Rob Walker has a piece in Slate discussing the various future advertisements for presently companies and products that exist in Spielberg's Minority Report

Other creative voices, from filmmaker Paul Verhoeven to writer George Saunders, have wickedly satirized advertising and where its voracious ambitions might lead. But here, in a weird way, the familiar product names may in fact be intended to serve almost as reassuring guideposts: Minority Report is set in a version of the future that is disturbing in some ways and entrancing in others, but it seems that whatever wild twists the future may hold, the one thing we can all be sure of is that it will turn out to be a brand-friendly place.

I haven't seen the film yet - it doesn't open in the UK for a couple of weeks - but what is interesting about this is that this isn't new. Another film that was famously set in a future world that contained enormous numbers of advertisements for mainly current day products was Ridley Scott's Blade Runner , the other famous movie to be based on the works of Philip K Dick. It is certainly true that in that movie too the advertisements featured as anchors of familiarity in a fairly alien and hostile environment. Of course, soon after that movie was released, companies that were featured in it started going bankrupt, to such an extent that a Blade Runner curse. has been much discussed since. As to whether this will now happen to The Gap I suppose we will wait and see.

Well, here in England everyone is ecstatic about the 3-0 win in the World Cup over Denmark. Personally, as an Australian, I don't have anyone to cheer for directly (Australia last qualified for the World Cup in 1974, and their once every four years humuliation in the qualifying tournament generally ends with them skulking out of a stadium containing 120000 wildly cheering Iranians, or similar). The great thing about the world cup in soccer, however, is that there are so many teams who are capable of being competitive. This year we have Senegal, an African team who have never qualified before, defeating defending champions and favourites France in their first game, and now making the last eight teams. They play either Turkey or Japan in the quarter finals. While both of these are good teams, neither are invincible, and so Senegal making the last four is a real possibility. This is great.

When Cameroon made the quarter finals (and took England to extra time in the quarter final) in 1990, quite a few people thought that African football had arrived. The Africans haven't really impressed since, until now, but maybe this is it. Certainly the final 16 teams have quite a bit of diversity this year. We have nine European teams, two South American teams, two North American teams, one African team and two Asian teams. It may be just home team advantage for Japan and South Korea, but the improvement in the South American teams is also impressive. The days of the World Cup just being Europe versus South America may be coming to an end.

Just following up on what Instapundit , Tapped , and this somewhat difficult to name blog have to say about Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands, American Samoa etc having their own 'international' soccer teams, and trying to carry the argument to Washington DC. I realise the argument isn't entirely serious but some more serious thoughts on the subject.

Sporting contests between national teams came into being a little over 100 years ago. International matches in soccer were played in 1872, international cricket was first played in 1877, international matches in rugby in 1871, the olympic games in 1896. At the time the world consisted of far fewer units than it does today, and a lot of this cosisted of large amorphous empires. Sports that were played in multiple countries were generally spread around by these empires in the first place, and so the first international matches tended to be matches between the component units of these empires anyway. Therefore, when international sport first started out, teams between 'countries' without independent sovereignty were more the rule than the exception. (The first international match in soccer was between England and Scotland, in cricket between England and Australia, and in rugby again between England and Scotland). The rule seemed to be that if there was some sort of local identity, then there could be a local team. Colonies having separate teams from their imperial masters became accepted and normal, and although these colonies later mostly became independent countries in their own right, this tradition survived. Thus the Dutch Antilles, the Faroe Islands, and various other territories (and for that matter Hong Kong) still have their own independent soccer teams. The point however is that truly international sporting contests grew out of these inter-colonial type events. And while America was never an imperial power in quite the same way were the British or the Dutch, the Puerto Ricans, the American Samoans and the like have some sort of local identity, and since they do, having local teams fits in quite well with this tradition. And while there is no way Catalonia would be allowed to have a 'national' soccer team today without becoming a genuinely independent country, Scotland and Wales do by tradition and it doesn't bother anyone much.

