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In a refreshing turn, over at Newsweek's LevelUp blog N'Gai has some suitably chastising commentary on the newly-announced FPS entitled simply THEY. This overly-simplistic name is accompanied by a nearly informationless press release, and reinforces the idea that whatever THEY is, it's not worth looking into. "Generally, the role of a press release is to inform. But having read the THEY press release, all we've taken away from it is hyperbole and buzzwords, assembled Mad Libs-style for maximum unintended hilarity. What is THEY? Apparently, THEY is a 'next generation mystery first person shooter for PC and next generation consoles.' Who are THEY, you ask? ''THEY' are huge--'THEY' are different--'THEY' are hostile!' How good will THEY be? It's 'so mysterious, so stunning and so amazing--that 'THEY' might become one of the most anticipated world premiere titles from this year's Games Convention!'"

Last week's new diatribe from Roger Ebert on the merits of games had some people up in arms. Commentary ranged from the respectful at Ars Technica, to the dismissive statements at GameCritics. N'Gai Croal, of Newsweek's LevelUp, has a lengthy and thoughtful look at the issue from both sides. From his comments: "It's the right of someone with the maturity of an honest and articulate four-year-old to forget the history of his own favored art form and close his mind to the potential of another. In the meantime, those of us who care about the possibilities inherent in this medium will have to rely upon ourselves and one another to keep doing the heavy lifting necessary to suss out where the art of videogames lies; to determine how the craft can enhance that art; and to continue the fight to push this young medium from squalling infancy into graceful adulthood. Let's get cracking."

In the wake of yesterday's Microsoft conference, there are further details and updates on what was discussed. Moore dropped the statistic that there are 7 million users on Xbox Live, and mentioned an August 24th release date for the Elite SKU in Canada and Europe. Call of Duty 4 seemed to be the most popular game of the event, with the single-player demo going over very well and news of a multiplayer Beta coming soon raising the eyebrows of FPS gamers. There was, of course, a party afterwards; Dean Takahashi gives us a sense of the event, while Kotaku has some beer-fueled comments from Peter Moore and Shane Kim. N'Gai Croal has the final word, with a point-by-point breakdown of the event.

Officially Microsoft is putting on a brave face, saying they won't drop the 360's price even in the console's weakest market: Japan. Just the same (probably in anticipation of Sony's PS3 price drop), the San Jose Mercury news says the company is secretly working on preparing a lower cost Xbox 360 SKU. Called 'Falcon', it's a cost-reduced system using 65nm chips instead of the at-launch 90nm electronics. This ties right into Michael Pachter's expectation of such a cut; it should be noted he doesn't see the DS or Wii prices moving any time soon. Related to all of this, Newsweek's LevelUp blog has two great interviews today: a Peter Moore discussion harkening back to last week's warranty announcement, and a chat with Jack Tretton about the price cut and the 360's hardware issues.

Officially Microsoft is putting on a brave face, saying they won't drop the 360's price even in the console's weakest market: Japan. Just the same (probably in anticipation of Sony's PS3 price drop), the San Jose Mercury news says the company is secretly working on preparing a lower cost Xbox 360 SKU. Called 'Falcon', it's a cost-reduced system using 65nm chips instead of the at-launch 90nm electronics. This ties right into Michael Pachter's expectation of such a cut; it should be noted he doesn't see the DS or Wii prices moving any time soon. Related to all of this, Newsweek's LevelUp blog has two great interviews today: a Peter Moore discussion harkening back to last week's warranty announcement, and a chat with Jack Tretton about the price cut and the 360's hardware issues.

N'Gai Croal (of Newsweek) and Stephen Totilo (of MTV) once again match wits in a textual format, this time over the Manhunt 2 controversy. In Round One, the two reporters discuss the process of playing the game for the first time, and wonder what the experience must have been like for the ESRB raters. Round Two sees them take things up a notch, discussing what exactly it is about the game that's so violent. Round Three ... has them questioning the nature of gaming itself. As always, these are two smart guys with some interesting insights into the medium. Well worth your time. From N'Gai's final letter: "It's difficult to 'read' or derive much meaning from a game. That's why in our three Vs. Modes, we ultimately don't spend very much time talking about or analyzing the experience of playing a game, because it's hard to do so without turning our emails into "I went here. I did this. I picked that up." Which is, after all, what games are. So if the essence of a game is located in what we do, is a walkthrough--go here, do this, pick up that--the most truthful way to write about the experience of playing a game? I hope not. But it's something we should consider. Once again, if the essence of any game is located in its action, reaction, interaction, and the rules which circumscribe those three elements, what does the narrative do?"

HaymarketRiot writes "N'Gai Croal from Newsweek has given us a broad outline of Nintendo's plans for downloadable original content. To be called 'WiiWare', the company will be selling these all-new games via the Wii's Virtual Store for Wii points. Not only are they looking to big-name developers for these titles, but small garage-style shops as well. 'Shorter, original, more creative games from small teams with big ideas; these are the buzzwords that you'll be hearing from Nintendo when its Wednesday announcement goes wide. Fils-Aime told us that while Nintendo, as the retailer, would itself determine the appropriate pricing for each game on a per-title bases, the games themselves would not be vetted by Nintendo. Instead, Nintendo would only check the games for bugs and compatibility, with developers and publishers responsible for securing [a rating lower than AO with the ESRB].' For more, N'Gai has an interview with Reggie Fils-Aime on the subject. Unfortunately, we won't be seeing a finished product until 2008."

HaymarketRiot writes "N'Gai Croal from Newsweek has given us a broad outline of Nintendo's plans for downloadable original content. To be called 'WiiWare', the company will be selling these all-new games via the Wii's Virtual Store for Wii points. Not only are they looking to big-name developers for these titles, but small garage-style shops as well. 'Shorter, original, more creative games from small teams with big ideas; these are the buzzwords that you'll be hearing from Nintendo when its Wednesday announcement goes wide. Fils-Aime told us that while Nintendo, as the retailer, would itself determine the appropriate pricing for each game on a per-title bases, the games themselves would not be vetted by Nintendo. Instead, Nintendo would only check the games for bugs and compatibility, with developers and publishers responsible for securing [a rating lower than AO with the ESRB].' For more, N'Gai has an interview with Reggie Fils-Aime on the subject. Unfortunately, we won't be seeing a finished product until 2008."

The Halo 3 Beta has been in the news just a bit lately, and with it the Halo franchise is again looming large in other formats. Director Peter Jackson is speculating that the release of the game this September may refocus attention on the movie, stalled as it has been since October of last year. Jackson still wants to make it, but only with Neill Blomkamp directing. The Halo comic, meanwhile, has been confirmed as an ongoing series. The comic will consist of several mini-series runs, with future adventures possibly featuring the return of Brian Michael Bendis (the mind behind the first series). As for the game itself, Beta code has uncovered several game achievements that will be earnable after launch. Trying to calm fans somehow disappointed with the Beta's graphics, Bungie's Frank O'Connor assures us the shipped game will look better. And finally for a broader view of the game N'Gai Croal and Stephen Totilo are at it again, dissecting the Beta experience with witty correspondence.

Tomorrow is Mother's Day in the US, and Newsweek's N'Gai Croal rightly estimates that many gamers owe a lot to their mothers. Because they indulged what they likely initially saw as a strange choice of hobby, we have a thriving gaming industry to enjoy today. The Level Up site offers an interview with a woman on the Newsweek staff who learned to tolerate those 'console things', and another piece where N'Gai interviews his own mom about his games-related past. "N'Gai: Growing up, you allowed us kids to have a computer, but we weren't allowed to have a videogame machine. What was your thinking behind that? Yvonne Croal: Well, in my estimation at that time, videogames were just another silly game. We certainly didn't want you to be spending 24/7 playing these games that we considered not productive in any way." If you're still looking for a gift for your own mom, Pop Cap is giving away a free copy of Bejeweled to anyone that signs up for their newsletter. Worked on my mom. Happy Mother's Day.

