Nintendo sets the Alarmo | A Decade Down the Road
Nintendo's new alarm clock surprised everyone, even though the company told people all about it 10 years ago this month
Did you see that new alarm clock Nintendo announced last week?
It's amazing! A high-tech clock that can tell when you've dragged your lazy carcass out of bed and deliver a triumphant fanfare to reward you for the effort? It's just the sort of impossible-to-predict innovation people love about Nintendo!
Or it would be, if the company hadn't talked at length about it before. Take this quarterly presentation Nintendo gave to investors a decade ago where president Satoru Iwata went into detail on the company's upcoming Quality of Life sleep sensor.
"There are currently several existing ways to measure our sleep status," Iwata said. "However, even though there must potentially be significant demand to visualize sleep, there have not been any definitive products to date. We believe that this must be because devices launched so far have required consumers to make some kind of effort, which made it rather difficult to continue."
Iwata wanted to make something that didn't require any of that nasty effort consumers hate so much. He had a different vision.
Iwata wanted something non-wearable and non-contact, because such things might be distracting to people trying to sleep. This actually went against the grain because "wearables" was a trendy emerging tech sector at the time, with Apple having announced the Apple Watch just a month earlier.
He also wanted it to be "non-operating," so users wouldn't need to actually do anything considering "not everyone has a clear head when they get into or out of bed."
He had two more criteria for this sleep device: "non-waiting" and "non-installation efforts." He didn't want users to wait like they would have had to with the Wii Vitality Sensor Nintendo had prototyped but shelved years earlier, and he didn't want it to be a hassle to get up and running.
So what's different a decade down the road? Iwata originally said the sleep senor would gather data on the user's sleep, send it to the cloud and analyze it so it could "visually represent sleep and fatigue results" to users.
That feature may have been downgraded a bit (or perhaps was never particularly robust), as Fast Company describes its Records feature as akin to "an ultra-basic sleep-tracking wearable," and Nintendo's Alarmo website emphasizes that Alarmo "does not communicate any information to Nintendo."
While it's wonderful to see one of Iwata's last big projects finally see the light of day, Alarmo appears to be significantly scaled back in its ambition.
For one thing, it's being rolled out as an exclusive product available only for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers in the US and Canada (or at the Nintendo Store in New York City), with a launch for the general public to follow early next year.
For another, Iwata was telling investors a decade ago that Nintendo was "expanding the definition of platform" with smart devices like its sleep sensor.
"As with the definition of entertainment, Nintendo is willing to expand the definition of 'platform' without being bound by traditional thinking," he said.
This was a couple years into the Wii U's ill-fated lifespan and there were plenty of calls for Iwata to step down, so maybe it was just a matter of Iwata having to sell investors on something – anything – that would help turn the company around. But I'm convinced he had bigger things in mind.
Here are a few images from a patent Nintendo was granted last year that suggest the company has been exploring the idea of incorporating activity-tracker-based gameplay into Alarmo.
I don't necessarily see the appeal of gamifying one's daily activity, and lots of other products and apps already do that, but I can't help but be interested in see what Nintendo's specific spin on such a thing would look like.
Video games and the "threat from within"
In observance of the spooky season, let's recap a spine-tingling story I completely memory-holed before I started poking around for this month's column.
But first, a warning. There are no witches or werewolves here, but it will most certainly get ghoulish.
We'll start, as horror stories often do, with a rather mundane setting: a moderated discussion put on by The Atlantic Council, a US non-partisan thinktank with a focus on international affairs. (You can even watch this whole cursed thing on YouTube, if you're broken like me.)
Why does a video gaming history column care about such a thing? Because the featured speaker is Dave Anthony, director and co-writer of the first two immensely popular Call of Duty: Black Ops games, and (for some reason) the Atlantic Council's newest nonresident senior fellow focused on the evolution of conflict and warfare.
Anthony's qualifications to speak to this Very Serious Organization about "The Future of Unknown Conflict" seem to be because Black Ops 2 had a story about hackers hijacking American drones and using them to attack Los Angeles, and because Anthony had consulted with experts like a Seal Team 6 member and disgraced marine Oliver North.