Sometimes, the sporting teams can actually survive the changing in national boundaries. In my favourite sport of cricket, there is a 'national team' called the West Indies, which is a combined team of players from the former British colonies of the Carribean (plus Guyana in South America). These nations are so small that they would have difficulty fielding strong teams individually, but together they can, so they do. When they started doing so, they were all parts of the British Empire, but now they are not. Attempts to set up a federation of former British colonies in the West Indies failed, but they still kept the cricket team. (The West Indian team was awesomely strong from about 1980-1995, but is now, rather sadly, a shadow of its former self, although it still has one or two great players). Australia has had a national cricket team since 1877, but 'Australia' did not exist in any political sense until 1901. Probably the main reason that they got together on the cricket field was that if they did they had a better change of beating England. They did so, and they enjoyed it so much that some people believe that the success of the cricket team was a factor that hastened the political union that occurred in 1901. On the other hand, sometimes the sporting teams do not outlast the political changes. The pre-partition Indian cricket team included players from what later became Pakistan: the post partition team most assuredly did not.

It seems that for a place that is not fully independent to maintain its national sporting teams, it needs some sort of history of being separate from the larger country, some sort of local identity, and some sort of special political status within the larger country, and some sort of desire to have a local team. The key issue may be that sport isn't actually very important, and if it gives a little place that isn't really a country pleasure to have a soccer team, then why not? You do have to draw the line somewhere, but it doesn't hurt if it is in a few places a little anachronistic.

In any event, deciding who is a country for any other purpose, such as UN membership, always ends up a little anachronistic anyway. (The Ukraine and Belarus has their own UN seats for the entire history of the Soviet Union. As to why Texas and Louisiana didn't in this case demand them as well, I have no idea).

It seems that astronomers are now discovering planetary systems that resemble our own, although we do not yet have equipment capable of resolving Earth sized planets (although we will soon). In any event, the number of planets discovered in other solar systems is greater than 100.

This type of research excites me no end. When I was a kid, I recall being told two things. Firstly, no planets have been discovered orbiting other stars, and from Earth we never will be able to discover any, because telescopes cannot resolve individual stars as anything other than points of light. I also recall being taught that nobody has ever seen an individual atom, and nobody ever will, because it is not possible to design a microscope that uses a light (or electon) wavelength short enough.

Both these predictions have of course been shown to be false in just a few years. Nobody should ever have made the first one to me, as it must have been obvious even then that we would be able to discover planets by watching stars wobble due to gravitational fields, and by watching their radiation vary as planets orbit in front of them, but the second one resolved in a way that was was completely off the wall. The guys at IBM invented the scanning tunnelling microscope using obscure quantum effects and we have suddenly have company logos made from individual atoms. (I think the STM is one of the coolest things ever invented).

In both cases the things I was told were true in narrow terms. It was not possible to refine existing instruments of observation to see planets or atoms. However, in both cases people invented completely different techniques to do the same thing, which did not have the same limitations. This is science at its most wonderful.

The rain on my car is a baptism. The new me. Iceman. Power Lloyd. My assault on the world begins now. Believe in myself. Answer to no one
-- John Cusack as Lloyd Dobler in Cameron Crowe's Say Anything ...

I just feel that way today. More on Cameron Crowe movies some other time.

There's an interesting obituary of Genichi Kawakami, long term head honcho of Yamaha, in the Economist. Its on overwhelmingly complimentary piece, but it talks about his desire to catch up with and surpass piano manufacturer Steinway in terms of prestige as one of the few disappointments of his career. It also describes his great enthusiasm for everything his company made or did. My favourite story of Kawakami, as told in Bob Johnstone's We Were Burning: Japanese Entrepreneurs and the Forging of the Electronic Age , involves the electric organ business. As with pianos, you had an old venerable and prestigious American firm (in this case Hammond) which dominated the business. (Okay, Hammond was not quite as prestigious as Steinway). New technology for analog sound synthesis had been invented at Stanford University in California, and the inventors initially went to Hammond. Hammond did not know what to make of semiconductor based technology, and didn't want the product. Yamaha got wind of it, and eventually did a deal. The amusing part of this is that Kawakami conducted the negotiations from a hospital bed. The reason for this was that he had recently been a little too enthusiastic about his company's motorcycles. Yamaha's dominance of the electric organ business has been total, from the cheapest to most expensive organs, ever since.