Tomorrow is Mother's Day in the US, and Newsweek's N'Gai Croal rightly estimates that many gamers owe a lot to their mothers. Because they indulged what they likely initially saw as a strange choice of hobby, we have a thriving gaming industry to enjoy today. The Level Up site offers an interview with a woman on the Newsweek staff who learned to tolerate those 'console things', and another piece where N'Gai interviews his own mom about his games-related past. "N'Gai: Growing up, you allowed us kids to have a computer, but we weren't allowed to have a videogame machine. What was your thinking behind that? Yvonne Croal: Well, in my estimation at that time, videogames were just another silly game. We certainly didn't want you to be spending 24/7 playing these games that we considered not productive in any way." If you're still looking for a gift for your own mom, Pop Cap is giving away a free copy of Bejeweled to anyone that signs up for their newsletter. Worked on my mom. Happy Mother's Day.

Newsweek's N'Gai tackles the allegation that the Wii is a glorified GameCube. He specifically looked at recent comments by Microsoft's Robbie Bach saying that 'the video graphics on it aren't very strong; the box itself is kind of underpowered; it doesn't play DVDs; there are a lot of down-line components [that] aren't actually that interesting. ... They don't have the graphics horsepower that even Xbox 1 had. So it makes sort of the comparison set a little bit difficult.' LevelUp spoke with a pair of technical experts at third party publishers and learned that, essentially, Bach's comments about horsepower are accurate. However, "the 'Gamecube 1.5' moniker, while accurate, doesn't mean that gamers won't see graphical improvements on the Wii. 'There are three main differences which will result in graphics improvements. One, the increased memory clock speed, from 162 megahertz to 243 megahertz, means that it is easier to do enough pixels for 480p mode versus 480i. Two, the enhanced memory size of the Wii gives much more room for image-related operations such as anti-aliasing, motion blur, etc. The performance to these memory systems from the graphics chip is also improved. So full-screen effects and increased texture usage seem likely as a result.'"

The fourth title in the extremely well received Call of Duty series has been announced. Infinity Ward is now working on Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat . The title will end the series' reliance on the theatre of World War II, and will place gamers into a current-day setting fighting terrorists in the Middle East. While the chance to get away from WWII will be appreciated by game-players, not everyone is happy about that hackneyed title. "What followed [Medal of Honor] were such games as Day of Defeat (Activision, 2003) and Men of Valor (Vivendi, 2004.) Ubisoft briefly bucked the trend, boldly replacing the near-mandatory 'of' with 'in' for its 2005 release 'Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30,' but soon fell right in line with the rest of its industry brethren with the 2006 real-time strategy game Faces of War. Ditto for THQ's 2006 RTS game Company of Heroes. Later this year, retail shelves will be graced with THQ's Frontlines: Fuel of War and Midway's Hour of Victory. (That's why for the last couple of years, we and a number of our peers have jokingly created our own World War II game titles, Mad Libs-style, like Call of Honor, Men of Duty, Company of Brothers, etc.)"

N'Gai Croal's LevelUp column continues to impress, with a new feature called 'Team Assault'. Instead of the usual interview about a game with one featured speaker, Croal has gone after the people that pieced the game together: the development team. The first targets for this approach are the makers of God of War II. So far he has conversations up with Executive Producer Shannon Studstill, Lead Programmer Tim Moss, and Game Director Cory Barlog. From the first interview with Barlog: "Making these games is freaking hard work, and it can drain every ounce of life you have in you to make the 2-3 year haul, but it is worth it. It sounds weird to me to say this, but right now I am doing exactly what I want to be doing. How many people can say that? Until I started working on the original God of War, I absolutely couldn't say that. I was actually thinking about getting out of games at the time. Not sure what I was going to do, maybe become an archaeologist or something like that. But then I would more than likely be slapped in the face by the cold hard reality that I wouldn't get to carry a gun, or a whip, or fight bad guys that wear eye patches and expensive suits. So I would probably just end up coming back to games or making movies."

N'Gai Croal's LevelUp column continues to impress, with a new feature called 'Team Assault'. Instead of the usual interview about a game with one featured speaker, Croal has gone after the people that pieced the game together: the development team. The first targets for this approach are the makers of God of War II. So far he has conversations up with Executive Producer Shannon Studstill, Lead Programmer Tim Moss, and Game Director Cory Barlog. From the first interview with Barlog: "Making these games is freaking hard work, and it can drain every ounce of life you have in you to make the 2-3 year haul, but it is worth it. It sounds weird to me to say this, but right now I am doing exactly what I want to be doing. How many people can say that? Until I started working on the original God of War, I absolutely couldn't say that. I was actually thinking about getting out of games at the time. Not sure what I was going to do, maybe become an archaeologist or something like that. But then I would more than likely be slapped in the face by the cold hard reality that I wouldn't get to carry a gun, or a whip, or fight bad guys that wear eye patches and expensive suits. So I would probably just end up coming back to games or making movies."

N'Gai Croal's LevelUp column continues to impress, with a new feature called 'Team Assault'. Instead of the usual interview about a game with one featured speaker, Croal has gone after the people that pieced the game together: the development team. The first targets for this approach are the makers of God of War II. So far he has conversations up with Executive Producer Shannon Studstill, Lead Programmer Tim Moss, and Game Director Cory Barlog. From the first interview with Barlog: "Making these games is freaking hard work, and it can drain every ounce of life you have in you to make the 2-3 year haul, but it is worth it. It sounds weird to me to say this, but right now I am doing exactly what I want to be doing. How many people can say that? Until I started working on the original God of War, I absolutely couldn't say that. I was actually thinking about getting out of games at the time. Not sure what I was going to do, maybe become an archaeologist or something like that. But then I would more than likely be slapped in the face by the cold hard reality that I wouldn't get to carry a gun, or a whip, or fight bad guys that wear eye patches and expensive suits. So I would probably just end up coming back to games or making movies."

N'Gai Croal's LevelUp column continues to impress, with a new feature called 'Team Assault'. Instead of the usual interview about a game with one featured speaker, Croal has gone after the people that pieced the game together: the development team. The first targets for this approach are the makers of God of War II. So far he has conversations up with Executive Producer Shannon Studstill, Lead Programmer Tim Moss, and Game Director Cory Barlog. From the first interview with Barlog: "Making these games is freaking hard work, and it can drain every ounce of life you have in you to make the 2-3 year haul, but it is worth it. It sounds weird to me to say this, but right now I am doing exactly what I want to be doing. How many people can say that? Until I started working on the original God of War, I absolutely couldn't say that. I was actually thinking about getting out of games at the time. Not sure what I was going to do, maybe become an archaeologist or something like that. But then I would more than likely be slapped in the face by the cold hard reality that I wouldn't get to carry a gun, or a whip, or fight bad guys that wear eye patches and expensive suits. So I would probably just end up coming back to games or making movies."

N'Gai Croal's LevelUp column continues to impress, with a new feature called 'Team Assault'. Instead of the usual interview about a game with one featured speaker, Croal has gone after the people that pieced the game together: the development team. The first targets for this approach are the makers of God of War II. So far he has conversations up with Executive Producer Shannon Studstill, Lead Programmer Tim Moss, and Game Director Cory Barlog. From the first interview with Barlog: "Making these games is freaking hard work, and it can drain every ounce of life you have in you to make the 2-3 year haul, but it is worth it. It sounds weird to me to say this, but right now I am doing exactly what I want to be doing. How many people can say that? Until I started working on the original God of War, I absolutely couldn't say that. I was actually thinking about getting out of games at the time. Not sure what I was going to do, maybe become an archaeologist or something like that. But then I would more than likely be slapped in the face by the cold hard reality that I wouldn't get to carry a gun, or a whip, or fight bad guys that wear eye patches and expensive suits. So I would probably just end up coming back to games or making movies."

grenada writes "As reported by Ars Techncia, Shigeru Miyamoto has some good advice for aspiring game developers. Instead of telling kids to focus on video games, he actually says that it's beneficial to diversify your education and personal interests. He says that meeting people and familiarizing yourself to different fields will give you the best perspective of the world in the long run, which will help in your game-developing career. 'While young people are still students, I think it is important for them to not just focus on something like programming or just focus on video games. Instead they should do things that you can only do while you are in college. Get out, meet people, and talk to people.'" As a follow-up, N'Gai Croal at Newsweek has up an interview he did with Miyamoto-san entitled the Artist's Way.

