Just Another Meme Vector

Ever find yourself checking your Facebook feed absent-mindedly, on the off chance that there might be something new and interesting there?

Ever follow an eBay auction obsessively, or get a burst of happiness when someone gives you a high seller rating?

Ever spend a day in anticipation, wondering how many views your YouTube video will accrue?

There’s a lesson in all these experiences in how to make an online journalism app successful. We’re talking basic principles here.

All the apps I mentioned above are successful at least partly because they have adopted principles of game design in their user experience.

There’s more to game design than actually making video games – though I think they can be good for journalism, too.

The principles of game design can be most usefully implemented instrumentally, to make other applications better.

Fundamentally, it’s all a question of user experience. Design a winning user experience, and people will want to interact with your site or app, for the sheer fun of it.

I just re-found a post by Paul Bradshaw that I should have blogged about way earlier.

Paul writes the Online Journalism Blog and founded HelpMeInvestigate.com, a very cool 4ip-funded project. In this post, Paul talks about exactly what I’ve been saying about game design as a fundamental component of User Experience in online applications.

“Every medium has its own genres and conventions, and the web is no different,” he says. “You can’t just shovel print or broadcast or campaigning content online. It’s interactive. It’s communicative. The most successful sites on the web know that, and they use game mechanics.”

The take-away lesson, for me, is that a site/application with good graphic design and good UX design (incorporating game design principles) is so attractive on a basic, brain pattern-matching level that users will want to interact with it, and they’ll do what we want them to do there for the sheer fun of it. (This is something I touched on with Five Lessons ARGs can teach Journalism.)

Implementing game design features like customization, social exchanges, collecting, points, and feedback into web apps makes them more engaging, more fun,and generally a pleasure to interact with.

Any app designer that can make people interact with his creation obsessively for hours and hours has clearly learned something important about the way people’s brains work. Implementing game design principles in online journalism is about putting these lessons into practise.

I recommend viewing the embedded presentations by Amy Jo Kim, they’re well worth it.

Six Days in Fallujah, which I wrote about before, is still alive and kicking, despite fierce opposition and lack of a publisher. Its opponents say its very existence as a game belittles the sacrifice of those who died there. Its supporters say it’s an honest record of the battle.

It should be published. Then we can all play the game and decide for ourselves how it treats the memory of the fallen.

A couple of days ago, I ran part of a training session for journalists from BBC News.  It was a day-long course on the new possibilities offered by new media. I told them about the power of using video games as journalism, including Darfur is Dying, Insurgency and Six Days in Fallujah. The people I was talking to are hard-bitten, editorial types. They’re the people who make the news happen, who send pictures from war zones and famine areas to our living room TVs. I could see them stir uneasily in their seats when I mentioned the ‘G’ word.

There’s a prejudice against games as a medium for significant content. On one hand I understand this, because video games are still new, and many people are still likely to think of them as something invented as a plaything for their kids. On the other hand, this prejudice is odd, given that video games are the most popular medium in our civilization and many (if not most) of them deal with one of the most significant subjects of all: death.

I concede that the prejudice is reinforced by the fact that many video games are violent, sensational, visceral fun.

But then again – so are most movies.

Most movies are sensational, entertaining. But that doesn’t mean they’re incapable of significant communication. I think most of us would agree that there’s a way to make movies about difficult subjects sensitively and appropriately. For example: United 93, Generation Kill, Schindler’s List . . . need I go on?

So – why can’t we treat video games the same way?

Know Thine Enemy

Like many unjust prejudices, the prejudice against video games is founded on a lack of understanding.

Dan Ephron writes in the latest issue of Newsweek:

Efforts to document war in new ways have always garnered skepticism and controversy. The first published photographs of dead American servicemen—including a 1943 shot showing three bodies sprawled out on Buna Beach in New Guinea—prompted a public outcry. The effect of television footage beamed from Vietnam directly to the living rooms of Americans was hotly debated throughout the war.

This same prejudice is back, and it has crystallized around Six Days in Fallujah. Opponents say the game is trivializing and disrespectful by its very nature as a game.

But let’s look at the way the game was made:

Peter Tamte [head of Atomic Games, Six Days' developer] says he got the idea to make a videogame of the Fallujah battle from Marines who fought there. Starting in 2003, he worked closely with members of the Third Battalion, First Marine Regiment, to make training simulators based on games he’d helped develop. A year later, those same Marines ended up at the center of the Fallujah battle, code-named Operation Phantom Fury. When they came home, Tamte says, several were already contemplating how they could turn their experience into the kind of game they themselves would want to play.

So the very origin of this idea came from the men who fought and lost friends there. If soldiers wanted to write a book or film a movie about their experiences we wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Why should we dismiss their desire to tell their stroy just because it is in a new medium?