And we have a further article in Salon on the creative cities business. From the article

What that means for cities is that instead of "underwriting big-box retailers, subsidizing downtown malls, recruiting call centers, and squandering precious taxpayer dollars on extravagant stadium complexes," the leadership should instead develop an environment attractive to the creative class by cultivating the arts, music, night life and quaint historic districts -- in short, develop places that are fun and interesting rather than corporate and mall-like.

My personal opinion is not that it is about making cities less mall-like, but more about making the cities more like the right kind of mall. I'm sorry for being a little cryptic here. I have more thoughts on the subject - in fact I probably have a long book's worth of thoughts on the subject, and I shall get to them over time.
At least, however, they do attempt to answer the "Why do so many cool people come from Texas (in particular Austin) question, although I don't think they have got to the bottom of it yet.

Interesting piece in CNN on Daimler Benz's efforts at building a fuel cell powered car that has been driven across America. Besides observing that this is probably the only chance Americans ever get to see something as small as an A-series Mercedes, allow me to comment that this is a good thing. The sooner that we can get off oil and onto engines that run on something else, the better. Its not that we are running out of oil or that cars are too polluting (although a less polluting engine would definitely be a bonus), but that we need a fuel for which the lowest cost producer is not Saudi Arabia. (Given that I do not expect Saudi Arabia to ever be the lowest cost producer of anything other than oil, we simply need any new type of engine.

As a quick aside, a fuel cell is simply a battery that can be recharged by adding fuel to it, rather than by recharging it. Ideally you just open a valve on it, poor in some methanol, or whatever, and bingo, it is recharged. A car using this then uses the power to drive an electric motor. Besides powering cars, cheap and efficient fuel cells would be a boon for road warriors with lots of cellphones, PDAs, and laptops. Rather than carrying spare batteries, or desperately trying to find a power outlet in a Starbucks, you simply carry a bottle of fuel with one. Or, once these things are widespread, you buy a small bottle of the stuff from a news-stand, or grocery shop, or wherever.

My thoughts on digital projection of Star Wars Episode 2. In order to see the film in digital, I saw the film in a cinema I am not familiar with (the Ritzy in Brixton) The cinema had assigned seating and when asked where I wanted to sit, I specified "Two thirds of the way back", which is about my normal preference. Of course, this preference is for modern multiplexes where the screens are large and the seats generally close to them. When I got to the cinema I discovered I was in an old style long narrow theatre. Thus while I was in by no means in a bad seat, I was watching the film from a fair way back. At this distance it looked pretty good. I thought the colours were very "hard", and the film lacked warmth, even in scenes where it didn't have to: for instance the outdoor scenes on the grass in front of the waterfalls. (I am not sure how you descibe "warmth" technically, however. When fans of vinyl records have complained the digital CDs lack warmth, I have been sceptical, but I think I now do know what they mean). Given the special effects films are never very warm anyway, it possibly doesn't matter much here, but I think when a great cinematographer attempts to make a fully digital picture, the problems will show up much worse. I never got the "Wow, this is beautiful" feeling I sometimes get watching beautiful 35mm photography, or even better from 65mm photography.

At the distance I was watching from, there were reletively few of the pixelation artifacts or visible jagged edges that have been reported by other people, but they were visible occasionally. I saw enough to suggest they would be much worse from closer up. This is a serious problem. In short the picture was good but not great. 35mm film scales wonderfully. Because the potential quality of the picture is so high, it looks great on large screens, small screens, at the front, and at the back. The present manifestation of digital does not scale so well.

