The flip-side to my post about Dopplr being a stand-alone network, and how that is probably a bad thing is exactly where are all the serious or worthwhile Facebook applications? I can’t recall ever having seen anything with that isn’t a novelty of some sort.

Sure, games, quizzes, toys etc can be fun and people are most definitely using them, but are there any applications out there outside of the entertainment/trivia category that are good enough for consumption? I’m fairly interested by this and what, if anything, it says about preferred usage patterns on social networks.

Is the lack of visibility on non-entertainment apps because they don’t exist or because people simply don’t use them? If the former, then is that because the serious app developers don’t want to cropshare or because they see it as futile? If the latter, is it something inherent in being in front of your friends that causes the lack of interest?

I honestly have no answers here, but I’m hoping I’ll see some suggestions made here about what’s happening, or even showing some good “serious” apps.

There is a fairly tangible link between the language used to describe a software system and how easy it is to understand, maintain, and expand that system, for both technical and non-technical people. To be clear, when I say language I don’t mean the programming language of choice (Java, C, Python etc): I mean the terms used to describe it.

If all participants in the design process (again, technical and non-technical) can agree on a set of terms for each component and always talk about those components and their interactions in the same way, it can greatly ease understanding. There’s a lot more to it than that, but this is basically Domain-Driven Design.

I’d been thinking about the general principles of this a number of years ago, when I read a great article about the Guardian redesign. It took me a while to dig out the link but it’s worth a read: Domain-Driven Design in an Evolving Architecture. It’s definitely worth reading to get a feel for the issues around and power of the DDD.

It occurred to me recently that the reason that many vendor tools take a significant amount of effort before either making sense or before you realise that they’re awful is that they’re written in someone else’s domain, one in which you were not privy to the design of and which is usually only documented in terms of the things that it has already been used to do. That’s a mistake.

The empowering part of good documentation for a system is in first describing exactly what it is and how it is structured, before describing what it can do; by focusing on the domain, rather than the outcome.

With this information in hand, it should become clearer much sooner whether the domain of the tool is compatible with the domain of your problem-space. This is probably why Spring has been such a successful framework in the Java world: it goes to great lengths to explain exactly what each part is, and helping you understand how it fits under your own domain.

Quite a short month and one for horror. Three films:

Jennifer’s Body is a fairly poor attempt at horror. It’s also a fairly poor attempt at comedy. Trying to mix the two is an incredibly difficult thing to do, and very few films have managed it successfully. The comedy kills the horror, and the horror kills the comedy. Beyond that, we’re treated to some pretty terrible acting, fairly affected dialogue, teen cliches and bad editing. Lack of consistency kills this film: it could’ve aimed for being cheesey and been better for it, rather than trying to be serious some of the time. Not worth seeing. (See my Jennifer’s Body Twitter review).

Paranormal Activity is another horror movie, in the style of The Blair Witch Project. The premise is fairly straight-forward: a couple believe they’re experiencing some odd, possibly occult, activity in their home so decide to film during the night. This starts to yield results. The scares themselves are pretty predictable if you’re a horror film fan, but the style of the movie brings out a little more believability. It’s a decent enough film, but probably won’t frighten those who’ve seen enough scary films. That said, the showing I was at was full of screaming teenagers so it’s certainly doing its job. (See my Twitter review of Paranormal Activity).

Finally, the Coen brothers yet again manage to create a world of ambiguity, disquiet and intrigue with their latest offering, A Serious Man. It follows a physics professor whose life is falling apart (the details of which I’ll leave to the film itself). In amongst this, he starts a struggle to become a better man, to understand the meaning of all the bad things in his life and try to become better. We see this through some typically brilliant cinematography, where so many stills from the film tell a story by themselves, and great uneasy characters moving through awkward situations; amusing, but never farcical. The point of it all? As with many other Coen plots, that’s for you to decide. Very good. (See my A Serious Man Twitter review).

While it didn’t have much competition, it would have done well in most months: the winner is A Serious Man.

For a long time now, various game developers have been complaining about the secondary market, arguing that it should either be abolished or that they should get a slice of secondary sales. I don’t think either of those ideas is particularly good. If the secondary market (for any type of good) is removed then you have the situation where, upon buying something, goods effectively become worthless beyond their immediate utility to you. This doesn’t reflect the real world where items often become less valuable to you but much more valuable to someone else. It’s also pretty damaging to free markets when items no longer have resale value.

Consider buying a car. Would you be as willing to spend as much on one if you couldn’t trade it in or sell it on? The industry only manages the pricing structure it has because there is segmentation. Those who both want and can afford a new car have access to that option, and those who want to spend less have a second-hand option available.

Whether developers deserve to get paid from secondary markets as well as primary markets is for you to decide. Personally, I see no reason to differ from other goods where this overhead doesn’t usually exist.

In recent years, though, a third trend has appeared that is somewhat more interesting: the game itself comes with a code to unlock additional content, over and above the core game. These codes are one-time use only. If you bought the game at retail, then you get the additional content. If you buy the game second-hand, then you get the original game but not the additional content. It’s an interesting take on market segmentation and, I think, relatively gentle at the moment.

The danger is that once we start to accept this kind of segmentation that developers and publishers start to become more aggressive and punitive. While all the codes we’ve seen so far unlock content that is very much in the extras category, it’s not too hard to imagine a situation where something is omitted from the main game for this purpose; an epilogue or prologue maybe, something that could be argued to be extraneous but is actually fairly core.

Perhaps a way of avoiding this situation is having the additional content available to buy as well. If you bought the game second-hand, then you can buy the extra stuff for a small fee. That way the developers get something out of it, and people in the lower segment of the market still have the option to access all of the content, without being required to use that option.

We should keep our eyes open going down this path. If this practice is seen as handing out rewards it’s fine, but as soon as publishers realise that it can also be a stick, someone will use it. That could hurt the industry as a whole.

The thing that impresses me most about the current generation of games, the thing that differentiates it from the previous generations, is the level of spectacle on offer. While I’m sure that in a few years time I’ll look back on this and cringe, I can’t help but think that there really has been a huge step-up in recent years in delivering some eye-opening experiences.

To be clear, I’m not talking about any sort of deeper engagement or interaction (better advances in that arena will surely come later), I mean a purely surface-level increase in wow-moments. Some highlights:

• Burnout Paradise brought us a massive streaming city, with over the top speed, insane collisions and the potential for a lot of carnage.
• Left 4 Dead took the zombie apocalypse movies that people love so much, and turned them into a game. The sheer amount of action and messiness, coupled with the great 4-player co-op, really makes a difference. The finales are great.
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is exactly like playing through an action movie. While the general shooting mechanics are okay, the level of spectacle on offer is almost unparalleled. The cliff-climbing, the dodging helicopters falling out of the sky, the massive pitched-battles in a fast-food car park; every section brings another eye-popping moment.

There are many other examples, I’m sure. It seems like a great time for gaming, and finally one where we seem to be getting some pay-off for all the time developers have been putting into mimicking films, even if they are mostly dumb action-movie clones.