February Limps Over The Horizon

This one has actually been out for a couple of weeks, but the February issue of Game Developer debuted, and it features the totally rawk Guitar Hero cover (hi-res version), including flames on the GD logo. Actually, it's been one of our best-received issues in a while, which is nice.

Next up is the March 2006 issue, which actually went to the printers already, thanks to the compressed schedules leading up to GDC, and that features a pretty darn interesting postmortem of Neversoft's Gun as a cover feature, documenting why the highest-profile original IP game of last holiday season really wasn't quite the smash critical hit they might have hoped for.

In addition, there's a longform GDC preview that includes a whole bunch of editor picks for next month's show, plus a fascinating long technical piece on virtual skyscape (sun, stars, moon, cloud) construction, as well as our typical code, art, audio, design, and business columns - and it's all packaged in a bumper size, too. As for April, which we're just finishing now - more about that next month, but ahem, King Kong, Will Wright?

Outside the magazine realm, our work on Gamasutra continues to go pretty well, with a plethora of new features - go poke a few. I'm particularly enamored with the anomalous but amusing two columns thus far from 'mysterious German developer' Schadenfreude Interactive, in which we discover who "the Alexei Pajitnov of the Black Forest" is, and if "there still a market nowadays for a tern-based [strategy] game". (And no, they aren't by me.)

Also going darn well is GameSetWatch, which got Digg-ed (Dugg?) earlier this month, to the tune of quite a few hits - we're also planning to add some columns to sit among the bloglike content, because we're weird like that. Otherwise, been doing _lots_ of logistical work regarding the IGF, and also messing with a Sprint Power Vision phone that they sent me as part of a promotional campaign to get the blogosphere buzzing - FWIW, mobile TV is particularly cool, but reception is a bit spotty down here on the South Bay to use it thoroughly on my morning commute.

Phew... and that's all she wrote. I'm just planning carefully to get over the GDC hump, and then it's off to New York and Boston with Holly to see my family (over from the UK!) in early April - should be lots of fun. Over and out.

Bonhomie Revealed?

So, I was reading Boing Boing Boing last week, and I came across an interesting correction from former EFF staffer and current sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow:

"An anonymous writer from [UK tech site] The Register writes to say that Andrew Orlowski was not the pseudonymous author of an article that attacked the Electronic Frontier Foundation by erroneously alleging that EFF loses the bulk of its cases... according to the source at The Register, the person who made the factually incorrect statements in that particular article was a different regular contributor to The Register."

Because I'm interested in why a regular contributor on a major IT site would actually use a pseudonym to bash the EFF, I figured a little word analysis could unlock the secret of who 'Bonhomie Snoutintroff', the author of the anti-EFF screed on The Register is, especially now that sources at El Reg have led Cory to print a correction on his belief that it was the somewhat infamous Andrew Orlowski.

So, let's look around a bit. The article deals with a lot of historical EFF stories, and maybe by comparing phrases to previous Register stories, we can work out who actually wrote it. Here's a basic first example, which I guess could theoretically be dumb luck:

From 'Thomas C Greene in Washington', we have the following 2001 article printed at The Register:

"First up, 2600 publisher Eric Corely aka Emmanuel Goldstein, who was barred from posting or linking to the DeCSS DVD descrambling utility last summer by a US district court, has lost his appeal."

From 'Bonhomie Snoutintroff', we have a rather similar sentence construction on his pseudonymous The Register piece:

"They also defended 2600 publisher Eric Corely, who was barred from posting or linking to the DeCSS DVD descrambling utility of "DVD Jon" fame, and they lost."

But hang on, there's a trump card here - the Ed Felten paragraph. From 'Bonhomie Snoutintroff' (who is based in Washington, incidentally, according to his pseudonymous piece published back in 2000), we have the following on his pseudonymous The Register piece in December:

"They persuaded Princeton University Computer Science Professor Edward Felten to withdraw from a talk on the old SDMI challenge, and later trumpeted it as an example of speech being "chilled" by DMCA threats. (Yet, once he'd enacted that media stunt, Felten delivered his talk at a different conference and survived without a scratch.)"

From 'Thomas C. Greene in Washington', we have, in a 2002 article in The Register:

"After coaching Felten to voluntarily withdraw from a talk in which he was scheduled to spill the beans, the EFF trumpeted this as an example of protected speech being chilled by DMCA threats. Once he'd enacted that choreographed media stunt, Felten later gave his talk at a different conference and survived without a scratch."

So, unless 'Bonhomie' has relocated to the same locality at Thomas C. Greene and is ripping off his old stories, I'd say we can make a good guess about the identity of Mr. Snoutintroff at this point - especially since there are a very small amount of The Register employees who have been around long enough to have posted in 2000 and still be posting on the site now.

I don't actually have a big agenda in this discussion either way (I've never contributed to the EFF, and actually have some reservations with some of their P2P-related arguments, though Doctorow did say something nice about my book once), but as a journalist, I believe that there's no reason at all for that Reg EFF rant to be pseudonymous. Why hide behind a pseudonym in an opinion column if you're a regular writer and respected security author/columnist for the site, unless you're just trolling, if indeed the author is Greene? It certainly doesn't seem like a good journalistic principle.

[Oh, and I'm aware I don't have any comments turned on right now, apologies - feel free to mail me if you're one of the involved people and you claim I'm plumb wrong.]