My key feeling, however, is that the 1280 x 1024 resolution being used in the present system is manifestly inadequate. The best picture from this is less good (by miles) than the best picture from 35mm. In fact, it is much less than the best picture resolution (1920x1080) that you can get in your home to watch High Definition TV. (There isn't much programming being broadcast for this yet, but it does exist in the US). I go to the cinema to see films sooner than I can see them at home, but also to see better pictures than I can see at home. If it is possible for me to see better pictures at home, then this is just about the only thing that could possibly kill my cinemagoing habit (and I see a lot of films). Home pictures are getting much better. Responding to this by making cinema pictures worse seems curious.

Another thing is that 1280x1024 is a terrible resolution choice for a widescreen movie. Ideally you want to have pixels that are approximately square in shape. 1280x1024 gives pixels with an aspect ratio of 1.06:1 on a television screen, 2.31:1 on a conventional (1.85:1) widescreen movie, and 2.94:1 on a very wide (2.35:1) movie such as Star Wars. (I can't really say Cinemascope here, because that is a film based process).

I am bothered by the possibility that people will say this present technology is good enough, and that therefore it will become the standard and we will be stuck with crappy pictures forever. I doubt this will happen, as technically there should be no problem with having different picture resolutions in different cinemas and converting between them on the fly, but the danger is that cinema chains may accept the present technology because they simply do not know better. This was a problem with sound for many decades - the mono academy sound format was bad but was used everywhere because it was a standard. (That said, the invention of digital seems to have aided the improvement in sound rather than hindered it. It could conceivably do the same for pictures, but that is a way off. One advantage of digital is that converting from one digital format to another is as simple as getting the right software. Not true for analogue).

I am not against digital projection in the long run. While film does give beautiful pictures, its problem is that it can be easily damaged and it deteriorates. I think it is a catastrophe that 100 years of cinema is sitting in studio vaults decaying, and films made and stored in digital will never do this. (The scale of his problem is just terrible. There are Academy award winning films from 25 years ago for which no clean prints exist). In addition, a badly scratched print with lots of splices in it can be really trying to watch. (This is especially a problem with repertory, where prints of great movies tend to be ten years old, have been screened vast numbers of times, and have been transported from cinema to cinema to cinema).With digital this will not be a problem. If the libraries of the studios are eventually all transferred to a high quality digital format, then cinemas may finally be able to show whatever they want whenever they want, and the cost of obtaining prints will be eliminated. Whether, with all their fears about piracy, studios will ever allow this to happen, is another question, but the potential is there.

One point to be taken from the transition from vinyl records to CDs is that when the CD was invented, it was a new form, and sound engineers weren't used to its characteristics, whereas they had decades of experience with records. On top of this, many early CDs were of recordings made for vinyl, and later transferred to CDs. It took a while for people to learn just what was the best way to record for CDs. When they did this, quality improved, and recordings were made in such a way that they avoided the weaknesses of the format. The same may happen for digital cinema. What George Lucas is doing is good in terms of getting the technology to work properly and training people to use it properly. However, we are not quite there yet.

My compliments to N.Z. Bear for his article in Salon. I remember the days of Atari and Apple and C64 owners having contempt for each other well. (I wasn't so much into the BBS scene however. I was in a regional Australian city where there wasn't very much of it, I suspect). Here we have something interesting, however: a non-professional journalist blogger puting something on his blog, getting a good reaction, and then selling it to a professional publication (although a net-connected one). This isn't entirely new: Dave Winer was writing for Wired in about 1994, but we are perhaps seeing the start of blogging as an entry to professional publication. It may not be so much whether people are noticing the bloggers (as Virginia Postrel and Glenn Reynolds have been discussing), as whether people are noticing the people who are noticing the people who are noticing the people who are noticing the people who are noticing the bloggers. The presence of a chain might be enough. When I see someone who started as a blogger writing for the Washington Post or the New Yorker, then I will be impressed, and I think it will happen. (The New York Times has its head in the sand, obviously). More on this after my exam tomorrow.

