So far, no del.icio.us feeds here at just another meme vector. But here’s two things I found cool this weekend.
A great post by Kevin Anderson on the future of newspapers.
And a hell of sand. Have fun!
GameCamp ‘08
I spent a big chunk of yesterday sitting in Sony’s living room talking about games with interesting people.
Not a bad way to spend a Saturday.
The occasion was GameCamp London - an ‘unconference’ about games. As an event, it could have been the bastard mashup of a gaming conference and a private loft party in London’s East End, (minus the drinking and cheeky lines of coke). The venue was Sony’s 3Rooms, a plush private space full of designer couches and game consoles Sony has hidden behind steel doors somewhere near Spitalfields market.
GameCamp is organised along the principles of BarCamp: the conference is announced mere weeks before it’s supposed to happen, no one is supposed to have a big, formal presentation prepped, but everyone is supposed to talk as well as listen to the other campers. It was the first time I’d been at something like this, and the format works quite well. Informality is key.
Among other happenings, I attended a couple of really interesting discussions on ARGs.
James Wallis Levels With Us
One was by James Wallis, who asked us “ARGs - are they fucked?” He said the subject was a riff off a recent blog post:
This is the big problem I have with the state-of-the-art in ARGs: it doesn’t scale for density. The more ARGs there are, the less successful each of them will be. There is a limit to the number of ARGs that one can play or follow at the same time. Even with the low-investment ARG-alikes such as Lonelygirl and Kate Modern, where the majority of players’ involvement doesn’t go beyond watching a few minutes of video a day, there’s only so many that people will want to follow.
Basically, said James, ARGs have become more and more mainstream, and there are now too many of them around. This spoils the TINAG ethic, so ARGs will die.
I don’t entirely agree that this means ARGs are ‘fucked,’ to use the technical term. There are also way too many books and movies out there for anyone to follow them all, but the better ones still seem to find an audience. In fact, books and movies get larger audiences because they’re well-known media. ARGs are just starting on this path.
Besides, if you ask me, one of the most important things about ARGs isn’t the established form of ARG as distributed entertainment experience. Heck, even the guys who make them are starting to think that there’s a lot more to ARGs than following the pattern laid down by The Beast.
I think ARGs are important partly because they embody the concept of pervasive gaming. That is, ARGs are examples of using game dynamics to improve other activities, like collective intelligence training, telling short stories or collecting business cards. This is what Jane McGonigal was talking about in her GDC rant earlier: the power of using games to improve life.
James himself had a great example of this - right on the back of his business card. It’s a game called business card snap, and the rules are on the right (the pic gets bigger if you click on it).
Politics: The ARG
Another good discussion was led by Tassos Stevens from Shoal Media, who led us into a look at the political implications and possibilities of ARGs. (i.e. what if people start protesting inside The Lost Ring?) The discussion eventually wended its way to this idea: could you organise a political party as an ARG? Use game dynamics to animate the political process, and you get points for canvassing, campaigning, fundraising . . . you level up from drone, to officer, to minister, to - Prime Minister? It’s crazy, but it could be done . . .
Anyone who wants to brainstorm this with me - you know how to get in touch. I’ll co-GM a political party any day of the week.
As for me, I didn’t have anything intelligent to say about gaming so I lead a practical workshop on how to kill a person with a single elbow strike. The best bit was trying out our kiais on the rooftop terrace and hearing them echo off the Bishopsgate towers . . .
Many thanks to Bobby, Dan and Adrian for putting this together (and letting me come)!
Rant: Oldtimers Unbellyfeel Gaming
Right, that’s it.
I’m pissed off, honest to blog.
Recently someone I was corresponding with warned in grave fashion that video games were eating their children, that they
enhance addictive tendencies and unchecked will consume all spare time to the exclusion of any other form of play.
Here’s a medium that’s arguably more powerful than any other - a communication tool so engaging that people actually get addicted to it - and you’re saying that the medium itself is a bad thing?
Addiction is a bad thing. Doing only one thing all day, every day, is bad for you and your kids. But as long as you’ve got control of yourself (or your kids), I say better being engaged in a video game than rotting passively in front of crappy TV. At least with a game, you’re actively engaged in problem-solving.
The fact is that there are good games and bad games, just as there are good books and bad books, good TV and bad TV, good films and bad films. No one would dismiss books as a medium just because they’d found their kid reading a Harlequin Romance.
And yet, critics of gaming do this all the time, for a whole range of reasons, real and imagined, often without ever playing the games they are criticising. Well, it’s too late for that. Ultimately this is a demographic issue, as Richard Bartle pointed out in his acerbic but ultimately truthful column in the Guardian recently.
Orwell could boil Bartle’s rant down to three words of Newspeak: oldtimers unbellyfeel gaming.
And that’s more than a little frustrating for someone like me.
