Technophile Monkey

But ssshhhhh! Don’t tell anyone!

The Escapist’s current episode of Stolen Pixels takes on a serious note for a change. I like this bit:

The system obviously isn’t having any effect on piracy, unless you count the thousands of people who were going to buy the game but vowed to pirate the thing when they found out what was involved with attempting to conduct honest commerce with the likes of EA.

Quite a few games recently have been easier to pirate than to buy legally (Assassin’s Creed, Mass Effect, Spore) and both of the big guys (Ubisoft and EA) are equally guilty. Meanwhile, game developers like Stardock with with nerves the strength of submarine plating say things like “hey, let’s treat our customers like customers“, and they have the courage to do it as a press release.

I hope it pays off for them. If I were a bit more interested in the serious-ish side of strategy games, I’d go buy and download one of their games just for that. With the angsty state of the industry right now, it’s anyone’s guess how long it takes for either Ubi or EA to buy Stardock, fire anyone with common sense and inject the place with DRM nonsense.

I’m afraid that Stardock’s games are just a bit too serious and niche to make a difference in how the industry as a whole sees their customers, but Stardock have a few friends with big names, so it just might work. The alternative, even sillier DRM, is unthinkable and will push PC gaming’s zombified stumbling corpse right off the cliff. Though in the end you can be sure that they’ll blame it all on the “pirates”.

Update: Another frustrated PC gamer is asking Slashdot: What modern games are DRM-free?. Interesting comments, though the future looks bleak for now, but who knows, it might just improve if companies notice that they’re shooting themselves in the eye socket with DRM. And if they don’t realize this, they might just jump ship and go console-only, leaving the field entirely to the indies.

I realize it’s a tough world for a company coming from a place with a binary understanding of languages (“English” and “Foreign”), but this has nothing to do with cultural differences. It’s about understanding web technology. Or your users, for that matter.

When you visit most of Google’s services, their interface will change its language based on Google’s guess of where you are. If you’re a businessguy travelling in Korea and want to access your e-mail via the web, even from your own computer in the hotel, you’re in for a fantastic learning experience. Puzzle for hours over the interface, wondering whether that button says “Delete” or “Squid sandwich”. Marvel at the new Arabic positioning of interface elements. Get ready to learn German even though it appears nowhere in your browser’s accept-languages list. Millions of people already speak German, might as well catch up to see what all the hype is about. And when you’re subscribed to a Swedish company’s ADSL service (like I was), Google cheerfully serves results in Swedish. Men det är inte so god för de som talar inte svensk.

Google seems to geotarget languages. They try to guess your IP’s location, then serve you some language that they pick from a conveniently located black top hat like the struggling little bunny it is. Living in a country with four official languages, Google’s behavior becomes especially rude. Can they tell whether my IP is from Chur or from Domat/Ems, two towns only a few kilometers apart but with different languages? What about bilingual places such as Biel/Bienne? Oh, that’s right, languages are binary, so that situation would never come up.

Google, here’s an idea. What if the user told you what language they want to accept? There could be, say, a field in the GET request header that tells your servers what languages the user wants to see. This would be a miraculous innovation if it hadn’t been in the HTTP spec since 1999. If you implemented that, perhaps your news groups wouldn’t be filling up with eight pages of user requests to turn off the darn geotargeting since at least September 2007. It would also help if Google services didn’t completely ignore the language settings in users’ accounts, as they do right now. I get German sometimes, then English, perhaps this is a quantum situation and every time I am not googling for anything, my results turn Swahili.

If you’ve reached this page wondering how you do change your language settings for Google’s services, here’s a quote directly from the horse. Err, I mean Graham:

That preference page actually just sets a cookie — language
preference isn’t stored permanently in a database or anything. If
there’s no cookie set, we’ll go by your browser’s language
preferences, which is probably what’s happening for you.

So if you want to get around this, you can do one of the following:

• Set Firefox to not automatically delete cookies on shut down.
• Change your browser’s language preference to English.
• Bookmark http://www.google.com/reader/view/?hl=en and use that link
  for accessing Reader. (The “hl=en” forces it into English, regardless
  of any other settings.)

-Graham

Jumping through hoops? It’s the new web experience. Trouble with this approach is, there still seems to be some geotargeting involved, so if you forget accessing the services via hl=en, you might still end up googling in Sanskrit from time to time.