Gaming and Culture

San Francisco Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum throws a pitch during a motion-capture session for the 2K Sports video game, 'Major League Baseball 2K9'. Lincecum is the cover athlete for the game and the 2008 National League Cy Young award winner.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

NOVATO, Calif.--We're about to see Tim Lincecum, the 2008 National League Cy Young award-winning pitcher, go deep.

"He's going to hit a home run, which is the first time in his life he's ever done that, including Little League," said Johnathan Rivera, an associate producer for 2K Sports, who was standing near the pitcher, explaining what he was about to do.

"Thanks," Lincecum said sarcastically.

The San Francisco Giants pitcher was here, at 2K Sports' motion-capture studio on Tuesday, because he's the cover athlete for the publisher's forthcoming Major League Baseball 2K9 game, which is slated to be released in the spring, just before next year's season begins.

And now, after about an hour of throwing all kinds of pitches for the mo-cap cameras, he's got a bat in his hands and, according to the script, it's time for the long ball.

Lincecum prepares for the mo-cap session. His suit is covered in reflective markers used to create a skeletal image of the subject's movement.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

Of course, he's not swinging at real pitching, but he takes his swing, and it looks good. It's possible to imagine the ball soaring off Lincecum's bat and clearing the fences, even though he's a pitcher by profession.

For me, this was my second trip to 2K's mo-cap facility, after visiting in May for a similar session in which pro hockey star Rick Nash was filmed for NHL 2K9. But I'm actually a baseball fan and could pick out Lincecum from the crowd, whereas Nash had been an all-new face for me.

Lincecum, however, is tiny, at least as far as pro athletes go. If you didn't know which one he was, you would not have been able to tell he was at the top of his sport.

But once he was covered in reflective markers and began throwing pitches in front of the mo-cap cameras, there was little doubt. The kid--he's 24 years old--has a scary smooth pitching motion and throws heat (see the video below).

To be sure, much of what went on here today was familiar to me, having been at the Nash mo-cap session. But according to several of the people involved in putting this session together, shooting mo-cap of baseball presents specific challenges that other sports don't.

I'll explain all of that in a full story I'll post tomorrow, along with a photo gallery. So stay tuned for that.

Over the last several years, the so-called "serious games" movement has picked up a lot of steam.

Among the many things this encompasses is the use of games in education, health care, and the military.

But perhaps nowhere are serious games having a greater impact than in the business world, an arena always searching for new tools to improve efficiency and keep employees and customers engaged.

In Changing the Game, David Edery and Ethan Mollick argue that games can be one of the most effective tools for improving business.

(Credit: FT Press)

With this phenomenon having gained a critical velocity, the time has come for a book chronicling it, and David Edery and Ethan Mollick have answered the call.

With their new book, Changing the Game, Edery, the worldwide games portfolio manager for Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade, and Mollick, a consultant at MIT's Sloan School of Management, have pulled together what is likely the most comprehensive examination of the use of games in business. I recently interviewed the pair by telephone; scroll down to hear the audio, and please excuse the occasional static.

The book's first few chapters are introductions, first to the various genres of video games, and then to the concepts of advertising in video games, and "advergames," games created for companies as a way to promote their brands and attract consumers to them.

Much of these introductory chapters go over ground well-covered in the media over the last few years, though they do build an important base for the rest of the book.

Where Changing the Game really earns its keep is when Edery and Mollick delve into the idea of how companies, large and small, can use games as a way to recruit, integrate, and maintain their employees.

An example that I like is Rise of the Shadow Specters, a game designed for use by new Sun Microsystems workers, especially those who mainly telecommute, as a way to learn the culture and business units of the mammoth technology company.

All told, Rise of the Shadow Specters cost Sun $150,000 to develop, but the payoff for the company has been huge, Edery and Mollick write.

Thousands of Sun employees played the game, and its lessons apparently took: the authors write that even months after playing it, they could still recall much of the information it imparted.

And while not every business will have the resources or the will to turn to a video game to educate their employees, the authors make a clear argument that the benefits are certainly there for those enterprises that do follow Sun's example.

There are many other areas, of course, where businesses can use games to improve their bottom line, and Edery and Mollick do examine many of them in detail.