From an editorial perspective, Atomic’s commitment to accuracy is impressive:

Capt. Read Omohundro, who led a Marine company in Fallujah and lost 13 men there, acts as a kind of quality-control manager for Six Days. “I’ll say to them, no, that guy has to be facing the other way. This piece of ammunition doesn’t blow up so fast, it only detonates this much. You can’t be standing next to it when it goes off or you’ll become a casualty.”

The game’s makers also appear to have treated the dead with respect, by not including any dead Marines in in-game cinematics. Though this gesture is also the target of some criticism – does that make the game less accurate as a documentary?

Procedural Accuracy

Or: It’s about the way it works, not the way it happened.

I’d say this game can be accurate even with those changes made above. That’s because any game’s accuracy is procedural, not narrative – that is to say, a game is accurate if it works the same way as the real thing did, not if everything in the game happens the same way it did in reality.

If you think about it, it’s impossible for everything in a video game to happen the way it did in reality. There wouldn’t be much point in playing it if you could only follow one pre-set sequence of actions. Then it’d be a 3D movie, not a game.

The whole point of using a video game to convey the reality of the battle of Fallujah is that the player can figure out the way things worked during the battle, and get at least some sort of appreciation of what it was like for those who fought there.

Hell, Abstracted

I’ve never been in the military, and I have the greatest respect for those who put their lives on the line for the rest of us. That includes two of my best friends from Montreal, who are now serving in the Canadian Armed Forces.

I don’t think any media experience can really convey what it’s like to be out there in a battle. But some can get close – and each medium increases our understanding in different ways.

War is something we need to understand, not ignore. If done with sensitivity, in an appropriate manner, this is a gesture of respect towards those who have made sacrifices in battle. From what I’ve seen, it looksl ike the folks at Atomic have made every effort towards sensitivity and appropriate treatment.

Why should we deny ourselves the use of our civilization’s most powerful communications medium as we seek to understand war and appreciate the experiences of our soldiers?

p.s. The rest of Ephron’s article makes for interesting reading and is well worth a read.

Milo, The face of Xbox Natal

So who’s seen Milo?

Those of you who are avid gamers like me know what (who?) I’m talking about.  The Natal system was unveiled last week during E3: a motion-sensing, controllerless interface for the Xbox. It’s bleeding-edge stuff. The system performs motion-capture in real time, can recognize faces and voices, and allows for a whole new level of interaction between the user and the console.

Milo is one kind of interaction we’ve never seen before – not outside sci-fi movies, anyhow. He’s a charming 8 year-old avatar developed by the people at Lionhead under Peter Molyneux.

If you still haven’t seen it, allow me to refresh your memory. Here’s footage from Milo’s E3 premiere.

In his remarks after the film, Molyneux says “You can meet what I believe is a real character. That understands you, that understands your voices, your emotions, that’s fascinated by your life.”

The guys at Kotaku got a chance to look at him in more detail, and found that he’ll even automatically keep track of major entertainment events in the real world, so he can talk about them with you:

Molyneux also talked about how the software could in theory track your daily Xbox 360 usage to help build out a conversation with you about your gaming habits. He also plans to have Milo track bigger cultural events, like American Idol, and get regular voice updates so the child can talk to you about things currently going on in the world.

What I find interesting in this is the emotional dimension of the experience. Milo is designed as a way for the user to have a genuine emotional attachment to the system. It’s an area that Molyneux and Lionhead have been exploring for quite some time in their other games.

But Natal takes it to another level – one where we might have to start considering some ethical questions.

Killing the Kid?

See, Milo learns about you the longer you keep him turned on. The idea is that you build a shared history, where you can talk about things you’ve done together and expand the relationship. The guys from Kotaku discovered something else interesting, too: Milo is reset every few days.

Lionhead’s Project Natal demo Milo may look to be eight, but he’s never lived longer than 12 days.

Speaking with Peter Molyneux this week, the developer said that the child artificial intelligence for Xbox 360 tech demo Milo and Kate is usually “scrubbed” after about 200 hours. The longest Milo has “lived” is 300 hours, he said. Something done to help test the development of their virtual child and his ability to track experiences.

Molyneux repeated that Milo isn’t meant to be a living AI, but rather a cleverly-crafted combination of nuanced facial animation and artificial emotion that creates the illusion of life.

Enter the Turing Test

Intelligence is a hard thing to define. That’s why the Turing Test is so useful. If it talks like it’s got a mind, then it probably does have a mind. The illusion if interacting with an intelligence, after all, is no different from actually interacting with one.

Maybe Milo isn’t quite there yet. But from what I’ve heard and read, it sounds to me like Milo is designed explicitly to make you feel like he’s got a mind.  The whole idea of Milo is that here’s a construct you can build a real relationship with.