A child who spends every spare moment lost in books is called ’studious’, not ‘addicted’. A kid who spends days kicking a ball around is called a ‘dedicated athlete’. But kids who spend their free time creatively engaging in digital culture - gaming, updating wikipedia articles, blogging or whatever - are often considered maladjusted and dismissed as geeks.
Well, geeks like this guy, this guy and these guys are changing our lives - our entire civilization, in fact - deeply and irrevocably because they engaged in digital culture instead of dissipating their spare cognitive energy watching TV soaps.
Clay Shirky wrote a great post about this on his blog. I heartily recommend it.
Now I need a drink.
UPDATE: The discussion continues after the jump!
Web 2.0 - All about game.
Some interesting headlines coming out of Web 2.0 in SF this week.
You can turn just about anything into a game. Game Design in a broad sense is just the idea that you can structure any user experience in ways that inherently encourage participation. Fundamentally, a game is just an incentive system. You can incorporate game design into almost any activity.
Social networking is a game - it taps into our natural social-primate urge to express our identity and accumulate friends. The social-primate game is one that we play all the time (and online social networks let us do it in a way that advertisers can tap into).
Blogging is a game, too.
There are a few rules that your experience has to have if it’s going to take advantage of game structure. Raph Koster talked about this at the Web 2.0 expo last year. Here’s his list of game features that can make any experience game-like:
- Preparation. The user must be able to prepare for the experience in many ways - to practise.
- A play space. There must be a gamespace, which can be as limited as a tic-tac-toe grid, as abstract as your friends network on Facebook, or as limitless as the TINAG reality-wide playing field of an ARG.
- A solid core mechanic. In Facebook, it’s ‘Communicate to Accumulate Friends’. In Halo, it’s ‘Aim and Time your Movements to Shoot the Enemy’. In blogging, it’s ‘Write and Link to Contribute to the Conversation’. In chess, it’s ‘Move Pieces to Capture the King’. It’s all about the verbs.
- A range of challenges. Any experience where you do exactly the same thing over and over tires quickly. There has to be variety.
- A range of abilities required to solve challenges. Users have to be able to do things more than one way and still succeed.
- Skill required to solve challenges. You have to be able to get better at the experience if you devote more time.
- Feedback. Users have to have some way of knowing how well they’re doing.
- Failure cost. If you don’t succeed, you have to lose something - even if it’s just time.
UPDATE: Ian Bogost has a good article on games in advertising in the Guardian today.
Bartleized
Richard Bartle is one of the Elders of the Univesrse when it comes to Game Design.
He had a good rant in the Guardian the other day. I can’t believe I haven’t blogged about it before. But there you go . . .
I’m talking to you, you self-righteous politicians and newspaper columnists, you relics who beat on computer games: you’ve already lost. Enjoy your carping while you can, because tomorrow you’re gone.
Is Gaming Melting our Brains?
In a recent article, Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield (right) has voiced some pretty significant concerns about video games. With their explosive growth into mainstream culture, video games are taking up more and more of our collective brain cycles. What effect will this have on our species? Quite a profound one, she suggests. I agree - but I think her conclusions beyond that are bunk.
The Baroness Professor is pretty heavy duty. She’s the sort of person you listen to when she has something to say. Greenfield claims that the brains of today’s youth are headed for a drastic alteration:
Given the time young people spend gazing into screens, small and large – reckoned to be from six to nine hours daily – she believes the minds of the younger generation are developing differently from those of previous generations. “The brain,” she says, “has plasticity: it is exquisitely malleable, and a significant alteration in our environment and behaviour has consequences.”
I agree wholeheartedly. I spend the majority of my awake time staring into a screen. Given that you’re reading this, I’ll wager the same is true for you, too. There’s no way that this lifestyle is not affecting our minds.
So we agree that gaming and electronic culture in general is going to affect us all significantly. But what will those effects be? The Baroness Professor enumerates:
[Greenfield] sets out a catalogue of repercussions: the substitution of virtual experience for real encounters; the impact of spoon-fed menu options as opposed to free-ranging inquiry; a decline in linguistic and visual imagination; an atrophy of creativity; contracted, brutalised text-messaging, lacking the verbs and conditional structures essential for complex thinking.
OK, one at a time here:
1. The substitution of virtual experience for real encounters. The thing a lot of people seem to miss when they’re talking about games, and the internet in general, is that Information Technology is communication technology. It’s all about connecting people. Games are no exception. Games are interactive, unlike the other media that used to take up most of our time, books and video (cinema or TV). What’s more, most games throughout history have been multiplayer games, and video games are no different. Think about it - solitaire is a rare exception. People have always gotten together to play together. Why are World of Warcraft, Second Life and Habbo Hotel so popular? Because you connect with other people and do things together. The Wii’s phenomenal success is due to this. Look at their advertising:
What do you see here? People. Playing together. The technology is almost not in the picture.
