Archive for the ‘germany’ Category

Behind the scenes of BlogCampaigning, I’m often giving Jens a hard time for not contributing more often. Some of it is good-natured ribbing about how he’s lazy, some of it is a little more serious.

The reality is that for the past few months he’s been busy finishing up his PhD, and is now on a speaking tour of Australia, so I really shouldn’t be so hard on him. (Espen, however, has no excuses.)

Part of Jens’s hard work has paid off in the form of recognition by the Sydney Morning Herald, which published an excerpt from the abstract of one of his presentations:

“For Europeans, as the Swiss banker father of a friend of mine once said, Australians are the plebeians of the Western world.

“The clichés were presented by the editor-in-chief of the German broadsheet Die Welt, Thomas Schmid, last year in an editorial. He argued that Australia lacks civilisation, everyone is dressed informally, there is a lack of social differentiation and the only thing setting the upper class apart from the middle is its higher income.

“It is an empty place with nothing in the middle—in geography nor identity. These are prejudices Australians have had to deal with almost since the arrival of the First Fleet, a fate they shared with other New World societies such as the United States.”

Read the full article here.

-Parker

Congrats to a few members of the BlogCampaigning crew:

The official notice of Heather Morrison’s new position at Sequentia Environics went out (over the newswire, no less) last week, saying that she’ll “supervise the daily operations and performances of client service teams.” A good move indeed; Sequentia is  a digital communications firm that “focuses on the online relationships between companies and their customers.” It’s also part of the Environics Group.

In other celebratory news, Jens “Schredd” Schroeder sent me an email last week to say that he handed in his doctoral thesis last Monday. “I can’t really believe it’s over… ” he wrote. “But I suppose you never reach the point where you’re convinced that it’s the right moment to hand in a project of this size.” The paper is titled ‘Killer Games’ versus ‘We Will Fund Violence’ :The Perception of Digital Games and Mass Media in Germany and Australia, and Jens is hoping to make it available here on BlogCampaigning sometime soon.

-Parker

I’m on my way Australia again. After a twelve hour flight from Frankfurt I currently get to spend some time on the Singapore airport, getting ready for another nine hours of flying.

So what brings me to the antipodes? Mainly research for my Ph.D. (which, I might add, is financially supported by the German Academic Exchange Service).

As some readers might know I’m looking into the differences of digital game discourses in Germany and Australia and how these relate to the socio-cultural history of both countries – an old “Kulturnation” such as Germany obviously has a different attitude towards mass media – and therefore digital games – than a young nation such as Australia.

One part of the plan is to make the work I’ve completed so far more coherent and factor in some of the advice fellow students gave me or that I received at conferences.

Moreover, I’m planning to look deeper into game discourses in Australian media; something that I obviously have done already but something that I feel I need to elaborate on – especially now that I had a chance to do some more research in Germany that brought my attention to angles I didn’t consider before.

E.g. discourses about digital games in Germany until the early 1990s were often embedded in a broader discussion about the (supposedly negative) impact of computers. In no Western country the fear of rationalisation, surveillance and reduction to binary thinking by means of cold, soulless technology was as pronounced as in Germany.

Accordingly computers and digital games, similar to film, were confronted with antimodern, anti-capitalistic, anti-American sentiments, independent of their content. They were regarded as escapist trash that threatened national cultural assets as well as creativity and fantasy, two of the main pillars of artistic autonomy.

Will I find similar patterns in Australia? From what I’ve gathered so far, probably not. Australia always showed a very high acceptance of mass media and technology and “has yet to experience a moral panic generated by a politician around games to score some cheap political points with the conservative lobby.”

This is a quote by my second supervisior, Brett Hutchins of Monash University whom I’m looking forward to meeting to further discuss my work. Moreover I’m planing to see my old lecturer and friend Jason Nelson who always supported me generously; other people I’d like to meet include Helen Stuckey, Games Curator at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and some members of the Australian game industry, but that will eventually depend on how the research goes.

If you happen to be a reader of blogcampaigning and live either on the Gold Coast or Melbourne drop me a line because it would be great to meet you too!

Ok, I gotta go, several more hours of hanging around at this aiport demand my attention…

-Jens

As you might have read, a teenager went on a rampage at his old school in Germany, slaying at least 15 people before turning his gun on himself during a shootout with police.

