#and yet I claim to hate being at the forefront of group projects

[plumdale]

the way I have to pioneer every group project because I need the sense of control that it’s being done correctly although I can’t think of anything worse than leadership. so… that’s contradictory of me 😖

[allanamayer]

More Product, Less Pollution

Earlier this week the Coalition of Museums for Climate Justice (sounds a bit more pleasant than “Against Climate Change” I suppose?) posted a great meditation on air travel and its contribution to pollution (which I saw thanks to the great Eira Tansey). It’s inspired a long and meandering rumination of my own about the environment and our work.

Here in Canada our GLAM work covers a huge geographic area, and at ridiculous cost (“cheap flights from Iqaluit to Toronto start at $1,732,” proclaims the Expedia headline). Our national library and archives frequently hosts “national” symposia and other in-person events in places like Ottawa and Toronto, but has yet to livestream or provide other ways to access and participate in the events remotely.

Compare to the recent Ontario Digital Inclusion Summit, that livestreamed using Youtube (making rewinding and replay immediately available) and offered digital Q&A participation through a tool called Slido. Thanks to this, the Summit was able to include both far-flung participants from all ends of the earth, but also people who couldn’t attend the event due to mobility, cost, or scheduling.

Similarly forward-thinking, the aptly-named Access Conference for library technology livestreams its events, keeps up a steady stream of Twitter participation, and shares edited individual sessions and slides on Youtube and its website after the fact. It’s the smarter way to overcome Canada’s geographic divide, and to be inclusive to all types of stakeholders. And it’s vastly cheaper and less damaging per capita than flying around the country.

A certain quality of internet access is required to livestream events and to keep up with Twitter hashtag use on the fly, I know. Canada still struggles to provide basic internet connectivity to the vast majority of its northern and rural communities, especially in Indigenous communities - 18 percent of the population has no access to better-than-dialup internet. The nation declared in December 2016 that broadband internet is an essential utility “for quality of life” but won’t hit its target of 100% delivery until somewhere between 2026 and 2031.

This lack of residential service, of course, doesn’t mean that Library and Archives Canada can’t start offering livestreaming of its events well in advance of full market saturation - and I hope I never hear them argue this.

I’m sure there are, instead, a bunch of mitigating factors I can’t possibly understand or have explained to me because I’m sooooo far outside the world of LAC and its millions of restrictions. I’m sure federal government livestreaming has to, by law, provide simultaneous transcription and audio in both official languages, or something else totally prohibitive, and a million signed waivers from both presenters and audience members, and some sort of deposit requirement, and on and on and on. I’m sure it can’t cost just a few thousand to do properly with existing in-house expertise and existing in-house equipment. I’m sure LAC’s internet connection is so bad it can’t even provide wifi to conference delegates, let alone reliably stream audio, let alone video.

The last email exchange I had with a LAC staff on this topic was for the “Foundational Meeting” of the National Heritage Digitization Strategy - a new standard that sets digitization goals for every heritage organization across the country regardless of capacity. That was October 2016, and I was advised that “If there is sufficient demand, LAC will do its utmost to provide this service.” I asked the national archives listserv to weigh in and make “sufficient demand” known at the time, but apparently no action has been taken since. Which is funny, because I hear complaints about LAC’s initiatives being inaccessible to smaller, rural, and northern organizations basically all the time.

For an industry consistently denied opportunities by cost barriers, an industry with a consistent critique of being too top-down, large-organization-focused, and ignorant of the issues facing non-academic institutions, livestreaming events of national interest seems a no-brainer. National professional conferences, symposia, and committee meetings should all be included in this. (Someone with enough clout to sit on the latter will have to fill me in on how easy it is to Skype in to such meetings as a member, let alone an observer.)

We could, eventually, settle on one of many different models, from fully-virtual conferences and a mix of on-site and remote presentations, or local-hub conferences (satellite events for watching livestreams in groups, and having breakout sessions or collaborating digitally with other hubs) - such as what the Canadian Archives Summit did in 2014, which I would link to, if the links weren’t all broken already. Flying Less has a great FAQ (in a Google Doc) to help you think about ways to decrease air travel and increase remote participation.

