Interestingly, with the technology today, we have actually forgotten a great many of those ideas in favour of what we do now, because we have new techniques that often replace the old – but they need not.

The best example I have of this phenomenon is colour cycling. Scroll back a few years, games had the ability to display 16, 32 or 256 colours on the screen (depending on the system you were using) but that was it, you could only have that many unique colours at once.

What a number of folks figured out was that while the number of colours had to remain the same, the actual colour didn’t. You could, conceivably, change the colour each frame. Just not the pixel itself. If it was colour index 123 last frame, it’d still be colour index 123 this frame – but you change it so all the pixels of colour index 123 this frame are a different colour.

And recently, I saw someone emulating the effect in modern technology (in a browser, which is no mean feat since we’ve “moved beyond” needing such techniques), over at http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/ which is an incredibly neat thing to do in my book.

If you look at the ‘options’, you can see exactly what it’s doing: it’s not changing the pixels, merely the colour attached to them. This was an incredibly neat thing to do 20 years ago, and it has a charm today that can’t be emulated except by actually doing it. You ask an artist to draw you an animation of a waterfall, they’re not going to use this technique, unless you ask them to, they’ll use whatever magic they have at their disposal.

I’m not saying that this is better or worse, merely different. It’s the sort of diversity that we’ve lost along the way, because ever better technologies and facilities mean that the limits we used to have to think about are no longer limits.

Consider: the artist making an animation today won’t care how many colours or frames there is in the animation, only that it looks good. It won’t matter how much space it takes up – space is cheap and plentiful. So is graphics hardware with many millions of colours. Techniques like colour cycling are old-school, and a dying breed.

But innovative? Sure. They were in their own time, but here’s the thing: you take that old-school idea, apply it to a new technology and a new use and you can do amazing things. That site is just one example: how to take a technique pioneered two decades ago, remix it in a new way and to do all sorts of things with it that had never been conceived of before.

The result of doing *that* is what is done in http://www.effectgames.com/demos/worlds/ for example.

Now, there is actually a point to all this. A lot of the game ideas I’ve been playing around with would all carry some of the old-school vibe to them, because I want to remind people of games of that generation.

You see, games from the generation when I grew up (which is the late 1980s, and the early 1990s), relied a lot less on graphics and sound and much more on playability, on replay value, and really like I’ve said recently, on leaving something with you (other than muscle fatigue).

The thing is, games that have that style really need the accompanying art style for mood; you can’t have a game that feels ‘retro’ while looking modern, because it’ll be mistaken for a modern game with modern values, where we seem to have fallen into the trap of dumbing down games for the lowest denominators. Playability is often limited, so is replay value, it’s all about how good it looks.

So to successfully pull off a game with retro vibe and retro playing characteristics, you need retro looking art, and after experimenting, I think you need a retro art tool as well.

I’m not a great artist, but I can knock the odd thing together if need be. Here’s the kicker, though, I spend more time faffing about in GIMP trying to do ‘retro’ than I would actually using a retro art package. It’s easier to be retro, to do retro when you’re already half way there.

So, this is one thing I’ve been noodling about, quite a bit. And really why I’m going to town with a big article on it!

You see, back in 1990, that fateful Christmas when I unwrapped a shiny new (parents-already-opened-and-had-lots-of-fun) Amiga 500, the first thing they showed me was Deluxe Paint II. Not the dozen or so games we had even then, but DPaint.

Now, I’ve already spoken at length about things staying with you, and DPaint has, probably more than most of the games I’ve ever played. I learned more about how to use a mouse from that first few minutes with DPaint than I think I can remember – it seems so natural and obvious now, but 20 years ago, this was still quite a new idea (PCs didn’t come with mice entirely as standard at this point!)

But not only was this using a mouse, this was using a mouse in a very visceral and effective way. And, now that I look back, the stuff I created even then would fit right in (if looking just like a 7 year old’s scribble!) in a retro environment. You wouldn’t get that in Photoshop – even a first timer’s attempt at making something in PS looks so much more polished and professional than the things I made as a kid.

