Category Archives: Technology

The Unsurprising Renaissance of Reading

Last week, Timothy Egan’s column in the New York Times noted an apparently surprising outcome of the presence of e-book readers and a ‘digital monolith’ like amazon.com, which should have resulted in the loss of the culture of reading, the loss of the culture of “ideas printed on dead trees’ to that of  ’the soulless digital monolith on Lake Union, with its 164 million customers.’

But,

[T]he apocalypse already came and went, and look who’s standing. One technology, the e-book, the biggest new invention in reading since Gutenberg cranked out a Bible with movable type, changed the world — most likely for better. We have more books, more readers, a bigger audience for words, on pixels or paper.

Of course, it might be that the publishing industry as we know it is doomed as is the beloved independent bookstore.  But are people reading more? The answer, it seems, is yes:

[T]he Association of American Publishers reported that overall revenues, and number of books sold in all formats, were up sizably in three years since 2008. Without e-books, the numbers would have been flat, or declined. One-fifth of all American adults reported reading an e-book in the past year….those digital consumers read far more books on average — about 24 a year — than the dead-tree consumers….e-book readers also buy lots of paper books…[they] “read more books in all formats”…By 2025, e-books will be 75 percent of total books sold.

But this ‘renaissance’ should not be surprising at all.

E-books represent a mode of distribution of the written word; they offer a mixed package of conveniences and entail the loss of many of the delightful physical affordances that printed books provide. As such they were never likely to appeal to all readers uniformly and thus unlikely to comprehensively destroy the culture of reading the printed-on-paper word. Readers read books on paper, via objects they can hold in their hand, for many more reasons than simply reading. Page-turning; marking in margins with a pencil (another physical affordance of another long-used artefact); these interactions have their own value and were never likely to be completely over-ridden by the e-book. They might lose their centrality for us as our material world changes and the nature of our embedding in it does. But it will take some doing. It will not be as facile a process as e-book-phobes might imagine.

And fears that e-books and their readers would destroy the culture of reading in general were even more overblown. Why anyone would imagine that reading would be displaced by a new mode of distribution that made it more convenient has always seemed mysterious to me. In a world bursting to the seams with information, with ever more knowledge to be disseminated, processed, and articulated (and I haven’t even touched on the expanding literary world yet!) why would reading ever lose its centrality?

Expressions of fears like those directed at e-books are not so much apprehensions of technology as much as they are expressions of distrust in humanity in general, in a lack of faith in its ability to absorb, and engage with, new modes of being in the world. For far too long, fearing that a particular relationship to the world might be mediated by a new mode of technology has been  considered a fashionable expression of one’s commitment to humanistic concerns; I think instead that it covers up an alarmingly fragile assessment of the resilience of human beings. This does not mean, of course, that concerns about the lockdown of e-books by pernicious technologies like DRM are unfounded; those continue to remain urgent. But those critiques, are, I think, independent of the worry that reading books on e-book readers will impact reading negatively.

Note: I still do not own an e-book reader, and do not anticipate buying one in the near future though my ever-growing archive of reading material in PDF format is making me consider doing so. I’m open to recommendations for the best reader for PDF files; please leave these in the comments section if possible.

Hyman Strachman the Pirate AKA Troops Supporter

Hyman Strachman is a pirate. But he doesn’t fly the Jolly Roger, drink rum, hop around on a pegleg with a cutlass tucked neatly into a cummerbund, board ships while yelling “aarrr!” or call anyone a ‘scurvy bilge rat.’ Rather, he buys DVDs, makes multiple copies of them using a ‘duplicator’ and ships them to US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He has not kept an official count but estimates that he topped 80,000 discs a year during his heyday in 2007 and 2008, making his total more than 300,000 since he began in 2004….

That sounds like massive copyright infringement to me. And it is. But Mr. Strachman is not going to be brought to justice any time soon. Not even by the MPAA:

Howard Gantman, a spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America said he did not believe its member studios were aware of Mr. Strachman’s operation. His sole comment dripped with the difficulty of going after a 92-year-old widower supporting the troops. “We are grateful that the entertainment we produce can bring some enjoyment to them while they are away from home,” Mr. Gantman said.

