Sony Sacrifices Goat to God of Sales

By daring to suggest that the Wii is a far better (and far better-selling) console than the PlayStation3, it seems I have mined a fresh seam of outrage from Sony fanboys, who are currently bombarding B2's viewer mail list, thanks largely to our old friends over at the Official PlayStation magazine. But their flames are like tiny candles next to the vast fireball of outrage Sony itself has provoked today, for the utterly bizarre act of killing an animal in the name of PlayStation publicity.

The party took place in Athens, Greece late last month. It was a launch party for God of War II, the last blockbuster title to launch on the old PlayStation2. The games press who went on this junket -- very few of whom were local -- were greeted with the sight of a freshly decapitated goat, surrounded by body-painted women and men in furs who looked like rejected extras from One Million Years B.C. They were invited to eat the intestines of the sacrificed goat (which were, in fact, mere bowls of warmed-over offal from a local butcher).

Now I've been to a few Sony parties in my time -- mostly the much-lauded (but ultimately rather dull) bashes they threw every year at E3. Nothing like this ever happened. But if it had, I'd be on the horn to my editor faster than you can say "animal welfare." So why was the games press asleep at the switch? Why did we have to wait for this story to come out in the official PlayStation magazine, no less?

Where Sony Went Wrong

Pity poor Ken Kuturagi. The creative genius behind Sony's videogame consoles -- the PlayStations 1, 2 and 3 -- announced Thursday that he would step down as CEO of the company's games division, which means his career there will end on a sour note, the sound of defeat.

As noted in the latest issue of Business 2.0, the eagerly-anticipated PlayStation 3 has already lost this round of the console wars to its Japanese rival, Nintendo's Wii (See "Why Wii Won," May). Since late last year, when both consoles were released, the Wii has consistently outsold the PS3 in every major market.

For Nintendo, the number 3 company in the videogames business, it's a David-vs.-Goliath turnaround. For Kutaragi's team, who ruled the roost of this industry for 12 years, it's a shameful final defeat.

Future Boy Film Club: Idiocracy

There are two visions of the future in this famously overlooked gem of a movie from Mike Judge, now out on DVD. One is funny, but inaccurate, misleading, and potentially dangerous. The other is very funny, all-too-accurate, and absolutely terrifying.

The first vision, a well-illustrated, mercifully short one that sets up the rest of the film, is this: stupid people are having more kids than smart people, therefore the world is getting more stupid. This is an old chestnut, and the notion was shot down long ago by evolutionary biology. Stupidity is not a genetic trait. There are hundreds of thousands of genes that play a cooperative role in intelligence, but it's more about how they work together than what they are -- which is why education, the environmental factor, is so damned important.

I don't believe for one second that Mike Judge is into eugenics, but it's hard not to watch this part of the movie without feeling like the message is that we should sterilize idiots for the good of society. Sorry, Mike, but it's a little too close to the bone. Not too long ago, the U.S. did sterilize the stupid. Not only did it not work, it also helped give the most evil man in history one of his worst ideas. "I have studied with great interest the laws of several American states concerning the prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock," wrote the pencil-moustached one.

In Space, No One Can Hear You Sweat

Kudos to astronaut Sunita Williams, 41, for running a virtual version of the Boston marathon while tethered to a treadmill aboard the International Space Station. Williams went all-out in her attempt to make it feel like the Boston marathon, playing DVDs of the route on laptops next to her treadmill and comparing notes with Mission Control on Beantown landmarks she was "passing".

You might think runners down on the ground, punished by gravity's constant demands and the cold weather, would be jealous of runner no. 14,000, competing as she was in temperature-controled zero-G. But Williams' harness put significant strain on her shoulders and hips, enough to make her feet go numb. She ran the marathon in four hours 24 minutes, a good half-hour longer than her Houston marathon time, and around an hour more than the time of a fellow astronaut on the ground in Boston. And Williams had the added distraction of fellow ISS crew members throwing weightless orange segments at her, which must be a little off-putting.

Williams is a bit of a type-A overachiever, having set a record earlier this year for the longest spacewalk ever performed by a woman (22 hours, 27 minutes). Perhaps when she quits NASA, a new career in Zero-G training awaits. People already $3,500 a pop for "vomit comet" parabolic flights that make them weightless (as some guests did at the Yuri's Night event at NASA). Imagine how much you could grow the market by adding the killer app of aerobics instruction.

Get fit by flying like Superman! Think of the bragging rights: even your yoga instructor will look on enviously as you describe doing your downward-facing dog pose when there was no down.

Making Space Sexy

Now why didn't anyone think about throwing a party in a NASA spacecraft hangar before?