I've mentioned previously how much I enjoy the writing of Newsweek's N'Gai Croal and MTV's Stephen Totilo. All this week, then, it's been a pleasure to enjoy their witty exchange on the PS2's most recent blockbuster, God of War 2. The conversation is spread across both Croal's LevelUp column and Totilo's Player Two blog, and features ruminations on the title from a number of viewpoints. If you have some time this afternoon I highly recommend you give their full correspondence a look. More than just a discussion about a single game, they manage to capture some of the greatness of the medium, with their conversation ranging across genre, time, and content to get at some of the most fundamental elements of videogaming. From N'Gai's final post: "I've said before that we 'see' videogames with our hands. Extending that analogy further, the way cutscenes are used today is the film equivalent of title cards during the silent film era: even though the audience came to the movies to watch people move, they had to do a fair bit of reading to get the full measure of the filmmaker's vision. Similarly, cutscenes leave gamers watching when they should be playing. Sure, cutscenes can communicate critical information; they allow for dramatic and spectacular sequences that might be too difficult to pull off interactively; they provide a nice breather or bookend to lengthy gameplay sections. But just as silent film gave way to the talkies, cutscenes need to keep giving way to gameplay so that our eyes--excuse me, our hands--are constantly engaged."

Gamaustra's Soapbox this week touches on the lessons learned from Slamgate and the Super Columbine Massacre RPG!. Author Patrick Dugan explores the ways in which SCMRPG challenged the media and gamers alike to think about what the medium of games is all about. Covered by everyone from Newsweek to Game Informer, it opened the eyes of non-gamers to the possibilities of the format and forced gamers to rethink their assumptions. "Game Informer's benchmark of game-specialized print journalism may very well inspire other major publications to follow suit with their own coverage, and in the capacity of Game Informer's readership, paints a symbol of solidarity. The twelve year old kid who thinks Gears of War is the best thing going can take a look at these graphics, popular before his birth, and get a sense that his beloved past-time is part of something greater, something he can defend to non-gamers as being inherently valuable." This issue is also explored in the final part of N'Gai Croal's interview with Jamil Moledina, which we talked about last week.

Newsweek's N'Gai Croal continues to offer excellent coverage, running an interview with Jamil Moledina, the Executive Director of GDC. N'Gai and Jamil discuss Apple and the iPhone, and they do a very smooth job of hooking that into games and the current state of the industry. They also discuss Sony's current next-gen positioning, what makes a good keynote, and the gaming event world post-E3. "The interesting thing is that E3 and E For All have split apart. For a long time, a number of people in in the industry, myself included, were advocating a combined event, like Tokyo Game Show, that would have a day of business meetings, then open it up to consumers. Because then all of the key players have an incentive to be there. They need to conduct business. And then it is open to the general public to see what it is that we've all got going on. By splitting them into two separate events, I wonder how that dynamic is going to play out; if the same exhibitors that were at E3 would also want to go to a consumer-only event? I'd love to see how that works out. It's a bold experiment. We'll see how it goes."

Newsweek's N'Gai Croal continues to offer excellent coverage, running an interview with Jamil Moledina, the Executive Director of GDC. N'Gai and Jamil discuss Apple and the iPhone, and they do a very smooth job of hooking that into games and the current state of the industry. They also discuss Sony's current next-gen positioning, what makes a good keynote, and the gaming event world post-E3. "The interesting thing is that E3 and E For All have split apart. For a long time, a number of people in in the industry, myself included, were advocating a combined event, like Tokyo Game Show, that would have a day of business meetings, then open it up to consumers. Because then all of the key players have an incentive to be there. They need to conduct business. And then it is open to the general public to see what it is that we've all got going on. By splitting them into two separate events, I wonder how that dynamic is going to play out; if the same exhibitors that were at E3 would also want to go to a consumer-only event? I'd love to see how that works out. It's a bold experiment. We'll see how it goes."

N'Gai Croal, at Newsweek, has a three-part interview up speaking with games journalist Geoff Keighley. Undoubtedly the most respected games reporter on television, Keighley is probably best known at the moment for the SpikeTV show Game Head. He's also written for Entertainment Weekly, Time, Rolling Stone, Gamespot (with the behind the games series), and EGM, as well as hosting the "McLaughlin Group"-ish show Bonus Round for the GameTrailers site. The first part of the interview deals with the creation of 'Bonus Round', and his inspiration for the show. The second piece looks at Keighley's extensive CV, and what it is like writing about games for a mainstream audience. The third piece wraps up with a few words on the industry at large, and perspective on gaming from a business standpoint.

N'Gai Croal, at Newsweek, has a three-part interview up speaking with games journalist Geoff Keighley. Undoubtedly the most respected games reporter on television, Keighley is probably best known at the moment for the SpikeTV show Game Head. He's also written for Entertainment Weekly, Time, Rolling Stone, Gamespot (with the behind the games series), and EGM, as well as hosting the "McLaughlin Group"-ish show Bonus Round for the GameTrailers site. The first part of the interview deals with the creation of 'Bonus Round', and his inspiration for the show. The second piece looks at Keighley's extensive CV, and what it is like writing about games for a mainstream audience. The third piece wraps up with a few words on the industry at large, and perspective on gaming from a business standpoint.

N'Gai Croal, at Newsweek, has a three-part interview up speaking with games journalist Geoff Keighley. Undoubtedly the most respected games reporter on television, Keighley is probably best known at the moment for the SpikeTV show Game Head. He's also written for Entertainment Weekly, Time, Rolling Stone, Gamespot (with the behind the games series), and EGM, as well as hosting the "McLaughlin Group"-ish show Bonus Round for the GameTrailers site. The first part of the interview deals with the creation of 'Bonus Round', and his inspiration for the show. The second piece looks at Keighley's extensive CV, and what it is like writing about games for a mainstream audience. The third piece wraps up with a few words on the industry at large, and perspective on gaming from a business standpoint.

With everyone talking about Apple's big announcement, it's unsurprising that commentators are discussing the possibilities of gaming on the iPhone. The DS and the PSP are both on N'Gai Croal's list of who is afraid of the iPhone, and with good reason. Touchscreen gaming on a high-resolution screen? Sounds like fun. TIME's lengthy run-down on the iPhone even mentions the possibilities of games on the small screen. Just the same, it's not all roses: Kotaku talks about the developer unfriendly nature of the platform, and how that could throw up barriers to the first game on the handheld.

1up reports on the departure of Rare co-founders Chris and Tim Stamper. They, along with company president Joel Hochberg, founded the company more than two decades ago. They've been with Rare through the good (Wizards and Warriors) the great (GoldenEye), and the disappointing (Perfect Dark Zero). The news site now reports they left the company at the end of last year. From the article: "The Stampers' exodus comes just four years after Microsoft acquired Rare from Nintendo for $375M. Since that acquisition, Rare has published five games for Microsoft Game Studios. In addition to Pinata, the Rare released Kameo and Perfect Dark Zero at the Xbox 360's launch and shipped Conker: Live & Reloaded and Grabbed By the Ghoulies on the original Xbox. While it seems unlikely that Microsoft has recouped their original investment in Rare, the company maintains that the studio is 'the cornerstone of Microsoft Game Studios' broadening strategy.'" N'Gai, over at Newsweek, has an interesting additional viewpoint on this departure: Phil Harrison's view on Rare. The unpublished exchange from his earlier interview with the PlayStation worldwide studios boss is interesting, as is N'Gai's blunt appraisal of the company since its purchase.

