Valve’s SteamVR hardware heads to GDC

Valve — the company behind Portal, Team Fortress 2 and the game distribution hub Steam — will show off its own virtual reality hardware, SteamVR, at GDC 2015 next week. This comes despite Valve’s previous insistence that it had no plans to release any such hardware. We had our doubts about that anyway, after Valve held virtual reality demos at Steam Dev Days in January 2014. Developers who got their hands on the company’s early VR experiments were impressed by their holodeck-levels of immersion. Beam us up, Valve.

Valve will offer demonstrations of SteamVR at GDC, along with a look at the new, improved Steam Controller and new living room devices. These are all part of the Steam Machines initiative, Valve’s plan to compete with gaming consoles by licensing its own Linux-based operating system, SteamOS, to PC manufacturers, meant to be sold in a package with the Steam Controller. Valve expects Steam Machines to launch this year.

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Source: Steam

How a Gamergate target is fighting online harassment

There’s a wariness to the way that Alex Lifschitz and Depression Quest creator Zoe Quinn comport themselves over Skype, as though they’ve grown accustomed to expecting assault. Their voices are clipped, their laughter strained. They’re careful about everything, vigilant against even the slightest risk of being hacked.

Which makes sense. Caution is a natural response when you’re in the crosshairs of the Internet.

Lifschitz and Quinn are the co-founders of Crash Override, a grassroots volunteer effort that aims to provide support to those suffering from online harassment. It’s not the first of its kind; organizations like Stay Safe Online and Working To Halt Online Abuse have long labored to cultivate a safer Internet. But Crash Override is trying to offer a little more. “One of the big things that separates our network from others is that we like to say it’s ‘for survivors by survivors.’” Lifschitz explains.

Quinn, in particular, is what many would consider a survivor of online harassment. About six months ago, an ex-partner of hers published a series of vitriolic blog posts alleging sexual infidelities. The diatribe, overflowing with screencapped Facebook conversations, was the catalyst for an avalanche of personal attacks from readers who believed that Quinn had slept with a journalist to secure positive coverage for her game.

“It’s for survivors by survivors.”

This supposed breach of ethics gave way to the so-called Quinnspiracy Theory: that Quinn used sex and pity to manipulate the industry. As weeks passed, the accusations continued to mount. Quinn was implicated with a litany of questionable acts, including sabotaging a game jam led by The Fine Young Capitalists. The situation eventually came to a head when actor Adam Baldwin created the #Gamergate hashtag, providing an identity for the growing movement.

Though ostensibly about ethics in games journalism, Gamergate has also been linked to various incidents of online harassment, including doxxing (having one’s private information researched and disseminated), SWATing (the act of inciting an emergency response to false situations) and death threats, among other examples. Quinn says she personally experienced many of these kinds of attacks.

But where others might reciprocate aggression in kind, Lifschitz and Quinn are taking a more constructive approach with Crash Override. “There’s a massive cultural issue where people sort of think that the internet is this magic alternate dimension where your actions don’t matter,” Quinn says. “When really, it’s sort of like tech needs to have its Soylent Green moment and go ‘The internets is people!’”

Educating the public about the dangers of online harassment is only part of what Crash Override does. Built in response to their own experiences, the organization specializes in assisting others with what the two describe as “coordinated online mob harassment.” Such attacks are often planned on anonymous bulletin boards like 4chan and 8chan, which have become infamous as staging grounds for Internet “raids” — large-scale assaults on websites, forums or targeted people. Quinn says that Crash Override is also beginning to assist with “smaller scale things,” such as individual cyberstalking and harassment.

There’s no cut-and-dried methodology to the work they do. Quinn says no two cases of harassment are the same, adding that the “correct thing to do” can vary wildly depending on things like the person’s ethnicity, gender, who their aggressors are, and the nature of their digital footprints — the kind of personal data they’ve made available on the Internet. Not surprising, considering the panoply of forms such abuse can take, and how minorities are treated online. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center, for example, shows that young women are more likely to experience “severe” forms of abuse — stalking, threats of physical assault and sexual harassment — than men.

According to Quinn, some of these situations can be safely waited out. However, a huge portion requires active monitoring and safety measures to be taken on the part of the victim. “What we try to offer people is some best practices, advice, and just lending an ear if they’d like to talk because very few people understand what it means to go through this kind of harassment.”

She adds that the network can also help provide some basic diagnostic assistance for those attempting to divine weak points in their computer setup, along with information on what kind of service hacks to expect and how a person might be compromised. For highly technical matters and more specialized assistance, Crash Override has an extended network of experts conversant in fields like white hat hacking, PR, law enforcement and counseling — most, if not all, of whom were former clients.

The original group, Lifschitz says, came about when a handful of those affected by Gamergate banded together to contend with their harassment. “There wasn’t much of of a formal procedure other than ‘Hey, we really helped each other out, wanna join up?’” Lifschitz adds that there are still people who they reach out to who are “not formalized agents of the network.”

