news●pa●per (noun) (pl. -a●pers): a community website, with articles as the objects people interact around.

Is blogging journalism? Is it ruining journalism? What do the “professionals” do with the “audience” when every member of that audience can broadcast themselves to each other - without us?

You could ask: what’s the point in having journalists at all, in that situation?

And many people are.

But I think that’s missing the point. Blogging is a symptom of a massively connected public. And that public’s nature necessitates a fundamental change in the way news org’s behave, whether print or broadcast. (The distinction is little more than a historical curio at this point, anyhow).

Adam Tinworth got it right when he said that blogging isn’t a publishing process: it’s a community strategy. Blogging isn’t about getting on a hilltop and blasting your view out over the plebs. Not successful blogging, anyhow. That sort of narcissistic stuff tends to die quick, leaving little in its wake except a bad name for blogs.

Good blogs, on the other hand, are conversations - reactions, counter-arguments, rebuttals, fields of links and connections to other people’s thoughts - all parts of an interdependent communal thought process.

The internet is good at community. You could say that’s what the internet does: it connects people to each other in a rich way. As Adam points out, the reason Flickr is so successful isn’t because it’s a photo site. It’s a community site, with photos as the objects people interact around. Ditto eBay - the site’s whole success is predicated upon the creation of a trusted community of buyers and sellers. Community is built into these sites, and that’s why they’re so successful.

Community is what the internet does.

The internet enables networked communication: the many talking to the many. Just look at alexa’s list of the world’s top 100 websites.  The top 10 are Yahoo!, Google, YouTube, Windows Live (Hotmail), MSN, Myspace, Wikipedia, Facebook, Yahoo Japan, and Blogger.

Notice that all these are about connecting to other people?

Even Google gets part of its popularity from gmail, and increasingly from shared tools like calendar and documents that enable collaboration and communication.

This is in contrast to broadcasting/publishing, in which the few can talk to the many, but the many don’t really get to add anthing.

Well, now we can take it farther.

News itself, in a networked world, doesn’t have to be a publishing process.

News can be a community.

You don’t have to run a community alongside a news organisation. In a networked world, running a news organisation is running a community. News is a community, with news items (articles, video, etc.) as the objects people gather around. Some of those can be supplied by pros, some supplied by the wider community.

But those wider community members will be participating because the news organisation has created an attractor for them: a place where people congregate.

You could see news organisations defining themselves in this way. They’re already social networks, in a way. Talk to anyone in the UK and they’ll tell you what a ‘Sun reader’ or a ‘Guardian reader’ or an ‘Independent reader’ is like. Even how they’re likely to vote.

Other newspapers are communities with identities, too - often, but not neccessarily, geographically defined. The Birmingham Post says: “Nobody knows Birmingham like we know Birmingham. Come here to find out what the buzz is in this city.”

The New Yorker is a geography and social status community, saying “This is what’s going on in the mind of the cultured, the swanky and the sophisticated in New York City. Come here if you want to find out all that’s happening in that sphere.”

Fox News and BBC News are both saying that they see the world in a partuiclar way, inviting like-minded people to join them - and now, to join actively in that community.

Journalists do have a place in that community, because they do nothing but harvest and curate information, and this gives them context and perspective. But they are by no means the best-informed members of that community, especially when it comes to specific stories. The people actually involved will tend to know more than the journalists covering it (that’s why we interview people a lot).

Which goes back to Jeff Jarvis’ maxim: do what you do best, link to the rest.

In the past, journalists weren’t good community members. But they did provide fuel for community interactions (Roy Greenslade):

we spent our lives dominating conversations. No, that’s wrong of course. We did not converse at all. We lectured. We provided the information that people feasted on in order to hold their own conversations.

All this conversational activity happened out outside the sphere, and usually outside the knowledge, of the  journalists who fuelled it.

That’s all gone - obsolete as a town crier reading a Royal Proclamation. Now we can provide places for people to have particular kinds of conversations. In the same place, we can give them the information they’ll need to have an informed discussion, with all the facts at hand.

[Thanks to Kevin for the 1337 linkage that inspired this one. ]

An ancient tradition, revived through the network: Geishas are taking to the web.

For decades, the numbers of geisha training in Kyoto has been declining. A recent Guardian article attributes the decline to a crisis of reputation - during the end of the 20th century geisha came to be seen as “prostitutes in national dress.” Now, thanks to unprecedented media exposure and an embrace of the internet, the tide is turning. Kyoto residents are seeing

the emergence of the cyber-geisha, who combine daily study of the traditional arts with a few minutes spent on their laptops. Though free of gossip - protocol precludes any mention of clients’ names or how they behave - the most popular blogs draw thousands of visitors a month, eager to soak up even the most pedestrian accounts of the maiko’s working day.

“The old geisha were terribly snooty and couldn’t care less what people thought of them,” says Downer, who attributes teahouse websites and online maiko application forms partly to enlightened self-interest.

“Now there is more interest in presenting an image to the world that brings them bigger dividends. They finally started to worry that geisha traditions would die out, and that they needed to do something about it.”

Openness attracts success, the network connects people and builds critical mass.

Interesting.

This is too cool for words. An apartment designed to be a real-life adventure game, full of secret compartments and hidden messages.

The Post family in New York got a posh apartment. They hired an architect as an interior designer. The father commented in an off-hand way that he’d like a message hidden for his family somewhere in the place - a bottle containing a poem he’d written for them.

The architect, Eric Clough, went off on one.

