Competing Products are Competition

There's been some noise on programming.reddit.com recently about a Wall Street Journal story describing how Intel and Microsoft are apparently crushing the OLPC laptop.  According to the WSJ article, Microsoft and Intel have been working together to sell low-priced laptops running standard Windows technologies to developing countries at prices that make them competitive with Mr. Negroponte's OLPC laptop initiative.

The article quotes Mr. Negroponte as claiming that Intel was attempting to "undermine" his initiative, and saying that he didn't want to compete in "bake-offs" with Intel's machine.  I'm a bit confused by this.  While it's all well and good that Mr. Negroponte's company is non-profit, it doesn't magically mean that their products don't compete with Intel's.  In fact, if you read the description of the machine, which is based on AMD processors and an operating system using the Linux kernel, it would seem to be designed precisely to avoid Intel and Microsoft's dominance in the US market.  It seems no more remarkable that Intel and Microsoft consider this competition as that IBM's competitors disliked their charitably giving computers to all the major engineering schools in the 50s and 60s.

Perhaps most humorous is Mr. Negroponte's assertion, early in the article, that his "goal is not selling laptops" and that he's in the education business.  In that case, it's hard to see why he should be upset that Intel and Microsoft are aiming products at the same market he's reaching with the OLPC; this is only achieving his eventual goal of allowing children in developing countries access to first-world technology.  He claims he's good at selling ideas, not laptops; it seems from here that his ideas have sold.

Roger Ebert Is Dumb

There's apparently been something of an ongoing spat between Roger Ebert and various people who write about games as to whether games are art. Since Roger Ebert's connections to the games industry are at best tenuous, and from all the evidence I've seen he's never bothered to play one, this seems a bit like his staking out a claim that the Mona Lisa isn't really art.

But I suppose that's neither here nor there. In his review of the Hitman movie, based on the games of the same title, he writes:

Other scenes, which involve Agent 47 striding down corridors, an automatic weapon in each hand, shooting down opponents who come dressed as Jedi troopers in black. These scenes are no doubt from the video game. The troopers spring into sight, pop up and start shooting, and he has target practice. He also jumps out of windows without knowing where he's going to land, and that feels like he's cashing in a chip he won earlier in the game.

This is particularly funny since, as a fan of the Hitman games, those are the scenes that made me least interested in the movie. Hitman is about disguise and stealth; striding down halls shooting bad guys is possible, but the game discourages it. As for cashing in chips he won earlier in the game, that sentence is a great mystery to me.

The sad thing about the whole fiasco is that most games aren't art, and the approach most game designers are taking isn't going to lead to art. Whether that's the fault of the designers or the publishers, how games fit into the current ideas of art, and what the artistic potential of games is and ought to be are all valid and interesting questions. However, Ebert is doing no one any good by trying to be part of this discussion when he clearly can't even be bothered to do basic research on what he says.