Kendall Gelner, Noel Llopis, and many other hugely talented but yet pleasant to be around folks were inspiring.

Only thing I regret about the thing was eating those veggie burritos. Man they were grody.

iPadDevCamp was a super-intensive “hack something together a-zap and present it two days later” thing. Actually it was roughly 1 whole day of working, with only a few hours on the Friday eve and Sunday morning to do last minute fixes. I ended up with a group of 4 others doing a ‘multi-device game’ called (eventually) Tank or Die. The idea was to be able to add iPhones as game controllers and iPads as playing fields in this ‘control the tank and try to shoot the other tanks’. There were 3 developers (4 even) and one graphics designer. Everyone decided to start working on things on Friday, but due to transportation issues, I couldn’t actually join them until Saturday. My task ended up being the connectivity between iPads (the playing fields) and I just didn’t have enough time to figure out how to get it all working in time for the demo, so when we won “best game” award, I felt a bit like a cheater when I took that wireless keyboard from the prize pile.

Was a learning experience though, and I don’t regret participating. It’s a very nice feeling when you are convinced that “if I were tasked to do this with the things I know today, I would have succeeded”, and I am.

Now I’m going to be doing some work and relax until Friday, when I go up to Seattle for the last conference in my “conference tour”.

“Goodbye The Silver Lining. Our culture is formed by the sharing of ideas. Throughout history, for millennia, every piece of art, music, literature and entertainment has been the result of a worldwide collaboration. It’s been an astonishing act of creative evolution, the most vibrant and extraordinary gene pool of imagination and inspiration, from which all were free to draw and create. It has been exceptional, and in the last 50 to 100 years it has come to an end.

The tragedy of the abuse and misuse of intellectual property and copyright cannot be counted. After centuries of sharing, we have allowed a “MINE!” tag to be affixed to every thought, string of notes, doodle on a page, or merest whim. We have committed a grotesque cultural suicide. And the extent to which this has reached should be a parody. We have now allowed ourselves to be in the situation where art museums ban sketching – something that should surely make anyone whose understanding of art history goes beyond yesterday scream in fear. And it exists in our world of gaming in a similarly berserk form. And so it is that Activision has closed down work on not-for-profit fan creation The Silver Lining.“

Very similar to what I said recently, but worded a thousand times better.

Game software copy protection goes far back beyond that, of course, and in contrast, GCP (I invented this acronym, probably) can be justified a bit more. Music is something that we, on a nearly instinctual level, love to share with each other, be that by playing together or listening together or simply showing each other the kind of stuff that makes us feel certain ways. Music is such an integral part of the human society that’s been with us for as long as we’ve had hands to play with or mouths to sing with. The industrialization thereof is perhaps the most critical error of ours. Games on the other hand may have been with us for a long time (Go for example dates back to the 4th century BC), but it’s not as intimately associated with sharing as music. That said, game piracy of course thrives just as any other software piracy does, and the game developers seek new methods to battle the piracy.

Most recently, Ubisoft, the makers of titles such as Assassin’s Creed, have decided to take this a step further, thus evolving the DRM. Rock Paper Shotgun has an article on the subject of how Ubisoft not only restricts the player from starting the game without doing an online check to verify the game has not been pirated, but it even throws the player out of the game if their internet connection at any point in time drops offline, while playing.

I actually think that’s pretty awesome. I mean, the balls required to do that? Not to speak of, the conviction that their players will be loyal to the point of ridicule, that they buy the game anyway. Reminds me of Metallica.

Just now, I went and created a Battle.Net account and started adding all my games to it. You can add any Blizz game you’ve bought simply by inputing the CD key for the game in question into a text box and the correct game will pop up and be permanently added to your BNet account. Not only, but you can now “download client” directly from the BNet site… so as in my case, I *wouldn’t* have had to bring my CD keys in a secure encrypted file, and I *wouldn’t* have had to illegally download the game from some torrent site, because all I’d need is already there, on my BNet account. Awesome move by Blizz there.

I also added my WoW accounts (note the pluralis — though in honesty, neither one of them is currently activated), which felt awesomely nice, because it is incredibly confusing to have two separate accounts for the same game. Now I just use my BNet creds to login to whichever it is I’m playing. Presuming I actually start playing again, some day.