As usual in my Vaterland, German media are having a field day accusing so called “killergames” of inciting such horrible acts. I won’t go into these discourses in detail as that would only bring me to the brink of an heart attack.

But I just couldn’t pass up on this one: German tabloid Bild is calling for a ban of violent games (by citing “Germany’s most important media analyst”) yet runs huge ads for Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X, a game that “promises to revolutionise the way players think about combat in the sky.”

Not really that violent you say? Fair enough. We might as well go for the real stuff and buy Counterstrike (the game officials love to blame), GTA IV or Gears of War 2 (officially banned in Germany because of its violence) in the official Bild.de shop!

On a similar note: Another brilliant idea on how to curb youth violence by making the access to videogames more difficult comes from the UK. Reports Destructoid:

A tax on videogames would combat knife crime in UK, claims a government advisor who lost his own son to inner city youth crime. According to the rather outrageous suggestion, videogames are “too cheap” and this makes it easy for children to buy them, which in turn causes them to become violent psychopaths. Typical logic from a man thinking with his heart and not his brain.

And another politician taking a convenient shortcut… Ban instead of educate, prohibit instead of looking into deeper reasons that might result in questioning one’s own policies.

-Jens

I recently came across the so-called ‘Heidelberg Appeal’ initiated by some professor for German language and literature studies. In it, more than 1600 German authors, intellectuals and publishers lament that:

[A]t the international level, intellectual property is being stolen from its producers to an unimagined degree and without criminalisation through the illegal publication of works protected by German copyright law on platforms such as GoogleBooks and YouTube.

They mix this criticism with a condemnation of the open access initiative, a portal which offers the free use of scientific articles. One of the arguments for public access to scholarly literature is that most of it is paid for by taxpayers, who therefore have a right to access the results of what they have funded. This, in turn, would cut publishers out of the equation.

The undertone of this appeal is quite characteristic for the current mood in the Vaterland: The Minister of Family Affairs wants to introduce mandatory blockage of child pornography via a black list, a system potentially open to political abuse and economic pressure. In fact, the music industry would like to extend this list to ‘P2P link sites’ (whatever that means) in order to protect its intellectual property. Meanwhile a branch of the youth organization of the two conservative German political parties CDU and CSU seriously suggested that users must register themselves on youtube with their personal id-number. The reasoning for this measure: It is supposed to curb youth violence. I kid you not.

In short, as this excellent article on the German blog netzwertig (which I’m very much in debt to for the following points) explains: The basic quality of the internet as a space for open communication is threatened.

This threat basically emanates from groups and individuals who are incapable of grasping the digital nature of the medium. All over the world you’ll find industries which are incapable of adapting their ‘analogue’ business models to changing circumstances. Businesses which are threatened try to get rid of the threat by calling for protective legislation. Eventually it comes down to a fight between the supporters of free information, communication, and knowledge and those who are afraid of these new freedoms and would like to curtail them.

The problem with Germany is… well, exactly that: It’s Germany. Take the US for example, a country with a strong belief in a free market, freedom of speech and personal freedom. Here you find the same calls for a protection of the culture industry – however, the regulation of the internet is way less strict than in Deutschland.

Viewed under a long term perspective this should not be surprising at all: Germany is a country with very little liberal traditions. Germany did not see a single successful bourgeois revolt in which the concepts of freedom and unity helped to overcome suppressive structures. Instead, the bourgeoisie focused all its hope on the state as the preserver of the social order, though with a growing claim for absoluteness the myth of the nation corrupted a group whose initial core of existence revolved around cosmopolitan and tolerant concepts.

These tendencies were perpetuated by the darker side of German romanticism which the educated bourgeoisie gave itself over to. In contrast to an unscrupulous belief in progress and reckless pragmatism, people enjoyed the ‘romantic’ because it offered an escape from the rationalism of industrialisation: A romantic anticapitalism arose out of the conflict between humanist culture and capitalist exchange relations.

These specifically German foundational dynamics had a distinct impact of the perception of mass based cultural forms; these were mainly shaped by rejection, a strong control on behalf of the state or an over-enthusiasm which eventually betrayed a deep insecurity.