They look, for example, at the idea of alternate-reality games, a type of multimedia experience that a growing number of companies have used to build excitement and mystique around new products. For example, Microsoft commissioned an ARG known as I Love Bees, which crafted a large narrative related to, but not directly about, the story line of its Halo 2.

But games can also be used, the authors argue, to motivate employees, user communities and just about anyone that a business would want to engage. All it takes is an understanding of what the purpose is, as well as the skills and know-how to design the kind of game that meets the needs of the question at hand.

It is about time that a book like this came along, and with their backgrounds, Edery and Mollick seem like the right team to have written it. As the economy sours and companies look for every edge they can find, they might just discover that games, in one form or another, give them a way to stay afloat while less enlightened competitors sink.

AUDIO

Game-changing business
Changing the Game authors David Edery and Ethan Mollick talk to CNET News reporter Daniel Terdiman about why games can help companies develop more efficient employees and build stronger brands.
Download mp3 (8.19MB)

National Amusements, a media and entertainment company controlled by Sumner Redstone, is expected to announce on Monday that it sold its majority stake in Midway Games, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Redstone reportedly sold the 87 percent stake to investor Mark Thomas, in exchange for $100,000 and the assumption of $70 million in secured and unsecured debt.

The transaction, while expected to result in a loss in excess of $800 million for Redstone, is expected to yield a substantial tax break for the media and entertainment investor, according to the Journal.

And for Redstone, that could mean one fewer headache as National Amusements, reportedly in a separate transaction, is busy renegotiating a restructuring of its $1.6 billion in debt with its banks and note holders.

Redstone is under great pressure, as the first portion of the debt, a $800 million bank loan, is due this month, according to a report in the New York Post.

National also holds controlling stakes in CBS, publisher of CNET News, and Viacom.

NASA has made its series of video updates on the progress of the Ares rocket program available on Apple's iTunes service.

(Credit: NASA)

NASA said Wednesday that it has made available a series of video updates on the Ares rocket program available to the public via iTunes.

There are 10 videos--which have been produced quarterly since August 2006--in the series. NASA's move Wednesday means that all 10 will be viewable on Apple's service immediately, with forthcoming progress reports to be added as they are finished.

The Ares rocket is the space agency's next-generation launch vehicle, intended to carry the Orion crew capsule--and its astronauts--to the moon, as well as to the International Space Station.

The first space station launch is scheduled for 2015.

According to NASA, the video reports have been intended as a way for the agency to disseminate updates on the development of the Ares project. NASA also sees the series as a way to save, for posterity, the record of "the historical work being completed on America's newest fleet of spacecraft for future generations."

Each video is between 10 and 15 minutes long, and over the course of the series have touched on everything from the Ares program's conception to the most recent testing.

For some pilots, flying solo doesn't cut it. Pilots like Christian Goetze and Wolfgang Polak spend much of their time in the air in formation flights, with two or more planes flying in close proximity to each other. This is an aesthetically attractive, if demanding, form of flying. Here, Polak flies just feet away from Goetze's plane in the skies over California.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

I don't have a lot of rules, but here's a new one: when someone offers you the chance to take part in a formation flight, jump at the opportunity.

For me, that chance came a couple of weeks ago when Christian Goetze, a co-worker of my wife's, offered to take either or both of us up with him on one of two flights he was about to do.

To be perfectly frank, I didn't really even understand exactly what formation flying was, despite, for example, watching the Blue Angels flying from their home base in Florida last summer, but there's no way I was going to not find out.

Unfortunately, I missed out on being part of a five-plane flight a few days later, but on November 19, I climbed into Goetze's 1991 Grumman Tiger for my formation flight education.

Taking off out of the small airport in San Carlos, Calif., we flew straight up into a thick bank of fog. Our destination? The skies over Livermore, Calif., where, I was told, we'd be making a rendezvous with a friend of Goetze's, his fellow formation flier, Wolfgang Polak.

Sure enough, not long after ascending out of the thick fog and into a stunning early morning blue sky, a tiny speck on the horizon gradually got bigger, and bigger, until Polak, and his 1977 Grumman Tiger, suddenly swooped around us in a big turn, and then approached slowly on our right side, eventually ending up so close to us that I could see his headset and the little round ball covering the microphone.