Canada is the perfect country to pioneer such forward-thinking policies as nation-wide virtual events and reducing barriers to participation. Alongside broadband as a utility, can’t we conceive of virtual professional development as a nationwide right? Especially in heritage, where we already believe digital heritage is the way of the future - else why would we have an NHDS at all?

For now, let me end this section with a plea: tell your conference organizers to spend less time deciding where to host a conference to maximize attendance, and more time working out ways to attend remotely. I’d happily throw in a tenner for live access to my national conferences, especially the wonderful ACA Annual. For events around ideas with national reverberations, such as the NHDS, it seems like an obvious priority for federal funds.

**

It’s easy to use sticker-shock as a reason to cut down on needless expenses, and it’s an exciting bonus that reducing those expenses is also environmentally superior. But to me it’s equally compelling to talk about what changes we, in our little profession, can do to mitigate climate change.

Eira Tansey is at the forefront of this, leading Project ARCC (Archivists Responding to Climate Change) and sharing useful resources wherever she shows up on the internet (and also walking the walk on other ethical issues by recently leaving Twitter, the hotbed of hate). I have been thinking of how to contribute to this discussion for a long time.

There’s as much reading about how climate change affects archives (emergency preparedness and disaster relief for heritage collections; institutions in high-risk regions; preservation environments in the time of climate instability) and how archives can affect climate change (utility consumption and sustainable operations; sustainable materials and buildings; efficient digital consumption and offerings; dealing with volatile storage media and disposal; renewable conservation) as well as how to archive and promote data and information related to climate change, which is especially relevant in an era of government censorship and cuts to environmental protection services and science.

One thing I hope to write in the future is a non-exhaustive list of ways archives and other heritage organizations can divest from corporations and vendors that contribute to climate change (such as banks that invest in oil pipelines, suppliers that aren’t using recycled materials where possible, etc.).

For now, I’m not in a position to do building or space planning, order LEED-certified HVAC and recycled-material acid-free boxes, or work with local scientists to do data-rescue initiatives. I am, however, in a position to research and write about two things relevant to my work and the profession at large: digital labour and digital consumption.

***

It’s indeed modest and necessary to claim that air travel for work and professional development is a brutal abuse of our environment and our budgets. By very minimal extension, we can see that car travel for work and professional development is the same. A car commute produces more than ten times the carbon-dioxide emissions of an equivalent public-transit trip.

In the archival industry, which is so very material-focused and place-based, it’s hard to imagine a career that doesn’t involve heading in to the office, sitting among the collections, supervising the reading room, setting up the computer terminals and microformat readers, giving tours and organizing exhibits, lecturing in classrooms, processing in the workroom, digitizing in the lab, and meetings, meetings, endless meetings. I realize that, but I also realize that as the profession transitions slowly but surely to more digital tools, digital work, and digital communication, opportunities are popping up all the time to think about ways to make our work more energy-efficient and less environmentally damaging.

Of course, I know plenty of library and archives workers who are able to take days at home - whether this is because part of their job includes professional-development and research time, because they work primarily on tech they can access remotely, or because they’ve organized their schedule to optimize a day for writing, editing, and emails. I can rattle off a quick list of tasks that can be done at least partially at home:

Virtual and phone reference, especially on institution procedures or web resources

Administration and coordination through email and phone

Lecture, tour, and exhibit planning

Research and policy-writing, such as on legislation or involving environmental scans

Writing and editing documentation

Marketing, social media, web copy

Web/systems admin, digital collections admin

Metadata, copy cataloguing, finding-aid writing and editing

Post-processing of digitization

Lots of meetings! So many meetings!

The obvious financial expense of using your home technology and utilities to do your job’s work will have to be reckoned with in your contract. And none of that will cut down on pollution - but saving yourself a gas-guzzling commute certainly will.