Mr. Strachman’s activity, if carried out by anyone else, for any other reason, would have brought the wrath of the Righteous Copyright Enforcers, sorry, the MPAA, on his head. But Mr. Strachman is doing it for ‘the boys over there,’ fighting for our freedom. So Mr. Gantman eases up, knowing well that if there is one line you do not cross, it is the one that would turn you into a non-supporter of the troops. (Except when you are going after retired generals speaking unfavorably about the conduct of wars overseas; then you load both barrels and fire.)

Of course, the studios have tried to help ‘our boys’ as well, ‘sending military bases reel-to-reel films…and projectors for the troops.’ The reason studios send ‘reel-to-reel films’  to military bases and not DVDs is that they are well aware that DVD-burners and laptops are a dime-a-dozen on bases, and that the young, just-above-teenaged soldiers who make up a sizable portion of the troops overseas are quite likely to respond to DVDs in precisely the same way that young, just-above-teenaged men and women in the US react to DVDs back home: They’d make copies of them or rip them and pass those on. The studios love ‘our boys,’ they just don’t trust them to observe the laws they are defending.

Note:  As expected, the New York Times article linked to above uncritically parrots an MPAA talking point:

Although the most costly piracy now takes place online through file-sharing Web sites, the illegal duplication of copyright DVDs — usually by organized crime in Eastern Europe and China, not by retirees in their 90s in the American suburbs — still siphons billions of dollars out of the industry every year.

It would be extremely useful for the Times to tell us how these staggering ‘billions and billions‘ numbers are calculated. For I have no idea. It would also be a useful enhancement of this debate if once, just once, the Times might talk about how movie attendance is enhanced by the word-of-mouth buzz created by the presence of ‘pirated’ DVDs and torrented versions of movies. Just once.

Robot Graders: A Professor’s Delight?

Over at Concurring Opinions, Deven Desai makes note of an interesting study–whose details I have not yet had the time to investigate–underwritten by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and conducted by a team of “experts in educational measurement and assessment, led by Dr. Mark Shermis, dean of the College of Education at The University of Akron.” The study claims to have found that,

A direct comparison between human graders and software designed to score student essays achieved virtually identical levels of accuracy, with the software in some cases proving to be more reliable [I am not quite sure what 'reliable' means here]

The reaction of at least one kind of college professor is, I suspect, likely to be: Hallelujah, no more grading! Another kind will mutter and grumble about the invasion of a domain of faculty privilege, the mechanization of a humanist skill, the loss to students of vital professorial feedback and so on. I’m not quite sure which camp I fall into.

The reason for that ambiguous response is that I find the business of grading papers (student writing assignments) genuinely perplexing. I’ve now been grading papers, on and off, for some fifteen years. (That is how long I have been teaching philosophy, first as a graduate teaching fellow, and then later, of course, as a full-time faculty member; before that my teaching was centered on computer science classes and there was little writing to grade.) In that time, I have never had a teaching assistant to help me with grading but neither have I had to teach a class with more thirty students in it. But twenty or so six-page or four-page papers–the standard length of my assignments, of which I assign three in a typical philosophy class–is still plenty of work.

And that is so because fifteen years on, I’m still not quite sure how to provide good feedback to my students. I find writing to be very hard work; I struggle with it constantly; I still remain terrified by the blank page. More to the point, when confronted by a piece of writing that doesn’t ‘read well,’ I don’t quite know how to instruct someone other than me in the business of how to make it better. There is an exaggeration here, of course; I can point out problems in relevance (‘You haven’t addressed the question I asked!’); I can note elementary mistakes in spelling and grammar; I can point to mangled sentences and constructions that don’t make sense. And so on. But at the end of this process it still seems like there is something that I haven’t managed to convey to my students. It is for this reason that I urge my student to consult with writing tutors, to have their papers read by their friends (or even their parents, if they have time!).

The long and short of it is that I continue to find writing a bit of a mystery, and given that I find it so intractable, I find the task of teaching someone else how to do it to be particularly insuperable.

Any help would be much appreciated. Bring on the robotic graders!

We Robot 2012 – UAVs and a Pilot-Free World

Day Two at the We Robot 2012 conference at the University of Miami Law School.