"I look at the US military and government, ironically, as having some of the very same problems as what the Call of Duty franchise has," Anthony said. "We are both on top of our game. We are both the best in the world at what we do. We both have enemies who are trying to take us down at any possible opportunity. But the difference is, we know how to react to that."
Where to begin with that one? Is that really irony? Was the United States really at the top of its game in 2014? Were EA DICE, Bungie, and Respawn Entertainment really good comparisons for ISIS, al-Qaeda, and whichever adversarial nations Anthony had in mind? Did Activision really know how to react to enemies trying to take it down, considering the follow-up to Black Ops 2, Call of Duty: Ghosts, sold fewer than half the copies of its predecessor (according to VG Insights' Steam sales data), and the soon-to-launch Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare would go on to sell even less than that?
Putting those questions aside for the moment, how does Anthony suggest reacting to the various enemies looking to take America down? If you said, "Borrow a page from the Trump handbook and deploy the military within America's own borders," give yourself a pat on the back.
"I would look at the soldiers right now that we have," Anthony said. "I would look at what they’re doing on a day-to-day basis, and look at the needs we have for our internal security of this country, which is a different national security threat than it used to be. It has fundamentally changed, because the threat now, the invasion, comes from within."
Oh hey, that one's also in the Trump handbook. Must be uncomfortable when fascists keep taking your talking points.
To be fair, Anthony wasn't talking about Democrats or immigrants with that "enemy within" comment, at least not overtly. But much like Trump and his supporters, his statements were absolutely rooted in a bone-deep fear of the world, which he essentially admitted time and again throughout the session. He even wrapped up his time with a video of "potential future threats which terrifies the life out of me." It was clearly intended to scare, but like the best horror movies, it might just as easily provoke eye-rolling and laughter.
Among the clips inducing terror in Anthony were Hal 9000 from the movie 2001, Ray Kurzweil talking about the singularity, a Guy Fawkes mask, news coverage about drones that accidentally killed Good Guys instead of Bad Guys (complete with a smash zoom on the word "Robot" for maximum effect), invisibility cloaks, exoskeletons and Call-of-Duty-loading-screen-worthy aphorisms from Malcolm X, Shakespeare, and Confucious against a background of ominous and gathering clouds.
The video also pointed out a few things for which there is appropriate and rational concern, like 3D-printed firearms and technological advancements in surveillance. But whatever intellectual heft the video could have wielded was utterly offset (and then some) but the choice to set this thing to Ave Satani, the not-so-subtle theme song from The Omen.
Time and again during his presentation, Anthony talked about how scared he was.
"It could be that you have 100 of these guys who may be on our soil right now, who may even be US citizens, who could legally walk into whatever gun store they choose, buy some assault rifles, and start attacking soft targets," Anthony said.
He mentioned the 2008 Mumbai hotel attack, and said that "one of my great fears" was a similar attack happening in the US.
That fear got its own dedicated video, as Anthony wondered what would happen if terrorists attacked a number of hotels simultaneously. With all the insight, taste and decorum one might expect from a key creative on the franchise that brought us the interactive-airport-massacre-as-entertainment, Anthony set the video to Elvis Presley's "A Little Less Conversation," splicing together actual footage of the Mumbai attack with clips of the Kevin Costner comic heist movie 3000 Miles to Graceland, where a crew of crooks dressed like Elvis rob a casino during an Elvis impersonator convention.
Anthony also envisioned ISIS gunmen causing chaos in the US by repeatedly attacking schools around the country, one after another after another.
Anthony was right in that a Vegas hotel would be the site of a horrendous attack just a few years later, and schools around the US have been targeted by gunmen time and time again (which was not an impressive prediction given Anthony had seen everything from Columbine to Sandy Hook and a bit beyond at that point), but the people responsible for these shootings have not been members of foreign terrorist organizations so much as homegrown gun nuts, bigots, and nihilists.