Which, I can tell you, is a rather sobering sight if you've not experienced such a thing before.

Luckily for me, these two pilots seemed like old pros at this flying mere feet away from each other, and on top of it, it was a gorgeous day up high in the sky where we were, with little turbulence to make for a bumpy flight, and therefore, little reason for the two pilots not to keep their planes so close to each other that they could almost have handed each other notes.

Ostensibly, the purpose of the flight was so that Goetze could take his plane in for its annual servicing. Having Polak bring his plane along too meant that Goetze had a ride back to his home airport in San Carlos, and heck, since they had some time to kill on the way to Columbia--and a newbie passenger onboard--why not play around a little?

"You want to do some maneuvering on the way?" Asked Polak over the radio.

"Sure, why not," Goetze replied.

To start off with, Polak, in the lead, and now on our left side and a little above us, began doing a series of hard turns. Goetze, as the trail plane, aligned his rudder with Polak's wing tip, a system, Goetze explained, in which geometry keeps his plane automatically aligned with Polak's.

I wasn't sure I understood that exactly, but sure enough, for every move Polak made, Goetze followed suit, and we were mirroring him almost exactly.

For a few minutes, with Polak leading, and Goetze and I trailing, we climbed, dropped, turned, and dipped. I was furiously taking pictures, focusing entirely on Polak's plane, and before long, totally losing track of the ground. The sensation of gravity kicking in was extreme, but at that point, I really couldn't have told you whether we were going up, going down, flying flat, or even where the ground was.

During some maneuvers, the only way to tell what we were doing, relative to the ground, was to see how the horizon was changing. Here, Polak, in the lead plane, makes a sharp right turn.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

Then, Polak gave some sort of hand signal to Goetze, they agreed over the radio that there would be a count of five, and suddenly, Polak did a sharp turn away from us, disappearing into the sky and out of our sight.

"One, two, three, four, five," Goetze counted, and then, "hold on," and he turned his own plane hard, a thrilling and somewhat unexpected move that pushed me back against my seat.

At first, we couldn't find Polak in the wide open sky, but then we saw him. We flew back toward each other, and then were alongside again. This time, we were in the lead.

"OK, now we'll do a break and rejoin," Goetze tells me. "OK, bye bye."

He turns hard on the wheel, and the plane jerked hard to the left and away from Polak. And seconds later, Polak turned hard as well, and followed us.

And we repeated what happened before when Polak had been in the lead: A couple minutes of trying to spot each other and then a slow and steady rejoining.

As Polak flew alongside and a little behind, I asked Goetze how close he was. He explained that there were probably three to five feet between the nose of Polak's plane and the tail of ours, and maybe five feet of lateral separation. The planes don't overlap, he said.

I asked why not.

"It's too dangerous," Goetze told me. "We're not the Blue Angels. We don't have ejection seats."

Six Blue Angels F-18s flying together in perfect formation during a practice performance at their home base in Pensacola, Fla.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

A few minutes later, I noticed that, trailing us, Polak wasn't looking ahead at all. Rather, he was looking intently at us.

Goetze explained that the trailing pilot always looks at the leader, looking for anything that he might have to respond to.

"If I flew into a mountain," Goetze said, "he wouldn't notice."

Next up, Goetze starts doing what he calls "lazy-eights."

Essentially, this was a series of "S" turns, where he would gently pull the plane up as he began left turns, and out the window, I could see that Polak was mirroring our moves precisely.

The lazy-eights are so smooth and I'm focusing so much on the sky in front of me that it's hard to tell that we're doing them. Only the constantly changing horizon in front of us lets me know that we're not flying straight ahead.

Clearly, Polak is the more experienced pilot because as we pull out of one of the turns, Goetze got on the radio and said to Polak, "You're just disgustingly good at this."

"Sorry about that," Polak responded.

Goetze explained to me that in formation flying, the basic structure is the two-plane "element," in which one is the leader and the other the follower.

In what's called "acute" flying, the follower stays slightly behind and below, at a 45-degree angle.

"If he's too far behind, you can't get the 45-degree angle," Goetze said.

And as for why the follower doesn't fly even with the leader, but a little below, he added, "If I was to gently turn, he would have no reaction time, and I would run into him."