Amir Rahmani‘s presentation Micro Aerial Vehicles: Opportunity or Liability? prompted a set of thoughts sparked by the idea of planes not flown by human beings, and in turn, the idea of an aviator-free world.  It has been some 109 years since Kitty Hawk, and in that time we have come to the point that we might seriously consider the idea of all aircraft being exclusively robotic (I should hasten to add that I doubt man will ever stop flying but at the least, a very significant attenuation of the role of the pilot looks likely. Peter W. Singer’s Wired for War notes, for instance, that UAV operations in Afghanistan, which account for a significant percentage of all aerial operations in that theater of operations, are carried out by desk-pilots working from home bases in the US. The culture that has sprung up around that community is interestingly different from that of pilots who fly combat aircraft from front-line bases.) While I generally welcome the idea of a ‘robotic uprising,’ i.e., a  greater role for robots in our society as a means of spurring greater introspection about ourselves and our place in this world, in this domain I find the idea of a pilot-free world curiously melancholic. And it is entirely unsurprising that such a thought is sparked by a set of deeply personal interests: After all, I did grow up on air force bases, watching jets take off, and admiring, like only young boys can, all those impossibly dashing, crew-cut, sunglasses-wearing aviators (then, they were exclusively men; now, women have joined the ranks of armed forces aviators as well).

The twentieth-century might have been the century of the pilot, and all the imaginative possibilities associated with the image of man borne aloft on wings, above this grubby world, into the skies, placed in a position, as John Gillespie Magee put it, to ‘reach out and touch the face of God.’  It was a century that saw the rich flowering of  a literature born from  the radically different viewpoint of man that aviation  afforded its practitioners (and those who admired them).  Antoine Saint-Exupery was a product of that century, as was Michael Collins (whose Carrying The Fire still remains one of most literate and passionate books about aviation and manned space flight).

So my concern here is not so much the loss of employment for pilots, a rather mundane economic worry. Rather, it is the idea that a whole domain of creative imagination might be lost. Hopefully, new creative possibilities might spring into being. Perhaps the little flying that will be done by humans in the future will generate a new form of literature, one that sees the aviator’s role not as a ‘worker’ flying airlines or as a ‘soldier’ flying combat aircraft, but returns perhaps to the original role of the aviator as an adventurer trying out and flying radically new craft. Perhaps. More on this possibility later.

We Robot 2012 – Day One

I am posting today from the University of Miami Law School, which is staging the We Robot 2012 conference. I presented and discussed Patrick Hubbard’s (University of South Carolina Law School) Regulation of Liability for Risks of Physical Injury From “Sophisticated Robots”. Presenting someone else’s work presents a difficult challenge; thanks to being an academic I have perfected the dark arts of bullshitting about my own work but doing so about someone else’s work is far more difficult.  I tried my best to present Patrick’s work as comprehensively and fairly as possible and to raise some questions that could spur on some discussion. (I will place the slides online very soon so you can see what I got up to.)

One of the points I raised in response to Patrick’s claim that robots that displayed ‘emergent behavior’ would occasion changes in tort doctrine was: How should we understand such emergence? Might we need to see if robots, for instance, displayed  stability, homeostasis and evolvability–all often held to be features of living systems, paradigmatic examples of entities that display emergent behavior. Would robots be judged to display emergent behavior if it was not just a function of its parts but also of the holistic and relational properties of the system. I also asked Patrick how the law should understand autonomy given that some philosophical definitions of autonomy–like Kant’s for instance–would rule out some humans as being autonomous. (Earlier in the morning during discussions in another talk, I suggested another related benchmark that could be useful: Draw upon the suggestion made in Daniel Dennett’s The Case for Rorts that robots  could be viewed as intentional agents when we trust robots as authorities in reporting on their inner states, when its programmers and designers  lose epistemic hegemony.) An interesting section of the discussion that followed my presentation centered on how useful analogizing robots to animals or children or other kinds of entities was likely to be, and if useful, which analogies could work best. (This kind of analogizing was done in Chapter 4 of A Legal Theory of Autonomous Artificial Agents.)

Earlier in the day in discussing automated law enforcement–perhaps done by fleets of Robocops–I was glad to note that one of its positive outcomes was highlighted: that such automation could bring about a reduction of bias in law enforcement. In my comment following the talk, I noted that a fleet of Robocops aware of the Fourth Amendment might be be very welcome news for all those who were the targets of the almost seven hundred thousand Stop-n-Frisk searches in New York City.

