Interactive Australia 2009 Report

Bad game journalists! Bad!

Apparently Dr Jeffery Brand, Ms Jill Borchard and Ms Kym Holmes of the Bond University yesterday published a little something called the "Interactive Australia 2009 Report" which contains a whole bunch of statistics that are very favourable to our gaming Australia. Kotaku's quoting the thing like mad; that's okay, as they're fairly credibly claiming to have an actual copy of the report in front of them. The Herald-Sun have done some reporting and they also appear to actually have the document.

The bad sets in because every man and his dog is on-quoting them without reading the report for themselves. How do I know? Because if they had read the report they would have linked to it. I've had to go and find the thing through my own researches instead of just trusting in the magic of the hypertext markup language. Thanks to the Interactive Entertainment Association of Australia for, as I understand it, commissioning the report and providing the linkage above.

So - the statistics! And be aware that while this summary is nicely sound-bitey, you should go and read the source material for yourself before you start deriving conclusions and possibly looking like an idiot.

(1) Average age of an Australian gamer is 30. That's up two years from 2007, when it was 28, which means not just that the existing population is ageing but that we're picking up new gamers from older demographics.

(2) 88% of Australian households have at least one gaming device (meaning, conversely, that only 12% are going without). 61% have more than one gaming device. "Game device" is defined here to include PCs, consoles and handhelds. Mobile phones and PDAs are specifically excluded.

(3) Male/female player ratio is 54% male, 46% female, up from 59/41 in 2007.

(4) Only 3% of gamers report never playing games socially; 97% report gaming at least occasionally with others in the same location or via the internet.

(5) 63% of Australians are unaware Australia has no R18+ classification for games; 91% of Australians, whether gamers or not, support the introduction of an R18+ rating.

(6) 17% of Australian households report being in possession of pirated games. 24% of those in possession of an illegal game report that they "often" or "usually" go on to purchase legitimate copies of those games.

There's also some analysis of games in parenting, and a bunch of fuzzy-wuzzy quotes and anecdotal stuff which doesn't exactly provide hard fact but does help non-gamers understand where some of the results are coming from.

By and large it seems like excellent research. It is commissioned research; it's not study for the love of study, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad. Do check out the methodology at the end of the report; it seems pretty reasonable to a non-statistician like myself. Sample size was 1614; a portion of the sample was surveyed online, which may mean a bias towards the tech literate.

Anyone who's got a criticism of the methodology or an analysis of the results please comment, or link me to your post elsewhere. And if you're quoting the survey please remember the different between what people report when surveyed and the actual fact.

Real-Time Censorship

Disturbing news, everybody!

Microsoft have patented a technology for real-time audio censorship. The technology analyses recorded or live transmitted speech to look for "undesirable" words or phrases and render them inaudible. Which means you can swear all you want, and the person on the other end of the line will just wonder why you've suddenly gone quiet.

Microsoft obviously intends to turn the thing loose on XBox Live, so that young babies and suchlike will be protected from the ravages of the 14-year-old vocabulary, and as a togglable option that's probably something that everyone on that community can benefit from.

It's one of those technologies, though, that could have a lot of horrible, horrible applications in the wrong hands. Can you picture the thing being applied wholesale to our phone system? To our television networks? Ars Technica have already seen the problem in their article, and they draw our attention to the love that regimes like that in China would have for this process. Picture a world where the word "election" simply can't be communicated over a telephone line.

YouTube already uses something similar for automatically detecting copyrighted material in uploaded videos, whereby videos that the algorithm thinks contains visual or audio information belonging to another party are flagged, and the onus is on the video uploader to prove that their work is original. The algorithm is, of course, secret, so the precise method by which it brands you a criminal is neither known nor open to criticism.

Naturally, you can't put the genie back in the box, and the development of something like this was more or less a cultural inevitability. Ultimately the only way that we, as a society, can see that this benefits us more than it harms us is by strong privacy laws, a free and intelligent ongoing political debate on the issue, and through the vigilance of each individual citizen.

LHC Edutainment. Word.

It's time we all learned a little something about the Large Hadron Collider. A little funky something.

Here we see workers at the Large Hadron Collider being careful not to cause a resonance cascade dropping some fresh beats, or somesuch. It's good to see the under-representation of the Higgs Boson in modern music being addressed.

I'm also disturbed to realise that the scientific community has still not learned its lesson about giving things acronyms that form girls' names, particularly where said things are involved in giant cutting-edge research installations.

Large Hadron Malarkey

Now, I don't want to be accused of scaremongering, so treat this as less in the way of factual news and more in the way of extremely awesome news. (It's also quite old news but let's not let that get in the way of me writing about it.)

In only a couple of hours they are turning on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC is a device 27 kilometres long installed in a series of tunnels one hundred metres below the Franco-Swiss border.

What can the LHC do? Hopefully, say scientists, it will produce the previously theoretical Higgs boson, also known as the "God particle". Also, says British Astronomer Royal Martin Rees (aka Baron Rees of Ludlow), it has a one in 50 million chance of destroying the world. Them's good odds.

Possible candidates for an LHC apocalypse include a micro black hole, a magnetic monopole, the incredibly cool vacuum metastability event, or the creation of a strangelet, which could in turn result in an "ice-nine" disaster scenario.

Now, I've had a bit of a hunt around about the LHC and as far as I can tell no one involved in the project is an obvious super-villain. That's a bit disappointing, really. You'd think a giant doomsday machine located in secret tunnels beneath the French border would draw megalomaniacs like mice to cheese. Joystiq does have an excellent photo demonstrating that Gordon Freeman is attached to the research, though.

The infinitessimally small chance of the world ending is a bit of a worry, I'll grant you, but it's totally balanced out by the massively jaw-dropping science-faction involved. Thumbs up, LHC. Thumbs up.