But there are many things you just can’t quite do in PS as freely or easily as Deluxe Paint, and a lot of my spare brain time has been wondering just how much effort it would be to revisit a great many of the characteristics of Deluxe Paint, in the modern day: doing old-school, new-school.

I suspect it would make a great difference to those making retro-styled games, actually, and in hindsight there are a lot of cute features that really would make a difference.

Probably most notably, actually, is the split screen view. Actual size on the left, zoomed in view on the right. The really strange thing is that there have been plenty of times I’d wished to have that in GIMP or similar tools, it would have made life easier, but no-one’s implemented it.

Interestingly, I looked around the other day. There’s a relative dearth of pixel-perfect editors that all seem like they should be ideal for this sort of thing, for retro-styled art, but they all end up doing it wrong. They try to be modern in their approach and mimic the old school style, rather than being old-school in their roots. The consequence is that you end up with half-assed tools that not only fail to be any good at what they were designed for, but aren’t suitable for anything else much either.

I think for it to be any good, it has to be more specific than just a quasi-generic art package.  Deluxe Paint was very, very good at what it did, and it did a lot of things, but I’m thinking of its pixel art capabilities, with the other stuff (like animations) as just a bonus rather than a primary feature.

I suspect, quite firmly, that were I to attempt it – and it has crossed my mind a lot – I’d probably look at dropping the extra stuff and focussing on the pixel art features much more heavily, because all the other stuff for general art making… it’s all been done before and GIMP or Photoshop is probably a better bet, even if you can do some truly amazing things in Deluxe Paint (like the demo pictures that it comes with)

Mind you, I suppose even the more general tools for bigger works will retain a place, if only for title screens, logos, interfaces and stuff like that.

You know the really weird thing? I’ve thought about starting to make a DPaint like tool many times over the years, in the different environments I’ve come to work with, not because I’m fixated with a 20+ year old paint program, but because it approaches the material with a view that stuff today just doesn’t. There’s none of this layers business (well, there’s two layers, but only in the sense of a primary canvas and a ‘spare’), only one undo level, and a very much ‘iterative’ process to drawing, that you just don’t get with art programs today.

I find the art packages very much removed today: they’re very sophisticated tools, very powerful in the right hands, but they’re suited to photographs and photographic manipulation, not the sorts of things I want to be able to do, things that look and act a certain way.

I think there’s potential here…

Today I’m going to look at one of the myriad ideas I’ve had lately. A lot of them seem to be distinct old-school influences that I’ve seen, and whether the ideas are salvageable into something very new – most of the time, this old-school stuff didn’t work because the idea didn’t have the right execution, and with a new take on execution, often the idea becomes much more awesome.

First up, haunted by a game I played as a kid called Microbes. Like most games of the late 1980s/early 1990s, there’s a really lame story that explains why everything’s going to hell in a handbasket and why you and only you are equipped to fix it. Something about the US govt. making a super bug or something.

Anyway. You’re in a circular environment, you can only move left and right around the perimeter of the environment, blasting inwards like some kind of odd Robotron clone. Naturally the enemies reproduce and spawn and creep closer to your safety area that is the edge of the … petri dish? … and if they do that, you lose health/die/whatever.

The mechanic is cute: player moves around a circular area but not within it, but the game doesn’t give anything back. It’s essentially a time waster, and judging by some of the magazine reviewers, essentially boring because there’s no difficulty to it. The 8 year old me had trouble with it, but the 28 year old me had very little trouble with it, so yes, that seems fair comment.

Now, the question I’ve been pondering is whether there’s any real mileage in doing something with the mechanic. Can a fun, engaging game be done with the mechanic of moving all around the action and never touching it?

I think to answer that, we need to start by revisiting our history; where does the game style as a whole, and more specifically this example, come from?

Well, historically, Space Invaders. The interaction is distant, you’re mimicking a survivalist response – avoid bullets, shoot back in self defence. The only differences to this model are how the fact enemies spawn (in Space Invaders, they just get closer until you die, they don’t spawn in the level space), and that it’s in a circular not planar environment.

