Mousetrap Technology - Times Online - WBLG

GTA IV and the battle of the consoles

Grand Theft Auto IV is expected to sell out today on both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, but already the console makers are battling to get the upper hand. Sony has released a PS3 package that comes with the game, but it's Microsoft that have really pulled out all the stops by spending a reported $50 million on two downloadable additions to the game that will be available exclusively on Xbox Live.

The content of the packs is currently unknown, but with each costing Microsoft $25 million, it's fair to assume that they will add significantly to the already huge game – and that they won't be cheap for us to buy. But given that most serious gamers already own one of the two machines, will it be worth forking out for the 360 to get the extra content if you already have a PS3?

If you’re a well-off PS3 owner who plays every game through to the bitter end, then it might be worth getting a 360 for the downloadable add-ons that will entertain you for another few hours. On the whole, though, I doubt that many will be tempted to buy an additional console.

Nor are the two versions different enough to encourage much console switching. The graphics are more or less identical, by all accounts, which is disappointing – Rockstar, the game makers, could have used the full power of the PS3’s cell processor to up the ante in the visual stakes.

If you have neither console and this is your idea of car-jacking, gun-toting, drug-dealing fun, the 360 seems to be the one to go for. But if you are a movie buff with an HD-TV then the Blu-ray player in the PS3 may well be the clincher.

Essentially, we have two companies that have pretty much bottomless pockets fighting to be top dog in an industry worth billions of dollars per year. Regardless of the outcome, even the loser will be sitting pretty. If you find yourself appalled by the content of GTA IV or just are becoming a little too involved in the criminality then you can always fork out yet more for a Wii Fit and throw yourself in to it's yogic bliss to centre yourself once more.

Full GTA IV coverage:

Man stabbed while waiting to buy Grand Theft Auto IV
GTA review: Not just a game, but five-star entertainment
It’s just a game, says GTA producer

Is the web twisting your sense of time?

Concerned that you - or indeed your company - are falling behind in the race to be noticed in the digital age? It may be because you are operating according to an industrial concept of time.

In the railway age - an age when trains apaprently did run on schedule - timings were far more rigid, and the importance of abiding by them was paramount. Now our sense of time is more 'fluid', meaning we feel less willing to making temporal commitments because of the ease of breaking them - by making a call on the mobile or sending a text.

So, anyway, says FutureRealWorld - a research company which tracks consumer behaviour and trends. "The most obvious expression of this is in media consumption, where we've witnessed the end of prime time because of the advent of PVRs [personal video recorders]," said Tamar Kasriel, FutureReal's director, warming to her 'time' theme in a speech at Internet World in London. "But it's influencing social patterns too. Rather than arranging a meeting now, people schedule a 'proxy-meeting'. You'll say Friday. Then in the middle of the week - you might specify Friday afternoon, and then as time gets closer, you gradually nail down when and where you'll meet. There's a sense that you can bend time, and for some people that provides a great sense of empowerment."

Those starved of the vocabulary of digital marketing and consumer trends were also feeling empowered after Ms Kasriel's speech. Featured in her 30-minute talk were a raft of creative - and sometimes slightly bamboozling - phrases which sounded nothing if not very 2.0. Among them: "the half-life of data is much shorter than it used to be", the "world wild web" - a reference to the perceived unlawfulness of many activities on the internet, and "the tyranny of immediacy", which has something to do with the fact that we and many of the services we use are "always on". Still with us?

'Government 2.0' has a little way to go, says the Government

The blogging habits of David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, are well-known. Rather less documented are the Government's - or at least the civil service's - other attempts to embrace the web 2.0 age.

Today the Central Office of Information (COI) - which runs the communications for the whole of the civil service - revealed a little more about how it is attempting to reach the MySpace generation in a speech given by its director of digital media, Jamie Galloway. (Or former digital director. Mr Galloway recently left the organisation after an eight-year stint to set up his own digital agency.)