Sorry if the broken HTML on this page confused anyone today. It was actually Blogger's fault. (Well, I made an error in my HTML, which somehow interacted with the HTML on Blogger's page so as to disable the 'edit' function. Before I could fix it, I had to "View source", and peer at the HTML for a while). By the way, I will be doing a site redisign in a couple of weeks, in order to add comments, and all the other things you want in a blog, plus to make this blog a little more distinctive.

There are also a few comments I have written on my slashdot homepage , if you really want to read my thoughts.

The references to this blog have now vanished from Google entirely, as the link to it is no longer on the front page of slashdot. I would have thought that Google would have at least some memory. A search for "Michael Jennings" on Google actually does turn up one or two references to me, although it is difficult to figure out which Michael Jennings is me if you don't know me well. A search on Google groups will find a lot of stuff of mine dating from the days when I posted to Usenet a lot.

Virginia Postrel, in discussing why bloggers aren't actually all that influential, has the following to say.

My challenge to bloggers who think the blogosphere is immensely influential is the same as it has been for months: Oh yeah? Then why isn't anyone outside the blog world talking about Brink Lindsey's book? Why hasn't it been reviewed in the NYT Book Review? Why did The Washington Post kiss it off in one nasty paragraph? Why isn't Brink on NPR all the time? Why haven't Time and Newsweek quoted him? It hasn't even been reviewed in National Review or The Weekly Standard. All these places have plenty of room for far less worthy authors. Check out the full list of reviews here. This is ridiculously scant treatment of a good and thoughtful book, the sort of serious work that public intellectuals are supposed to do.

When I think about it, Virginia is probably right, my reaction to reading this was to be quite surprised. Normally, I start to pay attention to a book when I see it referred to in several different places that I regularly read or see. The less related the several different places are to each other, the more likely I am to pick the book up. Now, I had seen the book reviewed by Samuel Brittan in the Financial Times , a had seen it discussed in a few blogs, I may or may not have seen the review in The Economist and I saw a prominent display of the book in the Islington Borders just as I was entering the men's bathroom (which means that a British publisher was pushing the book or someone on the staff of the bookshop liked it). This was enough to make me think that I should probably read it and that it was being discussed. (It could mean that my reading habits are more insular than I thought, but I rather doubt it). Whether it means that British people are more interested in reading a strongly pro-globalisation book by an American libertarian than are the Americans, I am not sure. What it might mean is simply that the pro-globalisers in Britain (who mostly read the financial press) are a long way from the sorts of "influential" people who write for the New Statesman or produce programming for the BBC. Typically, I think that such people have missed the point so completely that I don't pay them much attention. The difference might be that in the US, NPR and the Weekly Standard and the National Review aren't so far away that the pro-globalisation, pro-trade blogging types do not care what they think.

I see that large numbers of New Yorkers want to rebuilt large towers at least as tall as the buildings destroyed on the WTC site. I sympathise - I think my preferred solution emotionally is a single, 220 storey tower in the shape of an upraised middle finger - but it won't happen. Firstly, although the people of New York might like to see such a skyline, it would be very difficult to find tenants for it, particularly on the higher floors. And, sadly, the Osama bin Ladens of the world would see it as a personal challenge to try and knock it down again, and it isn't worth that. (Osama bin Laden seems to have been driven to knock down the first one for in some ways curiously obsessive and personal reasons as well. In any event, the desire for enormous office buildings seems to have shifted away from the US and to Asia, from Malaysia to Hong Kong to Shanghai to Taipei, a couple of decades ago. New Civil Engineer ran a nice article on these Asian buildings a couple of months ago - another free but irritating registration required). It seems to me that the best approach to rebuilding on the WTC site is to see how to use the site to improve how well New York operates as a city. That largely means infrastructure improvement. There are various proposals to rebuild the 1 and 9 subway lines, as well as the PATH service from New Jersey in order to provide better interchange services and greater capacity in lower Manhatten. Plus there is an interesting proposal to extend the Long Island Railroad to a new terminus downtown - something that would not have been otherwise possible because there was nowhere to build turnaround facilities in Lower Manhattan. (There was an article on these proposals and others in the New Yorker last week - not on the web, sadly). I think these sort of opportunities to improve the infrastructure to something better than existed before is a more subtle, useful way of saying "up yours" to the terrorists. It means that in the long term, development of downtown Manhattan, in general, can grow to something more complex, and something greater than it otherwise could have, because we push the factors that limit development further into the distance.