N'Gai at Newsweek has up a quick article highlighting the start of a series that could be considered gaming's answer to 'Crossfire'. Hosted by the GameTrailers site, "Bonus Round" is set to be a frequently-produced show highlighting and discussing issues in gaming from multiple viewpoints. Geoff Keighley (writer of Behind the Game and host of Spike's Game Head, among many other things) will play frontman for the show, and the first episode has a few notable names sitting down to talk about the Wii. From the article: "The staff at GameTrailers were kind enough to provide Level Up with an exclusive preview of the next 'Bonus Round' segment--shown above--where an analyst (Wedbush Morgan's Michael Pachter), a composer (Tommy Tallarico) and the producer of the hit videogame Scarface (Vivendi's Peter Wanat) discuss Nintendo's Wii. In 2007, Keighley and the folks at GameTrailers plan to produce new episodes on a monthly schedule, with a wider variety of guests and a broader set of topics, including micropayments (such as the purchase of a 99-cent song from iTunes) and emerging trends in game design."

Both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 appear to be having a bit of a rough Christmas. For the PS3, it's all about launch jitters. The worst of these jitters is probably the dubious nomination from TIME magazine, who has cited the console as a 'bust'. The 360, likewise, is having problems meeting expectations, especially those of Michael Pachter. He's the gent that expected big sales this Christmas for the console, and he's now trying to figure out why the 360 fell short. What is, perhaps, a larger problem - lack of penetration for the Xbox Live service - is being discussed by Reuters. While the still laudable number of 4 million subscribers sounds impressive, the article points out that the runaway success of the Wii and the overall ratio of possible to actual subscribers should give Microsoft pause. In short, Sony and Microsoft are having good, but not great holiday seasons. Next year, when there's enough stock to go around and big games on the way, we'll see who really 'has the stuff'.

The site Computer and Videogames has up an (unverifiable article) stating that several anticipated Wii titles are going to be delayed until late 2007. Specifically, they mention Super Mario Galaxy and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption as being out of our hands until the Christmas season next year. They report this information via 'reliable sources', and Nintendo is unwilling to confirm or deny the claims as of yet. N'Gai at Newsweek reminds us that Reggie Fils-Aime denied the possibility of a 'Nintendo drought' in an interview they conducted back in October. Here's hoping he doesn't live to regret these words: "... The third example I would give you is Mario Galaxy, another from-the-ground-up Wii game that we are strategically timing the launch to make sure that we continue driving momentum through 2007. So N'Gai, how do I answer the question, 'Will there be no drought,' and 'How will we make sure that there are fantastic titles for Wii?' The answer is Zelda, Metroid and Mario. Which is a pretty darn good lineup."

Newsweek's N'Gai Croal steps up this morning with some interesting analysis of the Sony re-organization that occurred late last month. Mr. Croal points out the difficulty of understanding the machinations of a notoriously tight-lipped foreign company, and attempts to look at the executive movements from the games business view. From the article: "Here's what's on SCE's plate at this very moment: three product lines that must be managed over the next five to six years (PS2, PSP and PS3); two more product lines that are almost certainly already in the planning stages (PS4 and PSP2); an online service, an online store, operating systems and system updates for each of the post-PS2 machines; and one of the world's largest game studio operations. Given that workload, Sony desperately needed to free Ken up to do the vision thing, and groom the next generation to run SCE on a day-to-day basis, much like Microsoft did when Bill Gates ceded operational control of Microsoft to Steve Ballmer. So while we have absolutely no visibility into whether this evolution was initiated by Kutaragi or by Stringer, it strikes us as precisely the right move to help ensure the future health of the PlayStation business."

N'Gai Croal, the talented gent covering the games scene at Newsweek, has a short piece up looking behind the scenes at the Colbert Report the night that Will Wright was in attendance. Mr. Wright passed on some encouraging words about the progress of Spore, and some funny comments about the culture inside EA. From the article: "Wright told us that Spore is slated to come out sometime during the second half of 2007. It's currently at a stage that he calls Pre-Alpha Five. In non-geek, this means that the game is finally at a point where EA employees outside of his team can play it from beginning to end, though they must endure rough transitions and levels of difficulty that have yet to be tuned. The project's subsequent milestones--Pre-Alpha Four, Pre-Alpha Three, etc.--are expected to be achieved monthly until it finally hits Alpha next spring. " Update: 12/06 00:23 GMT by Z : Don't blame me, Comedy Central. I got the YouTube link from KingJoshi.

Despite analyst assurances that there would no longer be many console exclusives, EA is forming an entire studio for Wii titles. Larry Probst revealed this tidbit in a very interesting interview with Newsweek's N'Gai Croal. They've since acquired Headgate studios, rebranding it EA Salt Lake. From the article: "I don't think the Wii is going to be any different than all the other Nintendo platforms. Nintendo is going to have a very significant market share, and all the third party companies are going to have market shares that are single-digit or low double-digits. We think that we can be very competitive in that environment. We don't have any expectations that we're going to have a 30 percent market share, as we have had on Xbox 360, on PlayStation 2, or what we're targeting on PlayStation 3. But I think we can have a meaningful market share on the Wii platform, and be in the number two position behind Nintendo."

Sony's having a rough week. After shootings on launch day and a harsh review from the New York Times, Bloomberg is now calling Sony out as having completely missed its shipping targets. The analyst company says there may have been as few as 50% of aimed-for units available, and that the company may only get about 200,000 units to stores by the end of the year (something Sony flatly denies). PS3 fans now also have to deal with the fact that Koei is cross-platforming two previously exclusive titles. Fatal Inertia and Bladestorm are now in development for the 360 as well, marking the latest in a string of titles that have slipped away from Sony. There is some consolation for the company to take away from this week, though. They did better than Microsoft last week in Japan, with around 81,000 PS3s, 19,000 PSPs, and 16,000 PS2s sold to a mere 4,000 Xbox 360s and ... 4 Xboxes.

Newsweek's N'Gai Croal writes "In a two-part Q&A, Playstation marketing chief Peter Dille discusses the PS3 ad campaign, Microsoft's blogger superiority, why Ludacris is his kind of celebrity and more." From the article: "Emotion is a big part of the category. You've seen the baby spot, which kicked off the TV effort. The whole thought behind that was, look at the wide variety of emotions the PlayStation 3 can elicit. The other theme we're setting up is that the power of the PlayStation 3 is so awesome that anything placed in close proximity is witness to this awesome power. So this baby doll is whipsawed through a gut-wrenching range of emotions, from laughing and crying to reverse crying. That's going to set up a series of spots where you'll see the power of the PlayStation 3 in this white room environment." N'Gai also has a great piece up looking at why screenshots are no longer effective marketing for next-gen games.

Newsweek's N'Gai Croal writes "In a two-part Q&A, Playstation marketing chief Peter Dille discusses the PS3 ad campaign, Microsoft's blogger superiority, why Ludacris is his kind of celebrity and more." From the article: "Emotion is a big part of the category. You've seen the baby spot, which kicked off the TV effort. The whole thought behind that was, look at the wide variety of emotions the PlayStation 3 can elicit. The other theme we're setting up is that the power of the PlayStation 3 is so awesome that anything placed in close proximity is witness to this awesome power. So this baby doll is whipsawed through a gut-wrenching range of emotions, from laughing and crying to reverse crying. That's going to set up a series of spots where you'll see the power of the PlayStation 3 in this white room environment." N'Gai also has a great piece up looking at why screenshots are no longer effective marketing for next-gen games.