As was noted in discussions in the morning, some common threads have already emerged: the suggestion that robots are ‘just tools,’ (which I continue to find bizarre), the not-so-clear distinction–and reliance on–true and apparent autonomy, the concerns about the need to avoid ‘projecting’ human will and agency onto robots and treating them like people (i.e., that we need to avoid the so-called ‘android fallacy.’) I personally don’t think warnings about the android fallacy are very useful; contemporary robots are not sophisticated enough to be people and there is no impossibility proof against them being sophisticated enough to be persons in the future.

Hopefully, I will have another–much more detailed–report from this very interesting and wonderfully well-organized conference tomorrow. (I really haven’t done justice to the rich discussions and presentations yet; for that I need a little more time.)

Record Albums, Artwork, and Physical Immediacy

At the corner of 7th Avenue and Flatbush in Brooklyn, a sidewalk entrepreneur has set up a vinyl LP sale. This has gone on for a few weeks now (and possibly longer). There’s a pretty wide selection on display, ranging from Johnny Mathis to Lil Wayne. I’ve never bothered to inquire about prices; I don’t own a record player any more; I’m always in a rush; and honestly, not that much in that catalog is of interest to this self of mine. But the stacked jackets and the artwork still serve to remind me of what we’ve lost in the transition from vinyl to the alphabet soup of MP3, AAC, OGG or whatever.

By this I don’t mean the standard audiophilic complaint of a loss of quality in the recorded sound and the resultant poorer listening experience. Rather, I mean the absence of a very particular kind of physical contact with the composite artefact consisting of vinyl long play record and its jacket with artwork. Part of the pleasure of purchasing an album–I purchased my last one back in mid-1980s–was the perusal, in the record shop, of a dazzling array of covers. I might only have purchased one–indeed, back in those days, I would have had to saved diligently to afford even that–but in getting to that point, I’d spent considerable time enjoying a great deal of eye-candy. (As a pre-pubescent lad, I remember staring goggle-eyed at Uriah Heep’s Fallen Angel! But do check out the ‘worst album covers of all time‘ too.) As Bill Walsh from albumcovers.net notes,

For a while, there was a true ‘marriage’ of two very distinct and different media — art and music. In their heyday, LP covers were an outlet for experimentation, art, fun, social comment, and the power of the visual image to sell you the music that was contained therein….The ‘cover’ of a CD is about 14% of the size of a record album; the artwork on the cassette box is just 7% as big. That’s barely enough space to put the name of the artist, much less some breathtaking or unusual artwork.

Now, of course, we don’t have CD’s either. (Or do we? I haven’t been to a record store in years so I have no idea whether these things are still out there or not.)

More to the point, the album was something I lovingly brought home, and then, following my father’s carefully drilled-technique (you would not believe the pristine state of his record collection back then!), removed the record from its sleeve, not touching its grooved surface, before gingerly setting the diamond-tipped stylus needle  on it. Something about that kind of physical contact with the music ensured a relationship with the music I struggle to find now, as I stare at the gigantic playlists on Grooveshark or at my list of Pandora stations. The convenience of playlists, queues, on-demand access and the like are not being disparaged here; not one bit. I’m merely noting the loss of a very particular kind of entanglement with the music that made it less remote, less ephemeral. Physical object fetishization at its worst, perhaps, but there you have it.

Incontrovertible Proof of the Corporatized University: Its Modern Architecture

In “Laboratory Conditions” (New Yorker, September 19 2011), Paul Goldberger waxes lyrical over the architectural details of new science buildings like the Rockefeller University Collaborative Research Center, Columbia University’s new “fourteen-story tower for scientific research,” and the University of San Francisco’s “new center for stem-cell research.” Goldberger clearly likes what he sees:

[A]ll three of the new buildings I recently visited managed to satisfy a daunting list of functional demands and still have room for poetry….scientific research can be conducted in an environment of both zest and dignity….scientists have become the architecture profession’s most optimistic clients. They believe that well-designed buildings can help them.

To which my reaction is: I’m glad someone is happy with the buildings now under construction for centers of learning. The recipients of Goldberger’s admiration appear to be exceptions to a broad regularity, for a ghastly fact staring us in the face is that university buildings are on a Road to Architectural Perdition, wherein their buildings get uglier and uglier, hankering apparently, for some summum bonum of sheer architectural banality.

