Nobody Move or the Angry Birds Get It!

From the Guardian

As the home of titles such as Angry Birds and Clash of Clans, Finland is where many ambitious game developers – not just Finns – go to make their mark in the industry. Where I work, at Rovio, nearly 40 different nationalities are represented within our workforce alone.

As there are 28 members of the EU, 12 are outside, so have no problem bringing workers in

But whatever the case, a crucial part of the magic is the openness of Finland itself. While Rovio recruits from all over the world, the lion’s share of those nearly 40 different nationalities are in fact European. Thanks to Finland’s membership of the European Union, Rovio and all Finnish companies are able to very easily, with a minimum of bureaucratic hassle, draw upon on a high-quality pool of talent from all across Europe. In our offices, Finns work in high-performance teams side by side with Poles, Germans, French, Swedes, Estonians and Britons, to name a few. Finland’s openness to Europe has led to the cosmopolitan clustering of artists, coders, engineers and other game professionals that we see in the bars and clubs of Helsinki today. Rovio is undoubtedly richer for it.

Well, we'd expect the lion's share to be from Europe. People living in Sweden, Latvia and Estonia aren't going to spend as much on trains home or feel so out of place as someone from China.

So as the CEO of an entertainment company delivering globally competitive products, to me Europe means business. Europe means talent. Europe means that a company based in a small country such as Finland has a fighting chance of assembling a world-class team that is able to compete head-to-head against the largest companies anywhere.

I worked in a team in Switzerland with someone from France, Portugal, Spain, America and a few Britons. Switzerland isn't in the EU.

What would happen, then, if the UK were to vote to leave the European family? From my point of view, at least, it would create a challenging and disorienting situation. We would be obliged to review our business arrangements regarding the UK, a worrying and potentially costly prospect. And if the law were to suddenly force us to restrict British talent from future hiring considerations, that would be a sad loss both for Britain and for Finland. That’s my opinion as a businesswoman, anyway.

Jesus Christ. Look, I frequently work with Indians working in the UK on visas. At the last site I was at, we had 2 South Africans on site and outsourced work to the Phillipines and China.

As a Finn, as a person, I would also be saddened that, despite being surrounded by the technology and the means to reduce barriers between peoples like never before, yet another wall would seem to be going up, when in this century, in these thrilling times, they should be going down.

And that's why I'm voting out. The barriers of distance and time matter less and less, which is why our dependence on EU trade is falling in favour of more global trade.

It's also worth noting here (something that the article doesn't mention) that Rovio received EU funding worth €25m from the European Investment Bank in 2014.

Game theory - tee hee.

From the slightly longer print version of an article, which is actually about Grexit, in City AM:

One of the insights of game theory is that it is possible for both sides to win...*

Nicola Sturgeon and David Cameron have manoeuvred themselves into a lucrative strategy of co-operation. The game began during the election campaign. The SNP needed to destroy Labour in Scotland. They trumpeted their intention to help Ed Miliband get into Downing Street. The Conservatives seized on this and used the SNP bogeyman to frighten the voters in marginal seats in England.

The game goes on. Cameron needs to make some concessions to Sturgeon so that she can boast about them to the Scottish electorate. But the SNP also needs to maintain a set of grievances, which is the party's raison d'être. Neither side actually wants to redress them, so that both continue to gain and keep Labour out. Practical politicians are often much better game-players than so-called expert theorists.

* If they can gang together to do over a third party. If there's no third party, this is called 'compromise' or 'saving face'.

Easter Opening Times

Just going to throw this out there for debate...

Generally, I'm against bank and public holidays because they're a classic case of Bastiat's broken window fallacy - that you get a "free" day off, when in reality, someone has to pay for that and it's going to be the employee, so giving people a public holiday means either that someone gets less money or more realistically that they take a day off at a time when they'd rather not and creates uneven demand for roads, beaches, zoos with all sorts of bad effects.

But I do think that there's something useful about Xmas Day and Boxing Day in that it's a time when families get together, most people participate in it, and so they don't have to muck around booking time off as you have it by default. Two days means one day with his family, one day with hers.

When it comes to Easter I don't think it has that for most people, though. Where Xmas has become a time of merriment, a time for family and pushed out nearly all the Christian aspect and become universal, Easter really is more something for the Christians, who represent a rather small percentage of the population. Today is just Sunday for me - bacon sandwiches, roast dinner with the family, play Minecraft with the kids, watch The Man in the White Suit. And for most of my extended family, the same is true. It's just like any other Sunday, except I can't go and buy some plants for the garden.