What precisely is it with Taiwan's China Airlines anyway? It's not a very big airline (a fleet of 56 aircraft) yet it manages fatal crash after fatal crash. Nine fatal accidents since 1970 and four since 1994. Taiwan is a rich country: the airline has a fleet of fairly modern Boeing and Airbus aircraft (22 years is middle aged for a 747: there are plenty of aircraft this age in the fleets of almost any airline you care to mention, including those with perfect safety records) and should have plenty of money to spend on maintenance and crew training. Yet somehow the airline manages to have more fatal crashes than American and European airlines ten times its size or more. Australia's Qantas is more than 80 years old, and is about double the size of CAL today, and has not had a single fatal accident in its history.

When you come out of the Finsbury Park railway station in North London, if you turn in one direction you find a large shop selling memorabilia from the Arsenal football club. (The stadium where Arsenal play is close by). If you turn the other way, you quite quickly come across the Finsbury Park mosque, infamous for the extremism of the Islam preached in it, and for some of the people who have stayed there from time to time - certainly shoe bomber Richard Reid, and likely a number of the September 11 terrorists. A couple of month ago I visited in order to see precisely where the enemies of civilisation hang out, and I was somewhat struck by the juxtaposition of the two things. Non - locals appear to come to this part of London for two reasons - Arsenal and extreme Islam. Perhaps impolitely, I was struck by the peculiar question as to whether the two went together - whether, in their travels, fundamentalist muslims were in fact tempted by western decadent behaviour such as supporting Arsenal. From this article in the New York Times (free but irritating registration required) I now discover that Osama bin Laden himself has purchased Arsenal memorabilia in that shop, and has attended a number of matches at Highbury. I am not sure what to make of this.

Well, I am the number one Michael Jennings on google . Amazing what a good link will do. (A previous website of mine that I had when I was a graduate student was the number 1 Michael Jennings on Altavista in about 1994. In fact I think I was the only Michael Jennings on the web in 1994. But that was a different life). Yes, I need to write something soon. I am busy studying for the Level 2 CFA exam I am sitting next Saturday, so life is hectic. Website content will no doubt look up after that.

Well it seems my dastardly plan to get the URL of this weblog on the front page of slashdot has succeeded . If you have come from there and want to e-mail me, the address is mjj12@btopenworld.com .

Here is a review of the Game On exhibition that is on at the Barbican centre in London, and which will tour Japan and the US in 2003. I wrote this to submit to slashdot , and they may or may not publish it, but I may as well post it on my own site as well.

On Friday I attended the Game On exhibition about the history of computer games, at the Barbican Centre gallery. (Admission charge, 11 pounds ($16)). This is on in London from 16 May to 15 September, before moving to The Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh from October 2002 to February 2003 and touring to be announced venues is Europe, America and Japan in 2003.

The exhibition starts off well as you walk into it. The first thing you see is a PDP-1, with a description of the development of SpaceWar in 1962. Sadly, the PDP-1 is not actually operating, but there is a later (1977) coin operated version of Space War that you can play. From there, we jump straight to the 1970s, where we have a couple of instances of "Computer Space", the very first coin operated game, from 1971, which had a truly cool cabinet and was produced by Nolan Bushnell, who had then not yet founded Atari, but was otherwise unmemorable, (although this photo does seem to indicate that the sixties were not yet over). We then have working versions (of both cocktail and upgright versions) of many coin operated games from the 1970s.