Among the government schemes about which Mr Galloway spoke  were an instant messaging component of Frank, the drugs advice campaign aimed at young people, which allowed children to install a 'virtual robot' on their phone which would answer drugs-related questions via IM.

He also gave details of a Royal Air Force recruiting drive which involved a serviceman blogging about his experience on the front line in Afghanistan, and - perhaps most innovatively - of a climate change awareness campaign involving a youth-focused virtual world called Dubit.

In the latter, the COI joined Dubit, which is similar to its better-known competitor, Second Life, and 'installed' a virtual glacier. COI representatives masquerading as virtual penguins then set about distributing messages to the world's inhabitants about the perils of environmental degradation. (Are you still with us?) The two-week campaign culminated in the glacier melting and the entire world flooding, which Mr Galloway demonstrated with slides showing a virtual music festival clogged with mud and water - a scene reminiscent of Glastonbury.

"It certainly got the message across," he said.

But, he added, the civil service still had a long way to go before it properly grasped the potential of web 2.0, especially in comparison with the US, where presidential candidates such as Barack Obama had raised vast sums of money by reaching out to the so-called 'long tail' of voters - people who would contribute $5-10 to his campaign - via the web.

"When I joined the COI no one wanted to talk about digital, but now a lot do, and I think you're going to see a lot of the lesson from the US in the past couple of years applied here," he said. "We've had ministers blogging, but gradually more decades-old processes are being turned on their heads by the reality of being able to share information more easily."

The boardroom voting scandal at the (usually sedate) '.co.uk' company

Rarely does dissent, intrigue and acrimony ripple through Nominet, the organisation which for most of the time takes care of the highly unglamorous and for the most part sedate task of administering the .co.uk domain name.

But this week is an exception. Tomorrow, the organisation - a not-for-profit company set up to register the now 6.6 million .co.uk domain names - has a crucial boardroom vote which may influence how much it costs a company or individual to set up a website. And the outcome is hotly contested.

For 12 years exactly - the time Nominet has been in existence - the wholesale price of registering and renewing a .co.uk domain name has remained unchanged at £5. Some members want that changed, though, and there's a significant and unusually heated debate about how.

Approximately half of Nominet's members run a business selling domain names to companies and individuals. They want the price reduced, because it will mean that the cost of 'sitting on' addresses prior to selling them will be reduced. (Some companies have more than 20,000 domain names in a pool waiting for the sale, so the twice-yearly cost of renewing them would come down by tens of thousands of pounds if the wholesale price is reduced even by £1.)

The remainder - many of whom run websites on other companies' behalf - would like it raised, because it will mean their clients will take more seriously the process of re-registering the domain name every two years. "At the moment you've got this absurd situation where whether a domain name as important as bbc.co.uk gets registered depends on whether some person in accounts remembers to pay the £5 every two years," one Nominet insider said.

Because of the vagaries of the company's consitituion, a vote on a change to the fee would require a 90 per cent approval of members, which the Nominet management says is "extremely unlikely", given the split.

Still, the progressives are adamant. They've put forward two 'rebel' candidates to be elected to the board at tomorrow's AGM who, Nominet says, would attempt to push through the changes - a move the organisation's management opposes. So last week its chief executive, Lesley Cowley, sent a letter to members urging them not to vote for the reform candidates.

Asked what kind of a majority would be required among the 40-odd members expected to attend the event in London would require, Ms Cowley couldn't be specific, blaming the complex voting structure of the organisation. "But you'd need a massive swing, definitely," she says.

Is she worried?

"It's a decision for our members to make," she said coyly today at the Internet World conference in London. Stay tuned.

What's on Mick and Keith's iPod?

Stones songs. Lots of them. From the most recent performance.