Newsweek's N'Gai Croal writes "In a two-part Q&A, Playstation marketing chief Peter Dille discusses the PS3 ad campaign, Microsoft's blogger superiority, why Ludacris is his kind of celebrity and more." From the article: "Emotion is a big part of the category. You've seen the baby spot, which kicked off the TV effort. The whole thought behind that was, look at the wide variety of emotions the PlayStation 3 can elicit. The other theme we're setting up is that the power of the PlayStation 3 is so awesome that anything placed in close proximity is witness to this awesome power. So this baby doll is whipsawed through a gut-wrenching range of emotions, from laughing and crying to reverse crying. That's going to set up a series of spots where you'll see the power of the PlayStation 3 in this white room environment." N'Gai also has a great piece up looking at why screenshots are no longer effective marketing for next-gen games.

Newsweek's N'Gai Croal writes "In a two-part Q&A, Playstation marketing chief Peter Dille discusses the PS3 ad campaign, Microsoft's blogger superiority, why Ludacris is his kind of celebrity and more." From the article: "Emotion is a big part of the category. You've seen the baby spot, which kicked off the TV effort. The whole thought behind that was, look at the wide variety of emotions the PlayStation 3 can elicit. The other theme we're setting up is that the power of the PlayStation 3 is so awesome that anything placed in close proximity is witness to this awesome power. So this baby doll is whipsawed through a gut-wrenching range of emotions, from laughing and crying to reverse crying. That's going to set up a series of spots where you'll see the power of the PlayStation 3 in this white room environment." N'Gai also has a great piece up looking at why screenshots are no longer effective marketing for next-gen games.

On the Newsweek site, 'Artist's Way' columnist N'Gai Croal interviews David Jaffe about God of War, his upcoming PS3 title, and ... why he does what he does. From the article: "Q: Can the fans draft you back into the director's chair on God of War or Twisted Metal, the way they have with Hideo Kojima on the Metal Gear series? A: No. Unless they want to draft me by paying me a lot of money. But, no. I don't work that way. Right now, I'm comfortable enough that I can say something as arrogant as that. One day, I may have no choice. Phil [Harrison, president of Sony Worldwide Studios] is a really big believer in this service. It's not just a place to put shovelware. It's our version of HBO original programming. Not everything is suited to a 50-megabyte Blu-Ray disc. It doesn't mean those games don't deserve a platform. This is probably the first time since the arcade days that games of this type have had a viable home. So far, Sony seems really supportive of me staying in this space."

Joel Dutt writes "IBM... 'the corporation known as Big Blue has seen its reputation in the global open-source community shift from suspect sugar daddy to knight in shining armor.' Newsweek has an interesting article in its latest issue, discussing the relationship between the open-source community and the corporate giant."

erth writes "Newsweek has an interview with Peter Jackson asking him what he thinks about some of the most famous and/or obvious bloopers in the LoTR series. Moviemistakes.com has more Fellowhip of the Ring, The Two Towers, and Return of the King bloopers as well for your snickering pleasure." I just wanted to give my props to Jackson and all- we took off early yesterday to see the final film. It was everything I hoped for... except for the bits that I expect I'll have to wait for the extended edition DVD to see. And I was to busy grinning ear to ear to notice any serious bloopers.

Steven Levy's Crypto is a brief history of the men involved in developing modern cryptography. If you've read Applied Cryptography or another work with a mathematical emphasis on crypto, you've heard their names -- Diffie, Hellman, Chaum, Rivest, Shamir, Adleman, Zimmermann, and so forth. But the other books on cryptography typically neglect the human side in favor of the math. Crypto aims to fill that hole.

Crypto author Steven Levy pages 356 publisher Viking/Penguin rating 9/10 reviewer Michael Sims, drfalken, topeka ISBN 0-670-85950-8 summary A history of the people involved in developing modern cryptography

Several people were interested in reviewing this book. We try to be accomodating, so this is a mega-review by myself and slashdot readers drfalken and topeka. I'll try to be brief.

Michael's review:

I didn't expect to like Crypto. I was frankly put off by the subtitle on the front cover: "How the Code Rebels Beat the Government -- Saving Privacy in the Digital Age." Every time I send an unencrypted email (because none of my correspondents use encryption, because it isn't built-in) or think about the law (CALEA) which requires my ISP and telephone company to accomodate the government in wire-tapping my communications, I realize that this just isn't true. While the cryptographers thought they were winning battles, the government has so far been winning the war. From the sub-title, I expected the book to be a rah-rah cheerleading history of these noble crypto-knights wielding their ciphersabers with gleeful abandon against the fascist, corrupt, and evil Big Brother.

It turns out to be a much better book than I had expected. The author has collected most of his information through personal interviews, and it ends up being a very readable and very personal account of the past 30 years of cryptographic research and commercial development -- both in the public sphere, and, to some extent, in U.S. and British intelligence agencies. The author treats his subjects fairly - the government is not demonized as I expected, and the cryptographers are not idolized (much). There is essentially no math in this book, beyond the bare minimum necessary to understand the main concepts of cryptography. Together with, say, The Codebreakers for early history and Applied Cryptography for the math, it would make a comprehensive and thorough look at the history and science of cryptography.

drfalken's review: The ubiquity of encryption technology employed by everything from bank machines to e-tailers is now taken for granted. Most people fail to realize, though, the profound impact that this component of the digital world has had on the Information Age. Illumination of this point is the formidable task of Crypto.

The renowned author of Hackers and Insanely Great remains true to form, transforming an obscure, dry and complex subject into an addictive page-turning thriller. He takes us from the hippie culture of academic math research in the 70s, through the dark underworld of government intelligence, into the development of the modern information age. Each step emphasizes the central conflict of the story: American national security vs. the right to individual privacy.

While this conflict has largely been resolved, the story contains important lessons that can be applied to the contemporary struggles over technologies like DeCSS and peer-to-peer media 'sharing.' Levy doesn't make any such connections in the book, but it is impossible to read Crypto without seeing how history is repeating itself in these other areas. This makes Crypto and important book to read. Everyone from the RIAA to 2600 subscribers can learn a lot from this well organized retelling of the past 30 years of crypto history. There's a certain futility involved in trying to put the genie of progress back in a bottle. There's also a case to be made for the management of progress so that it is used with the greatest benefit and smallest detriment to all. Perhaps the most remarkable revelation in the book is how the adversarial nature of 'the geeks' vs. 'the spooks' allowed for the maturation of a sensitive technology in a safe and thoughtful manner.

Anyone who has read Wired or Newsweek over the past 5 years will have read excerpts from Crypto. Levy spent a long time researching this book, which makes sense considering the story he is telling is one that was developing during his period of research. Many of the events he recounts are ones he covered as a journalist at the time that they happened. Some time spent in the Wired archives shows the extent to which he has been one of the journalists closest to the crypto revolution since the release of PGP and the popularization of the Internet.

The book begins with the story of Whit Diffie and his wild ambition to simply learn more about the black art of electronic cryptography. In the early 70s the government monopoly on information relating to serious crypto was nearly complete. Coming from the mindset of the Open Source community, Levy's tale of the early crypto research climate describes a cathedral that makes Microsoft look like the Debian project. The resulting story, therefore, highlights the magnificence of the public key breakthrough, the boldness of the RSA discovery and the daring of Paul Zimmermann's PGP.

If you're looking for a history of Cryptography, get The Code Book by Simon Singh, or Codebreakers by David Kahn instead of this book. Crypto is a contained story dealing exclusively with the American Cryptographic Experience from Diffie-Hellman, through RSA, and PGP. It is effectively a collection of short, intertwined biographies of the saviors of privacy, from Adleman to Zimmermann. This is not to say that Levy ignores the math; on the contrary, his explanation of the magnitude of the public key concept hits home even harder than the impressive work by Simon Singh.