That, even I can understand, would not be a good thing.

Next up, Goetze told me about the two kinds of what he called "overhead breaks."

These are maneuvers in which both planes in an element--or more planes if there are more than two--turn simultaneously.

First, there's the "welded wing" turn, in which the follow plane climbs or descends into the turn with the lead pilot's wing. This means that as the leader turns left, the follow planes will climb above as they turn, while if the leader turns right, the follow planes will drop down as they turn.

An "echelon" turn, on the other hand, means that all the planes in a formation turn as one, keeping on the same level, or row.

"We only do (echelon turns) away from people," Goetze told me. "The Blue Angels will do echelon turns into each other, because they're crazy."

We were now approaching Columbia, and Goetze began to get ready to land.

But once he dealt with a few administrative details, he explained how formations work if there are, say, four planes, or two elements.

He held out his hand, with his fingers together and the thumb tucked away, demonstrating that the middle finger in such a formation would represent the lead plane in the lead element, with the index finger being the following plane in the lead element. The other two fingers, then, represent the second element.

With this general configuration in mind, he explained that there are all kinds of maneuvers possible in formation flying, but that they always do them in pairs. If there happened to be just three planes, the third would be its own element, he said, and would pretend to have a wing man.

By now, it was time to land, and so we broke formation so that our plane could hit the ground first, with Polak following close behind.

Goetze said they would have landed in formation--the runway in Columbia was probably wide enough--but they didn't want to scare me.

Nintendo is hoping that strong sales of its Wii console are evidence that it, at least, is immune to the economic downturn. Others agree that the video game industry as a whole will suffer less than other technology sectors.

(Credit: GameSpot)

It would be tempting for those in the video game business to take some recent news--for instance, that October sales were through the roof, or that the latest World of Warcraft expansion broke the all-time record for single-day PC game sales--as proof that their industry may be immune from the deep despair confronting the global economy.

And indeed, that seems to be exactly what many people in the industry are choosing to believe: that in rough times, people always spend money on entertainment, and that as entertainment goes, video game software and hardware offer much higher value than other options. In other words, the theory goes, the video game industry is recession-proof.

But people holding to that notion may yet want to consider getting their resumes ready or holding off on buying that Porsche, since all optimism aside, the future may not be so bright. It's true that sales may be up in the short term, and look good for the holidays, but Wall Street doesn't appear to be impressed.

Still, many in the industry contacted for this article say they think the sector could in fact turn out to be one of the few winners as general economic conditions get darker and darker.

Activision Blizzard's 'Wrath of the Lich King,' the second expansion to 'World of Warcraft,' set a single-day record for PC game sales. Some see that as evidence that the game industry can withstand the recession.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

"Nobody's got a crystal ball, but we remain cautiously optimistic" about the future, said David Dennis, Microsoft's corporate Xbox 360 Group PR manager. "All the signs we see point to continued strength for the industry and for the Xbox."

For example, Dennis explained, a recent survey conducted by the National Research Center indicated that 46 percent of consumers expect to purchase a video game system of some kind on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. At the same time, he said that NPD Group, a leading retail analyst firm, reported that video games came in at the bottom of a list of what kinds of products they expect to cut back on in the coming months.

NPD has other data as well showing signs of strength in the business. In its report for October, the firm revealed that for the video game industry as a whole, sales were up 18 percent for the month, to $1.31 billion from $1.12 billion a year earlier. Software was up 35 percent in October, from $514.5 million in 2007 to $696.8 million in 2008, while hardware had a more modest 5 percent rise in the same period, from $470.5 million to $494.8 million.

And on November 13, its first day on the market, Blizzard Entertainment's Wrath of the Lich King, the second expansion to the mega-hit, World of Warcraft, broke the all-time record for one-day sales for a PC game, moving 2.8 million units of the $40 upgrade and surpassing the record of 2.4 million units set in 2007 by The Burning Crusade, the first WoW expansion.

The rationale for projected growth, even in the face of a looming and deep recession, is simple.

"There are a couple of reasons," said Ron Meiners, director of community for the Hollywood Interactive Group. "One is the traditional value of entertainment during tough economic times. Like the great fantastic musicals in the 30s. Movies did great, because they took people's mind off of the troubles they were facing. (And) video games have great value as entertainment. The number of hours of solid entertainment that comes from a video game purchase is much greater than a movie, for example, for very comparable cost."

