The current covid situation in Italy is decent enough. There have been outbreaks here and there, and there’s concern with younger people infecting one another as they enjoy their summer in a somewhat careless way. Schools will finally reopen mid-September, so whether that leads to a mess that requires another lockdown remains to be seen. In the meantime, I’ve already begun purchasing flour to make bread at home. Not kidding.

The economy is what is: a mess. I used to have my hands into a bunch of cakes with online gigs of various kinds, but most of those are gone. When I tell people, they’re usually shocked: “I thought you were safe, working online for foreign companies.” Yeah, well, not really. Those companies depend on having clients bringing money in, and especially with the US being the disaster zone that they are right now, that’s just happening less and less. It’ll take a while for things to bounce back, but yours truly ain’t no idiot and has been saving and planning for years. I’m not rich, but I’m not sinking in a month either.

And while a few gig have gone, a few others have come. I’ve begun collaborating with a neat gaming site called SideGamer, writing articles (you can find them here) and helping the boss with some behind-the-scenes stuff. Due to time constraints I don’t play games much lately, alas, so it’s been an interesting excuse to do that (“it’s for work!”), and a way to get words on paper screen again.

Indeed, writing those articles definitely rekindled my desire to write “my own stuff”, though you obviously wouldn’t be able to tell, since I don’t post here much. Then again, perhaps I’m writing something else and some announcement shall be made in the future, for all you know. The same applies to photography: not much to see, but lots of plotting and planning are happening, so stay tuned if you’re interested.

In the end, many things are changing all around us, and that may require us to contribute to those changes, or facilitate them. The thing is that leaps of faith are scary at the best of times, and downright terrifying at a weird moment in history like the one we’re collectively going through. It reminds me of this song, and the irony of that, I’m quite sure, won’t be lost on a small group of people who are probably grinning right now… (Never mind if you have no idea; that’s for the best, believe me.)

To quote Marvin: “Life! Don’t talk to me about life!”

This was a triumph, I’m making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS. It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction.

PS: the cake is a lie.

I used to work at a small video game store. Like any other video game store, people often brought in used games. As an employee, I had a nice benefit: I could take them home and try them for a day or two, and then either bring them back, or purchase them. While that’s perfect for the Xbox 360, and in fact that’s how I fell utterly and hopelessly in love with Burnout Paradise, I only managed to try PS3 games over the weekend. If you have a PS3, forget about popping the disc in and checking the game out. It doesn’t work like that.

You pop the disc into the console. You try to start it, and it says it needs to be installed on the hard drive. This is because the Blu-ray reader is slower than DVD readers, and it would probably be unable to keep up with real-time loading, or it would just make the loading screens stay up longer. The obvious solution is: let’s use that hard drive space! That’s true of every single PS3 game, and you can confirm this by peeking at the back of any game when you happen to be at a retail store; and we’re not talking a few megabytes, oftentimes it’s in the gigabyte range.

After a while, it’s finally installed. You start it, and before you can do anything, you’re told that there’s an upgrade. So you let it install it, otherwise it just won’t play, unless you disconnect from the network. This is extremely silly, and defies any logic: if I am not planning to play online, why do you want me to upgrade it? Just let me play with the older version, but let me play now! After all, that’s what happens if I’m off the network, so why not let me do it anyway? Incidentally, the Xbox 360 gets it right: if an update is available, it offers to download and install it. If you say no, you just won’t be able to play that game online until you update. It makes sense, as it enforces version consistency among online players. The PS3, however, forces you to go through the painful process of downloading and then installing the update. And it takes time, lots of time. My PS3 was connected directly to the router using an ethernet cable, and my DSL is 8 megabits down / 512 kilobits up. Either the updates were huge, or the servers were slow.

Finally, after well over half an hour if you’re lucky, you are ready to play. Too bad it’s late and you have to get up early tomorrow. Ah well. And all of this doesn’t include any system updates, which, as Ars Technica points out, happens fairly often.

It is worth to note that the Xbox 360 only recently (as in: a year and a half ago or so) gained the ability to install games on its hard drive. It’s still usually not mandatory but it can be good to speed up the loading times, to reduce the wear on the discs, and to make the whole thing quieter. A few games do require a mandatory installation when the data spans more than one disc and needs to be available at all times (Forza Motorsport 3 comes to mind), but it’s a small minority, and that’s a very good thing because changing hard drives on an Xbox 360 is essentially a huge and messy hack. The PS3, on the other hand, gets it perfectly right: one screw, and a standard 2.5-inch SATA disk and you’re ready to go. You even get the option to back up your data to an external unit before the surgery and then copy it back to the new disk after it.

Now if only Sony gave up the 16-year-old design of its controllers and accepted that Microsoft got the ergonomics just right…

But are video games addictive? Are some people more likely to be unable to stop playing? And when should playing video games be considered an addiction? Let’s try to answer those questions.

Wikipedia defines an addiction as “a persistent behavioral pattern marked by physical and/or psychological dependency and tolerance that causes significant disruption and negatively impacts the quality of life of an organism.” It is true that some people are unable to stop playing and can go through actual withdrawal symptoms when forced off their game of choice. The following video shows how a teenager reacted when his World of Warcraft character was deleted by his family.