Oh, and the most important difference: Space Invaders stimulates the survivalist response, Microbes doesn’t. There’s a psychological trigger of seeing your actions move one thing (the base) and to have all this *stuff* coming at you.

But not so in Microbes. They spawn, multiply, can also spawn little separate entities that come at you, but it’s not so visceral or emotional as Space Invaders is. It just doesn’t have the same feeling of ‘coming at YOU’, and I think that’s more systemic to the mechanic in the game than anything else. When you’re a little ship in a big ocean of pixels, there’s a response triggered of seeing you move your little ship on the screen.

However distanced, it’s still representative of you, you’re controlling it. That’s why generally you’re at the bottom of the screen, because in most of those old machines, the screen’s tilted. It’s physically nearer to you. Triggers more of the response.

But by effectively separating you from that, by making it an arbitrary place to move around, you lose that trigger. If you can make the mental shift towards things coming at you from all around, and that you’re the nearest thing to omnipresent in the plane, the mechanic still works. But I soon realised that my recollection of the game was influencing me more than anything else, and that my reactions to the game weren’t emotionally driven, but purely intellectual. It wasn’t bringing me into the game, it was forcing me out of the game to handle the logic required to beat it.

And ultimately it’s the mechanic at fault, not the execution. One for the bin, then.

In hindsight, that’s why I never actually got very far with realising those ideas, because I forgot the key elements.

I talked about how I’d reimagine Populous, taking out the dullness and just allowing the player to be a god. I actually imagine the result would be like a simplified version of Black and White in hindsight.

This is, interestingly enough, not a good thing. It wouldn’t be B&W because it would skip the micromanagement and the overheads attached to getting anywhere but it would hit the same wall that B&W does. You’re interacting with the world, the people (and in B&W’s case, your pet), but no matter how much of yourself you leave on them, even so far as to shaping behaviour under some circumstances, but that’s it.

After spending more time lately playing B&W, I found I didn’t feel any real connection with the game, no lasting impression, just frustration with the interface and a sense of the game missing the point a bit. I’m not sure how much of that is down to Molyneux’s involvement, and the idea is certainly strong but I think the execution missed something quite serious. I just don’t know what yet.

I suspect I’d have the same problem: that I’d create a game that was transiently amusing (either helping or smiting the populace) but had no staying power because there’s only so much you can do and there’s nothing lasting to leave with the player. It doesn’t teach them anything and other than trying to stimulate the player into coming back and having more of the same, I didn’t see what draw there would actually be.

As for Tower of Babel, I look back at that, not just my ideas for overhauling the game, but at the game design as a whole. What does it teach us? What does it leave us with after the event? During the event, even?

Well, assuming I take off my rose-tinted lenses for a minute, I think I can see a glimmer of something there in the corner of my eye, but it’s not exactly bright. It does leave us with a sense of leadership, of learning how to effectively use three separate units, and I guess there’s a slight hint of emotion there when you lose a robot, but I’m not sure that’s enough, and I’m really not sure my proposed additions would make either of those things stronger.

If anything, really, I suspect the opposite will be true: the game will (like so many games of today) be so wrapped up in its mechanics and its own cleverness that the spirit of what it would leave us with is actually removed, or at least seriously distanced.

I have a bunch of ideas floating around at the moment, some more innovative than others and over the next few posts I’ll try to explore them a bit to see what can be done with them. Maybe, if they work out, I’ll build the game and post it here on the site.

The thing I’ve been putting my mind to a lot lately is innovation in gaming. Or, more precisely, the lack of it. There is an astonishing lack of innovation in gaming at present, and even the stuff I’ve been playing with has been largely stillborn in my mind because none of it is experimental or innovative, it’s simply getting to grips with a toolkit by cloning what’s been done before. (Which, by the way, sucks. Not the toolkit, the fact that the best way to use a toolkit is to implement something you already saw, so that you have fewer unknowns in mind)

I spent the festive season reading up on game literature a lot, reading weighty tomes on game design theory and that sort of thing, and as I declared late one night in a chat room, I came away enlightened.