Desk shifts and tours aside, lots of people work better without social interruptions and casual chats around the watercooler, and when occasionally saved from the stress of deciding what to wear, at least a day or two a week (or month, or whatever works in your shop). The flipside is yes yes yes I know your IT department would never give you remote access, ever ever, I know.

I hope dearly that heritage institutions of all kinds will look clearly at such factors as their regional roads and bike lanes, walkability and public transit, housing costs relative to proximity, and relevant compensation (and office perks - including employee parking! Space on your land! That you could use to hold stuff!) in order to find ways to offer increased remote work for GLAM staff.

Then it’ll be up to GLAM staff to figure out if they can work productively from home - something that isn’t easy for everyone.

**

I’m relatively lucky in that I’ve captured for myself one of the few remote-work jobs in the heritage industry: a nonprofit software provider with a team entirely decentralized across the province. We work together with Skype, Google Hangout, shared documents, and plenty of emails. We get together once a year on the occasion of the Ontario Library Association SuperConference, as many of us as can be gathered; there are team members I still haven’t met in the flesh.

We’re able to support ourselves in this by working on digital solutions for a number of public libraries, archives, museums, galleries, historical societies, and other interest groups. Many of these organizations are simply too small to have the capacity for internal IT staff and stacks, so our process often involves shipping USB sticks and HDDs across the province for ingest, and arranging for the shipping of materials to digitization vendors elsewhere. Our process also often involves talking to municipal IT workers who are managing the unfamiliar world of digital heritage collections - a point of contact rife with opportunity and conflict, and one I’d love to be able to explore more in the future.

I believe strongly in a consortial approach for small organizations and want desperately to see our nonprofit grow in capacity and stature. I want this not just for my own prosperity (and because I have a job with a five-second commute and no dress code) but because it’s the answer to our problems both financial and geographical.

At one point I thought of having Iona’s job: the Archives Advisor for the province, driving from one border to the other to assist in training, project management, and emergency relief. I imagined driving a mobile digitization studio around in a suspicious white van to do processing right there in the parking lots of archives and libraries. It would take some math to discover whether one vehicle delivering digitization to a variety of organizations would be less energy-consuming than the equivalent in shipping costs and remote digitization. And hey, what if I put solar panels on the roof of the van? What if I converted it to biodiesel and ran it on food-frying oil from the many A&Ws on the road between institutions?

**

Working in digital means the actual energy consumption of what we do and what we offer is quite obscured, compared to the monthly electricity bill of a library branch. Unfortunately, this means obscuring the intense cost of web servers with 99.9% uptime and multiple redundancies.

A recent (and very impressive) look at the climate-change contributions of Amazon Web Services brings this into stark relief: AWS was predicted (in 2015) to use almost as much energy in 2016 as the entire residential sector of Seattle - 7.2 million megawatt-hours serving up data, producing 3.3 million tons of carbon dioxide. Converting land - to produce solar and wind power in server-heavy places like Virginia - is only going to offset one fifth of this pollution. By now, cloud hosting and services take up 2% of the USA’s total energy consumption.

These numbers scare me, but I lack the immediate capacity to translate them into meaningful comparisons. I don’t know how much energy my employer’s digital collections consume, and I don’t know what nationwide numbers might look like. I do think that sooner or later we’ll need a benchmark that measures financial cost, energy consumption, and pollution effects compared to access and download rates to decide whether or not to put stuff online, and whether or not to restrict access. I absolutely envision a future where digital collections are unavailable overnight and on weekends because the traffic doesn’t justify the cost of keeping the server on. Maybe the energy usage is negligible - but we don’t have the numbers to be sure, and at some point the carbon emissions will outweigh those pennies of actual consumption.

I have been thinking about digital consumption in heritage since I started hearing the dreaded phrase “blockchain in libraries.” A library school recently got a tidy grant to research the possible uses of consensus algorithms for libraries - decentralized linked metadata is an obvious one, provenance information for digital assets is another. Past that, I’d be hard-pressed to imagine any kind of “distributed authority” system that would benefit from power-chugging servers meaninglessly generating blocks to hold our not-all-that-often-used data or to arbiter our not-all-that-sensitive transactions. (We literally have TDRs for that.)