Especially in light of recent Slashdot stories, Crypto is highly recommended, for novices and Cypherpunks alike. It's a coming of age story for American technology, and a great addition to the bookshelf of modern American history.

topeka's review:

The first time I heard the term "elegant" applied to a technical problem was a bit of a revelation for me. Until then, elegance, to me, was a visual quality that could only be achieved by painters and poets. When I began to see the elegance in solutions to technical and mathematical problems, I was hooked into a world of intellectual curiosity. Cryptography immediately filled the mold of a highly complex and technical problem with a beautiful and elegant solution when it was first explained to me several years ago. The idea clicked again when I read Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar and equated that elegance to "scratching a particular itch". This intellectual curiosity seems to drive the open source community.

However, in 1967, when James Ellis (of the secret British agency, GCHQ) first came up with the idea of public key cryptography, his theory was buried. Until then, solutions to cryptographic problems were a dirty process. If it was easy to create a cipher, than it was just as easy to break it. As such, Ellis's breakthrough was simply too pretty to be trusted and as a result, it lay locked away until 1997. Steven Levy's new book, Crypto is the story of the individuals who transformed cryptography from a dirty art, which only the most elite governments dabbled in, to an elegant mathematical solution available to the public in hundreds of different forms. It was all done by a community of individuals who preached openness and sought out clean solutions to tough, technical problems.

Levy starts out his story in the same place as he started with an earlier famous work, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He narrates the story of Whitfield Diffie, the co-creator of public key cryptography. Starting in 1969 as Diffie sought shelter from the Vietnam war working for a defense contractor, Levy discusses Diffie's transformation from examining ideas about cryptography as merely a hobby, to an all out obsession. Diffie is transformed from a man thinking about cryptography on the weekends to a man criss-crossing the country in one run-down Datsun after another, searching for any and every piece of information about cryptography. Diffie would not broach the wall of cryptography until he was pointed to another researcher in California, who seemed to be investigating the same concepts. Levy chronicles the fateful partnership that occurred with Marty Hellman and the subsequent invention of public key cryptography, at least its theory.

At this time, there were few works published on the subject of cryptography. In fact, only government agents and a few privileged defense contractors were able to expend meaningful resources on crypto research. It seems that while Levy's work is a story of the people who waged a war to bring crypto to the public, it is also the story of that wars' enemy, the National Security Agency. The cryptography bureaucracy, gaining most of its resources during the Second World War, had built quite a palace around anything that involved codes. In the years to come, the NSA would fiercely defend its position of strength. From its early attempts to classify David Kahn's famous work, The Codebreakers, to its involvement in the creation of the Digital Encryption Standard and its invention of the Clipper Chip. As Crypto defines it, the spooks were able to keep their lock on cryptography by invoking a mentality of "if only you knew what I know..." in classified briefings to politicians and contract negotiations with defense contractors like IBM. What the NSA never expected, was for anyone to try and find out what it was that they knew. With the publishing of the Diffie-Hellman paper, "New Directions in Cryptography," one of the NSA's most viable opponents would begin their work where Diffie and Hellman's theories left off, implementation.

Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, through a four-month period of intense brainstorming, would eventually implement and patent the Diffie-Hellman concept of public key cryptography while working as faculty at MIT. As Levy chronicles it, the algorithm, which would become popularly known as RSA, was named for the order in which each mathematician gave to the project. Rivest, who spearheaded the search for the implementation was listed first and Adelman, who merely poked holes in Rivest and Shamir's proposals, had to be convinced that he had even contributed enough to the project to be listed on the paper. Until this point, the description of cryptographic algorithms in scientific texts had always been done using letters of the alphabet to depict members in a cryptographic exchange. The creators of RSA introduced the now famous cryptographic characters, Alice, Bob and the unruly Eve, to describe their new breed of algorithms. Levy is able to highlight the mentality of the three mathematicians, some of which at first, thought the problem was nothing more than a clever puzzle and too grounded in the real world to be successfully dealt with by mathematicians. He shows their transformation to the church of cryptography, as the elegance of the new algorithms would prove as beautiful as the theorems of Gauss and Euclid.

The story continues with RSA Data Security, the vehicle Rivest would use to commercialize his algorithm. To talk about RSA Data Security is to talk about patent use. Both the Diffie-Hellman algorithm, as well as RSA, were actually patented by Stanford University and MIT, respectively. When the patents were granted, those Universities then had the option to either free the patents or restrict them. As history has painfully shown, they did not choose to free them. RSA Data security was built on this decision -- an MIT patent. It was sometimes difficult to read this section of the book with the same exuberance that Levy writes about it. Nonetheless, it is a reminder of the state of our intellectual property laws today in the United States.

Levy's narration eventually leaves the story of RSA to tell that of Phil Zimmerman, someone who could rightly be called a crypto-anarchist. Once again we are treated to an in depth discussion of the motivation that created Pretty Good Privacy. Levy contrasts the use of legal patents by RSA Data Security to bring encryption to the masses, to the complete ignorance of them by Zimmerman in his creation of PGP to achieve the same goal.

Finally, in my favorite section of the book, Levy discusses the controversy that surrounded a device known as the Clipper Chip. It was originally invented by the NSA as a complete key-escrow system, named the Capstone Chip. Later, as AT&T attempted to market the first encrypted telephone device, the Capstone chip became the Clipper Chip as the FBI and other Executive branch officers rushed to implement a brain-dead subset of the original system before the AT&T device made it to market. An entirely amusing fiasco, Levy lays the entire story out from beginning to end.

Lastly, includes an epilogue telling the story of the British agents at GHCQ, who beat Whitfield-Diffie and RSA -- a story that the GCHQ refused to let surface until the mid 1990s.

Levy tells a story about people. If you are looking for a technical discussion of the different aspects of cryptography then you would be better off with Schneier's Applied Cryptography or Singh's The Code Book. However, to understand the freedom that cryptographic technologies bring us, we must understand the history that it stands on. This is what Levy provides. A comprehensive history of the events that took cryptography out of the hands of the NSA and into the hands of political dissidents, CEOs, Nazis, you and me (not to mention mozilla, pgp, ssh, and gpg).

You can purchase Crypto at ThinkGeek.

Three organizations -- Microsoft, the WTO, and the AOL/Time-Warner incubus -- are revealing symbols of cultural and technological life at the beginning of the 21st century. They are also warnings. Corporatism is spawning a series of serious legal assaults on the open nature of the Net. These incursions directly challenge open source values, both technological and cultural. For some context, consider the organization soon to be headed by Citizen Case, our new national corporatist leader and spokesperson. Read below for more on this increasingly troubling problem and to offer some possible solutions.

This weekend, Josh Rosenberg, a Slashdot reader and Drexel University student, sent the following e-mail:

"Dear Jon Katz,

Today [Friday], Slashdot posted a series of related stories. There is the one about Napster being banned in colleges, and even more closely tied together are the articles and threads about DVD reverse engineering. There are well over 1000 comments about these topics, and just by browsing at a level of 3, I can see how many good ideas are mentioned within.

"Many of these ideas, however, need a mass unifying force to have any real effect. (Ad banners containing the deCSS source will be no good if there are only 10 out there and they don't point to anything useful. Writing letters to the copyright office will be no good if they are flames, or perhaps more relevant, if they are not in Word, wordperfect, or pdf format.

"Can you be that unifying force?... Can you make some clear suggestions to the community that can hopefully be followed en masse? As I see it, the Slashdot masses are needed now more than ever."

This e-mail, one of a number like it, had a powerful impact on me. No single person can be a unifying force for so diverse a place as Slashdot, and Josh's plea for constructive suggestions is complicated. But the actions he cited aren't occurring in a vacuum. He's right to perceive a common thread. They aren't unrelated. They are all very much linked by a growing, runaway menace: corporatism. And they are in fundamental conflict with open source notions of technology and culture, on the rise in recent years, from Linux to MP3 to DVD's.