Richard Kerris, the band's former AV geek, tells Variety he introduced Mick, Keith, Charlie, Ronnie & Co. to the wonders of the iPod on the 40 Licks tour. Ever since, the band has been recording all of its shows to a Mac laptop sitting behind Charlie Watts' drum stand. After the show, the techies then port the play lists to iPods so the band can listen afterwards.

As Kerris tells Variety, "If you look at any of the old videos from that tour you’ll see a laptop, a Mac laptop sitting behind Charlie, everything’s recorded with these two stereo mics, so they have a rough, they have a full 48-track underneath, but everything goes into that laptop. Everything’s connected to a little distribution amp with five Firewire cables hanging off of it. So while the band was doing their bows and the fireworks were going at the very end, the backline crew would plug in their iPods, synchronize the thing, and put in their bathrobes an iPod that had that night’s show, so when they came offstage, they’d grab their stuff, get in their car and they would have the show with them right then and there. No one had done anything like that at all."

Mick, says Kerris, is a natural geek. He took to the technology in short order. And Keith? Well, that's a different story. Says Kerris, "Keith doesn’t use the computer as much, he just recognizes what part it plays."

A new infected website every five seconds

That's the findings this week from online security specialists Sophos, who say their filters are detecting an alarming rise in the number of infected web pages in the first quarter of 2008, another indication that cyber criminals have set up shop virtually across the web.

Sophos says its filters blocked, on average, an infected website every five seconds -- up from one infected web site every 14 seconds a year ago. The top three culprits are the US, China and Russia, which account for more than 82 per cent of all web-based malware hosted online.

Wii Fit: cute graphics, but little to get the blood pumping

I went to a Wii Fit launch event this morning, designed to show off Nintendo's fitness game and its  pressure-sensitive floor pad. It was a slightly surreal event, with all the Nintendo folk dressed in white tracksuits with big marketing smiles. I felt a bit like I had stumbled upon a technologically advanced cult. Thankfully, there was no fruit punch offered and we were soon set loose with the games.

To get started, a colleague of mine went through the few steps to work out his Wii Fitness age – a measure of physical wellbeing – by entering his age and height and trying to stand stock still on the balance board. He wavered and came out with a fitness age of 69. Being in his early 30s, he wasn't overly impressed. He did, however, laugh at the number, suggesting he has a mental age half his actual years, so it probably balances out.

We moved on to skiing and hula-hooping, which were fun but didn't seem to require much exertion. Nor do the other balance and Yoga exercises seem to burn off many calories, though doing headers was a bit more energetic. There are some more aerobic exercises available, like jogging, but they just aren't the games I felt were the most appealing. The game's strength is the graphical appearance, which is very appealing in a cute and slightly weird way, with funny animations popping up as you get hit by a football boot or a disembodied panda head while trying to do headers.

The problem as I see it is that the game provides little motivation to keep playing. You can see your Wii Fitness age – and hopefully see it falling – but is that enough to get you using it a few times a week? The motivation for visiting a gym often comes from peers, or because it costs you money every month whether you go or not. Even with the £70 price tag, I'm not sure that these motivational factors are there in big enough proportions to keep me using the Wii Fit.

The balance board's sensitivity is impressive and works really well as a control system, so it will be interesting to see what other titles come out using it as an input device. If the fitness regime had more of a level-based system, like Super Mario Galaxy, I would probably be more inclined to play it regularly.

I don't want to give the impression it's not good. I did like it, and even though I’m probably not in the target market, I am tempted to get one once it has been released. I just feel that it could fall into the same trap as Wii Play, effectively being little more than a good way of showing off the capabilities of the hardware.

My colleague and I agreed that we probably used up more energy walking there from the Tube than we did while playing Wii Fit, but any game that features panda heads being kicked at you is alright by me.

The mystery of the world's biggest net outage solved?

Conspiracy theorists, you were right. Apparently.