The Wii is popular because it enables connections between people. Other games are similar connectors. I have frequently played Medieval Total War online with my brother, who lives in a different city - time spent together that we otherwise would never have. In a world where many people lead isolated, alienated lives, a technology that allows them to play together - even via avatars, at a distance - is extremely valuable. In fact, it’s worth cash money. That’s why Nintendo is winning the console wars.
2. The impact of spoon-fed menu options as opposed to free-ranging inquiry. Greenfield clearly needs to play more video games. If she did, she’d know that games do not spoon-feed people anything. Games are all about learning by doing. What we call “fun” in games is actually the process of acquiring an intuitive understanding of how a given (game) system functions. (More on this here.) You try, you fail, you try something different, you fail, you try again - success! A little dopamine hit reinforces the behaviour you’ve just practiced, and you’re on to the next challenge. There’s nothing spoon-fed about the way people learn things in video games.
Let’s compare games (and the internet, for that matter) with book learning. When reading a book, you take in facts and ideas in exactly the order the author sets them out. What’s more, everyone else reading the same book gets the same message, in the same order. Interactive media like the net and games allow everyone to dig for their own intellectual gold, in their own way. Sounds like free-ranging inquiry to me.
3. A decline in linguistic and visual imagination; an atrophy of creativity. I submit exhibit ‘A’: this blog post. It took a bit of time and effort to put it together. I’d argue it took a little linguistic imagination and creativity, too. Millions of posts like this one are saturating the noosphere with a profusion of ideas unlike anything the world has ever seen.
I also present exhibit ‘B’:
This amusing clip is the fruit of someone’s creativity. It’s not great film or great art, but it’s someone’s interesting idea that we have now shared. There’s plenty more where it came from: ten hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. In the past, the opportunity for this kind of public expression was limited to those few with money and connections. Now, anyone can express themselves on a world stage - and millions are taking the opportunity to do so, every day - every minute. How, then, has imagination and creativity declined?
4. Contracted, brutalised text-messaging, lacking the verbs and conditional structures essential for complex thinking. Looks like there’s plenty of grammar and syntax around, thank you very much. There’s just a lot more writing out there. In the past, only educated types with access to copy editors and story editors would ever publish anything. Now, anyone with a keyboard writes to the whole world. Of course, people on average pay less attention to grammar - they’re too busy getting their message out. I’m not going to send a text message in iambic pentameter to tell my mate that I’m waiting in the car!
Little by little, electronic communication is changing the rules of all our languages. Just like writing must have changed the rules, back when it was introduced. Trouble is, we have no evidence of pre-writing grammar because . . . it wasn’t written down. Languages evolve. It’s a fact. But complex thinking isn’t going anywhere - it’s too much of a competitive evolutionary advantage, especially in our complex world.
What I find really amazing in Greenfield’s opinions is her idea of how young people are meant to attain unique and enriched identities:
Through focused conversation, nursery rhyme repetition, recitation and rote learning, of reading and writing interspersed with bouts of physical activity in the real world, where there are first-hand and unique adventures to provide a personal narrative, personalised neuronal connections. This is education as we have known it.
A focused conversation is exactly what this blog is. Reading and writing have exploded with the advent of the internet (see above). The physical activity is everyone’s responsibility - but repetition of nursery rhymes? Recitation and rote learning? I remember when I was eight years old, standing up in class, and reciting the multiplication table in unison with twenty-nine other high-pitched voices, all running into each other in a rhythmic singsong:
“Five times five, twenty five. Six times five, thirty. Seven times five, thirty-five. Eight times five . . .”
At the time, of course, it was normal. But looking back, this sort of behaviour is a most bizarre and artificial excercise in groupthink. It certainly bears scant ressemblance to anything we do in our day to day adult lives.
This is, indeed, education as we have known it. And it’s got plenty to recommend it. But let’s not delude ourselves into thinking that this sort of thing encourages children to “attain unique and enriched identities”!
On the other hand, first-hand and unique adventures providing a personal narrative could do this. The sort of adventures that are simply unavailable to kids from isolated, disenfranchised communities. But play out those adventures in rich, explorable virtual worlds, full of mysteries to discover and real people to interact with . . . and you can open kids up to worlds of possibilities. Plenty of personalized neuronal connections.
More Brain Training
Wii fit went on sale this weekend in the UK. It’s not just for your body, either.
I love this - I’ve blogged it before but now there’s nifty embedded video . . .
A Wasted Opportunity
National Public radio in the US has been running some interesting pieces on video games recently. Lately they’ve taken a stab at a question that becomes more and more important as gaming revenues continue to swell:
Are video games art?