Regardless, he had a solution. Just like many airplanes in the US have armed plain clothes air marshals, he suggested "something like a school marshal." Anthony wanted to take those soldiers he mentioned who weren't in active combat and didn't have much to do, and station them in schools – armed but not uniformed – as a way to protect kids. (The stipulation that these soldiers be plain-clothed was curious given that air marshals are supposed to be under cover, but letting Private Joker wear Abercrombie and Fitch isn't really going to help him blend in with Mrs. Manganelli's second grade class.)
If that sounds absurd to you, remember that police officers had commonly been stationed in US schools as school resource officers for over a decade by 2014, but they were perhaps novel enough that Anthony might not have seen the frequent news stories about school resource officers abusing the kids they were supposed to protect. And we also didn't yet have studies about how they lower graduation and college enrollment rates, or about how punishments in schools with those officers fell disproportionately on Black kids.
In 2014, he also would not have seen how utterly useless armed officers proved to be in stopping the 2018 Parkland shooting or the 2022 Uvalde school shooting, or how families of the victims are suing Activision Blizzard for Call of Duty's role in helping promote the gun used in the latter attack.
Even without the benefit of all this hindsight, he knew there would be pushback to the idea of putting full-time armed soldiers into roughly 100,000 public schools that exist in the US to thwart potential terror attacks.
"The public won't like it, they'll think it's a police state," Anthony said. "All of these are solvable problems."
As for how to solve that problem of doing something when the public doesn't want you to do it, he suggested using a corporate mindset.
"When we have a new product that has elements that we’re not sure how people will respond to, what do we do as a corporation? We market it, and we market it as much as we can—so that whether people like it or not, we do all the things we can to essentially brainwash people into liking it before it actually comes out."
He also later refers to this as "communicating with" and "educating" the people, which is a pretty dark way to reframe the process of circumventing their agency so you can do whatever the hell you feel like.
Obviously Anthony wasn't introducing the notion of manufacturing consent to the US government and military with his presentation. But that doesn't make it any less gross to see someone actively advocating for it.
It's also a strategy you can see the games industry employing regularly over the years as it introduced a wealth of "innovations" that their customers pushed back against, including DLC, loot boxes, mandatory always-on connections, anti-cheat rootkits, and blockchain nonsense. You can see the industry "communicating with" and "educating" developers now about generative AI and how it isn't about cutting headcount so much as it's about empowering developers to do more with less fewer co-workers.
Maybe we should be glad that Anthony is no longer pitching his ideas on security and defense to The Atlantic Council or its audience in government and military leadership, and has since returned to the comparatively lower-stakes world of video games, merely shaping the culture that maintains an unhealthy obsession with guns and a thirst for military dominance.
In 2020, Anthony co-founded Deviation Games with backing from Sony. When the studio was announced in 2021, Anthony emphasized in an interview that the team had "complete financial security for years and years to come," repeatedly talking about how they could now create "fearlessly."
Perhaps Anthony wasn't accustomed to working without fear. Deviation shut down earlier this year, its first project never having been announced.
On a side note, the audience Q&A begins with a fun "question" from Atlantic Council senior advisor Harlan Ullman, who first criticized Anthony for having too narrow a view of history and then criticized him for talking about declining casualties in warfare through Vietnam and the Iraq War, noting that he seemed to be overlooking massive casualties inflicted upon Vietnamese and Iraqi forces and civilians. Ullman was relatively polite about it and moved on to an actual question, but there's a bit of a prickly undertone to his comments.
I wonder if he just had a dim view of video game makers playing in his sandbox. After all, his official bio bills him as the creator of the "shock and awe" doctrine of military warfare, and he might have recalled Sony's PlayStation division trying to trademark "shock and awe" the day after it became a household phrase with the US invasion Iraq in 2003.
Microsoft's push for diversity
In October of 2014, Microsoft started publicizing data on the diversity of its workforce so people could track its progress over the years. So let's do that.
In 2014, 29% of its employees were women.
According to its 2023 EEO-1 report filed with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, that figure is almost 33%.