From its onset in 1923, radio was basically state controlled. After WWII the Allies dictated the Germans an organizational model for public broadcasting – as soon as they left it was thrown overboard in favor of a scheme that allowed more political influence. To this very day, the pressure political parties apply on public broadcaster is immense.

Given the country’s spiritual heritage, German intellectuals were notoriously anti-modern, anti-capitalistic and anti-American. A very good example of this is the Frankfurt School whose elitist criticism of mass culture eventually amounted to allegations that weren’t too different to conservative criticism.

Given this track record, some of the current developments aren’t really surprising: The state trying to gain control over a free space, economic interests calling for the state’s aid because they fear a loss of control (something which also betrays their lack of trust in the market), the inflexibility to adapt to technological changes and take them as a chance, the comparatively large technophobia of German society.

The problem of course is that if the internet in Germany is curtailed as heavily as suggested – its advantages getting completely lost in the process – the Vaterland falls even more behind countries where the internet and its inherent qualities change society and economy for the better (and where the legislation reflects this fact).

Germany is hardly prepared for the cataclysmic changes brought about by the internet. The net becomes more and more important – and the more important it becomes, the more Germany closes itself to it. With the according consequences.

-Jens

As an addition to the Parker’s post about the future of the music industry (or lack thereof), here is an example from Germany of how the will to innovate can benefit everyone involved: in order to gain independence from the industry, hard rocking guitar pop band Angelika Express financed its last album by selling ’shares’ to fans.

To give fans an impression of the new album the Cologne based group first released rough versions of new songs on Myspace on a weekly basis. They then decided to issue 500 ’shares’ at 50 Euros (which sold out in record time and came with a detailed plan of how the money would be spent). With those 25.000 Euros Angelika Express financed the recording of their album, the album artwork, the manufacture of the actual CDs, and the accompanying promotion. They also plan to fund upcoming singles from this pool.

The thing is: Not only do the people who signed up for the shares get the new album but in return they also receive 80% of the earnings made with CDs sales and downloads (including upcoming singles and EPs) for the next seven years!

I have to say that this is really one of the most innovative and sympathetic concepts I came across so far. The band gained its independence and its fans get paid to support them. Everybody wins!

-Jens

Over the course of the last two weeks I conducted a couple of interviews for my Ph.D. dealing with the was the perception of digital games differs in Germany and Australia. By talking to just a couple of people you can tell how the cultural history of a country also influences the way modern media is dealt with.

The first person I spoke to was Malte Behrmann, attorney, secretary general of the European Games Developer Federation as well chairperson of the German developers association, GAME. Malte is also responsible for digital games getting officially accepted as Kulturby the German Kulturrat, the umbrella organization of the German cultural associations. This push always reminded me of the strategy of the early German Autorenfilm.

In an attempt to conform to bourgeois cultural norms and thus demonstrate cinemas’ cultural and social relevance, the Autorenfilm (films based on the works of famous contemporary authors or written by them directly for the screen) mobilized national literary and cultural traditions against the Schundfilm (‘trash film’) by serving as an incentive to ‘respectable’ artists from the ‘legitimate’ stage and literature to lend their prestige to the new medium. It was basically an elevation of the medium to adhere to bourgeois tastes and therefore broaden its social basis.

Asked if he saw any parallels between these two instances, Malte Behrman answered that he wouldn’t sit in his office like a spin doctor and think about how a game could be made more socially acceptable by means of “nobilitation”. A statement I thought was quite remarkable as it shows how on a subconscious level Germany’s long high-culture traditions and its specific socio-cultural influences still assert themselves – in a way that is decidedly different to Australia where, due to the country’s different history, I never encountered a similar attitude. Here digital games – and non-hierarchical entertainment in general – never needed any form of cultural legitimation.

German ad for Commodore VC20 - it lands you on Jupiter and the next class

Moreover, Germany’s cultural background allegedly influenced the way games were designed: They were regarded as overly complicated, complex and not very accessible (think complicated simulations, strategy games and management games [Parker's note: only Germans would be into "management games"]). When I was talking about this with Philipp from Yager he made the point that this might have something to do with the fact that for a very long time German developers mainly created games for the PC.