Rules and mechanics and assets and controls, these are all things a game needs, but they’re not what a game is. (It’s like a keel and a hull and a sail and a crew are things a ship needs, but they’re not what a ship is.)

And I think in pushing the technical envelope, we’ve gotten this a great, great deal. I’ve been playing computer games for over 20 years, and I have lots of memories of playing them that far back – and more importantly, even then I was doing some kind of analysis on them in my head, about what makes great games, about what makes them memorable.

Nostalgia’s a big part of it, that people who are old enough (like me) to have played games from at least a generation (not a technical generation, but a cultural generation) ago, we remember the games being more fun than they actually were. And for a lot of games from back then, that seems to hold true, that people come back to them 20+ years on and find them fun because they remember the fun they had growing up playing them, but not because they’re intrinsically fun in themselves.

In fact, most games that far back are hellish reflex testing devices, bent on inducing psychological breakdown. (There are a few like that today, incidentally. BIT.TRIP RUNNER, I’m looking at you.) And most of them are simply forgotten except for nostalgia value, not because they were a positive experience.

The exception which comes to mind is the first Zelda game, The Legend of Zelda. I, unlike my friends, did not own a NES or in fact any console until I finally bought a Wii last year. Which meant that I didn’t have much in the way of nostalgia when approaching LoZ for the first time, which I did recently. And the result was intriguing.

Of course, I’ve read around LoZ over the years and have a vague understanding of the world, the chronology and so on, as well as some of the design influences, but the most important lesson didn’t occur until I’d started playing.

And this is what games have forgotten to do largely. It’s what the moment of shining enlightenment taught me. Why so many games are uninspiring, insipid and even boring. And it’s this one lesson…

Games that we enjoy and come back to a generation later and still enjoy, without the benefit of nostalgia, are games that reach us on a deeper level than looking good or being responsive to our intentions. No, that alone would render many more games ‘classic’ status than they have.

The games we enjoy and continue to enjoy, we do so because they’re doing something primal, something emotional: they’re not games, they’re experiences. They grow us as a person. Some designers explain it as building a game that is an educational experience, but really it’s more than that. The games we come back to, they do teach us something, but very often it’s not really a lesson, but a skill, or an idea or something that reaches us beyond the surface, and leaves us something behind.

That’s really it: we’re not just interacting with the game, we’re not just motoring through the rules of the environment, but it’s reaching into us and making us one with the game. The better a game can bring us into the experience, the stronger it is and the more we will enjoy it, and that others will enjoy it.

I’ve had occasion to see a great many games lately, in varying stages of development, but most of the people who work on them, and who play them, entirely miss the point. I’ve lost count of the ‘Zelda clones’ I’ve seen while playing with the aforementioned toolkit, but not one of them does what Miyamoto did in Zelda: conveying the experience of going outside and exploring. They all imitate it, never conveying it, and certainly not innovating with it.

Much as conventional text fiction has few boundaries other than putting words to paper (or computer), interactive fiction has modest boundaries for realising all kinds of shenanigans, far fewer than you could ever do with using artwork in more ‘conventional’ games.

Now, the main problem is that in more recent years I just haven’t been able to really make the time to sit and play the inevitable raft of interesting games that emerge from this (and competitions like it), even with the rule introduced years back in this competition that each game had to be ‘winnable’ inside 2 hours, and any judging was to be done on the basis of the first two hours of play only.

As a consequence, I’m fairly sure I’ve missed most of the real gems going back to 2002 or so when I last really sat down to play, but this year I managed to squeeze in playing a couple of the entries, and I find that it wasn’t a bad decision to do so. There’s some real imagination right there.

The first game I tried out was The Elfen Maiden, by Adam Le Doux. In a manner reminiscent of Infocom’s 1985 classic, A Mind Forever Voyaging, the player is a computer. Figuratively, at least. The game still plays much like conventional IF gaming, you still go north/south/east/west, you still examine objects, but it’s wrapped up in a world that may not be particularly believable, though it seems consistent enough.