Most newly-constructed university buildings now seemingly aspire to the status of Generic Corporate Park Resident, with an exterior that resembles a thrown-together assembly of dull, mass-manufactured, pre-fabricated parts. My own academic home–Brooklyn College–has provided a particularly undistinguished addition to the pantheon of Ugly University Architecture. Our most recently erected building stands, in dramatic and depressing contrast, across Bedford Avenue, to the older Georgian structures on the older quad; its ugliness defies reasonable description. Many years ago, when a graduate student at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, I heard Cullimore Hall, a nondescript lecture hall, described as Ham-n-Cheese Hall. Nothing else quite captured its sheer ordinariness, its sinister and yet dull color scheme, than that little nickname, nothing quite deflated a component of the university like a naming after a boring, run-of-the-mill, easily-made-shapeless edible item. All too many modern samples of university architecture aspire to, and emulate, the two samples I have just noted.

But even corporate park buildings i.e., actual Generic Corporate Park Residents, come off better than most modern university buildings. Their glass, steel, aluminium, their straight-lines and metallic countenance, all speak to corporate efficiency, to a streamlined mode of operation that no matter how mythical in denying its own rough edges and inefficiencies, is at least true to a dream-making associated with it. In the case of corporations the Corporate Park Look might work; in the case of universities, the Corporate Park look is jarring. What part of the academic mission is this architecture speaking to?

Only in the context of a throughly-corporatized university do its new architectural inclinations make any sense.  That is, the modern, ugly university only makes sense if one understands it to be no longer committed to its older mission of fostering inquiry but rather to be pursuing considerably less-elevated bottom-lines (perhaps “outcomes”, “deliverables” and the like?). That is, if one accepts as concrete the clash between that older mission and the visible  goal of the contract awarded to the lowest bidder. Then, all of a sudden, all is made clear: the architecture of the modern university is a loud testament to the race to the bottom that is sought to be enacted within its walls.

Susan Matt on Homesickness, the ‘New Globalist’, and Technology

Susan Matt suggests that homesickness still afflicts the ‘new globalists,’ the cosmopolitans who would live ‘abroad,’ whether permanently or temporarily, away from home (“The New Globalist is Homesick”, New York Times, March 21, 2012). And technology, precisely by bringing them back into closer contact with loved ones and old haunts, and assuaging loneliness and longing, might actually be making things worse; it might remind them ever more acutely of just what it is that they are missing. This ‘new’ homesickness  seems at odds with the foot-loose sensibility that is supposed to be the hallmark of the connected, wired, constantly traveling world. The homesickness which afflicted the immigrant in the past is ‘back,’ and it is ever more persistent.

I’m not sure that Matt’s statement below represents the discovery of a genuine novelty:

In nearly a decade’s research into the emotions and experiences of immigrants and migrants, I’ve discovered that many people who leave home in search of better prospects end up feeling displaced and depressed. Few speak openly of the substantial pain of leaving home.

It might be that academics are now paying more attention to homesickness, but conversations about it and the infection of migrant enclaves, conversations and sensibilities with relentless nostalgia has been an enduring feature of migrants’ lives and it has remained impervious to the passage of time. This new homesickness is not new at all; it is just being paid attention to. Those living the lives of voluntary exile have always felt homesick, have never feared talking about it, and have always let it be writ large in their emotional and physical responses to their new worlds.

Consider for instance, that alcoholism is a common problem among international students in American universities; that expat cinema, for as long as can be remembered, has been concerned with the longing for a mythical, displaced land; consider how much the dilemma of the  torn, almost-schizophrenic, personality of the immigrant has been a feature of diasporic literatures. What are these if not manifestations of homesickness, permeating through the minds and bodies of immigrants?

It might be that the immigrant does not bring up homesickness in conversations with ‘locals,’ fearing these confessions might be viewed as evidence of dislike for his chosen home, a failure to assimilate properly, and reason to regard him as outsider in those conversational spaces. But elsewhere, in more welcoming climes, conversation all too easily returns to talk of home, of what remains behind, of the next trip, of the difficulties in reconciliation with two lands that leave them torn asunder psychically.