Most of the classics are there, from a 1972 version of Pong (or Ping, as it was known in the UK due to the world "Pong" denoting a bad smell in British English). Space Invaders, Mr and Ms Pacman, Asteroids, Tempest, Defender, Missile Command, Galaxian, Donkey Kong, Centipede etc. There is a very brief description of the Mame project, and a projection TV system running Mame with a choice of about 20 classic games. Unfortunately, the significance of the project from a preservation point of view is not adequately described, nor are the various issues that go with it. (I asked an attendant whether they legally owned copies of the 20 individual ROMs, and he had no idea what I was talking about). As we go on, a lack of explanation of the things on show turns out to be the major weakness of the exhibition. There are quite a few very significant things in the history of gaming in the exhibition, but in a lot of instances it isn't adequately explained just why they are significant, or even in some cases what they are.

From there, we go to a room containing "Ten playable consoles", showing a few of the things we might have had in our homes: working axamples of both dedicated game consoles and early microcomputers: the Magnavox Odyssey, Atari 2600, Sinclair Spectum, Nintendo Famicon, Spectravision, Commodore 64 (why not the Vic-20?) up to an early Amiga. This room also contains brief potted histories of the gaming activities of Atari, Commodore, Sega, Nintendo, Sony, with one or two pieces of classic hardware to look. Plus there is a little potted history of the IBM-PC (with an AT in a display case to look at). There is no mention of the Apple 2, somewhat curiously. No, it wasn't perhaps principally a gaming machine, but it was the first machine providing high resolution colour graphics that people could have in their homes. It was the first non-arcade machine I personally played games on, and I think this is true of a lot of people. (I cite the results of the "most nostalgic item" poll on Slashdot last week).

Up to this point, the exhibition has been largely chronological. From this point on, it drops the chronological aspects and becomes more theme based. This works with variable success. (Some themes work better than others). Some things that are historically quite closely related to each other are not close to one another in the exhibition due to the way they are categorised. A strictly chonological exhibition may have worked better.

Firstly we have a couple of rooms full of about 50 (mostly console) games that you can play. These are supposedly divided up into "Games of Action", "Games of Simulation", and "Games of Reflection and Thought", supposedly, but the distinctions are not very clear. Largely though it's just a room with lots of games in it. In one corner I found the Infocom game of "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy", which was the only text based game in the whole exhibition. (No Star Trek, no ADVENT, no ZORK). This was a shame, as the culture of text games would have amongst other things helped bridge the gap between Space War and the 1970s arcade games and would have fit in well in the early history of games section).

After this, we had a section devoted to the making and marketing of 5 famous games (or families of games), Grand Theft Auto, The Sims, Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider, and Pokemon. This section is good. We have original character concept drawings, storyboards and design diagrams from Yoshitaka Amano, James Kenny and other original designers of a number of these games, plus both artwork (both for marketing designs and simply for the sake of art) from many of the game designers. Most notably, we have a series of paintings from Ocean Quigley of Sims fame, showing his visions of various Sim Cities and Sim Worlds. This is really cool.

Upstairs, we find a display comparing games culture between "Europe and the USA" and "Japan". The "Europe and the USA" section is unimpressive, containing a few sports based games and a few military based games, without really explaining what these have to do with Europe and the USA. (A discussion of how military simulators and games have influenced each other is the best). The "Japan" half is much better, talking about the influence of manga and anime, the inluence of the Pachinko culture, the Japanese love of simulations games ("Go by Train", and "Bass Fishing"), plus a really good demonstration of how the game "Renegade" was modified from its Japanese version (which was set in a violent schoolyard) to its US version (which dealt with violence in a perhaps politically less sensitive gang dominated urban jungle).