At the same time, Meiners added, video games today offer consumers a much higher degree of interactivity and engagement.

"They're not just passive," he said. "It's a much more involving activity, which helps make them more valuable."

The industry is also blessed with a steady flow of blockbuster game franchises that seem primed to deliver huge paydays: Fable, Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Grand Theft Auto and many others.

Trouble on Wall Street
But the publishers of those games, and even a leading retailer, have seen their stock prices hammered in recent weeks, beyond even what has happened in the general market crash.

While the Dow's value dropped 28.16 percent from September 2 through November 17, and Nasdaq dropped 36.91 percent in the same time frame, six game industry companies (Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard, Take Two, THQ, Gamestop and Nintendo) saw their share prices fall an average of 52.53 percent.

And EA, the world's largest publisher of video games, was not on the better-performing side of that group. Its stock fell 60.1 percent, from $48.97 to $19.30 in that time period.

EA did not respond to a request for comment for this story, but in its most recent quarterly earnings release, in which it reported a net loss of $310 million--compared with a net loss of $195 million during the same quarter a year earlier--CEO John Riccitiello did his best to sound optimistic.

"Considering the slowdown at retail we've seen in October, we are cautious in the short term," Riccitiello said. Longer term, we are very bullish on the game sector overall and on EA in particular. The industry is growing double-digits on the strength of three new game consoles and increases in the number of homes with broadband Internet connections."

For its part, Nintendo, which saw its stock drop 36.77 percent between September 2 and November 17--almost exactly the same drop as the Nasdaq--also is making the point of putting on a brave face even as the phrase "the worse economic crisis since the Great Depression" becomes a cliche.

"We do believe that the continued popularity of our products, even during these tough economic times," said Denise Kaigler, the vice president of corporate affairs for Nintendo America, "are evidence that consumers are judging us as a good value and a great way to engage in social interaction."

In October, according to NPD, Nintendo sold 803,000 Wiis, up from 617,000 in September and 453,000 in August, and the company has said it plans to increase supply of the console by 50 percent over last year in order to ensure that consumers have an easier time getting a hold of one.

This would suggest, of course, that Nintendo isn't being disingenuous when it says that it has a strong value proposition that is likely to attract consumers this holiday season and perhaps beyond.

Microsoft, too, looks like it has some evidence to back up its reasoning for, as Dennis put it, being "cautiously optimistic."

In October, Microsoft sold 371,000 Xbox 360s, up from 347,000 in September and 195,000 in August.

But these sales numbers all come from before the economic crisis really kicked in. Now, job losses are mounting daily, the stock market is plunging--though it has risen considerably since Friday--and the government is faced with a more difficult job of pulling us back from collapse.

The pricing game
And for those who think that the video game industry can keep up record sales numbers even in the face of such a bleak atmosphere, some have sobering news.

"Video gaming is not immune," said Gartner analyst Van Baker. "It's certainly been robust over the last couple of years, and it's gotten much more popular, and a much broader install base of users, but they're certainly not immune, especially if it's a deep recession."

Baker acknowledged that video game hardware and software is likely to perform better than, say, plasma TVs, but still, he said, in an environment where jobs are scarce and people are losing their homes, "$50 (for a game) is $50."

And while Baker suggested that Nintendo and Microsoft may be able to continue moving the Wii and the Xbox, respectively due to those consoles' low prices ($249 for the Wii and $199 for the lowest-priced Xbox), he said Sony might have a harder time.

"Sony is the one that stands to get hurt the most," Baker said, "because they've got the most expensive" console. The lowest-priced PlayStation 3 costs $399.

The front lines of the video game wars, of course, are at retail, and that is one place to look for clues as to what lies ahead.

According to Colin Sebastian, an analyst with Lazard Capital Markets, leading retailer Gamestop could represent a sign that, indeed, the video game industry can weather the coming economic storm, despite its stock dropping 49.87 percent between September 2 and November 17.

In an alert Sebastian sent out last week by email, he recommended buying Gamestop's stock, citing not only strong October sales, but also sales growth of 20.5 percent during the first two weeks of November compared to last year.