The location: Hangar 211 at NASA Ames Research Center, near Mountain View, a hangar normally used for plane-mounted stratospheric infrared observatories. The occasion: Yuri's Night, a party to mark the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's skybreaking orbit in 1961. The sponsors: NASA neighbor and partner Google; Anousheh Ansari, the world's first private female astronaut and donor of the X Prize. The clientele: future-focused freaks and geeks of all stripes, dressed in their spaciest costumes. (Easily the winner for best costume: my friend Aaron, who came in a giant helmet built to resemble Sputnik.)

The evening was an unlikely combination of space exploration propoganda and dance music. Planetary scientist Chris McKay stood at the DJ decks and made the case for terraforming Mars -- with permafrost-preserved Martian bacteria if possible, Earth vegetation if not. In his lab coat, with outstretched arms and a dance floor full of youth cheering him on, he looked like nothing so much as a cult leader. Google gave away rave-friendly blinky lights and showed off Google Earth Burning Man, its new 3-D rendering of that fiery festival. There was much Burning Man art to be seen, and the Space Cowboys -- the Bay Area's hottest DJ possee -- were on hand with their Burning Man art car, the Unimog, to lead the dance.

Yuri's Night began as ad-hoc, small-scale parties around the globe to celebrate what is known in Russia as Cosmonautics Day. This massive NASA-based event was its first large-scale iteration, and there are still some kinks to be ironed out. Someone should have thought of the fact that a large hanger space at night would be cold. There was not a single heat lamp or (surprisingly, given the Burning Man presence) burn barrel to cluster around. So for many hours you had a lot of chilly people, with music that was too chill to dance to (the Space Cowboys only went on at midnight). Even worse, they ran out of beer several times, and what few casks they had were dispensed by means of a bureaucratic drinks ticket system.

But the first time is always a wash, as the evening's veterans of space programs and dotcom startups knew. You have to stress-test a system to find out where the weaknesses are. It was exciting enough to see a crowd of hundreds of energized youth prepared to pay for such an event. Dare I say it: space is getting sexy again.

A Short Film About Mastication

In my homeland, the UK, we may not have the best weather, but we do TV advertising right. Anyone who has seen the phenomenal Sony Bravia ad with the bouncing balls -- shot in San Francisco, but perversely never shown here -- must agree. Now, it seems, we do web advertising right too.

When was the last time you saw a short movie-length web ad that was actually worth watching? This one from Trident's UK site definitely fits the bill. It's a straight-faced pseudo-scientific documentary about the discovery of the "mastication lobe"; deadpan comedy that shows Trident doesn't take itself too seriously, and at the same time, makes you more interested in the brand. (In style, it owes a lot to "Look Around You", a spoof science education show). I willingly sat through all 25 minutes or so of original Trident content, something I never thought I'd hear myself saying.

When you're done with that, look at the US Trident site for comparison. It looks like a lame Monty Python pastiche, oddly enough, one that doesn't hold the attention for long. Under "advertising," you'll see the same 10-second ad repeated over and over, trying to drill itself into your brain.

Which of these ad sites, in the global marketplace that is the Web, is going to thrive? Which one is going to get its users to email it around virally? When you've answered that question, consider this one: which advertising team is likely to have been paid more, the one in the UK or the one in the US? Why?

UPDATE: The original link I posted seems to no longer work -- too many Americans logging on to see it, perhaps? Regardless, this one should work.

Revealed: The Google Master Plan!

Here, originally uploaded by Steve Jurvetson, is the Google Master Plan I mentioned in the lead of this week's Future Boy Column. You can see it with Jurvetson's tags here, or zoom in and out of the whole thing at the blog Undergoogle. Remember, this Master Plan of world domination is no longer active, since the board got wiped. But you can start to get a sense of the Google campus' mindset, just bursting with bankable whimsy.

Why Google Isn't the Next Microsoft

At the Googleplex in Mountain View, in one of the foyers of the ever-growing number of new buildings, you'll find a giant whiteboard with the heading "Google's Master Plan." Here, the company's 12,000-and-counting employees can write collaborative suggestions for world domination, such as creating an "interplanetary Internet," establishing "orbital mind control" and even eliminating "all stairs."

There's no reason to think the company takes any of these ideas seriously: when the board is full of world domination plans, it gets wiped. The whimsy of founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin is one reason why Google will never be like Microsoft.

This kind of whimsy is deep in Google's DNA. Google's gurus truly believe in following your most geeky passion of the moment, whatever that may be. Co-founder Larry Page's idea of focusing the company's efforts is to administer a list of the top 100 projects it will devote resources to. Google knows that it has a corporate form of Attention Deficit Disorder, and it doesn't care. With 31 percent of all U.S. online ad revenue, it can afford to be sanguine.

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