Okay, as a disclaimer, this article's meant just as a rant against vapid holiday consumerism and as a thought-experiment; I have this grave feeling that I'm in store for flaming comments, anyway. *shrug*
Let's trademark Christmas!
This may take some time to explain my reasoning, so bear with me. In the meantime, I'll state my overriding idea: Perhaps a technological solution exists to the ultra-commercialization of Christmas. Established, recognized Christian churches should get together, collectively trademark "Christmas", and give it a non-commercial Creative Commons license. In theory, this would allow the free use of "Christmas" anywhere, as long as it was for non-profit uses. I know what you're thinking, "Won't this eliminate use of the holiday in stores?" Yes, oh yes. And, it just might reclaim the religious value of the holiday.
I know, the natural response is, "Won't that prevent stores from selling stuff for Christmas?" The answer should not surprise you, if you think about it for a minute. No. In fact, stores have long since celebrated "Christmas", and are celebrating something entirely different which I'll call "X-Mas". But first, allow me to back up, and provide a personal perspective.
I'm the kind of person who, at some point in December, wells up with the Christmas spirit, and gets all feel-good about the upcoming holiday, gift-giving, seeing family, and the only decent Winter holiday that someone in the Christian spectrum of belief gets to celebrate. That said, at the same time, the sheer consumerism that's injected into Christmas makes me want to hurl. It's nothing new; certainly pimping Christmas for commercial gain has been going on for at least a century, if not more.
I hear Christian believers complain about it from time to time, and I also *don't* hear plenty more of them, but no one seems to have any idea on how to limit it. I suppose business owners could be *responsible* and tone it down a bit, but I think the shareholders would have a conniption to hear that their company is doing something anti-consumerism, right? Isn't the theory that stores need the Christmas season to get into the black every year, and so they keep making it earlier and earlier in the hopes that people will spend more and more?
Two Different Holidays: Christmas and X-Mas
Okay, pause a second. There are really two holidays here: Christmas and, for lack of another term, "X-Mas".
Christmas is the holiday that has to do with the birth of Yeshua*, the prophet and divine-declared messiah for millions of Christian believers. Sure, because of the translation to Latin, the name got changed to Jesus. Sure, his Pisces birthday** got changed to December 25 to convert many local paganistic ancient religious followers who believed in a god born that day to a virgin mother. But, still, it's a deeply religious holiday that commemorates the man.
"X-Mas" is, literally, the abbreviated version of Christmas. And so it is that I will use it to describe the cultural non-religious holiday that goes on. It's got Santa Claus (a silly tall-tale version of the original saint), reindeer, decorated evergreens (a German cultural element), carols about Winter, and massive, vapid consumerism. Ironically, while I call it the "abbreviated" version to Christmas, it winds up adding elements to the holiday as it abbreviates the religious elements. Which brings me to the next point.
Political Correctness has already sucked all the religion out of X-Mas
Ever listen to the carols played in the loudspeakers at malls and stores? Ever notice most of them are just the "Winter"-flavored songs, and less the Jesus / Christ ones? Notice that store displays focus around Santa and trees and snowflakes? That some mega-stores forbid their clerks from wishing people a happy particular-holiday and/or simply stopped making any reference to any one holiday?
And further, do Christians really get the spirit of Jesus when they're shopping for your friends and family, unless they specifically try? Do members of the Jewish faith cruise the malls reflecting on the fate of the Macabees? My opinion: definitely not. There's nothing remotely religious in the advertising and shopping atmosphere during the holy-moly-it's-starting-before-Halloween-X-Mas-shopping-extravaganza season.
I try to imagine what it must be like as a non-Christian during November and December in America, being bombarded with X-Mas advertising. Ironically, I feel it must only further reinforce their beliefs. If I were a Muslim, for instance, walking in a mall during this time would be an overt reminder that I was, in fact, Muslim. For any Christian, however, that same stroll through the mall separates a person from their belief in the extensive denial of any religious connotation.
In short, I believe the Christmas shopping season actually promotes other religions (including athiesm) and disconnects Christians from their religious beliefs. If Christian churches agreed with this fact, and cared about protecting their religion (which is an assumption I will make), then I think there's one natural conclusion: Take back Christmas as a religious holiday.
Need for a Public Holiday
While my idea is to take Christmas out of the hands of commercial enterprise through trademark, I want to be clear that I think there's a great value and need for a public holiday. There is this "X-Mas" season where people get time off to be with family, can reflect on things like good-will, and stimulate the economy through shopping. These can be all positive factors. America should have a public holiday and it should be named something other than Christmas.
The key, I think, is to remove all religious tenets to the commercial, public holiday. Let people celebrate their religion where religion belongs - among fellow believers. It's not about being politically correct; as I've stated, it would help protect the religion itself.
There are two essential problems with my idea:
1. Many churches enjoy having casual Christians. That's right, I said it. They like having not only the people who go to Church regularly, tithe, participate in Bible studies, but also have people who come a few times a year out of guilt or desire for some holiday hymn-singing, and open their wallets. They like having a holiday dominating America, and, in fact, many parts of the world, that bears the "Christ"-based name. They whine that Christmas is too commercial, but they are unwilling to do something about it that would risk diminishing their reach or perceived power.