Most importantly, blockchain mining (or, the most popular algorithm anyways) is a huge energy sink, inspiring assholes everywhere to set up giant server farms in the Arctic just to keep their systems cooled, and hacking networked devices to utilize unoccupied memory. Bitcoin alone is a network of such consumptive scale that it out-emissions Ireland. Already. Renewable energy is an absolute, non-negotiable prerequisite to using blockchain technology for anything at all, let alone for anything as superfluous as library checkouts. Sorry, blockchain-in-libraries enthusiasts, but this is just another digital evangelism without ethical grounding. Moving fast and breaking stuff shouldn’t mean actually destroying the planet.

**

Digital Consumption For Archives is going to be a much larger and more exhaustive research project, perhaps not up to me to complete. A nice first step would be for things like the National Heritage Digitization Strategy to conceive of what total storage and bandwidth would be required were Canadian heritage organizations actually to get all these materials online. Or for organizations to start doing environmental audits, to make transparent their power consumption and where that power comes from, and to ask their contractors and vendors to be transparent as well. To always choose the sustainable option when it presents itself, to include sustainability in RFPs, and to provide the aforementioned flexibility to get your employees’ cars off the road one day a week.

However we do it, what we talk about when we talk about digital heritage needs to include the costs to our power grid and to our planet, and the costs if we can be smart enough to offset or reduce those emissions to zero.

[lostsolsdestinyblog]

Examining Bungie's approach to Multiplayer/Matchmaking in 2018

July 15, 2018

This is a topic I've spoken on many times in the past, but I've never really gone super in-depth into why and how I feel we are where we are today with the way we are grouped and matchmade in Destiny. I think there is so much tied into the way we socialize in-game that affects the entire game (PvP and PvE) that it's time to at least shine a light on and discuss this.