The biggest net outage ever recorded was the work of two wayward ships off the coast of Egypt earlier this year. The news comes from Dubai, where the ships were briefly impounded in recent days and two men could face trial, VNUnet reports. This comes after Egypt's Communication Ministry informed us in early February that no ship was capable of knocking out the underwater cables, triggering vexing net outages from the Middle East to India.

The new version of events is that two ships -- one Korean-owned, the other Iraqi -- travelling in a forbidden zone, dropped anchor and dragged it across the sea bottom, snapping the lines.

Reliance Globalcom, which owns the cables, was able to piece together this scenario, using satellite photos to identify the culprits, essentially sinking the official Egyptian version of events.

Mac vs Windows?

My day to day job is multimedia design. If you see something that moves around or is interactive in any way, shape or form online, that's the sort of thing I do. In the late 90's I got a grant from The Princes' Trust and started printing skatewear t-shirts and moved on from there. When I started out I needed a computer so I bought a Mac. I chose a Mac primarily because I had a friend that knew about them and could help me fix it if it went wrong. I've been using them ever since and am now the bloke my friends with Macs call when theirs goes wrong. Contrary to what Apple would like you to believe, just like Windows machines, Macs throw a wobbler on occasion too.

Currently on my desk at work I have a Windows XP box and an iMac. I don't really use the Windows machine. It's not because I have any objection to the fact it's Windows, I just know how to get around the Mac better. Other folk I work with that also have the same set-up work the other way round, with the Mac hardly getting touched. Again, it's just about what they are familiar with and prefer. I find the whole frothing at the mouth evangelism some Mac users have a bit sad. I like using my Mac but I don't see why somebody who is perfectly happy with their Windows machine should be ranted at for their preference. I think the PC fanatic who rants with equal candour against the Mac is also misguided, and often misinformed. Both operating systems do similar things equally well, but there are some things a Mac does better, and some things Windows machines do better. Bizzarely, I find Microsoft Office is better on the Mac and one of my creative mainstays, Adobe Flash, is better on a PC. On a Mac it runs slower and is more processor hungry. Annoying but true.

But here is the thing. I'm glad Microsoft has the market dominance. I can't help but feel that if Apple had the same domination that Microsoft has they would be a lot more ruthless - to the detriment of the consumer. When Apple had market dominance way back in the late 80s and early 90s, the computers were astoundingly expensive. Bill Gates wanted to licence the Mac OS but was told where to go, so he made Windows. Apple responded to the new threat with arrogance and didn't work on giving people a better deal with Windows machines running at thousands of pounds cheaper than the Macs of the time. By the time Apple realised what they had done Microsoft had stormed ahead to where it's the system the majority of you are using now. Similarly, Quark was once the dominant force in publishing software, but has now been supplanted by Adobe InDesign because Quark didn't listen to it's consumers or understand the threat from the competition. Apple lost out for the same reason.

As far as figureheads go, I think Steve Jobs is an influential and charismatic leader as well as a great company figurehead, but I think Bill Gates comes across as a nicer - if geekier - bloke. I know he's been replaced by Steve Balmer as the head of the company, but I think most people still see him as the lead guy. I think the charitable trust he and his wife set up is great and his general ethos on the staggering wealth he has is a good one. I tend to imagine Steve Jobs may well sleep in a coffin, albeit a very nicely designed one.

Comment by all means but please don't prove the point of the article. Save the Mac and PC flaming for Engadget. Don't forget, even if you hate the other operating system to the one you use, the fact it exists means there is competition that will push forward the development on your favoured system. Consumers benefit and lower blood pressure all round.

Yes, I know Unix and Linux are players in the market too, but it's going to be an online OS we are all going to end up using in the future anyway. The Google ramraiding will continue.

Don't get me wrong, I love using my Mac and don't want to change operating systems. I just think some of the Apple users out there need to have a little more perspective about their beloved Apple, and to just chill out a bit. We should be more relaxed, we are running the better system after all. But then, I would say that, wouldn't I?

Mobile Broadband: Seems too good to be true. Isn’t.