That is undoubtedly an extreme response, and very few gamers are that obsessed. I have personally never World of Warcraft because I don’t like its premise: while it has intermediate goals (quests and such), the game itself is never over. It simply cannot beaten. I do love open-world games — more on that later — but no ultimate goal makes a game somewhat boring to me. Yet that’s exactly why millions of people pay a monthly fee to play World of Warcraft, even though I’ve been told that the role-playing aspect of it, which is the only thing that might attract me to that kind of game, is limited to usings one’s own skills to “level up.” In other words, there is little acting involved.

All kinds of video games, however, have to be pleasant enough to convince players to go back to them. It is a conditio sine qua non of any product: even cookies have to be tasty in order for the company that makes them to stay in business. The difference is that games are much more complex matter, because while consumers will keep buying the same cookies for decades, gamers will have no problem ditching a successful franchise if the latest game isn’t nice enough. And you don’t play the same game over and over, with some rare exception.

As much as the media likes to feed like vultures on the few extreme cases of “video game addiction,” the truth is that most gamers have a perfectly fine life. Playing video games is for most people simply a hobby, even though — just like with any other hobby — it can take different degrees of involvement. Some people will keep an unusual coin when they come across it, while others will spend much of their free time actively seeking rare coins, and possibly spending huge amounts on money to get hold of them. Similarly, the casual gamer will pick up his or her controller when bored; the hardcore gamer will use most of his free time to play. The problem arises when a person will give up his or her work time to do that.

Between those extremes, however, there is the huge majority of people who play games, that is those who might want to have some time to do so, but are not too bothered if they can’t manage to.

Video games are not addictive by themselves. They are captivating in one way or another, and that’s simply because they have to sell. Just like with anything else that’s enjoyable, it takes common sense to know when to stop. After all, as I said, it’s a hobby. Quite an enjoyable hobby indeed!

Such results do not surprise me in the slightest. I am a casual gamer, in that I usually buy a game every couple of months or so, and I usually purchase them from the UK, where they are much cheaper than in Italy. The reason I do that is that, since I never get games that have been just released, having to wait a week for the delivery is not a big deal. Savings versus instant gratification. (Disclaimer: that may not be the fact when GTA V comes out. Can’t help it.)

That is one of the reasons I prefer physical media: the price usually goes down on boxed discs, whereas digital downloads have a tendency to stay at the same price for much, much longer. Just compare the full games that you can now download through Xbox Live: they are invariably priced €29.99, even though the same games can now be found boxed and sealed for as low as €10.

Of course, physical goods can be lent and resold, which is what the big companies do not want you to do. Their line of business is 1-1: one user, one sale. If you sell your copy of Mirror’s Edge, DICE only makes profit once. If you rent your copy of Fable II to a friend, Lionhead only makes profit once. They don’t like this, and in a way it makes sense. However, perchance they should attempt to charge less on the game in the first place in order to have bigger sales. Game studios can and do make extra money on extra downloadable contents, after all. (And they sometimes manage to make money on that twice: many people who downloaded “The Lost And Damned” for GTA IV ended up buying the “Episodes from Liberty City” physical game, which carries both TLAD and “The Ballad of Gay Tony”.)

And while you can install games on an Xbox 360, it is not needed. It’s sure nice to have it load faster and quieter, but you can just run it from the disc itself if that’s your cup of tea. Considering that hard drives for the 360 are hard to find on their own, and usually come at insane prices, it’s not a bad thing. But when you download fifteen games at an average of 6 GB each, you start having a problem. (Yes, you can “hack” the hard drive bay, and I have done that. This is about “normal” consumers, though.)

Playstation 3 is not as kind: virtually all games require an installation, but at least you can swap the hard drive very, very easily. That’s a blessing, considering that some games require in excess of 10 GB, even when you have the disc.

These are the main reason for consumers — including me — not to feel like a digital download is worth such high pricetags. They have no resale value, and they have a higher cost in terms of space needed. Not to mention that it takes time to download gigabytes of data, and not everybody is on broadband; those who do, moreover, might have download caps.

The latter is also why I am stunned that Apple insists in saying that Blu-ray is not making its way onto Macs any time soon, and that it’s a “bag of hurt.” Do they really think that everybody is willing to spend money on purchasing/renting movies off the iTunes Store? That’s just not going to happen, for several reasons:

1. It’s just not available everywhere. Unless you are in the USA or in the UK, forget about video in the iTunes Store.
2. Even in those countries where it is available, bandwidth may be an issue.
3. Users only get 720p movies, whereas most — if not all — movies on Blu-ray are 1080p. That’s two and a quarter times the picture resolution, and well over five times the data size for a comparably smooth quality.
4. No resale value. Or, rather, no resale chance.
5. Other alternatives, at least in the US: Hulu, Netflix, etc.

Physical media is also very important for backup: a single-sided recordable DVD holds as much as 4.7 GB of data, and can be filled up in a matter of minutes. How long does uploading that much data when your upstream bandwidth is barely 50 KB/s?

Ultimately, whatever companies say, physical media is going to be around even in the age of cloud computing. Now let’s go and check for some bargains on videogames that support multiplayer, shall we?