-GOAL: “no distraction”.. I think I managed to say “no” to many things, and recently started GTD stuff has been a blessing for especially all non gaming stuff.
• SUCCESS: “no clutter in email” Email has been zero. I mainly Inbox or Archive, or Trash stuff. I did have zero inbox for the whole year. That is a great feeling.
• FAIL: “no more new Insider members accepted” – I did change the whole gamerelease.net thing (added forums on that domain, added twitter and other stuff), and there’s new members too.
• SEMI-FAIL, SEMI-SUCCESS: “focus in making game, having fun, generating the green stuff”. To get green stuff, I have had to do other than gaming stuff. I have had fun making card game, which is now in Tweak state. I’m not focusing on green stuff no more. It’s funny, but somehow those software pirates have taught me that “greating fun games for people” (and to myself to enjoy) should be the goal. I think that indeed is the biggest thing one can aim for. That’s where I’m aiming as well.
• SUCCESS: “no wockas if being parent requires time”. It sure does. Bye bye free time, but welcome great time. This soft talk is what only parents can understand.
• DUNNO: “no too fast conclusions”. I think I draw too fast conclusions, but maybe drew less fast conclusions last year. (Hmm, or do I draw a too fast conclusion here? I dunno)

Since I have one young kid and second one coming, I had seriously need to re-think my resources. My main goal was to get rid of stuff this year, and ensure there’s room for game development. I think that was achieved pretty well, and I’m pretty satisfied how this year has been.

Instead of sharing their crap, just like you know… do the following:

1. Stop buying (if it’s crap, why buy it?)
2. Stop consuming (if it’s crap, why share it in the first place?)
3. Stop sharing it (if it’s crap, why share it?)

And if it’s good, then why not buy it and show support for doing good stuff?

(And if it’s not “convenient to get”, then why not (a) first pirate it and (b) then buy a copy anyway?)

Trying to censor torrent sites leads to censoring google as well. It’s like saying “you cannot deal drugs in this building, so drug dealers, move to the next building please”. So, let’s all agree this path won’t work.

So, members of government, this is how you stop the dealers.

1. First, setup a huge torrent sharing site, operated by secret gov agency. Register PiratePartyBay domain or something like that. Tell that you support all pirate parties around the world. (Also, open some sort of “free proxy” system, but don’t tell it’s operated by you)
2. Second, make huge ad campaign: plaster ads everywhere: tv, radio, google, etc. All possible places to get visitors to your site.
3. Third: Make sure your visitors register at your site.
4. Four: make fake lawsuits against your own company, telling how “Big Media Corporation” is suing you. Gain publicity for 2 years.
5. Five: track which files people have shared, mark dates, IPs, etc. to you.
6. Six: Using available data to track down where the chaps are located. Half of the folks have figured out privacy stuff which makes it impossible to know where they are located, but half of the pirates don’t do that. Get court order for operators to help tracking.
7. Seven: Arrest half of your country’s population and put them in prison. Including some of the cops who do the arrest.

And, to get the rest of the country’s population in jail, do the following:

1. Setup a “rat the pirate” program, which gives $150 reward for each person who rats about their friend who is sharing illegal stuff. The remaining pirates will rat about their friends faster than you can say “parrot on my shoulder”.

P.S. Tomorrow morning I’m telling how pirates can stop evil media corporations

Now the final doors 22, 23, and 24 are available to check out.

Merry xmas folks.