In 2014, just over 17% of its employees in leadership positions were women.
In 2023, 30% of its executives and top level managers were women.
That's progress! And if that's not enough, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella isn't telling women they shouldn't ask for raises and should instead just trust the system like he was in October of 2014.
Sure, he fought investor calls for a gender pay gap report, and he did have to overhaul how HR works after it received 118 gender discrimination complaints and determined all but one of them was unfounded. And yes, he did acquire a massive game publisher that had been rocked by lawsuits and well-documented reports alleging a deeply sexist work culture, giving the CEO responsible for that operation a fabulous parting gift unlike any seen in the industry's history. It feels like there should be a "but..." here, doesn't it?
Microsoft is also making some progress on racial diversity as well.
In 2014, 60% of Microsoft employees were white.
In 2023, white people made up about 47% of the company.
Unfortunately, the executive ranks have not diversified when it comes to race as significantly as they have on gender.
In 2013, white people accounted for 72% of leadership roles in the company. 10 years later, that's down to 67%.
Company-wide, Asians have seen the largest increase in representation in the past decade (29% to 35% of staff), while Hispanic employees were up from 5.1% to 7.9% and Black or African-American staff nearly doubled, which sounds more impressive than hearing they went from 3.5% of the company to 6.4% of the company.
I was unable to dig up the 2014 leadership numbers, but in 2023, Black or African-American employees held 4.9% of the leadership roles, Hispanic staff accounted for 3.8% of the top tier, and Asian managers made up 21%. An additional 2.5% of the leadership tier identified as two or more races.
Trip Hawkins: Pioneer. Legend. Stupid?
Trip Hawkins was an industry legend thanks to his founding of the hugely successful Electronic Arts and his founding of the "Oh wow, they were actually a going concern for more than 2o years" 3DO Company. While those credentials have always given him fame in this industry, fortune was another matter.
Hawkins had filed for bankruptcy in 2006, but in the proceedings that followed, a judge ruled he would still be on the hook for $20 million in owed taxes due to shady accounting because he hadn't bothered to rein in his extravagant lifestyle even though he knew he couldn't afford it.
Hawkins appealed, arguing that his only crime was stupidity.
OK, maybe not in court, but Ars Technica spotted him in the comments of a Forbes article a decade ago saying literally that.
"I bought a private jet because I thought it would make me more efficient in my work. That was really stupid, too." (Hawkins sold his jet in 2003 for "approximately $5 million," according to the government.) Hawkins went on to say the one thing he was guilty of was "stupidity" for trusting accountants who promised him legitimate tax shelters.
The part of this story that actually was reported 10 years ago this month was an appeals court agreeing with Hawkins in a split-decision, saying essentially that bankruptcy law, in its majestic equality, had to apply to the rich and poor alike.
One judge dissented, saying, "The majority's conclusion, in my view, creates a circuit split and turns a blind eye to the shenanigans of the rich."
This didn't entirely end the episode for Hawkins, with the appellate court kicking the matter back to the bankruptcy judge who decided he should pay the tax bill in the first place. They said it wasn't enough that Hawkins knew he was insolvent and kept spending recklessly even after declaring bankruptcy. If the judge was going to stick Hawkins with that tax bill, he had to conclude that Hawkins was spending all that money because he specifically intended to evade taxes.
With no evidence to say that was the case, the judge ruled in 2016 that Hawkins' tax bill could be discharged through bankruptcy along with the rest of his debts.
For as long as such shenanigans work and we are unable to get the rich to pay their fair share of taxes, I think the least we can do is memorialize in perpetuity – and hold up as entirely sincere – every humiliating admission of ineptitude and inadequacy that the rich are forced to make in order to dodge accountability.
It's not much, but the public should get something for its $20 million, right?
Good Call, Bad Call
BAD CALL: With the acquisition of VR headset maker Oculus in the not-too-distant past, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors in an earnings call that it was "part of a long-term bet on the future of computing."