When you start out, you’re ‘on the deskop’, and can go ‘north’ to examine the webcam, ‘northeast’ to your owner’s email, or ‘above’ into the Ethernet port. As pure games go, it doesn’t seem that special, but the notion of being a computer is not done that often, and more importantly presenting the game with a familiar-to-genre-players manner, and using it in a new and interesting way is creative.

I’m not sure, in all honesty, that it works as well as it might, but certainly it’s intriguing nonetheless. I hope we’ll see more change-the-viewpoint experiments in the future.

OK, second up, PataNoir. Noir, to me, is a genre full of cliché and trite phrasing, almost that it’s hard to imagine anything genuinely new done with it. (Yes, I have seen some interesting noir, a few years back I participated in a group, collectively producing a noir novel. That was… interesting.)

Anyway. The introduction seems suitably noir styled, the environment full of cliche and the hard-boiled approach. But there’s one thing that catches my eye in this, and it’s one thing that saves me from just moving on.

It describes itself as a surreal noir game – if that’s not worth a look, I doubt I know what is. Noir isn’t surreal – that’s the point. It’s pretty solid, consistent and often predictable. So when you mix that up with surrealism, something strange is going to happen, and the mix that PataNoir takes is probably the most surreal I’ve seen yet. I would think it’s probably the closest I’ve seen to innovation in a little while.

You see, in this game, there are literal objects and figurative ones, and both are manipulatable. For example, the opening: “Shadows huddle in the corners, like dark pools of oil.” You can, like in any good text adventure, examine the shadows. You’ll get the same description, but it recognises the literal object reference. Then you try and take the dark pools of oil, being a figurative object.

And normally in such a game, you’d expect either some kind of kickback to something it doesn’t know (because most authors do not program in every little background detail as a ‘real’ object) or that it’ll tell you that it’s not an object to be taken. I was, then, quite surprised when it told me that instead, I just didn’t have a container.

Exploring the little office further, I find myself intrigued with this idea, that an object is an object, but that it sort of spawns a separate object just by being described. Like the old cigarette in the ashtray – it’s just an old cigarette. But it smolders “like the last embers from a dying camp fire” – and you can try and take those. Unsuccessfully, but that’s not the point.

I haven’t properly played through either game yet, or any of the rest of this year’s entrants, I just wanted to get the message out that I should have made more time – there’s a wealth of interesting ideas and emerging concepts, some that work better than others – to examine the games. Give it a go, if that sort of thing is your cup of tea, because odds are you’ll find something you’ve not seen before – I have…

We’ve been building bicycles for years using metal frames. It’s effective, but not particularly efficient. And now, a group of British engineers has demonstrated making a modern mountain bike out of a non traditional material: bamboo.

It’s nothing new of course – like most things it has been done before in some fashion, but today I’m more interested in the mentality.

In fact, bicycle frames made of bamboo were demonstrated back in 1894, but it’s amazing how we’ve spent decades refining metal, refining the processes and so on, only to come back to trying out bamboo as if it’s essentially a new idea.

It’s little surprise that we do turn to such things, though, given the current political and social position; we’re increasingly told that climate change is happening and that our environment is ever more vulnerable – so that anything we do which demands less of our fixed resources (like metals, ores) and more of sustainable resources (growable, like bamboo) must really be worth considering. Especially as bamboo has a higher yield of oxygen than other tree types, which means growing it is also environmentally sound.

Consider it: why should manmade materials be the sole province of strength or durability? Mother Nature was developing these materials long before mankind came around…

Perhaps we should be looking into more materials like this instead of automatically turning to the conventions of steel and plastic; there are almost certainly naturally-occurring materials that have some or all of the properties needed in manufacturing – like bamboo.

More interestingly, we could spend more time studying these materials and understanding what makes them so strong. I’ve long heard that spider-silk is incredibly rugged for its weight/thickness, and that if it were thicker it would be as strong as steel. What makes it so strong for its weight? Can the same technique be applied on a much bigger scale – can we produce a material that is as light (and thus using as few actual materials as possible) for its strength but more suited to the tasks we would have for it?