In contrast to consoles the PC was an open platform everyone could develop for without having to obtain licenses and development kids – and Germany has a very strong history of home computing. I suppose this is because the purchase of a home computer was easier to justify as it allowed its user to go beyond the mere pleasures of play. As the classical ad above puts it: “How do you land safely on Jupiter and in the next class?” With the most successful computer of the world of course! The VC20, not only does it allow you to land on Jupiter as part of a game, it also plays chess and connects people in play. Well, that but it also teaches math, physics and biology… So much for the theory, but then again this probably had more appeal to Germany’s cultural history of a country defining itself in terms of Kultur and education.

This eventually also might have had an influence on the design of German games: most of them went beyond mere play but offered an ‘added value’ by, e.g. teaching about complex economic correlations and challenging the player accordingly. I remember people at school telling me how they refused to play Doom because they thought it was too primitive. As Jens from Ascaron put it in the interview I conducted with him: “Germans liked to play with animated Excel charts”.

German Atari 400 ad - good for games AND school!

Obviously this was a competitive disadvantage: These games, on account of their design, hardly sold outside of Germany, probably another sign of their cultural specificity. Just like the (mainstream) American market did not appreciate the Autorenfilm with its intellectualized themes of broken identities, alienation and magic, history repeated itself 80 years later when it refused to play overly complex German games.

Of course this changed in the last couple of years, last not least because of a transition to console gaming. The Wii and especially the DS were godsend gifts – cheap and easy to develop for and… well cynics might point out that Nintendo isn’t very strict when it comes to shovelware. Also German developers are amongst the leading ones in the field of mobile and browser games. But eventually it is quite difficult to rid oneself off one’s cultural background. I suppose that’s what Philipp meant when he said that even though you can have lived in the US for three years you’re not quite ‘there’ yet in terms of an American (uncomplicated, commercially orientated) mindset.

My next interviews will be about support mechanisms. I wonder if the influences I just described also have an impact on how local game developers are supported by the state run institutions. What are the rules and regulations? And do they get applied eventually? Which games will be funded which won’t? Would something violent yet potentially successful receive support? I already got a taste of what to expect when I informally talked to someone about these things on a party and was told that ’serious games’ apparently play an important role when it comes to funding in Berlin. Not only because they demonstrate potential ‘transfer-effects’ (locally developed engines used for something… well, beyond play) but also because they function as a mental guide for the people giving out the finds: As a cultural/ technology-beyond-play token that helps to set everything in motion, the ‘ox that draws the cart’ so to speak.

-Jens

I had my friends Malte and Anthony over for the week: not only did the Web 2.0 Expo take place here in Berlin but their company, iliketotallyloveit, also had been selected as one of the top ten finalists in the Zanox Web Services Contest 2008 for 1 Million Euros. During the course of their stay I had the pleasure to attend several events with them which offered me a better grasp of the vibrant local start-up scene.

Vibrant for the most part as the impressions I gathered seem to support Matt Marshall’s view that a lack of capital keeps German entrepreneurs more conservative than they could be: Rarely are German start-ups working on a visionary, cutting-edge idea but more often than not fall into the copycat run. Many the conversations I had included the words “They already offer this/ a similar service in the US but we…”.

It’s not all bland and blatant though as the winners of the Zanox contest proved. Unfortunately iliketotallyloveit wasn’t one of them but it would be unfair to say that the three victorious companies didn’t deserve the attention:

Webtrakk – webcontrolling, helps to measure the performance, control and improve websites’ commercial success and online-marketing campaigns
Triboo – e-commerce and high definition marketing of some sorts… unfortunately I don’t speak Italian
Servtag – near field communication based mobile solutions which offers easy and quick access to independent product information; it also allows to share your shopping habits by feeding your shopping habits to social networks

In this Servtag is similar to another interesting start-up I came across after the announcement of the contest winners: Barcoo.com

It turns your mobile into a barcode scanner and shows the information you demand e.g. by comparing prices, user ratings, giving information about ingredients of foods and their effects on your health (from the amount of fat to allergies), the carbon footprint of a company etc.