My curiosity piqued by the aggressive advertising for ‘wireless broadband on the move’ offerings, I thought it might be a worthwhile experiment to test one of the current solutions for peripatetic surfers.

I took Vodafone’s new 019 mobile broadband USB stick on a road trip and surfed for all I was worth. The press release promises up to 7.2Mbps downstream and 1.44Mbps upstream connections. Those speeds are respectively fourteen and twenty-two times faster than the original 3G service launched all those years ago in 2004.

Precise speeds rarely reached those levels, but the performance certainly compared favourably with the 512mbps connection that seemed good enough for us all just a few years ago.  Passing through some cells caused the performance to degrade noticeably, but I never managed to make it die, despite downloading a song from iTunes while driving down the motorway at 50mph, and taking a look at Google Maps while I was ankle deep in the North Sea.

Installation was entirely painless on either Mac or PC, with a dual-format CD configuring the 'dial up' connection entirely automatically. Even in the age of mobile phones and wireless networks there's still something extraordinary about being connected to the web while you're in a rowing boat.

If you’re paying more than £15 a month for your current broadband service - maybe because you never got round to changing suppliers during the 2006 Broadband Price War - and you’re a casual surfer rather than a multimedia addict,  Vodafone’s solution may be a much more practical solution than it might at first appear.

Unimpressed by the BBC iPlayer on the Wii

Nintendo and the BBC last week sent out press releases and made a big deal in their respective news items out of the fact you can now view the BBC iPlayer on the Wii. Am I the only person who was left distinctly unimpressed?

The nice thing about using the Wii is that it has Wii Channels that allow you to read current news, see the weather, shop for downloadable games and browse the internet in nicely skinned custom channels, optimised to work as best they can on your TV.

The new iPlayer access talked about is not a custom channel. The new exciting access just means you can browse to the BBC iPlayer web page and play the content through the Wii Opera powered web browser. This is exactly the same as you can when using a PC or Mac online but on a browser that doesn't give you the resolution of a monitor - not what I would call an exciting development. To view a show, you have to type in the URL using point and click for each letter with the Wiimote, drag the window around to get the actual player in the centre of your screen and then try to zoom in and out to get the player to fill the viewable area.

It's a very long way from a simple solution. According to Mr Huggers, the group controller at the BBC’s future media and technology division, both Xbox and Playstation won't be getting the iPlayer as they wanted to skin it to fit within their custom look, which is why only the Wii has it. A publicly funded company can't have its player commercialised. It's also the reason the implementation is so weak. If the news stories and press releases hadn't been so generally over hyped, I might have thought being able to watch the last 7 days of BBC TV on my Wii was okay, but there in lies the problem. Nobody likes a show off, especially when it's the equivalent of a 15 year old showing how well he can juggle to his peers. No matter how good you are, your skills won't be appreciated and you are rightly going to get bundled.

One skill that Nintendo are justifiably boasting about, however, is the release of a fantastic new game. If you own a Wii, you should get your coat on and head to the nearest game shop and buy Mario Kart for the Wii as soon as you can.

I have previously expressed my concern that the new Mario Kart would be another weaker offering in the series, as the Gamecube version was. How wrong I was. There are now motorbikes which I think may well be my favourite vehicle as well as the option of racing against 11 other people online.

The online racing really brings the game into its own. If you have ever played any of the previous Mario Kart games with friends you will be aware of the technique of getting a red shell (the homing missile) and waiting until the last moments of the last lap before taking out the lead kart to win the race. when you have 11 other people doing this, being in first place on the last lap will mean you are hammered with 15 or so of the red menaces.

This makes the multiplayer game both frustrating and loads of fun. You can finish 2nd in one race and 12th in the next. It really does makes the game. For all of you UK folk, we unusually got Mario Kart before the US. Time for us to hone our skills and bring on the shells when our US cousins finally get their release in a couple of weeks. And because there is no microphone option on the Wii, it also means you won't regularly be called a mother f***** by the 12 year olds online too. Which is nice.