I have little doubt there’s such research going on across the world – but there’s an important point to be made here: what we normally use may be an acceptable tool for the job, but with a little research, a better alternative may be out there.

Whether you admired the man, or disliked the business practices that Apple carried out under him, I don’t think there’s any doubt that the man had a profound effect on computing, over the way we interact with the world today.

I doubt I’d be called a proper Apple fan; it’s only in the last year or so that I actually purchased anything Apple branded, and it seems somehow oddly apt that today was the first time in weeks that I fired up my Mac. But putting that aside, I think there has been some serious innovation driven by Apple, even as the press have only this week been up in arms that the iPhone 4S is nothing new, just the same as before but ‘improved.’

More interestingly, if you look back at what Jobs made happen, he’s neither an engineer or designer himself, and some less favourable have suggested that he’s largely someone who was in the right place at the right time, but I suspect these aren’t actually that relevant.

What Jobs was, what his real legacy to the world will prove to be, is that he was in every sense of the term a visionary. He had ideas and aspirations of computing that extended beyond the conventional wisdoms, where the user is the centre of things, not the machine.

I don’t know for sure how involved he was on any real day to day basis with the designwork and implementation of things like the iPhone or the App Store, but I’d be genuinely surprised if he were a hands-off kind of guy.

If you ever heard him talk about devices that Apple brought out, it wasn’t the conventional PR type fluff that most CEOs talk up. He had sincere care and enthusiasm about his company’s products.

I remember hearing the presentation for the original iPad, where he described it as ‘magical and revolutionary’, and while even some hardened fans may be disinclined to use those adjectives, there is no doubt that he genuinely believed it to be the case.

And, to be fair, it was revolutionary in a way that even Apple’s most hardened critics can’t really deny: there was no device with the tablet-style form factor in active circulation, using only a touch screen device – at least, outside of re-runs of Star Trek. For a product that critics decry having no ‘killer application’, it’s sold surprisingly well into the millions.

Why? Why is Apple so successful over the last decade, with its phenomenally successful iPad, iPhone and iPod series of devices? The answer, ultimately, comes back to Jobs’ vision for these devices.

Whether you like the devices, or deride them for being pretty, shiny but less functional, there is an unarguable fact: they’re designed and engineered carefully. The shape, ergonomics, usability and so on are all designed together as a cohesive whole.

How often have you ever used a gadget where some aspect of it seems like it was thrown in at the last minute? That one part is always less well polished and refined, because it was an after-thought? It’s something that, generally, doesn’t happen to Apple equipment – because everything is controlled to the smallest details, and designed to a cohesive whole.

Like or loathe Apple, that’s been their hallmark for the last decade, and one that was bestowed upon it by Jobs.

I mentioned before that Jobs wasn’t himself a designer or engineer. Thing is, you don’t have to be to innovate. You have to have a vision, and one that is prepared to bend some of the trends that pre-exist.

Apple, under Jobs, did exactly that. Instead of complex combinations of hardware and software like in the PC arena, there are a relative few models of hardware, in very broad categories, and all running the same base operating system, one far less unevenly distributed in terms of versioning due to having very few device drivers needed for it.

That’s the thing that no-one else has really grabbed the bull by the horns with: they manufacture both the hardware and the software, and present the entire thing to the user in a combined, cohesive experience – one unmatched in the computing industry, because Microsoft (and therefore Windows) is generic software for a variety of platforms and all the manufacturers ship Windows, rather than their own environment tailored to their hardware.

That allows them freedom unprecedented in the industry to make changes. I outlined the changes that OS X 10.7 (Lion) brings, most notably that it marks the shift towards putting the user and the user’s work at the forefront, not the application around it. I can’t imagine Windows introducing that any time soon.

Anyway, I’m gushing. Whatever your thoughts on Apple, on Jobs himself, I know I’m not alone in thinking we’ve lost someone actually special. Someone who wasn’t prepared to accept the status quo with what we had, and was more than prepared to go out on a limb to pursue his vision, and make that real.