But Crash Override is not a catch-all solution, says Quinn. “There are some people that we can’t really do much for in terms of, like, if they have a very specific need. “So, in those cases we like to try and refer them to someone on our network who has prior experience with their specific situation.”

Similarly, Quinn warns that Crash Override can’t really assist unauthorized third parties looking to act on someone else’s behalf. (“We don’t like to step in unless we’re explicitly working with the victims themselves,” she says.) Still, there’s a middle ground. The organization has a Tumblr cataloging general advice and other assorted public service announcements. Thus far, it includes an explanation on how to avoid being doxxed and how to secure private accounts. More specialized guides are in the works, including one on how to talk about mob harassment. “Everybody can benefit from having better online security,” Quinn says. “Everybody can benefit from scrubbing themselves from information brokers.”

Although the pair hope to help as many people as possible, local cyber laws can be a factor. “There are some countries that take this more seriously than others,” Lifschitz says. “Sweden and Norway have more secure laws about that kind of thing, or pay more attention to the issue. The UK has stricter cyber crime laws.” Lifschitz also said that SWATing is mainly an issue in North America.

The two are reserved about discussing future plans for Crash Override. Lifschitz says it’s “all very organic.” He describes a similar approach to funding, too. Right now, the organization is being funded by the pair themselves, but that’s subject to change. “Currently, we’re doing just fine on our own,” Quinn states, stressing that she can’t currently see a situation where the group would need to accept outside funding. “If circumstances dictate that we could be more effective and help more people in ways that we’re good at while still making sure that all of our agents are safe and anonymous and everything’s still working on our end, we’ll go in that direction.”

While Crash Override has been positively received by the general media, it’s also being met with angry opposition. Lifschitz says that over 700 hacking attempts have been attempted across their sites, with Crash Override itself enduring 184 of them. Nonetheless, the pair continue to persist, determined to give back to the community that they love.

Lifschitz says that over 700 hacking attempts have been attempted across their sites, with Crash Override itself enduring 184 of them.

“Being able to survive as we have is something we recognize that not everyone will be able to do.” Lifschitz says. “We have to give back somehow as best we can, and to people who might not be able to have access to the same resources we do.”

“We get so many people contacting us every day saying just, like, ‘thank you for being there. It also takes a bit of a personal toll, but it’s something that we know we’re in for the long haul, and we’ve always been prepared for that.”

If you’d like to get involved with Crash Override or have been the victim of online harassment, you can learn more at the organization’s website.

[Image: Hackers movie (background) / Crash Override Network (logo); Zoe Quinn 2014 via Wikimedia; Crash Override Network (gif)

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Twitch is holding a game-broadcasting convention this September

Want to meet up with your favorite game broadcasters? Of course you do, and with Twitch’s inaugural convention, aptly dubbed “TwitchCon,” later this year you totally can. There aren’t a ton of details yet, but it takes place in San Francisco from Friday September 25th to Saturday the 26th. The live-streaming giant promises ways to elevate your broadcasting game and chances to meet your followers (or maybe even your idols) too, which makes us think it’s going to be more along the lines of VidCon or PlayList Live than something like the Penny Arcade Expo. The very notion of a Twitch convention likely wouldn’t be possible without that massive influx of cash from Amazon last year, and this is a sign of how far online video’s grown (especially game-focused stuff) lately. What’s more, this is indicative of just how popular Twitch has become as a platform in a relatively short period of time. Planning on attending? Hit the comments and let us know.

[Image credit: camknows/Flickr]

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Jerry Lawson, a self-taught engineer, gave us video game cartridges

To celebrate Black History Month, Engadget is running a series of profiles honoring African-American pioneers in the world of science and technology. Today we take a look at the life and work of Annie Easley.

If you’ve got fond memories of blowing into video game cartridges, you’ve got Gerald “Jerry” Lawson to thank. As the head of engineering and marketing for Fairchild Semiconductor’s gaming outfit in the mid-’70s, Lawson developed the first home gaming console that utilized interchangeable cartridges, the Fairchild Channel F. That system never saw the heights of popularity of consoles from Atari, Nintendo and Sega, but it was a significant step forward for the entire gaming industry. Prior to the Channel F, games like Pong were built directly into their hardware — there was no swapping them out to play something else — and few believed that you could even give a console a microprocessor of its own. Lawson, who passed away at 70 from diabetes complications in 2011, was the first major African-American figure in the game industry. And, just like the tech world today, it still isn’t as diverse as it should be.

Only 2 percent of game developers in 2005 were African-American, according to a study by the International Game Developer Association (who also honored Lawson as a game pioneer a month before his death). But things were even worse during Lawson’s time: For his first five years at Fairchild, the company and its executives actually thought he was Indian. He was also one of two black members of the Homebrew Computing Club, a group that famously included Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and other Silicon Valley pioneers.