“I was thinking that maybe there could be a game or a scavenger hunt embedded in the apartment — that was the beginning,” he said.

Before long, his firm, 212box, was knee-deep in code and cipher books, furnituremakers were devising secret compartments, and Mr. Clough’s former colleague, Heather Bensko, an architectural and graphic designer who had been his best friend at the Yale School of Architecture, found herself researching the lives of 40 historical figures, starting with Francis I of France and ending with Mrs. Post.

The result is a real-life adventure game, an apartment that is actually a mystery waiting to be solved. The full story is awesome. Go check it out on the New York Times website.

Too cool for words.

(Now, there’s a post title that should get plenty of search hits!)

Games are a maturing medium. One day, perhaps, we’ll see games that are significant commentaries on life, the universe and everything - and we’ve gotten some that are better than others in that regard. But on the whole, games aren’t there yet.

Daniel Floyd thinks that’s because games aren’t terribly good at sex. He’s a grad student at Savannah School of Art and design, apparently. And he’s come up with a thought-provoking look at sex in video games, included here for your edification (not titillation).

Interesting how he’s imitating yahtzee on the style.

Also, special bonus linkage: I’ve just ordered Pat Kane’s The Play Ethic, which will apparently blow my mind (it says so on the dust jacket). But before I have the chance to write a full review, check out how games will save your workday . . . in the future!

This is a perfect example of how exploring an issue through play can make great journalism.

Check out the link and find out all about the US federal budget. Usually this is a fiercely complex topic, with reams and reams of spreadsheets - a general all around snore-fest. It’s one of those stories that’s important, but difficult to get into. Not any more. As Ian Bogost said, Budget Hero could have more info on the impact that budget choices have on individuals - this would really hammer home the point. But altogether I think this one really scores.

I hadn’t come across this before, until my good friend Rusty linked me to it. WoW Detox is a postboard for people who are quitting / have quit / are trying to quit World of Warcraft. It’s a simple site - just a place to tell the world why you left Azeroth. But some of it makes for very touching reading:

I keep asking myself this question. If I’m not having fun, why am I here? I feel burnt out with it and have cancelled my subscription so just a few days left to play. After that I’ll only be reading WowDetox not forums. Wish me luck, I’ll need it.

Or:

I’ve been w/oW (without WoW) for two or three weeks now; it’s definitely not easy. Every other day I think of ways to start playing again, reasons to justify it. In the end, I look at where I was three years ago in life, and I’m nowhere different really, other than about 30lbs heavier.

Prove it’s not an addiction by just walking away. Just walk away. It’ll be hard but it’ll be worth it.

Or this:

I can’t do it I can’t quit! I can’t fight it! It’s taking me from my mother my family my friends from everybody! I can’t take it anymore I can’t uninstall it!

You can approach it with schadenfreude or compassion, but either way there are some very real, very intense human emotions on display here. It’s testament to the skill of the Blizzard game designers: they’ve really made an experience so compelling that people will go to great lengths to play it - even to the detriment of their friends and family.

So far, no del.icio.us feeds here at just another meme vector (though you can catch mine from the link in the right-hand bar, if you want to cyber-stalk me that way). 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!

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)!

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!

My interlocutor writes:

given the choice between playing ‘Sim city’ and ‘brain training’ or playing ‘Sonic’ and ‘Mario karts’ I know which my children will tend towards, why?

Well, given the choice between ‘The Incredibles’ and ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’, which would they watch? Same example. These two movies are completely different, aimed at different audiences; just like the two games.

There are plenty of good, fun, enriching games for kids out there. The people in BBC Childrens’ are doing wonderful things. I have the greatest respect for them.

As for the addiction thing, I’m not inclined to contradict the assertion that they’re addictive. In fact, I’d say that’s spot on. Well-designed games present their players with challenges whose resolution is tantalisingly at the edge of the player’s ability. Players encounter increasing frustration as they try, try, try again to beat the enemy, finish the level or otherwise solve the puzzle. When they succeed, there’s a rush of dopamine released in the brain. Same chemical release you get when you’ve eaten a good meal, had an orgasm or taken a hit of crack cocaine.

Same rush you get when, after six hours of dancing around the blindingly obvious, Darcy and Elizabeth kiss, or when you score a goal in the neighborhood footy game. Same rush you get when you achieve anything, in fact - it’s the motivation chemical.

So - where’s the problem?

Addiction is bad. Doing only one thing, over and over, all day, every day, is bad. But that’s a question of self-discipline - not an inherent problem with the medium. For games as a medium, this is a good point.

We have at our disposal a means of communication capable of expressing sophisticated, complex points, of immersing audiences in a deep exploration of a topic; a means of communication so effective that people feel compelled to engage with it - and this is a bad thing?

It’s bad if you make TV shows, yes - because today, the biggest screen in the house is more likely to be used for the Wii in the evening than for Big Brother, Planet Earth or Panorama.

But it’s a whole world of opportunity for informing, educating and entertaining our audiences in an engaging, interactive and creative way.

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:

1. Preparation. The user must be able to prepare for the experience in many ways - to practise.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. A range of challenges. Any experience where you do exactly the same thing over and over tires quickly. There has to be variety.
5. A range of abilities required to solve challenges. Users have to be able to do things more than one way and still succeed.
6. Skill required to solve challenges. You have to be able to get better at the experience if you devote more time.
7. Feedback. Users have to have some way of knowing how well they’re doing.
8. 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.