Part One: A Brief History

There was a time once when the online console gaming experience was dramatically different than what we know today. Back in the infancy of Xbox Live, gaming online was a completely new and unknown experience for the majority of the players entering into that world and community. We had grown up playing in arcades, plucking down quarters at the bottom of the screens to claim our place in line on solo cabinets and then more and more playing alongside friends as multiplayer cabinets became more and more popular. When home consoles started creeping into living rooms across the world with early pioneers Atari, Colecovision and Intellivision, we discovered the joy of escaping to these virtual worlds we could drop into whenever we wanted and not be beholden to a pocket full of quarters. Then Nintendo kicked down the doors with the original NES. I can still remember the sheer disbelief of being able to play Super Mario at home and the wonder of actually having time to really learn and actually beat the game. The first system I bought for myself was the original Playstation. I will never forget sitting in a movie theater as the previews came on and instead of another BIG SUMMER BLOCKBUSTER; a trailer for FFVII came on and just floored the entire theater. To this day I could not begin to tell you what movie we saw that day, but I'm willing to bet I was not the only one to own a Playstation and that game within a few days after. The next real industry game changer was GoldenEye. Games like Doom had paved the way for first person shooters, but GoldenEye was the first game that all my friends and I had to play to where living rooms would fill up to take turns playing 4 player split-screen PvP (in our case on a 13'' screen!). It was a definitive moment in my life the first time I played that game, but while GoldenEye brought the FPS genre to the forefront of the industry, Halo was about to revolutionize the multiplayer experience. Suddenly players weren't just sitting taking turns on one console on split-screen and the ''wouldn't it be cool if teams could have their own screen'' was a reality and LAN parties became the way to get together in groups and play. Where 4 player PvP was a revelation in the N64 era, 16 players all battling on Blood Gulch was completely mind-blowing. I can still remember posts from Bungie from those days of the devs bringing in fans and the pictures of them all playing together in LAN parties at the studio. The problem was that it wasn't easy dragging consoles, cables and controllers all over to actually get those epic games going. Then Xbox Live happened and gaming hit in my opinion, a critical juncture in what the industry would become. I was not on the original Xbox Live for a long time, I joined a few months before the version we know today went live with the release of the 360, but I do remember it was very Wild West. There was this vast new landscape to explore with the ability to suddenly play other gamers from all over the world in Halo 2 and this is where we first got a real glimpse of some of the negative aspects of what that could mean with trash talking and insane cheating with players able to mod the game and destroy opponents. Xbox Live version 2.0 sought to smooth those rough edges with player reputations and systems to report positive and negative behavior and with the launch of the 360 we saw maybe the finest days online console gaming will ever see. Today when we get online to play, we generally don't expect to talk to anyone and everyone we meet in game. We are in private parties or games just don't opt players into that experience much like Destiny and D2. Things were different back then, you went online with a headset on and that was the experience; to play with, interact with and converse with these strangers from around the country and world as we played these games together and for a brief time it not only worked, it flourished and was as close to gaming Utopia as I've ever seen. Unfortunately like everything else in this world, nothing gold can stay. And here is where I think Bungie unwittingly played a huge role in altering the landscape of what online social interaction would be and to an extent even as they had just helped usher in this new age, they almost immediately cut the legs out from under it as well. This isn't a new revelation and it's something that I questioned on Bungie forums a decade ago, but it is something that has had a tremendous impact on not only how we as players game online, but it's directly impacted many of the challenges that Bungie face today in creating this game and universe. When the 360 went live, Halo 3 wouldn't be ready for another year yet and in that space there also weren't a ton of games actually available to play particularly at launch. I was first in line at my local game shop to get my 360 and came home with Perfect Dark, CoD 2 and Project Gotham Racing. The later 2, I barely touched, but Perfect Dark was everything I'd dreamed Xbox Live would be. I've written many posts on these forums referencing that game, particularly in regards to matchmaking and how the principals of PD could be applied to enable systems to match for raids and more in Destiny. We actually got a very watered down version of that for guided games, but to take a moment for those who don't know how it worked in PD, it went like this. When you played PvP in PD you could set matches to play with just a couple friends privately and fill in opponents with bots or you could allocate spaces for the game to bring in matchmade opponents. The games could actually be up to 25 vs 25 and map sizes would change depending how many players there were. The person who started the game and created the lobby was obviously the host and beyond determining the number of actual players, those allowed to mm in, map selection, weapon loadouts, scoring, number of bots and bot personalities, etc. These lobbies were static just like we see with private match lobbies in Destiny and D2 and players who were matchmade in would stay in that lobby until they left, were kicked or everyone quit playing. This approach to matchmaking and online multiplayer was then picked up by Epic Games and implemented for the original Gears of War; and maybe there were games that had done this on PC or elsewhere, but these early 360 games that adopted that philosophy ended up creating communities that were incredibly social and did more to build friends lists than anything I've seen since. The magic of the system was in keeping players grouped together from match to match. Yes there would be players coming and going within that, but it created a situation and environment where players had time to acclimate to each other and feel each other out. There were so many times a player would join a lobby and not be talking for game after game but then eventually they would get comfortable with the group and pick up on the personalities who were talking and eventually feel trusting enough to open up and join in the chatter. And yes there were also players who would try to troll, but they'd just get kicked and when being a dick meant not getting to stay in lobbies and actually play ever, it went a long way to tempering that kind of behavior.