Born on December 1, 1940, Lawson grew up in a Queens, New York, housing project, where his predilection for engineering was on display early on. His father, a longshoreman with a fondness for science, gave him unique gifts like an Irish mail, a handcar typically used by railroad workers. More often than not, Lawson ended up being the only kid that knew how to use them. His mother arranged it so that he could attend a well-regarded elementary school in another part of the city (i.e., one that was predominantly white), and she stayed actively involved in his education throughout his childhood (so much so that she became the president of the PTA). Lawson also credits his first grade teacher as a major inspiration.

“I had a picture of George Washington Carver [a black inventor who was born into slavery] on the wall next to my desk,” he told Vintage Computing in an interview. “And she said, ‘This could be you.’ I mean, I can still remember that picture, still remember where it was.”

It’s hard to deny Lawson’s geek cred: He ran an amateur radio station out of his housing project after building a ham radio on his own (complete with an antenna hanging out of his window and a radio license). He also spent his teenage years repairing electronics all over the city. Most impressively, he taught himself most of what he knew about engineering. Lawson attended Queens College and the City College of New York before working at several firms, including Grumman Electric and Federal Aircraft. After scoring a job with Kaiser Electronics, which focused on military technology, Lawson moved to Silicon Valley.

It’s hard to fathom today, but trying to make removable game cartridges was an incredibly new concept in the ’70s. Lawson and his team at Fairchild had no clue how the cartridges would fare after being plugged in and out multiple times — remember, nobody had ever done it before. The company also caught the attention of the FCC, as it was aiming to deliver the first consumer device with its own microprocessor. Lawson’s description of meeting the agency’s grueling requirements reads like engineering comedy: Fairchild had to encase the console’s motherboard in aluminum; it put a metal chute over the cartridge adapter to keep in radiation; and every cartridge it produced had to be approved by the FCC. He was also justifiably apoplectic when, years later, Texas Instruments successfully lobbied to change the laws that determined the FCC’s harsh requirements.

As for how race affected his job prospects during the ’60s and ’70s, Lawson told Vintage Computing it “could be both a plus and a minus.” If he did well, it seemed as if he did twice as well, since any accomplishment received instant notoriety. But the idea of a 6-foot-6-inch black man working as an engineer was still surprising to many people. Lawson noted that some people reacted with “total shock” when they saw him for the first time.

Lawson also had plenty of insightful advice for young black men and women who were interested in science and engineering careers:

First of all, get them to consider it [technical careers] in the first place. That’s key. Even considering the thing. They need to understand that they’re in a land by themselves. Don’t look for your buddies to be helpful, because they won’t be. You’ve gotta step away from the crowd and go do your own thing. You find a ground; cover it; it’s brand-new; you’re on your own — you’re an explorer. That’s about what it’s going to be like. Explore new vistas, new avenues, new ways — not relying on everyone else’s way to tell you which way to go, and how to go, and what you should be doing.

“The whole reason I did games was because people said, ‘You can’t do it,’” Lawson told the San Jose Mercury News in an interview. “I’m one of the guys, if you tell me I can’t do something, I’ll turn around and do it.”

[Photo credits: The Estate of Jerry Lawson (Jerry Lawson); Doug Kline/Flickr (Fairchild Channel F system)]

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Epic Games head believes VR will ‘change the world’

Tim Sweeney knows the video game industry. He started Epic Games, the studio behind huge franchises like Gears of War, Unreal Tournament, and Infinity Blade, and the widely used game development software, Unreal Engine. He’s hailed as a founding father of the modern gaming industry, having started Epic Games in 1991 while still in college, and he’s a technical genius with keen business sense. So when he says virtual reality is going to change the world, we’re listening.

“There are some amazing things happening in VR right now, and a lot of them haven’t seen the light of day publicly at all,” Sweeney said during a phone interview this week. “But next year is going to just be a watershed time for VR.”

It’s about time, too — Oculus Rift, the headset that spawned the tech world’s current infatuation with virtual reality, was first announced in 2012 and has yet to launch a final product or even establish a release date. In 2014, Facebook purchased Oculus VR for $2 billion, a move that did nothing to dampen industry anticipation. Other major companies have jumped aboard the virtual reality train since 2012, including Samsung, Valve, Google, Microsoft and Sony.

At Sundance this year, virtual reality stole the show with a flight simulator, a 360-degree monster film and a bunch of new movie, documentary and video game announcements.

Regarding the potential impact of virtual reality, Sweeney sees the landscape clearly:

“It’s going to change the world. The hardware is going to double in quality every few years for another decade, to the point where, 10 years from now, it’s going to be hard to tell the difference between virtual reality and the real world.”

Sweeney predicts that this next year will be crucial for virtual reality, and he’s not the only one.

At CES in January, Oculus Product VP Nate Mitchell told Engadget that 2015 would be a “big year for VR.” Michael Abrash, VR Lead at Valve (the company behind Half-Life, Portal and game-distribution service Steam), had the following prediction in January 2014: “A great VR system at a consumer price in 2015 is more than just possible — it’s sitting there waiting to happen. And it will happen, if not in 2015, then soon after.”

With all of these people pointing to the same timeline, we’re ready for a huge year in VR — or at least a release date, ahem, Oculus.

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