"With Oculus we're making a long-term bet on the future of computing," Zuckerberg said. "Every 10-15 years a new major computing platform arrives, and we think virtual and augmented reality are important parts of this upcoming next platform."
Depending on whether you think smartphones or tablets were the last major new computing platform, we've already gone 15 years without something I'd consider a new major platform. VR is cool and all, but I don't think it qualifies. (Meta lost $4.5 billion on its Reality Labs VR/AR division last quarter, by the way.)
And judging by the things Big Tech has been trotting out to us as The Future, I think these people are desperately short on good ideas for what such a new platform might be.
BAD CALL: John Riccitiello was named CEO of Unity. Wait, no, don't skip to the next one, that's not the Bad Call bit.
Riccitiello did grow the company tremendously, take it public, and eventually have the stock trading at ludicrously high levels (admittedly with a pandemic assist). The company didn't turn a net profit with him at the helm and his tenure certainly didn't end well, but from the outside it's hard to say if a generic replacement CEO would have ultimately been a better choice.
The Bad Call here would be Unity's prior CEO David Helgason doing an interview to say that the negative public perception around Riccitiello was "incredibly unfair," and people in the industry who are down on Riccitiello are probably just upset that he laid off one of their friends or something trivial like that.
Maybe it's just me, but I think it's absolutely fair to think less of a person for causing repeated waves of human misery not out of any kind of necessity but because they believe it's like eating vegetables, just something a proper company does "to facilitate your better and more nutritious self."
In case you're wondering, yes that one will be going in The Bad Quote Hall of Fame as soon as the four-year waiting period is up.
GOOD CALL: Helgason went on to say "it's now my personal goal that people will remember him as the CEO of Unity rather than the ex-CEO of some big publisher."
I think Riccitiello's going to be most remembered for racking up huge losses to grow the company and then burning all the bridges with the Runtime Fee plan (which was just going to be watered down and then scrapped a year later anyway), leaving the country in utter tatters for no clear gain. Congrats on accomplishing that personal goal, David!
What Else Happened in October of 2014?
● Crimes were all the rage in games! Or maybe rage was all the crimes in games?
Anyway, a Paranautical Activity developer got the game pulled from Steam after he tweeted that he would kill Gabe Newell because the game was [checks notes...] erroneously marked as still being in Early Access after it had formally launched? A compelling argument for capital punishment, to be sure.
Meanwhile, work was disrupted at Gearbox Entertainment after police received a "credible threat" and went looking for a bomb in the company's parking lot. They didn't find anything and later said the threat might not have had anything to do with Gearbox at all. (Gearbox was not making many friends that year, suing 3D Realms in a Duke Nukem rights dispute and being sued over the studio's Aliens: Colonial Marines.)
Keep in mind, all this was happening against the background of Gamergate harassment and an August bomb threat on a flight carrying Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley, somehow tied to a coordinated DDOS attack on various online gaming services including Blizzard's Battle.net, PSN and Xbox Live.
It was an awful time to be in games. As much as there has long been an abundance of harassment in the games industry, I don't recall things being quite so dire on as many fronts as they were around this time.
● The industry was very slowly coming around to the idea that if you give influencers money to say nice things about your product, the fact that you're a paid shill should probably be made clear to viewers. Twitch and Steam both adopted official disclosure policies on sponsored content, and a controversy poppped up surrounding a Warner Bros. Shadow of Mordor promotion that gave out copies of the game to YouTubers like PewDiePie. The terms of the deal required these influencers to be exclusively positive about the game, to mention some specific things (and not mention others), and to give the firm final approval over all content before it was posted.
Naturally, the reprobates who had been screeching about "ethics in video game journalism" ignored this to instead focus on their goal of making video games the least welcoming online venue for women.
But the Federal Trade Commission was paying attention, and it took action, filing a complaint against WB over the matter some two years later. As for how that turned out, WB settled with an agreement to follow already-existing laws about disclosure and not lying about a product in ads.
I would say that was a slap on the wrist by the FTC, but that would be an insult to slaps on the wrist. I'm just glad today's FTC has a bit more teeth.
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