Wherever he is, I kind of hope he’s sat on a comfy chair, browsing the web on an iPad, and able to reflect on the legacy he has left: one where form meets function, and where creating something new, something wonderful is not only permitted, but actively encouraged.

The debate ranged far and wide over the state of the Internet, but the first thing we agreed on is that there is a lot of out of date information on the Internet.

And it’s true, there is. Some of it has dates on, a lot of it doesn’t but swift validation with the likes of the Internet Archive demonstrates how old some of it is. Now, some of it won’t go out of date very quickly, some of it will be barely minutes old and be out of date – and herein lies the problem.

How do you know when something’s out of date? Better than that, how do you police it? The suggestion raised was to send a query to the author on the anniversary of publication and ask them if it’s still up to date. Putting aside the multitude of practical problems, the theory is quite sound: presumably the author of something published – especially if they’re a hobbyist – would be aware if what they had written had become out of date.

Unfortunately, reality trumps vision here: the overhead of physically tracking pages, and their content, being up to date would not only create a truly massive database (not quite in the multi-petabyte archive that IA has, or however many exabytes Google has, but still huge), you’d have to send out a great many messages to people to ask them if it was up to date.

Then, realistically, how many of them are going to actually respond, and if they do, how many of them are just going to reply with a quick ‘yes’, even if it isn’t? The answers are ‘not that many’ and ‘most of them’, respectively. The optimists among you will no doubt think I got the order the wrong way around, but sadly not.

So, this lead to the second major suggestion: vet incoming sites onto the web. Get them in the system up front. Essentially, give people a licence to publish information on the web. This has several interesting connotations to it.

It would pretty heavily cut down on fraudulent sites. Right now, setting up a site is a free-for-all exercise, anyone can do it, anyone can own a domain name etc. even if it’s a trademark or copyrighted, anyone can still register a domain and wait for the inevitable wrangling. After that, the actual exercise of dealing with publishing content, and content management, is surprisingly commonplace.

Now, if you put in place some kind of vetting procedure – especially if you have one that requires regular renewal – you would distinctly be encouraging users to get their software up to date on the server side. That would certainly help with reducing bad behaviour going on out there.

I see two problems with this otherwise glorious view of a policed internet, even putting aside the whole ‘global’ thing. Firstly, the Internet as it stands is very good at one thing due to its structure: it is very, very good at rerouting around failures.

The so-called Great Firewall of China is not exactly the greatest barrier to content out there, and you can bet that whatever policing measures are introduced here to prevent unauthorised publication, it would be rerouted around.

Secondly, and probably more importantly for some people, is the whole censorship angle. So you have an authority of some description, presumably at least partly government funded, authorising publication of material onto the public internet. Now, sure, there are measures in place to withdraw illegal material, but they’re not that reliable, certainly not across global spaces, and again the Internet reroutes around it.

But if you have a government-funded agency proactively (as opposed to reactively) vetting content, you can block content before it is published. If the penny hasn’t dropped yet, think state published and state vetted news…

Then we come back to the other matter: globalisation. The ‘net is global. It’s everywhere, and that means if one country implements stricter measures, they mean precisely squat except inside that country. I’ve mentioned the Great Firewall of China – the strict border control there doesn’t affect the US internet content, except to limit material going into China, at least theoretically.

It’s long since been shown, though, that getting through the GFC isn’t exactly the hardest thing to do, which makes you question the practicality of it in the first place – but whether it’s practical or not, the fact remains that you have two different countries with different rules. The rules would have to be enforced equally everywhere to have any meaningful impact, and as it stands, that just isn’t going to happen.

A bit like policing the Internet generally, I guess, because it will just reroute around any other blockages you care to place.

I sometimes have to work with datasets, documents that structure data in a meaningful way, and occasionally have to contend with documents that have a structure unlike anything I’ve seen before, even when it claims to be in a given format.

The source of my frustration is Wedge, of all things. Over the last month, I gave Wedge a management tool for organisation and activation of plugins, extensions of the core functionality of the software.

And, because I’m a bit of a fool, I wrote the manifest file – the file that directs what has to happen – in XML. I don’t honestly know any other language that isn’t a pure programming language that allows me to describe the operations that have to occur, and to do so in a manner where the document itself implies what has to happen.