The Net and Web, and the technological creativity, cultural outpouring and individual expression that has accompanied their growth, are incompatible with the greedy and powerful corporations moving to dominate burgeoning new markets and economic opportunities online. Corporatism finds intolerable the outpouring of individualism the growing sense of choice and control that typifies the Internet, and which is closely related to the issues behind the DVD - CCA, Napster and Mp3 cases (Josh might have mentioned Amazon.com's legal steps to patent one-click shopping and AOL's legal efforts to block Microsoft from using instant messaging programs as well).

This conflict pits millions of people newly empowered by technology (to access information for free, and choose their own culture such as music, books, software innovations and movies) against increasingly wealthy, lawsuit-happy, politically influential corporations who will fight to restrict those choices in order to control content (product) make money and retain power.

In many ways, the Net has been an open frontier, generating an astonishing amount of creativity, information-sharing and experimentation. The ideology of corporatism dictates that those kinds of unrestricted boundaries be closed. Corporations have begun deploying lawyers, and seeking a wide range of patents, copyright protections, restraining orders and other actions that are the Net equivalent of fences and borders. As the primary contributors to political campaigns, they will certainly seek the help of government regulators as well.

The geek conceit has been that the Net is too big and diverse for anyone to restrict, but this growing litany of aggressive legal action suggests otherwise. Corporatism has billions of dollars at its disposal, as well as access to platoons of attorneys, politicians and lobbyists.

Any real solution or response of the kind Josh Rosenberg seeks begins with the realization that corporatism is, in fact, a serious challenge that needs to be countered. Distributing source codes for disputed programs is certainly one highly effective option, as it makes legal challenges pointless. Supporting sympathetic political candidates -- these are rare -- is another option. So is contributing money for legal challenges.

Punishing censorious and proprietary corporations by refusing to buy their products may be the readiest, and the most powerful option. Although antithetical to many of the Libertarian impulses on the Net, boycotts are more feared by corporations than any other single threat. It might well be time to send some economic messages. People have to make their own choices. In my own case, I stopped buying books from Amazon.com after their one-click patent infringement suit against Barnes & Noble.com. If ten or twenty thousand people did the same, they might very well re-consider the suit.

(If you have other ideas, please post them below)

But are these responses premature? Are Netizens really less apathetic and comfortable than their non-virtual counterparts?

The first step seems a realization that we are suddenly up to our necks in a political, economic and technological struggle -- the most important political conflict of the 21st century, perhaps -- the outcome of which will say much about our personal freedom, technological choices and cultural expression. So far, there is no such consensus or consciousness.

Most of the people reading this probably don't share Josh's prescient concern. They believe we are in good and prosperous times, and have little reason to fear encroaching corporatism. In this regard, we are still an unconscious civilization. People like Josh could change that quickly.

To see our new future, and to better grasp the context in which the DVD, Napster and RIAA vs. MP3 cases are occurring, get hold of last week's "Newsweek" and see the cheerful face on the cover of "Citizen Case," who, at 41, has miraculously become our new national corporatist leader, momentarily crowding aside the distracted Bill Gates.

In the enthusiastically approving magazine article, one of a torrent of excited journalistic accounts of his life, Case spouts the corporatist ideology for the umpteenth time in recent days: the inevitabilities of globalization, the ethos of the marketplace and the growing power of technology as a force in modern life. These are the rationales for Napster, DVD and the ongoing war on MP3's.

Citizen Case is a bland tycoon indeed, the media baron as vanilla ice cream, too dull to hate or fear. The hapless magazine writer, breathlessly spreading the news that Citizen Case is such a regular guy that he doesn't even have a pool or tennis court, is nearly desperate to wring a single quote out of the new Monarch of the Information Age. What, he pleads, is Citizen Case's overarching philosophy?

"To change people's lives."

Citizen Case, says Newsweek, sent away for anything he could get for free when he was a tot, getting himself on mailing lists for records, consumer-product samples and other geegaws. "His family," reports the magazine, "recalled that he was eager to be first to the mailbox every day. (Steve, you've got mail!)"

Gads. Come back, Bill. All is forgiven.

For more than a century, sci-fi writers, futurists and filmmakers - H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Mary Shelley, George Orwell, Arthur C. Clarke, Ridley Scott ("Blade Runner"), the Wachowski brothers ("The Matrix") - have been painting bleak portraits of life in the 2lst Century, our time.

Some have pictured a world engulfed by war and high-tech weaponry; others foresee humanity overrun by runaway technologies from artificial intelligence to genetic engineering. The sci-fi writers were deceptively political. Most of them lived in a time when governments were especially brutal and predatory, and they inevitably jumped to the conclusion that evil political systems would conquer the human spirit.

How could they have imagined that we are, instead, being stalked by invasive and predatory corporations, who don't want to torture or kill us, because each of us is somebody's target demographic. As long as we don't hack into their computer systems, give up some privacy and cash, accept mediocre culture, gadgetry and software, we seem relatively safe, at least for now.

Still, a lot of the issues the futurists raised are relevant to the year 2000.

They evoke a nameless sort of bigness, an overwhelming intrusion by forces so wealthy and powerful, all-knowing and corrupting, that they crush the individual, place profit above human, moral and social concerns, corrupt the police and political system, and quell opposition and resistance. They smother us in gadgetry and entertain us nearly to death. Orwell and Huxley would have absolutely feasted on the image of the lonely citizen, up for hours trying to reach Tech Support or Customer Service, shunted from one automated menu to the other until he quits in disgust or perseveres heroically. This is, in fact, a uniquely American social equivalent of the Olympic trial, a hellish kind of cultural decathlon - only the bravest and most determined can get through to another human being and get the help they are entitled to receive.

So far, the future seems to be going its own way, and the futurists have been partly right, partly wrong. Life for many people is immeasurably better. Work is safer, cleaner. Lifespans are longer, food more plentiful. Leisure time and entertainment technology spawn vast new amusement industries.

The Luddites who violently rebelled against the advent of the Industrial Revolution in England in the 19th century rioted against what they believed would be impossible working conditions. In fact, labor conditions were often so brutal then that the Industrial Revolution is credited as having helped produce both communism and fascism in response, along with countless eruptions, rebellions and civil wars. Both movements promised, and then failed to deliver, better and more human working conditions.

Even though the modern workplaces has serious problems - unequal access to technology, crummy jobs, lack of benefits, security, and individual creativity - employed workers are not nearly as bad off as the Luddites were, or as many feared workers would be at the beginning of the 21st century.

We are healthier, safer, and having more fun than any previous American generation. Life before the Multiplex was bleaker.

But in some ways life is worse - more polluted, crowded, ugly, and complicated and less spiritual, and certainly less private. In parts of this county and world, job markets are quixotic or collapsing, standards of living slipping, social programs weakening. Divisiveness seems inevitable in a world in which access to new technologies spells the difference between education and ignorance, poverty and wealth, opportunity and despair. And increasingly, we can see, as Josh Rosenberg has, growing challenges to freedom and creative growth.

Our time is defined by symbols. One newsmagazine selects the founder of an online book and retailing service as the Man of the Millennial Year, and the other celebrates the unpretentious "Citizen Case," (he drives a VW, wrote the stunned reporter) creator of one the blandest, most consumer-abusive Internet Service Providers.

In a sense "Citizen Case" is pathetic compared to Orwell's Big Brother, who also took pains to present himself as cheerful, ordinary and bland while amassing fearsome power and information. He also, he told his cowed citizens, wanted to change their lives for the better, and had only their best interests at heart.

We would, Orwell warned, become inured to warnings from the handful of people who saw this coming. We'd deem them mad, then make them mad.