Part 2: Bungie and the impact of their matchmaking philosophy

Then Halo 3 happened. Halo 3 was an incredible game. That cannot be debated, but it also was a turning point for that new world of social gaming and one I think that set it firmly down the wrong path. Halo 2 was basically the OG Xbox Live. It built the house and birthed a revolution, but it was the Wild West and it could be ugly. Xbox Live 2.0 seemed to learn from that experience and along with the early games I've noted, looked like it was built around where Halo 2 had gotten right as well as where it had missed the mark. Halo 3 unfortunately dragged it right back by releasing with essentially the same matchmaking system Bungie had used for Halo 2. It was the Wild West again and it got really ugly really fast. Were Perfect Dark and Gears of War had created lobby systems that cultivated being social and getting to know the people you were playing with and against, Halo 3 went back to disposable teammates. Players matched just like we still do to this day and when a match was over it was on to a new group of opponents and you most likely weren't going to see the other team again. This created an environment of endless shit-talking and hate speech as players knew there were no consequences and they'd never see each other again. Suddenly what was a positive of teams being able to converse before and after a match became some of the most toxic environments you could witness in gaming. And it's not to say it was everyone or that there weren't still great games, teams, opponents and friends made, but the lowest common denominators were empowered by the throw-away nature of play and like we see in the world all around us today, it doesn't take much for a small group of bad people to ruin life for everyone else. I think Bungie is an incredible company and I think it's done as much positive things for the industry as anyone, but this is something that I feel it got wrong and whether they'd want to admit it or not, helped pave the way for a lot of what is wrong with gaming culture to this day and again completely shaped the gaming experience we see today with D2 and the challenges it faces. And I do think Bungie understands that to a degree because we saw Destiny release with no ways to communicate in-game with teammates or opponents without going to party chat and even when chat options were added, they were opt-in and by that time players had been conditioned to just not talk or want to subject themselves to what a Halo 3 type experience could be. Unfortunately for Bungie and Destiny, while recognizing the game couldn't have the toxic chat environment of the past, the game (and company) didn't really figure out how it had gotten there or how to approach multiplayer differently to not end up in the same place. Instead it shipped with the same disposable opponent matchmaking systems for multiplayer and just removed all chat, thus taking away not only the chance of running into toxic players, but also of making friends and meeting the cool players as well. And it's seeped into the core of so much that plagues the game today. The decision to go with that same old approach to matchmaking has directly led to the problems the game has had with balance complaints (weapons, abilities, team compositions, and any other), populations in game modes, having to shift away from set modes like Clash and Control and to random playlists, the split to quickplay and competitive modes, the current online rage over solo players vs fireteams, all the issues with not having matchmaking for raids or Nightfalls, and even modes like Escalation Protocol and the issues its faced... It all can be traced back to Halo 2, the system that was built there and the lack of real evolution or change to the core philosophy over the last 15 years and the reason I'm writing all this is to ask the question, is it time to rethink everything? What could Destiny be if the system were different? I've posed this before going back to March of 2015 in regards to this game and so I'll pose this thought again. There are systems already in this game that are very much what existed in games like PD and Gears. Both Guided Games and private matches heavily use components of those types of matchmaking systems. What would Destiny look like if that was all rolled together and those private lobbies also became where we went to play everyone? A player can choose to host just like a private match now, but from there they can choose to allocate spots for the game to fill in players through matchmaking. The hosts can choose game mode, set rules for scoring, time, loadouts, etc. They have the ability to kick players (or initiate a vote to kick). This would immediately solve issues of random game modes, playlists, fireteams vs solo, constantly trying to match connection, skill etc after every single game. It would cultivate an environment for players to actually stay together and learn to talk and be social; and for those who have trouble talking in groups or social disorders it could give the opportunity to find where they fit in. And it's not just PvP. These lobbies could be set-up to be able to do PvE content as well with raids, Nightfalls, Strikes, and events like EP. Sure there would have to be some safety functions built in like easy ways to report, mute or block, and having the ability to kick disabled once a boss fight starts and for (x) duration after a clear to prevent griefing, but there is so much win in it and it solves so many problems that this game has and it's all right there. The other thing with this is that the current PvP matchmaking system could still be used (though maybe tweaked and still improved socially) for events like Iron Banner and Trials to really make them the open tournaments they're meant to be and I think they could flourish from having players going into those modes from a base multiplayer/matchmaking experience that encourages learning to talk, communicate and develop relationships and friendships over the course multiple games or even hours playing together in a group. I don't know that this could happen and I know that there are probably a million other factors that I not being a developer am not aware of, but I think it is a conversation worth having in this age and culture of anti-social behavior and the subsequent isolating of groups of gamers. Thank you.