I have the plugin block, it contains blocks for the plugin’s name, description, author information, that sort of thing, before going on to describe new database tables, hooks to register, scheduled tasks to set up, settings to initialise, and even readme files for the plugin. (And more that’s unfinished)

Now, I’m a great fan of having tools to make my life easier. When it comes round to offering plugins for Wedge, either of my own, or a centrally organised site, I want something that will review the file for me and validate that the XML file provided is correct, meaningful and contains everything it needs to.

Except that writing something to really validate it automatically is a drag. Sure, I can rewrite the code I have which actually processes the file, but that means writing, and maintaining, a separate tool that has to be downloaded and run to make sense of it.

Now, XML files are supposed to (generally) be able to be validated through a Document Type Declaration, or DTD, but after a day or so’s head-scratching I finally gave up trying to write one of those for my format. Partly that my format’s not that typical, and partly that I don’t feel entirely comfortable being harsh about its validity – I don’t want to make a list of up to 16 items in a list be in the exact right order if listed. In this day and age of computing power, I should be able to put something together that does it for me – and DTD’s aren’t it.

So, I went searching and found the RelaxNG specification, which is great for handling the sort of things that DTD can’t, but it’s just so verbose it isn’t even funny. Fortunately I have copy/paste keys at the ready.

What I’d love to see is something meaningful, that allows me to indicate the structure of XML (or indeed, any file format I care to think about), and be descriptive – even thorough if I so choose – but without having to make me write lots and lots and lots about something fairly straightforward.

It should also allow me to state the type of data I’m expecting, so that the validation isn’t just structural or semantic but direct of what I’m actually working with.

I don’t think this is unreasonable, and if we had such data structures handy, we’d be able to validate incoming files more readily – generally – which has security benefits. If you have a system that accepts uploading of files, you can scan them through this system to ensure they are valid, which means you can trap malware at source rather than hoping to catch it at destination…

Still, I as a programmer can dream…

Part of how that’s been achieved historically is through cheap imitation of established brands and essentially leeching from other R&D. But perhaps not now.

In reality, no country – and no company, really – can afford to remain an imitator, because imitation is not really a sustainable basis for success, but it is a viable starting point: if you gear up for producing imitations, you develop and establish the foundations, the key knowledge and machinery, to be able to produce almost anything else you care to design.

This is, unsurprisingly, where China is beginning to make the transition; having spent time being an imitator, they have the foundations, they have the key knowledge and skills – all they need is the imagination to develop something new.

And, judging by reports from the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), this may be exactly what is occurring.

You may, for example, have heard of Huawei. They’re a recent upstart in the smartphone market, for example. It might not be the most dramatic change to the market – but it is a new contender that’s rising out of the Asian market, and one of those leading the charge currently gathering momentum in China.

That, interestingly, is patents. I may not be the greatest fan of patents, but it’s worth taking note of things that happen in the ecosystem – this week, we’ve seen the International High-Tech Patent Litigation Conference in London, of which a keynote speech spotlighted how many patents China is filing.

Sure, a certain amount of the patents filed are patent trolling escapades, filed solely for the purpose of trying to litigate and make money without genuine intention to innovate, but that’s true of most patent environments.

That said, if the number of patents rises, there is a general trend associated with the number of innovations going on – and the number of patents being filed in China is definitely rising.

In fact, the plan in China is to massively encourage more, with the ideal to double the patent filing over the next few years – as they shift away from imitating to innovating.

Note that this isn’t entirely a self-improving plan; China does have to contend with the fact that wage rates are rising and the overall population is ageing, with the consequence that it does become harder to make use of lower-end, manufacturing-based industries in order to support the economy.

Whatever the reason, though, the fact is they are moving one of their key market bases, and I have little doubt that we’re going to see more innovative products emerge from China and Asia in general, simply because they have the foundations and the knowledge – and now we’re going to really start to see them leveraging it, far beyond what we’ve seen from the likes Huawei thus far…