Just because you're right, his helpless Winston repeated to himself over and over again after being jailed by Big Brother, doesn't mean that you're crazy. But in Orwell's world, this mantra comes too late. If you see too much and complain, you are crazy, according to the people who run society. Soon enough, in Orwell's world and ours, the insane are envied by the sane.

It's no accident that in the past few months, three organizations have occupied our energy, imagination and consciousness as we bumble into the next century. There was the continuing government confrontation with Microsoft, which had become a new kind of company, bigger and more powerful than any that preceded it.

Then there were the startling eruptions in Seattle over the gathering of the World Trade Organization, attracting a polyglot coalition of protesters, many enraged at what they perceived as the greedy behavior of increasingly powerful multinational corporations.

But the most significant organization was born last week, dominating our cultural and economic news - a proposed corporation that would instantly dwarf Microsoft and every other corporation in history. Of the many amazing qualities of the gargantuan AOL/Time-Warner, perhaps the most remarkable is that even though the list of things it owns is two feet long, they are almost all intangible - ISP's, messaging systems, movies, music labels, cable operating systems. In a few years, you'll probably be able to fit the the whole company's holding on a couple of CD's or micro-chips. That says a lot about how valuable information has become in the Digital Age.

As increasingly happens in our boom-benumbed economy, where a record-breaking NASDAQ and an Everest-like Dow have become our only common national political goals, news of the merger obsessed business writers and journalists for a few days, then receded to the back pages and to thousands of mailing lists, Web logs and e-trading messaging boards. When it comes to the volatile mix of money and technology, Americans no longer have the attention span to get seriously concerned about anything for more than a few news cycles.

AOL and Time-Warner had barely formed their new $350 billion monstrosity before it became clear that other conglomerates would need to soon arrange their own super mega-mergers in order to compete with this mega-merger. In a few weeks, we'll have three or four multi-billion-dollar companies controlling much of our information and cultural lives.

The AOL/Time-Warner marriage is a fine metaphor for many of the futuristic predictions about our time.

Almost everything about the merger seems wrong. The company is too big, too unwieldy. It will know too much about our tastes. America Online is a new media company, growing along the flexible, hi-tech risk-taking that is the hallmark of tech industries. Many investors of both companies are twitchy about the merger. Time-Warner is an old media company, vast, lumbering, conservative, much better at acquiring things than creating them. Case, stubborn and unassuming as he's described as being, has never undertaken anything so remotely as complex as fusing these two worlds.

But there's no doubt that if the merger happens, Case will become one of the most powerful men in the world, the de facto voice of contemporary techno-driven corporatism. Does that make him someone to fear?

Orwell and Huxley were bounded by what they knew, and believed only governments should be feared, that only they could amass this kind of power, promote this degree of mass-marketed conformity, monitor private lives, squelch competition, individual voices and entrepeneurial spirit. And treat their citizenry (customers) with arrogance and contempt.

It turns out that governments aren't nearly as efficient at all of the above as large corporations.

In the 20th century, the governments that aspired to such total domination all failed. The human drive for individuality and freedom, it turns out, is more potent than fearsome weaponry and cadres of secret police. But the offspring of the world's newest global movement - corporatism - are doing much better.

They are less overtly malignant and heavy-handed, and have a simpler, all-inclusive ideology: money and market domination. Political power is less appealing and much less profitable. Everything else - working conditions, job security, the environment, individual creativity - is subordinated to the annual stockholder's profit.

In this new culture, critics don't have to be silenced or imprisoned. They just rail from the fringes until they wear themselves out. Winston wouldn't have been thrown in jail in the year 2000. Steve Case would woo him with some stock options, he'd get a talk show on MSNBC, or, most likely, he'd end up ranting into the ether on some Web log, his enemies and targets never even aware of his existence. Maybe somebody would take out a restraining order against him.

This is perhaps the strangest lesson of Seattle; the futility of the idealistic kids, labor types, environmental warriors and others who saved their money to trek out there. Unlike Winston, they aren't even accorded the dignity of being persecuted. They aren't threatening enough. Their targets could hardly view them as more toothless or ridiculous.

Curiously, the group the corporatists fear aren't the college kids with picket signs, but the handful of kids who can really fiddle with the machinery - the Uber-Hackers. Here, Orwell was right on the beam. The powers that be wasted no time in getting to Kevin Mitnick (now being released) and the handful of other renegades who hack governmental and corporate computers, spread viruses, or penetrate the systems that run the system.

They are not ignored or dismissed; they're treated like major criminals, rounded up by platoons of high-tech federal cops, paraded before reporters, jailed for years. Perhaps they signify the teeth behind the unpretentious corporate smile, the warning to the rest of us to behave, that things aren't quite as benign as they might appear.

The Libertarians appear to have gotten what they wished for, always a dangerous thing. Government now appears to exist primarily to collect taxes, and move paper and money around, and occasionally intervene in ugly foreign hotspots. We no longer even expect it to protect freedom, check power or monitor increasingly wealthy private interests.

Corporatism has also stripped the press of any bite, mostly by acquiring it. Government regulators are flummoxed, uncertain of whether to try and contain this new kind of fluid, evolving global economy, or simple take their best shots (the Microsoft trial) at appearing to be on the case. With corporations now the primary contributors to the political system, Congress is unlikely to take up this role either. That means there's no one around to slow this process, question its impact, or challenge it much.

The only entity smart enough or strong enough to challenge or disrupt the corporatists - the young techno-elite building the very technology they use, increasingly control and profit from - seem anesthetized, sated by the booming, techno-driven global economy, enjoying full employment and soaring salaries, dazzled by the most extraordinary array of toys and interactive entertainment machinery ever assembled. They don't have to be conquered; they've already been co-opted.

The AOL/Time-Warner merger offers us one of those opportunities to define the present and shape the future, depending on whether it's permitted to happen or not, or whether or not we choose to oppose it. If it does happen, the futurists warnings about life in a world dominated by bigness, greed and homogeneity will take another step towards reality.

In the corporatist culture, progress depends on public conformity, the unexamined life, since even a little scrutiny invites regulation, interference and public doubt. Nowhere in Newsweek or in any of Citizen Case's many public appearances recently does he acknowledge a single one of the questions or criticisms being raised about his new company.

Case is a skilled corporate ideologist, even if he isn't so great at getting his customers online quickly. He seems to know that the system he now represents depends on citizen desire for inner comfort, whereas creativity, freedom and individualism depend on self-examination and discomfort. Such unease, a willingness to be discontented, is a hallmark of geek culture, and the beginnings of a conscious civilization.

It may also be the best hope for the 21st century which is, despite all the New Year's pyro-technics, off to a crummy start, as Josh Rosenberg noticed. But his e-mail struck a hopeful chord, especially if it does, in fact, signal the beginning of a broader awakening.

Josh Rosenberg asked good questions, and he deserves good answers. Anybody who has ideas or solutions is welcome to post them here:

Rudolf writes "Newsweek has an article this week, available here, about NASA calculating that space probes, such as Pioneer 10, 11, and Ulysses, are slowing down more than they should. A team of astronomers and physicists couldn't figure it out, so they published their findings in Physical Review Letters to generate discussion. Several possible causes of the slowing have been discussed, but nothing that completely solves the puzzle. Anyone care to rethink gravity and time?" Update: 09/29 09:00 by H :Thanks to Mark for his link to the original citation.

Rick writes "Several companies now market digital VCR-like devices ReplayTV and TiVo). Articles on such were featured in this weeks Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal. These offer 10-14 hours of archivial TV, computer recording setup, random access playback, and easy commercial skipping. These free you from fumbling with tapes or arranging your evening around a TV schedule. A bit pricey now- $699/$499- but as with all new technology, should decline. "

Eugene Sotirescu writes "If anyone doubted that Linux is poised to break into the limelight, here's proof: a Newsweek article by Steve Levy, with all the right names, saying the right things, about the right system. "