"Children's exercise policy is child cruelty"

From the BBC:

The national policy to get UK children to do more exercise amounts to mass "child cruelty", the British Journal of Electronic Games Retailers says.

An editorial in the magazine says successive governments have implemented a comprehensive national policy of forcing children to undertake physical activities which most find physically and emotionally painful, not to mention pointless.

By contrast, a sedentary lifestyle in front of a computer or TV screen hones hand to eye coordination, improves reaction times and helps children to bond closely with their friends and classmates by taking part in multi-player games online, it argues...

Co-author Dr Richard Weiler, a consultant in sport and exercise medicine at University College London and club doctor at West Ham football club said:

"You don't need to have been in my job for long to realise that sport is pretty much a guarantee of long term and irreversible damage to the body.

"Which is why animals left to their own devices don't play much sport.

"There has been a persistent failure from this government and former governments to meet children's basic physical and psychological needs."

"Grand Theft Auto fan is stabbed, hit with a brick and robbed by characters from game"

From The Daily Mail:

A 23-year-old man was hit with a brick, stabbed and robbed by characters from the newly released Grand Theft Auto computer game in a bizarre revenge attack after buying it at a London supermarket.

The man was attacked as he walked home from the Asda store in Colindale, north London, shortly after buying a copy of the game following its midnight release.

His attackers include a pedestrian whom the man planned to repeatedly run over in level 1, a prostitute whom the man had raped in level 2 of the previous version and three hooded characters who have to be sprayed with machine gun bullets in order to complete the game.

He is said to be in a stable condition in hospital following the incident which happened at around 1.20am. Surgeons reported that these were the most serious games-related injuries they had seen since an 11-year old suffered third degree burns after crashing in the pit lane in playing Formula 1 2013.

A Scotland Yard spokesman said: "A 23-year-old man was shopping, then on his way back home he was hit with a brick and stabbed. He was robbed of items he had bought from a nearby Asda supermarket including a copy of Grand Theft Auto.

"Crimes like this have been on the increase since characters from GTA III set fire to a Sony warehouse during the London disturbances in 2011."

Michael Owen has a very selective memory

From The Daily Express:

Former Liverpool, Newcastle and United star Michael Owen [is] worried about [English football]...

“You couldn't get on this pitch out here when I was a kid,” he says, “You would have to get here at six in the morning to use a goalmouth.

"Every single person was playing football and if you couldn't get a goal you would have to stick a jumper down. Now the computers and the iPhones are winning the battle.”

Yes, bloody kids today, eh? All stuck inside playing console games, like, er, Michael Owen's World League Soccer 99, or maybe they were inspired to buy a Nintendo Wii when they saw that advert featuring Michael Owen and Ian Wright?

McDonald's Top Trumps

Here's a fun game for two or more players (one to ask the questions, the others to answer) while whiling away the time at Mickey D's. If you turn over the paper placemats, they have a list of every item on the menu, with columns showing how much energy (in kcals), protein, fat, carbohydrate, salt etc (in grams) is in each. Printed in grey six-point type, of course, so it's not a game for the faint hearted short sighted.

For example, choosing "Energy" as the category, the questions might be which option has more kcal's:

A. A portion of Flora or a portion of strawberry jam?

B. Sausage and egg McMuffin or Double Bacon & Egg McMuffin?

C. Ice cream cone with Flake or strawberry sundae?

Click and highlight to reveal answers:

A. Flora - 55 kcals; strawberry jam - 50.

B. Sausage and egg McMuffin - 420; Double Bacon & Egg McMuffin - 395.

C. Ice cream cone with Flake - 195; strawberry sundae - 300.

Bonus points to the first person to find a menu item which contains nuts, according to the relevant column in the "Allergen Information" section.

Picking losers

The original Picking Losers 'blog seems to have gone to sleep, but there are two articles in today's FT that bring this all back to life.

In the first, the nuclear industry is calling for hidden subsidies (cut price access to waste storage facilities) and in t'other the games industry is calling for tax breaks to prevent programmers relocating to Canada (where they get "30 to 40 per cent of their wage bill refunded ... while employees are offered income tax holidays for up to five years").

Call me old-fashioned, but I am happy to pay market value for my electricity, however generated, and I don't buy games anyway. But I am buggered if I, as a taxpayer, should subsidise a French state-owned enterprise or other people's hobbies.