I liked these services for several reasons:
– First of all it is an original idea which doesn’t blatantly rip off existing sites but on the opposite has the potential to be successful outside of Germany.
– I could immediately relate to it: Earlier this year I needed to buy a printer/scanner and was simply overwhelmed by the variety of options; here some orientation through easy to access on the spot information certainly would have been helpful. Another example: You’re an eco-conscious shopper doing grocery shopping; with Barcoo you can base your purchases on how sustainable the suppliers’ business is.
– The idealism in case of Barcoo: Of course financial success is a motivation behind this project but from what I gathered the founders are also personally invested in that they supply a platform which supports consumers in making conscious choices they can identify with.

Servtag and Barcoo also go to show how potential future collaborations between the scientific community and start-ups might work: While Technical University of Munich is involved in Servtag, the Berlin based Humboldt University is associated with Barcoo which received funding under a European Union R&D grant – the tragedy which Matt Marshall laments, namely that Germany has a tremendous basic science research and some of the best engineering in the world but lacks the ability to connect engineers with company builders might still be a real one but as this example shows is none that’s unresolvable.

One question remains though: Who would be willing to pay for such a service? While Servtag can monetize on affiliate programs and share valuable information about shopping habits with marketeers in case of Barcoo the industry might not be enthusiastic about too much transparency, consumers not about possible extra costs of a subscription model and an ad-based solution would cost a tremendous amount of credibility.

Whatever the answer may be, Berlin’s scene will stay exciting.

-Jens

As ReadWriteWeb reports a regional court in Germany ruled that Google is violating German copyright law by displaying thumbnail previews of copyrighted images. From the piece:

German photographer Michael Bernhard and cartoonist Thomas Horn had sued the Google and demanded that their images be removed from Google’s index. According to the judge at Hamburg’s regional court, “no new work is created” by displaying thumbnails.

Google, of course, has no way of discerning whether an image in its index is copyrighted or not. Based on this decision, we would not be surprised if Google decided to block image search for German users. However, we also assume that Google will try to appeal this decision.

Ah ze Germans… Ten years after Google they still haven’t figured out the Internet: A conscious decision to prevent people from accesing valuable information about one’s visual work, hampering any form of self-promotion that would somehow resemble 21st century practices; all this backed by an unwordly, anti-business court whose ruling could potentially throw the Fatherland back into ze digital stoneage. And you thought having to pay for newspaper articles on the web was a bad idea…

-Jens (Thanks for the link Malte!)

One of the more interesting pieces of technology depicted in Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End is that which allows users to put a skin over reality, just as we currently choose different themes for our operating systems and web browsers.

Thanks to some smart people working out of the Universität der Künste Berlin (“The Berlin University of the Arts”), we’re one step closer to making that happen.

From the description of their project:

Carcade is a concept for an in-car videogame for the passengers, which captures the landscape and uses it as a videogame environment. Existing objects, for example trees and architecture, are recognized by the camera and enhanced by videogame assets. The game is influenced by the manner of driving of the car. If the driver accelerates, the game becomes increasingly difficult. If the car comes to a stop a different game situation evolves. We developed a small game concept and a functional prototype, with which we did a test drive on the street. A webcam is connected to a laptop running camera tracking software which recognizes the horizon and objects in the environment. The player has to maneuver a spaceship and collect points whilst trying to avoid crashing into oncoming enemies.

It is still early days, but watching their video will help you understand the technology a bit better. As it advances, that boring prairie drive between Calgary and Edmonton could become a lot more interesting if it took the form of a space battle, jungle cruise or otherwise more-scenic route instead.

In order to further cement the relationship between videogames and driving, iTWire reports (via /.) that a car designed for the Playstation 3 game Gran Turismo 5 Prologue has made into real life and was unveiled at the Paris Motor Show. It isn’t just a fantasy car, either. Apparently the GTbyCITROËN handles the same in real life as in the the game.

If you’ve played the Gran Turismo series of games, you’ll know exactly how hyper-realistic they are. In fact, I’m pretty sure I learned more about driving through the original Gran Turismo for PS1 than I did from the driving lessons I took when I was sixteen.

I’m probably not the only one that thinks that way, either. According to this CNN story, Allstate insurance will start offering specialized computer games to older drivers and that this could end up lowering their rates.

-Parker