Okay, I admit, problem 1 is a pretty cynical take on it.
2. Perhaps even more than problem 1, I think people also feel that there's nothing that can be done against the consumerism machine. And honestly? They're probably right. Could churches really get together and trademark Christmas? Even if you got the major sects of Catholocism, Orthodox, and various Protestant churches to agree, there are going to be various sects or churches who will be opposed, and who could really claim a trademark without unanimous representation?
It's a nice thought-experiment to think that a technological solution could be afforded to this, but really, the problem is within the fabric of our culture. Christians have allowed their holiday to be used for generations, and they're going to have to suffer under the consumerism of X-Mas because of it. And for the true-believers, that might be enough to recapture a tiny bit of flavor of what it was like for the early Christians who were persecuted for what they believed, by the rest of society who believed something different.
Merry X-Mas, and Happy Christmas this year!
Notes:
* Yeshua means "to save" and has some cool properties with the letters it contains. Because Jesus was Jewish, and would have spoken Hebrew and Aramaic, not Latin, Greek, or English.
** Pisces, you know, the fish sign? There's plenty of debate to be found whether he was born in March, May, or September, but almost all the sources I've found definitely say that it wasn't December 25. I'm going with Pisces because it makes the most sense of the three, given the symbol used for his followers, the fact that the astrological age of Pisces started around the year of the birth of Jesus, give or take, and coupled with the astrological significance in Biblical text placed on foretelling of the coming of Jesus. Anyway, I digress.
11/24/2008
Christmas and X-Mas: Trademarking a Religion?
11/20/2008
Lively: I told you so
Google Says: Lively is Dead
And, I told you so.
Making an IMVU clone when you're gigantic monolithic company Google? Try harder.
So, I wonder, thinking back about the hype announcements that RRR and MoU made. Looks like they were, as suspected, just hype. While Millions of Us almost always follows through with its hype with events and builds that get good user turnout, for Rivers Run Red, this is just another in a string of hype-fizzles. You know, like, "Duran Duran in Second Life" or their current "Partnership with Linden Lab to provide business applications in Second Life"? Or how about the virtuallife.tv?
Why the animosity? It could be because all of the big companies doing third party development in virtual worlds are taking hits, and it's these false hype things that continue to tarnish the reputation of the viability of virtual worlds. I wish that both developers and businesses would bother to fully research the viability of platforms and projects before they go gung-ho into them. Usually, it's end-companies guilty of this hype. I just wonder why companies do apparently so little research into the end-result of virtual world projects. Do companies just not care whether their project succeeds or not?
As my CEO, Drew Stein, has said before, we developers should look as ourselves as sherpas. This new technology is something we should be very familiar with, and it's our job to educate the corporate-types. The problem is that we as an industry tend to only educate our clients, and very little public education is being done. And cooperative? Almost none at all - excepting the various conferences like SLCC and Virtual Worlds.
So, if any virtual world developer is shocked that Lively is gone, I tell you: You don't know your industry well enough at all!
Side-note: If anyone at Google wants to take a real shot at a good interactive world, give me a call. Let me rephrase that: If anyone at Google Earth wants to take a real shot at a good interactive world, let's talk about how *so close* you are already. ;)
Disclaimer: MoU and RRR are two of my company Involve's competitors, and I have previously *briefly* contracted for RRR.
11/18/2008
2 Videos of 7 Days
Last week Involve's CEO, Drew Stein, gave SLCN's Real Biz show a tour of 7 Days Magic Bakery. The destination is a build we did with Vivartia that we opened last month, and we're very proud of the results.
It's a fairly thorough tour, so it's a big file and I won't embed it, but here's a link.
I will, however, embed our own promo video that The Ill Clan made with us:
11/11/2008
For the love of sci-fi, it's NOT A HOLOGRAM!
I just had to say this, after seeing Wired.com jump on the bandwagon of using CNN's election green screen video FX as some example of a "hologram".
FOR THE LOVE OF ALL SCI-FI, A HOLOGRAM IS NOT A GREEN SCREEN IMAGE!
CNN was stupid to call their thing a "hologram". A hologram meant that a three dimensional image was IN THE SAME ROOM as the viewer, namely, Wolf Blitzer. No, it was really, really obvious that they just green-screened guests before sending out the news feed.
Once more:
Hologram:
NOT A HOLOGRAM:
11/10/2008
Wired Misses the Point (Again): Metaverse Identity Crisis, Part 3
So, I got around to reading my tree-killing edition of Wired over the weekend, and found an article "The New Reality" by Stephen Levy. Here's the less-tree-killing version . I applaud Steven for recognizing and praising trends in gaming and digital interface as they permeate slowly through our society. However, it became clear to me that while Levy understands fundamentally and clearly what's happening in our culture with technology, he exhibits a intermediate grasp on the technology and uses his last paragraph to, in the ongoing spirit of Wired Magazine, take a shot at virtual worlds.
