Month: January 2009

From an interview with lex Rigopulos, co-founder of Harmonix, the company that developed the game:

I do think that during the coming years we will continue to try to bridge the gap between simulated musicianship and real musicianship. That said, the path there is not obvious: As the interactivity moves closer to real instrumental performance, the complexity/difficulty explodes rapidly. The challenge is to move along this axis in sufficiently tiny increments, so that the experience remains accessible and compelling for many millions of people. It’s a hard, hard problem. But that’s part of what makes it fun to work on.

Heather Mac Donald on what she calls "Drive-Thru Religion":

The religious superstructure of centuries past has been dismantled.  Rising in its place is a remake of religion “in the image of mass-consumer capitalism,”  according to a sociologist of American religion at the University of Notre Dame.  That remake offers up easily digestible bits like the “5 Minute Theologian”  and “7 Minutes With God.”  Only a quarter of Americans attend church weekly.  Yet moral chaos has not broken out; society has grown more prosperous as secularism expands.  Empathy with others, an awareness of the necessity of the Golden Rule, survive the radical transformation of religious belief, it turns out.  Perhaps because a moral sense is the foundation, not the result, of religious ethics.

Eight years ago, Will Ferrell performed Bush’s future first State Of The Union. It could stand for his farewell address as well:

Carr responds to Rob Horning:

Distraction is the permanent end state of the perfected consumer, not least because distraction is a state that is eminently programmable. To buy a guitar is to open possibilities. To buy Guitar Hero is to close them. A commenter on Horning’s article writes, "To me, the radical move that Guitar Hero makes is to turn music into an objectively measurable activity that is more amenable to our Protestant work ethic. It brings the corporation’s focus on quantitative performance indicators to the domain of music, displacing the usual mode of subjective enjoyment."

Appleyard posits:

Let me say it again, the only newspapers around in the future will be very upmarket, all the downmarket stuff being more readily available on the internet or in magazines made of  pulped squirrels that will be handed out free to the unemployable and the insane. Until that day of gentlemen print journalists dawns – more properly redawns – various schemes and scams will splutter and die… But patience, wood pulp, pigment and high intelligence will endure.

It was the urban vote says Nate Silver:

…the future of America is an urban one — among the twenty largest metropolitan areas in 2000, nineteen had added population by 2007, a trend likely to sustain itself as rising gas prices place more pressure on exurban commuters. Republicans trail Democrats among essentially every fast-growing demographic except the elderly — the youth vote, the Latino vote; they never had the black vote. It is long past time that they hone their pitch to urban voters, and find their shining city upon a hill.

An inside expose of the publishing industry with all its gory secrets:

(Hat tip: Doctorow)

Rob Horning searches for the meaning of the video game:

If you want a more interactive way to enjoy music, why not dance, or play air guitar? Or better yet, if holding a guitar appeals to you, why not try actually learning how to play? For the cost of an Xbox and the Guitar Hero game, you can get yourself a pretty good guitar. I can’t help but feel that Guitar Hero (much like Twitter) would have been utterly incomprehensible to earlier generations, that it is a symptom of some larger social refusal to embrace difficulty.