Driving that growth, Sebastian wrote, was quick sales of games like Wrath of the Lich King, Gears of War 2, from Epic Games and the latest edition of Call of Duty, from Activision.

'Gears of War 2', Epic Games' new release, is expected to bolster the Xbox 360 platform, as well as game retailers.

(Credit: Epic Games)

But Sebastian's optimism about bellweathers like Gamestop aside, there are those who see deep structural flaws in the mainstream video game industry's business model, flaws that could wreak havoc down the line, even if things stay solid in the short term.

To Corey Bridges, a co-founder of the virtual world platform developer The Multiverse Network, the problems facing the industry have more to do with how its biggest publishers design and distribute their games.

"I do think that the video game industry is going to do reasonably well in this time of recession because video games are a pretty damned efficient use of time," said Bridges. "That said, the...industry has some other problems that it has been ignoring for awhile and that are creeping up on it."

Essentially, Bridges explained, he thinks that the dominance of giant publishers like EA and their general reliance on physical, in-the-box, units, can't hold up. Instead, he said, new tools, ubiquitous broadband and hungry independent developers are going to all combine to eat away at the continued supremacy of the $60 big-name title. And that could spell big trouble for the industry.

Still, he said, that kind of shake-out could take a few more years.

"I think the global macroeconomic climate will adjust itself before the video game industry hits the upcoming chaos," Bridges said.

In the short term, then, there is ample evidence that the video game business may well prove to be stronger than most others. No one is going to do better than companies producing cheap liquor, of course, but in the technology world, it may be tough to identify a sector that could better persevere than video games.

Even Baker, who said it's unlikely the industry will avoid getting hit by the recession, thinks there's room for optimism.

"We'll have to wait and see how consumers respond," Bake said, "but I don't think it's unreasonable to see some growth (though) it's certainly not going to be double-digit."

Fans of the planet Jupiter have something new to get excited about.

On Monday, NASA announced that it is planning to launch a mission, titled Juno, to conduct a large-scale survey of our solar system's biggest planet.

NASA said Monday that it intends to pursue a mission, entitled Juno, to do an in-depth survey of Jupiter. The mission is expected to launch in 2011 and reach Jupiter in 2016.

(Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

According to NASA, the new mission will involve an unmanned spacecraft that is planned for an August 2011 launch onboard an Atlas rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla. It is expected that the rocket will reach its destination, orbit around Jupiter, in 2016.

Once there, the plan is for the spacecraft to orbit Jupiter 32 times over the course of a year at a distance of around 3,000 miles above the planet's cloud tops.

NASA said this would be the first solar-powered spacecraft expected to be able to perform its duties so far from the sun. Jupiter is more than four times farther away from the sun as Earth, a total of around 400 million miles.

The spacecraft would feature an advanced camera as well as a series of scientific instruments designed to inspect Jupiter's surface. Among the things NASA hopes the mission will discover or explore are the existence of an ice-rock core, the planet's strong magnetic field, and its aurora borealis.

NASA did not say how much the Juno mission is expected to cost, nor whether the project is already fully funded, and a call for comment wasn't immediately returned.

The Army is investing $50 million into video combat training games and gaming systems over the next five years, in a move to prepare soldiers for battle.

Soldiers, via the video games, will face ambushes and roadside bomb attacks while traveling in convoys, along with a host of other situations that mimic battle under a number of conditions and terrain, according to a report in Stars and Stripes.

The Army's Peo-Stri and gaming unit will monitor the industry, seeking out commercial games and systems it can use for low-cost training, the report noted.

Darwars Ambush is one of the games currently used by the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard, and Homeland Defense.

The Army is looking for games that will allow it to alter the terrain and situations, as well as review the performance of its soldiers, the report stated.

Computer games, or modified versions, have long been used as military training aids as well as tools to recruit prospective candidates to the armed forces.

Now, if only these games could be used to actually fight our wars.

The zeppelin, Eureka, sits on the tarmac at Moffett Field in Mountain View, Calif. The airship was dedicated Friday at an event celebrating the 75h anniversary of Moffett Field.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif.--NASA celebrated the 75th anniversary of this iconic airfield and research center on Friday by dedicating a brand-new zeppelin from a private company called Airship Ventures.