Matt is right to note that technology–whether it is because of the Skype call back home, the cable television channel in their own language or anything else like that–does not seem to help this homesickness. It cannot. It only serves to remind them that nothing can ever replace the felt sensation of place, the encounter with sounds, light, and smells, born of  the imprint of childhood experiences long-ago sensed and internalized, that  are a feature of physical contacts with ‘home,’ that tap into sensations long ago integrated into their minds and bodies. The phone call and the web cam will not tap into these; nothing quite replaces the walk out of the customs hall, past the immigration desk, out into the arrival hall, and the drive back ‘home’.

Houston, We have a HotSpot Problem in Austin #SXSW

BBH Labs thought it was being clever, and perhaps even slightly humanitarian, when, at this year’s South by SouthWest technology conference, it enlisted thirteen volunteers from a homeless shelter, strapped Wi-Fi devices onto their bodies, gave them business cards and T-shirts that read, (for example), “I’m Clarence, a 4G Hotspot” and sent them out into the throngs of the technorati to keep their phones and laptops humming. The volunteers were paid $20 a day, and any “tips” customers gave them for the wireless services provided.

Tweetstorms, and accusations of BBH’s marketing ploy being “something out of a darkly satirical science-fiction dystopia” duly follow. The central accusation? That BBH had ‘dehumanized’ the homeless by turning them into providers of Wi-Fi services. BBH’s volunteers, note, did not say “I am Clarence and I can provide you wireless services for a fee’. Rather they were the service, by being the HotSpot (I’m a Hotspot). Without exaggeration, this controversy would have been considerably less acute had the former line been used.

BBH’s stunt is not markedly different from the many ways in which the human body is utilized for marketing: young women wearing tight T-shirts advertise car-washes, human Statues of Liberty advocate for tax-return preparation services, animal-suit-wearing-youngsters advertise electronic goods sales. The list of these humiliating encounters with some advertising agency’s brainstorm is a very, very long one. (The dogged persistence of these human billboards in adverse weather conditions often seems like a particularly cruel instantiation of “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers…”)

Given the ubiquity of such advertising strategies, it is perhaps astonishing that we have any outrage left over to be directed at BBH. And in each of these scenarios, were accusations of dehumanization to be leveled, the defense mounted would always be the same, “What would you have the unemployed do? Stand around at street corners, selling drugs?” Or, “Gee, we tried to provide employment to people, give them some dignity and this is what we get in return.”

The fallacy of the false dichotomy was never on better display. Apparently, car washes cannot be advertised without skimpily-clad women, tax services without mobile Statues of Liberty and so on. Similarly, there was no better way for BBH to have shown its support for the homeless than by making them into mobile HotSpots. No more visible, provocative, or genuinely-engaging-with-the-homeless-issue strategy was possible other than by using their bodies as wireless hubs, and paying them what seems like below-minimum-wage rates (plus tips).  Thus, straightforwardly, “We need to advertise our services and there is no way we can do so without dehumanizing these employees of ours. If not this, then unemployment. The choice is clear: so-called ‘dignity’ or employment? Make up your minds.”

Even if fallacious, there is something admirably honest in this defense: Business riches and profit margins require the immiseration of one class with the exploitation of the human body in the workplace one its resultant side-effects. BBH might not have had this explicitly in mind, but at the least, they, and their defenders appear to have successfully internalized a very particular component of the corporate zeitgeist.

Video Game ‘Cloning’: What Is It Good For?

Cloning of video games is a Bad Thing. Or so sayeth Brian X. Chen and some video game developers (New York Times, March 12th, ” For Creators of Games, A Faint Line on Cloning”). Roughly, the thesis advanced is: ‘cloning’ can be destructive of developer motivation and the video game market, and thus seems to require legal intervention (by the application of patenting protections). I want to raise some questions that I hope will complicate the picture Chen provides us of innovation and its relationship to its legal regulation.

So,

In any commercialized art form, be it movies, literature or fashion, the creators often tread a fine line between inspiration and shameless copying. Some small video game makers say that line seems to have all but disappeared….“When another company takes inspiration from the game and they try to make a different game out of it, that’s when getting imitated turns into a compliment,” said Rami Ismail, a co-founder of Vlambeer. “Getting cloned is like getting punched in the face. It’s like a robbery.” Demoralized, Vlambeer stopped development of Ridiculous Fishing for several months. “It was kind of a motivation black hole,” said Jan Willem Nijman, another founder. “It almost destroyed Vlambeer.”