Other media have a long history of relevant, moving social commentary. Movies and books lately have all been tackling important issues - Iraq, international politics, teen pregnancy, etc. But video games mostly stay away from all that ‘commentary’ stuff. There’s a fringe of activist games, sure, but no equivalent to Syriana or Juno. Why not? Are games simply incapable of this sort of sophisticated, nuanced commentary on reality?
Definitely not, as I hope the examples I’ve written about here prove. With enough budget, you could make a socially relevant, thought-provoking blockbuster game. Some day, someone will.
In the meantime, I agree with the conclusion Heather Chaplin, NPR’s correspondent, draws: “Until gaming gets serious, its cultural prominence is just wasted opportunity.”
The piece itself is well worth a listen (4 mins).
Foreign Correspondents: Doomed
When I was growing up . . . OK, actually when I was in J-school, I wanted to be a foreign correspondent. Going to far-flung places, seeing the world, dodging bullets, meeting important people - it sounded like a really cool job.
Shame they’re an endangered (doomed?) species.
As part of a series of articles over at the Britannica Blog on the impending demise of the newspaper,
I do not believe, however, that the foreign correspondence profession will disappear. If anything, correspondents are needed more than ever because the world has gotten so complex and so small. Only someone on the spot can provide the context and background that curious readers need in order to fully understand what is happening in far-flung places.
How correspondents package their product will vary. It may be words. Or pictures. Or video.
One thing is for sure: It won’t be by telex.
really good foreign coverage requires more than parachuting in, getting a few quotes or a little video coverage, and filing. It requires correspondents to spend time in one place or country, get to know the people and the environment etc.
Both true. I agree that we all need good news investigation and reporting from all over the world. And I’d say that Murphy is right on the money when she says that correspondents can’t just parachute in, shoot, and split to the next war/crisis/coup/etc.
But let’s connect the dots here. Don’t these two thoughts, taken together, mean that foreign correspondents, as a profession, are in fact threatened, if not doomed?
Here’s a thought experiment: You’re the foreign editor a major US news organization. The big story of the day: a threat of civil war in southeast Asia. Vast oil deposits have been discovered just offshore. But the province in whose territory the fields actually lie has announced that it will secede - and take all the oil with it. In response, the national government has moved in the army as a deterrent. Tensions are high. You have two options:
a) There is an American journalist in the area. He is originally from Iowa, but he’s been travelling and reporting in Asia and Africa for years, and built a reputation with his excellent news blog. He regularly freelances for major news organizations like CNN and the BBC on stories of international importance. He is in the region now, and will provide high-quality pictures, text and video.
b) There is a local journalist in the area. She was actually born in the disputed province, and for some years now she’s been living and working in the capital. There, she’s been covering local and national government for the Thai news, on a freelance basis. She also runs a popular blog on southeast Asian politics. Her written English is flawless and she will provide pictures, text and video.
Who will know the area better?
Who will have a better network of local contacts?
Who will understand the nuances of the story better?
Who would you send?
It’s not always going to be cut and dried. But remember that in most circumstances our US journalist ‘a’, above, is going to have to hire a local fixer/translator/driver, anyhow.
But what if the fixer is capable of producing all the material him/herself? Why bother with the import?
UPDATE - The Frontline Blog has a good round-up and discussion on this topic.
London, YouTube Torched
Today, the Olympic torch is making its way through London, where I live. Of course, it’s being covered by all the media. There’s some tension: a lot of people in this city view the torch passing as the perfect opportunity to send a message to the powers in Beijing.
The BBC covered the torch relay live. In Ladbroke grove, the sports news story became a political news story:
What’s interesting about this clip, for me, isn’t so much the fact that this happened. It’s that the video is on YouTube. The BBC, you see, doesn’t put things on YouTube. Private individuals, on the other hand, do. Which means that some member of the public lifted the above video off the BBC’s news site, and posted it to YouTube.
There were also more ’spot news’ videos of the event posted to YouTube - like this:
This is arguably a better camera angle than the BBC news crew got - instead of a distant zoom shot, we’ve got a good shot of the protester seizing the flame, and a good look at the chanting supporters with Tibetan flags.
Granted, the camera work isn’t so smooth - it’s shaky, and there are gaps in coverage. But even in this shot you can see at least three people that were even closer to the action. Not so professional as the BBC’s guy, maybe. But niesfisch was right there, close enough to see everything, almost close enough to touch the event. And his video is newsworthy. It’s crowdsourced journalism. With YouTube going live later this year, and services like Qik already live, we’re only going to see more of this.
Everyone in the audience has a camera. And everyone in the audience can broadcast their feed live to the world. If the BBC (or anyone) can figure out an efficient way for people like niesfisch to get newsworthy video onto their own organization’s portal, instead of YouTube, in a timely and yet edited fashion, they’ll have a good thing going . . .
