There’s some seriously flawed thinking behind this GamesIndustry.biz editorial on the movie rights to Halo, the massively successful Bungie game for the XBox. Basically, Rob Fahey applauds Microsoft for placing some extremely harsh demands on the movie studio that wins the bidding war for cinematic rights, including a large budget, an aggressive timeline, and full creative control. He claims that “the rest of the industry has been too ready to be used as a doormat by Hollywood just for the chance of getting games made into movies,” and he’s right.

But don’t assume that just because the movie studios can’t get video game franchises right, that suddenly video game developers will be any better. A movie is a far different thing from a video game, as piles of full-motion video “virtual adventure” games taught us in the heady days of Multimedia PCs and 2x CD-ROM drives. Take a look at pretty much any game out there that isn’t Half-Life 2, and you’ll see a minimum of plotting and barely any characterization. Even the king of cinematic games, Grand Theft Auto, paints in broad strokes, and often the answer to a conflict is to come out guns blazing. Which, of course, is the whole point of GTA—you get to blow things up in spectacular ways, evade the police in spectacular ways, and kill prostitutes in spectacular ways (which is why the game is evil and should be retroactively banned, as should prostitutes, killing, and floating icons with molotov cocktails in them). Interactivity allows you to fill in the blanks; you get to decide whether your criminal mastermind has a heart of gold, follows a code of honour, or likes pounding on dead corpses long after you’ve taken their money and weapons.

Which is not to say that there haven’t been games that have bucked the trend; recent examples include, of course, Half-Life 2, the original Half-Life, and the penultimate space sim, Freespace 2. On the other hand, what all three games have in common is the presence of a dedicated writer on staff to lend each game narrative coherence. As the concept of writing for games is a relatively new one, you can bet that these writers got their experience elsewhere; in the case of Valve’s Marc Laidlaw, it was from writing sci-fi novels. Volition’s Jason Scott, the writer for Freespace 2, spent years writing for theatre and teaching creative writing courses.

So, in sum, the video games with the best plots—and presumably the ones best able to make the transition from video game to cinematic experience—are the ones with honest-to-god writers supporting them. Which means that Microsoft’s demands for creative control essentially amount to the writer of a novel demanding creative control over the screen adaptation. There are plenty of cases where that control is given freely, only to see the writer screw up horribly because they didn’t realize that screenwriting is inherently different from writing a novel. Hopefully Microsoft and Bungie will similarly realize that making video games is a far different business from making movies.

Today’s hilarious Slashdot comment: “Instead of sharing non-free music, why don’t we share free music instead? Pirating music is equivalent to pirating Windows XP—why do it when OpenBSD is available instead? There’s a lot available under the CC.”

Because as everyone knows, music is exactly the same as an operating system.

Yes, it’s true. The Macintosh you buy two years from now will be running on Intel x86 silicon, and the era of the PowerPC Mac will be over. Despite the reports of no less than the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times saying it was so, a lot of people—including myself—refused to believe. It just didn’t make any sense, for a number of reasons. In fact, some of those reasons still hold true now that the announcement’s been made:

The relatively high price of Macs. Now that Powerbooks, iMacs and the rest of the gang will be moving to Pentiums, they may get cheaper. Or they may not. Until we know for sure, the question of pricing will still be an issue. Apple, despite the support it’s thrown behind its software and OS X, still makes its money largely off hardware. Macs have generally commanded fairly high prices in the PC market—the recent Mac Mini notwithstanding—and have only been able to do so for a couple of reasons: the bespoke quality of the product design; OS X; and the fact that it’s very hard to reliably compare the performance of a Mac and a Windows-based PC.

Of course, now that OS X essentially runs on the same hardware as Windows, two reasons to buy a Mac have disappeared (unless Apple pulls some DRM/hardware mojo and locks out other PCs from using OS X—a plausible, if unpopular, move). Notably, this leaves only one major reason to buy a Mac over a bog-standard no-name PC or a mean and cheap Dell: quality of experience. Macs come in nicer packaging, look cooler in their white and clear lucite, and have relatively unique form factors that are essentially impossible to create using off-the-shelf parts. What this means, then, is if Apple doesn’t lock out OS X to all but Apple computers, they’ll essentially be competing in the hardware sector on the basis of craftsmanship and luxury: buy our computer for more than you’d pay for a Dell because it won’t clash with the drapes and will be easier to put together. This is the famed “it just works” factor that the PC world finds so elusive. But to the kinds of people who are used to—nay, enjoy—mucking about in the pigpen that is their PC towers, they’d probably rather save the premium they’d spend to get a bona-fide Mac and stick with the tower they have now. Hell, they might even buy Tiger instead of stealing it off a torrent site. What they won’t do, unless they’re flush with cash and really feel the intangible extras are worth it, is buy a Mac. And that’s quite a gamble to take.

On the other hand, they said the same thing about the iPod and the MP3 player market, and look what happened. So perhaps this really was a smart move and all the naysayers were wrong.

You might’ve seen the work of Improv Everywhere from their meticulous reports of elaborate pranks they’ve pulled in New York City. My favourite one was the in-store appearance they held for Anton Chekov.

That is, it used to be my favourite. But now there’s a new sheriff in town. This looks like the most audacious stunt they’ve pulled yet, and by all accounts it came off spectacularly.

HOLY CRAP BEST THING EVAR. (Quicktime alert oh noes!)