The section devoted to "Character Design" gives us a brief overview of the development of Mario and Sonic, and we then get to a section on "Childrens Games". The most interesting part of this is a display of handheld games, in particular early single game handheld versions of Donkey Kong, and Scramble and a few others like this. (These were quite important to me, as I remember playing many of these in the early 1980s), as well as the usual Game Boys and the like. (I am not sure what makes these "Childrens Games" any more than a lot of the other games in the exhibition, however).

We then have brief sections on game sound and movie related games. Nothing too exciting here, although lots of movie posters for masterpieces like "Super Mario Brothers" plus a couple of non-working arcade machines with movie related themes. (Tron, most notably. A bit shame this one isn't working. Also a shame they didn't devote more time to the movie, given the movie was about game culture. At least the are showing the film as part of the film season associated with the exhibition).

A section on multi-player games is much too small, unfortunately. There are a small number of networked PCs playing a small number of games. (Red Ace Squadron and Worms Word Party when I was there), plus a sign saying that a changing program of games will be shown over the course of the exhibition. This was a little disappointing, as quite frankly this is a small part of a bigger story: the development and evolution of Doom and Quake into things like Counter-Strike is an interesting story, and one that is not covered in this exhibition. (Perhaps they thought that if they had lots of people playing death matches, this would make the exhibition less family friendly). One of the following sections of the exhibition is devoted to the use of gaming technologies for urban planning, and demonstrates the produce V/Spacelab, which is a planning tool used in real urban design, that was developed from the Quake 3 engine. This is really interesting, and one of the best things in the exhibition, but it the obvious connection with the multiplayer game section is missed.

Finally, we have a section on "Future Technology" which talks about where we are going from here. A little bit on games with evolving characters, and voice and body based user interfaces. I would have liked to have seen something on cell phone based games (Japanese i-mode perhaps) as I think this is going to be a big deal.

On the way out, there is a theatrette showing documentaries on the history of games. I sat an watched the documentary "Thumb Candy" from Britain's Channel 4 hosted by Iain Lee, which gave a much clearer history of games than did the exhibition, but this is at the very end of the exhibition when most people are tired, so I was the only person in the theatrette.

As well as all this, the exhibition includes a number of generally small, "contemporary commissions" , mostly concept art on games based subjects. None of this tells you very much about computer games, but I did have the opportunity to place a game of Space Invaders where I got to shoot down the words from quotations from Focault while listening to the sounds of short wave numbers stations. If nothing else, this reminds me that I am in in Europe.

I was accosted by a reporter for the Russian language programs of the BBC World Service, who saw me taking notes for this review in front of the PDP-1, and after I told him a little about the history of Space War and the like, he recorded an audio interview with about my impressions of the exhibition. Thus, the people of Moscow may be hearing my thoughts translated into Russian.

The exhibition bookshop has a book devoted to the exhibition for sale for 20 pounds, plus copies of virtually every book devoted to computer games that the organisers could lay their hands on, a bit of manga and books devoted to manga, one or two tangentially related board games (Harry Potter, anyone?) a little bit of cyberpunkish sf (The Difference Engine, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep), and, perplexingly, a large number of copies of Naomi Klein's "No Logo".

There is also a program of films and lectures/discussions taking place to go with the exhibition. The films are "Tron", "The Driver",
"Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (huh?) , "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within", "Resident Evil", "Existenz", "Ghost in the Shell", and "The Matrix", some of which are clearly worth seeing.

What's good? There is some very cool stuff on display. They have a PDP-1. They have lots of old arcade machines. You can play most of the games. Most of the stories in the histories of gaming are here if you look carefully. The final section on the use of the Quake 3 engine in urban design was great. There haven't really been any major museum exhibits on computer games before, and this is a good effort.

What's bad? There is a lack of coverage of text based games, and anything PC like prior to Windows 95. There is a lack of coverage of PC gaming. Many of the items on display aren't adequately explained. The organisation into categories doesn't really work.

Is it worth spending my money on? Yes.

Rating: 7.5 out of 10.