Xbox gets Rock Band 90-day exclusive

I've just come back from a chat with some of the folks at Xbox who are in an excited state as they have just managed to negotiate a 90-day timed exclusive with Rock Band, the big competitor to Guitar Hero III. This will mean the other consoles will have to wait until the summer before launching their own versions of the new game, with the Xbox 360 version coming out on the 23rd of May. Many of the original team that launched Guitar Hero jumped ship to start up Rock Band, so for the companies involved, it really is personal.

For those of you who have been living in a vacuum, Guitar Hero III is a game that comes with a guitar controller and lets you play along with famous songs, getting points for the accuracy and timing of your playing. Rock Band takes it up a notch, adding in a bass, mic and drums so you can play with four friends, each playing a different part of the song.

I've got Guitar Hero III and have played it with a couple of friends who earn their living as musicians and interestingly, the one who is a guitarist says he finds playing the harder levels of Guitar Hero more difficult than playing the same songs with real instruments. It will be interesting to see how Rock Band's multi-instrument set-up will put my drummer friend to the test, but it also raises an interesting question: if you have four friends to play with, why not start a real band? Personally I rock at Guitar Hero III, but if you heard me playing a real guitar, it sounds as if I was fighting it and the strings were winning.

Where are all the Blu-ray discs?

Call it a casualty of winning the war too soon. Now that Sony's Blu-ray technology has emerged the victor in the blinked-and-you-missed-it high-definition format war, the real struggle is just beginning. It looks as if there is no chance there will be enough Blu-ray discs to meet global demand this year, say analysts at Screen Digest.

Now that chief rival HD-DVD (backed by Toshiba and Microsoft) has been consigned to the scrap heap, global demand for Blu-ray discs is expected to jump three-fold in 2008 to a minimum of 43 million units, Screen Digest says. The problem is that production capacity can hardly match the surge. The top producer is Sony itself. Sony DADC's unit is investing in extended production line capacity to produce 38 million discs per month by October. This would meet just 60 to 70 per cent of global forecast demand, Screen Digest says.

Greater than expected demand is great for Sony's bottom line, but consumers will feel the pain. With production capacity being outstripped so far by demand, expect disc prices to remain at a premium.

The end of weird: why boring games dominate

I've mentioned the excellent Wii game Zack and Wiki here before. The game got fantastic reviews and was a bold departure in style from most of the other current releases, but it hasn't been selling well in the shops. I think this is partly due to big name games coming out and people are voting with their cash for the tried-and-tested titles rather than purchasing something different. This is going to end up leaving us with a games industry that follows the tragic path the movie industry has taken: terrible remakes of classic films and numerous sequels rather than original and risky movies.

Sonic is a classic example of a once-great title that just trades on it's name to produce shoddy titles. If we don't buy the games that are a little more unusual then games that have the potential to reinvent genres simply won't get made. There are already way too many Brain Training clones on the Wii and far too many bad first-person shooters on the Xbox, and unless we start supporting the more unusual, that's all we are going to be left with. There are games that try to do something different and fail miserably with bad execution and poorly thought-out plots, but when the reviews are great we need to buy these titles. The problem is that most of us can't buy numerous titles on a whim so picking and choosing does end up a conservative business.

The latest title with potential in the weird game stakes is My Beautiful Katamari. You get to roll a ball around a landscape picking up elements from the environment by rolling over them until you get big enough to move on to the next level. It's out on the Xbox, and although it’s a sequel to the PlayStation 2 game it’s easily strange enough to qualify for the "something different" category. There was a PS3 version being developed but this was apparently dropped due to porting issues and the resources have been put towards working on a Wii version.