So, copying is ‘shameless’; the imitated seems to think it is both a ‘compliment’ and ‘like getting punched in the face’ and like ‘robbery;’ it can act as demotivator. Ismail’s statement starts by noting ‘inspiration’ and the creation of ‘different games’, which would seem to be a good thing (for game players at least). But something goes wrong: even though a new game has been created, it has employed ‘cloning’, the copying of  ”the soul of a game — its gameplay mechanics, design, characters and storyline — “. And this has demotivated the folks at Vlambeer.

This story raises questions well worth pursuing. What did Vlambeer do? Did it make another game? Did the presence of the new, ‘cloned’ game force them into other innovative avenues of development, rather than just working on a previously explored artistic niche? Did the cloning prevent Vlambeer from staying safely and staidly on the same beaten track? What brought Vlambeer back to working on games? What do they work on now and how? More generally, is it the case that those developers whose games have been ‘cloned’ start working on another game or do they exit the development market? Does cloning produce an arms race with games developers innovating furiously to maintain a cutting edge?

Other questions suggest themselves. Did consumers get more games out of this episode of cloning? Were the ‘cloned’ versions of the game better in any regard? Even if the “gameplay mechanics, characters and storyline” are ‘cloned’ what does it mean to say the ‘design’ was cloned? Was the interface of the cloned version identical, or did the interface work ‘better’ in some interesting dimension? For instance, are any of the ‘cloned’ games faster? Do they load quicker? Do game players indicate their preferences for these new games in any way?

After not raising these questions, Chen turns to possible legal protections and regimes:

One reason that cloning is so frequent in the game industry is that there is no easy way to protect a game. A piece of published writing or a photograph can be copyrighted, but not the mechanics of a game. Small game makers could seek patents protecting software design, but they generally shy away from this because acquiring a patent can be both time-consuming and relatively expensive, said Ellisen Shelton Turner, an intellectual property lawyer at Irell & Manella in Los Angeles.

In addition, because games so often draw inspirations from previous works, many game creators believe that patent protections could stifle creativity in future games, Mr. Turner said. “A lot of them are anti-patents,” he said. “And only in hindsight do they think patents are the proper thing to do when someone has stolen their idea.”

But what are the ‘mechanics’ of a game and why are they kinds of things that could be be copyrighted? Turner claims that developers shy away from acquiring patents because of the difficulties of the process but then in the next sentence puts it down to their acknowledgment of the creativity-stifling potential of patent protection. Those same developers might know that their development has drawn freely on the creative output of other developers and that seeking patent protections might be damaging to the ecology of the game development world; developers might be more cognizant of this ecology and its particular constraints, than say, corporate ‘intellectual property’ lawyers.  The belated self-knowledge that Turner ascribes to game developers might rather be their acknowledgment of the particular contours of their development community: that their decision to not seek patents  comes with a price attached while contributing to very particular freedoms enjoyed by game developers.

Finally, the central claim, that cloning results in bad outcomes:

The founders of Vlambeer, the maker of Radical Fishing, said they disagreed that cloning was good for consumers. They said cloning would make it more difficult for small companies to take risks on new ideas, but easy for big companies to succeed by rehashing old ideas. As a result, all new games could look extremely alike and unoriginal.

“If we go into that sort of spiral we’ll end up in a place where there’s only cloners, and there’s a limited amount of creativity happening,” Mr. Ismail said. “That’s the biggest horror scenario.”

This ‘horror scenario’ seems overstated. First, in light of the questions raised above. Second, because, peculiarly, in the scenario envisaged, game players appear to have no agency, no discrimination. They do not grant any game-maker first-mover advantage, they seem not to select between games, they mindlessly take on clones just because they are similar to extant games.

‘Cloning’ suggests the creation of identical copies; but the situation at hand deals with new games that incorporate central features of the older game. This fact, and the nature of the game development process, which draws on a ‘commons’ of code, algorithmic techniques, and a grab-bag of tricks and solutions to game development problems, considerably complicates the picture of the game development world and its possible legal regulation that emerges from Chen’s article.