The zeppelin NT ("new technology"), which is one of just three currently functioning zeppelins that exist in the world, and the biggest, at 246 feet, was named "Eureka," a name that relates to the fact that the ship is based in California, as well as the fact that it is "rooted in scientific principles," said Brian Bell, a co-founder of Airship Ventures, the ship's owner, minutes before he revealed the new name.

At an event here to celebrate the two milestones, Alexandra Bell, also a co-founder of Airship Ventures, spoke of the experience of getting the zeppelin program off the ground. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), as well as Pete Worden, director of the NASA Ames Research Center, attended the event.

Airship Ventures is the first company in the United States to offer public access to zeppelins. And the company will be carrying paying passengers around the Bay Area, as well as helping NASA carry out scientific research.

The co-founders of Airship Ventures pull back the cover on the name of their brand-new zeppelin, the largest in the world, at the event Friday. The zeppelin is called the Eureka.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

Brian Bell explained that Airship Ventures had a naming contest and received more than 1,500 submissions, five of which turned out to be "Eureka," a name that those involved in the company had already been thinking about anyway.

But Alexandra Bell said that the Eureka may not end up being Airship Ventures' only zeppelin (See video below of the first flight of the Eureka after its dedication).

"We decided we just have to get a couple more," she said, "so we can name them with some of the other wonderful names" we got.

While the Eureka is the largest currently functioning zeppelin, the airships from the golden age of zeppelins were much, much larger. The Hindenburg and the Graf Zeppelin were about 800 feet long, and the Macon, which was based at Moffat for a couple of years in the 1930s, was 785 feet long.

A scene from the forthcoming remake of 'The Day the Earth Stood Still,' starring Keanu Reeves as Klaatu. The remake portrays Klaatu as less benevolent than in the original, 1951 film.

(Credit: Twentieth-Century Fox)

In its bid for our ticket-buying dollars, Hollywood has long sought to reach into our pockets by giving us films that appeal to our current sense of hopefulness or fearfulness.

Over the years, one of the most reliable mechanisms for doing that has been the alien, the evil, destructive invaders hell-bent on laying waste to everything we hold dear (The War of the Worlds, say) or the inquisitive visitors curious to make our acquaintance and see what they can learn from us and our experience (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, maybe).

And to many, the extent to which these film aliens have been friend or foe has had a great deal to do with our general emotional state of mind.

"I think that it goes in waves," said Yair Landau, the former president of Sony Pictures Digital. "There was a wave of benign aliens around E.T. and Starman...Then there was a wave of, 'They're out to destroy us' aliens, like in Indepdence Day and the remake of War of the Worlds. It depends on whether we're looking for fear or reassurance as a society."

In 1951, Twentieth-Century Fox released director Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still. In that Cold War-era film, we meet an alien, Klaatu, who has come to express, in the most soothing terms possible, that if we proceed with our nuclear weapons proliferation and are seen by the galactic consortium Klaatu represents as presenting a threat beyond our own atmosphere, we will be destroyed.

Even as he delivers this mortal threat, Klaatu, played by Michael Rennie, comes across as sympathetic, even benevolent, as he really, really wants to give us humans some say in what happens to us. He seems really to care, as expressed by his budding friendship (would it have become romance?) with Helen Benson, played by Patricia Neal, and the urgency with which he strives to deliver--even in the face of a belligerent U.S. military--his message that we have some say in our fate.

Next month, Twentieth-Century Fox will release a remake of the film, this time directed by Scott Derrickson and starring Keanu Reeves as Klaatu.

This time around, Klaatu is here to tell us that the galactic consortium has had it with humans' mistreatment of our own planet, and he has come to explain that, effectively, his colleagues have taken the side of the Earth over the humans. Large-scale explosions and destruction ensue.

Why would these beings from outer space care so much about the health of the third rock from the sun? That's not entirely clear, said Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute who worked for a time as a scientific adviser on the film.

"The (aliens) come down...trying to save the planet, but saving the planet requires them to obliterate the problem threatening the planet," Shostak said, "and in this case, that's not just SUVs and coal-fired plants."

In the 57 years between versions of The Day the Earth Stood Still, aliens covered a lot of evolutionary ground, so to speak, in how they've been portrayed. Some of that ground has had to do with the world's emotional makeup and some has had to do with what has been possible from a technological perspective.