The irony is that while his grasp of the technology is a bit less than stellar, he seems to grasp the nature of The Metaverse being a continuous technological space perfectly. He just names it "digital world". It's funny to me how anyone could miss how nearly literally identical these two terms are, but I digress.
In the article, Levy focuses on three products: iPhone, Wii, and Guitar Hero. He notes that they are huge in 2008. Levy comes out and says early in the article that what they have in common is that they, "integrate the digital world into the physical world in a straightforward way." It's an astute observation, considering that 99% of America has a mental divide between game-space (Wii, Guitar Hero, and the like) and communication-space. (iPhone, PDAs, other similar tech) And indeed, near the middle of his article, he is right when he states:
"[It] Turns out [that] you don't need total immersion immersion to interact naturally with a digital world"
He describes how the Wii makes you do the same actions as your avatars. Unfortunately, he fails to use the word "avatar", which might explain why by the end of the article he hasn't made the connection that virtual worlds are a happy, valid part of this "digital world"-space. His last paragraph contrasts the three technologies with virtual worlds:
"We once talked about cyberspace as a distant cosmos, a digital outland that left the physical world behind."
I have written previously that virtual worlds such as "Second Life" and "There" have really bad names, for this reason. It continues to propagate this belief that virtual worlds are some sort of other, rather than some sort of extension to, reality. It goes back to "Virtual Reality". I mean, why did computer scientists decide to make that distinction in the first place? Why not just call them digital worlds, or realms, etc? Well, in fact, some did, as well, but "Virtual Reality" was attached to the commercially available products. So, just like "Second Life", bad naming in advertising strikes again.
Author Levy finishes his article with a continuation of the previous thought:
"21st-century reality is a blend of the digital and physical, with a borderline so blurred it's not really a line at all."
Yes! Precisely! And yet, just two sentences earlier was that same line-drawing he's speaking out against, when he draws the distinction between the Wii, Guitar Hero, and iPhones, with virtual worlds.
The Tech: It's All Been Done
Let me back up a second, though. I did note that Levy's Knowles of the technology wasn't so hot. I need to back this up:
Yes, Levy acknowledges that all three of the products he talks about "were released earlier" but "in 2008 they dominated the zeitgeist". Well, at least the techy zeitgeist. The overwhelming majority of Americans own none of the three, but at least chances are most Americans will have heard of all three. But, even acknowledging that they "were released earlier" kind of ignores the significance of the tech he's talking about.
As I quoted before, Levy cites Guitar Hero and Wii's innovative controllers as forms of virtual reality without headsets. He then elaborates:
"The games of Wii Sports allow you to perform the same actions you do in the athletics they simulate."
Except this is neither a new phenomenon, nor limited to Guitar Hero.
Guitar Hero was originally Guitar Freaks by the illustrious Konami. It came out first in 1998. (In Japan, naturally.) But let's think about this ... how many games can you, readers, think of whose controllers simulate the same actions?
- Guns (countless games)
- Boxing Gloves (various premium arcade games)
- Steering Wheels (countless games)
- A full cockpit of a spaceship / sit on motorbike (countless games)
- Golf clubs (premium arcade simulations)
- Bongos (Donkey Congo, a Gamecube title)
These are all pretty common things in the video game industry, which has been pretty popular since the 80s. Why is a guitar controller, or a remote, any different? They aren't. they're just the next iteration. Even Atari home consoles had controllers with wheels in which to play certain games, like Night Driver.
What's innovative about the Wii and Guitar Hero has so much less to do with "new technology", and more about the fact that CPU time has come to a place where the visual are good enough to make you feel like you're in the game. And this is *precisely* the same thing that has slowed down virtual worlds. So, no real difference, here.
Then there's the iPhone. I know I may get hate mail or angry comments for saying this, but the iPhone? Not all that technologically innovative. Touch-screens have been out forever. Instant Messaging and pictures on phones have been out forever. Apple did a fantastic job making it user-friendly, and sexy-looking, but advancing the technology? Eh, not so much. It's about user-interface being made easier, not being made entirely different. Which, again, is the same issue that we currently have with virtual worlds; we need a sexy iPhone version of virtual worlds that will sell.
See, the thing is, Wired Magazine is a trend-spotter. They spot trends, they write about trends, and they are content with trends. But, when it comes to technology, things are moving at such a break-neck pace that by the time some technology is a trend, it's already second or third generation of that technology. The real cutting-edge stuff rarely makes it to the pages of national magazines. I could venture a guess and say it's because the cutting-edge stuff isn't quite ready for mass-market consumerism, and that magazines like Wired cater to Yuppies and Hipsters with too much money to spend on gadgets, and the advertisers who want to sell those gadgets.
But I digress.
The point is that Levy's right, and he misses the point nonetheless. He's totally right that The Metaverse - what he calls "the digital world" - is a conglomoration of all sorts of communication and digital worlds, from gaming to cellular communication. He aptly identifies why things are good, and why they are all part of this same space. And. Yet. The. Dig. Against. Virtual worlds.
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