There is also a game out now for the Wii and the DS called Jenga, which is a video game version of the popular wooden blocks game. I know. Exactly who thought this would be a good idea is unclear, but I think it's safe to say you should probably steer clear when looking for your next unusual game. It also costs four times as much as the real game. Surely somebody should have put a stop to this at the ideas stage?

Good news for Apple, bad news for music labels

That observation is proving axiomatic yet again as news emerges that Apple's iTunes has now leap-frogged Wal-Mart to become the No 1 music retailer in the United States, which is the No 1 music market in the world. According to Ars Technica, Apple has 19 per cent of the music retail market compared to Wal-Mart's 15 per cent. A year ago, iTunes surpassed Amazon for the first time. Now, Amazon is in fourth, Ars says, citing statistics from industry sales tracker NPD Group.

While the report suggests download sales are still surging (at least for Apple), it does point to yet again worrisome news for the labels. NPD Group had been tracking the precipitous decline in physical music sales for some time. In February, it estimated  that "one million consumers dropped out of the CD buyer market in 2007, a flight led by younger consumers. In fact, 48 percent of US teens did not purchase a single CD in 2007, compared to 38 percent in 2006."

So, while everything looks rosy for the sale of iPods and tracks on iTunes, few music execs have reason to smile. These latest figures no doubt will propel talks by the major labels to push ahead with plans to introduce all-you-can-eat monthly fees to broadband users who want access to their catalogues. If a universal fee is introduced, it might just be called the next "iTunes killer." 

An emotional response to Manhunt 2

Manhunt 2, which had been banned in the UK last year, has now been given permission for release in June after an appeal by Rockstar Games. Part of the defence used by Rockstar is that although the game is violent and is about committing murder it is no more violent than a Tarantino film.

I think the comparison is missing the very point of video games. My two young sons will always choose to play on the Wii rather than watch TV, the reason being that they like interacting rather than just passively watching the activity on screen. If I am watching a film and one character tortures another, it is the writer and director who are choosing to do the maiming. If I am controlling the character, then it's my choice to torture or not. I'm no psychologist, but that has to have a much bigger impact.

The latest Splinter Cell used the emotional choice you have in the game rather well. You have to make two opposing groups both trust you. One of the first assignments ends with you being asked to kill an innocent helicopter pilot who begs you not to. The game makes it clear that it's your choice and you don't have to do it to continue the game. I did kill him to gain more trust with the bad guys and, much to my surprise, I genuinely felt bad about it. This isn't something I've ever experienced before in a game, and it raises the question not of what Manhunt 2 involves but of what emotional involvement you have. A much harder thing to quantify.

I was talking to a friend about games recently and he was extolling Bioshock. One of his main selling points was that he got to burn a dead cat and hit it with a wrench while it was floating in water, making it bob pleasingly. To be fair to him, he was using this as an example of the interactivity of the environment. I hope it's safe to say that for him, Bioshock is purely entertainment and not a reflection of his ability to form emotional ties, as it seemed to be for me in Splinter Cell. Still, I wasn't overly convinced about this and have since made sure I always face him and avoid making sudden movements when chatting.

I hope he doesn't read this. I wouldn't want to make him angry.

What more can social networks do to protect us from ourselves?

Over the last few days we’ve seen a glut of official reports and warnings about Facebook, Bebo and the other social networks, and the threat that they pose to children. Or rather, the threat that some children pose to themselves by posting too many details about themselves.

It must be a frustrating time for the networks, who will be tempted to dismiss the reports as scaremongering by people who don’t understand the new phenomenon and want it stopped. A desire to seem sympathetic and responsible will keep a lid on the frustration, but it’s hard to see what more they can do to protect people from themselves.

It is, after all, up to the individual to decide what he or she posts. Where the person in question is too young to make a sensible decision, that responsibility passes upwards to the parents.

Parents may struggle to strike a balance between allowing children freedoms and keeping them safe, but in this respect the internet is an extension of everyday life rather than a world apart. "Don’t talk to strangers" is good advice, either in the street or on the web.