For example, the look and feel of the aliens in a film like the remake of The War of the Worlds have almost nothing in common with those of the original. What originally had to be built using crude models and special effects is now done to exacting detail with computer graphics. And these advances put a lot of pressure on filmmakers today to keep the audience's attention with a story while those in the old days could do so much more with the novelty of on-screen aliens, no matter how rudimentary they looked.

"Anything you can conceive of can be (computer generated)," said Landau. "Just blowing stuff up, or just having an alien creature itself, is not very compelling...We're (now) able to give aliens a much higher complexity, so you can imbue them with character...Now you can make us believe almost any physical destruction you can think of and you can make us believe in any sort of 3D CGI environment. So it's all about whether you can drive compelling story and performance."

Our friends the aliens
Further, as Landau put it, the story has to fill in gaps left by the fact that people view aliens--who have long stood in for foreigners, or the "other"--as less threatening. And while that presents writing challenges to filmmakers, it also opens doors to a whole new era of stories in which aliens can more easily be presumed to be friendlier than in the past.

An example of that might be Contact, the 1997 Robert Zemeckis film in which Jodie Foster plays a scientist scanning the skies for intelligent life. Upon discovering a far-away civilization, Foster interprets messages sent to us as instructions on building a monumental transporter that will allow us to travel to the aliens' distant world. And while the film gives a nod to the inevitable military suspicions of the aliens' motives, it is the optimistic view that carries the day.

"Aliens in fiction are exaggerations of our hopes and fears about ourselves," said Mike Kuniavsky, a co-founder of the ubiquitous computing device company ThingM. "If they were genuinely alien, they wouldn't be particularly interesting because we wouldn't be able to understand them."

To Allan Lundell, a co-founder of the DigiBarn computer museum and a former editor of Byte magazine, the question of how aliens are depicted has very much to do with the financial considerations involved in how people's fears and hopes resonate at any given moment in time.

"Arnold Schwarzenegger was popular as a good Terminator, keeping us safe from the evil sentient machines and the ever-present Skynet," Lundell said. "But soon, he will be facing serious competition from a new hero, Ramona, a sentient cybernetic being hatched from the inventive mind of Ray Kurzweil, in his upcoming feature release, The Singularity is Near. Much cuter than Arnie, she saves the world from a nano grey goo attack while showing us what love beyond biology is all about."

Steven Spielberg's 'E.T.' is a case of a film in which the alien is unequivocally benevolent. Its tone, therefore, was hopeful.

(Credit: Universal Pictures)

The question here, Lundell poses, is whether an artificial intelligence construct can be considered an alien. Given that the term "alien" in this context is generally assumed to be a creature from another world, that's open to debate. But his point is a good one, as Ramona, as Lundell described her, is certainly the other.

Yet even as cybernetic others will be increasingly making their way onto the silver screen, it's almost certain that malevolent aliens of a traditional kind will also be making regular appearances, despite the fact that we, as a people, are becoming more and more comfortable around those with whom we aren't familiar.

And why?

"Aliens have a bigger role today as bad guys in film," Shostak, of the SETI Institute, said, "because once the Soviet Union collapses, who are you going to make as bad guys? You can make certain (nationalities be) bad guys, but it's a little hard because everybody's so culturally sensitive. And aliens don't have any advocacy organizations that are going to protest (outside) your theater if you make them the bad guy."

Today, it seems, Hollywood has decided to apply that approach even to well-worn stories like The Day the Earth Stood Still.

For where the Klaatu of 1951 adopted a concerned facial expression as he explained to humanity that he wanted to save us, Reeves' 2008 Klaatu seems content to dispense with us as the only way to save our planet.

And while there might be some truth to that conclusion, it's not very benevolent, at least from the humans' perspective.

Perhaps, suggested Lundell, that's because we haven't been in a very optimistic mood the last few years, an idea backed up by opinion polls showing that vast majorities of Americans, at least, think things have been going very badly. But if things begin to look up, then perhaps the benevolent alien will return in force.

"From my perspective," Lundell said, "ultimately the greatest revelation about aliens is that 'they' are 'us.' It's just that some of us don't quite know that just yet."