So where does that leave us, ethically, if we ’scrub’ him every 200 to 300 hours?

Nowhere, you might say. He’s not an intelligence. He’s just a clever computer program that’s designed to make us bond with him.We can erase him when we want.

Emotions and Relationships

The trouble with that line of reasoning is that emotions, not intelligence, make relationships real. And that’s where we get into interesting ground, ethically.

Most of us wouldn’t consider rats particularly intelligent. Killing them is not a crime, and is usually not frowned on. Often, it’s a useful profession.

So what about this girl here? Is it OK to grab a hammer and smash her pet?

Obviously not. Why? It’s not because of the rat. The rat is no different from the millions of others out there who eat our grain, chew our electric cables, spread disease and so on.

The only difference, ethically, is that this particular rat has an emotional relationship with this particular girl. It knows and recognizes her, and she reciprocates.

That’s why hurting it would be wrong; it erodes the emotional matrix of relationships that binds society together and gives our lives meaning.

Nor is this sort of emotional relationship limited to living objects. You might have a fondness for your mobile phone, or maybe a particular ring or item of cothing. These are inanimate – and in most cases, entirely replaceable – objects. Nevertheless, my destroying or damaging them would be ethically wrong. Your emotions are what make it wrong – it’s nothing intrinsic to the object.

I haven’t played with Milo, so I don’t know how intelligent he actually seems, or how well he succeeds in eliciting the sort of emotional response he’s meant to. But he’ll be improved on. There’ll be a Milo v2.0.

What do we do with the old Milo when his replacement download becomes available? Suddenly, system upgrades aren’t so straightforward.

Peter Molyneux ended his E3 presentation with the words: “This is a landmark in computer entertainment”

I couldn’t agree more.

[This post also cross-posted on Objective 514]

Are corporate websites a thing of the past? I don’t think so.

But that’s the headline of a recent post by Robin Hamann of Headshift. Robin knows social media inside out. He used to be the BBC’s blogging guru (in fact, it was at one of his sessions that inspired me to start this blog up).

I think that he’s right on the money at the start of his post:

Increasingly, if someone wants to find out more about you or your brand they’ll seek out the  honest, authentic views being shared by their friends and others online rather than visiting a corporate propaganda site.

The only people who visit your website are people who already know about your ideas, products or service. What it doesn’t do is reach out to new audiences who don’t know about you.

Quite true – to attract new users to your site you either need excellent SEO or an active social media strategy.

In the current financial climate, it makes more sense than ever to scale back the effort put into creating a traditional, silo like web presence and start thinking about using the whole web as your canvas.

Well put. It’s arrogant to assume they’ll come to you – more effective to go where they are already, talking about what it is you do. You make widgets? Go to the world’s biggest widget blog/forum/discussion site, and get involved in the discussion there in an honest way. Users will respect you if you’re authentically engaged with them. Everyone likes being listened to – it’s a sign of respect.

But is your core website irellevant? I don’t think so. The examples Robin cites – a team of park rangers in Kenya and an environmental web site – both have great social media strategies. But they also have core sites with simple, recognizable URLs that lead users to a homepage.

True, these pages are quite different from the ’silo’ pages of the 90’s – more than anything, they’re a center of gravity for the many strands of social interaction that these brands have spun off across the web.

Those hompeages would once have been the sum total of a company’s web presence – now they’re just the bit that ties it all together. But they’re there, and they have a crucial role in shaping the identity of a company, organisation or person.

Online, I’d say, an organisation needs to be seen and heard in all the right places – Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, or wherever the conversation is happening. More importantly, it needs to be paying attention in all these places. But every organisation also needs a place of its own.

I agree with the ethos of Robin’s post, but I wouldn’t count on the death of the corporate web site, just yet.

The Norman invasion of England. It seems like the perfect topic to approach with gaming. It’s history, it’s dramatic, and best of all it’s about battles.

The game was developed by Preloaded and published by Channel 4, to go along with the drama series of the same title.

I’m a huge fan of Channel 4’s adventures in gaming, so when I heard about this one I was intrigued – Channel 4’s previous content in the gaming dep’t has been great. This game looks and sounds great, and it’s an ambitious project (one word: multiplayer!).

I was looking forward to wreaking havoc on the English in the first level . . . Then I got confused by the game space and stymied by strategic dead-ends.

1066 looks beautiful, but as a gameplay experience it doesn’t quite make it, mainly due to poor game design.

Adventures in Game Space

1066 tries to do something interesting: present a three-dimensional battle in two simultaneous views. The main game area is a silhouetted side-on view of the battlefield, with a schematic map view of the battlefield below it. You control the strategy on the schematic map, while the action happens upstairs in the silhouettes.

This is innovative, but confusing at first – it took me a while to work out how the silhouettes related to the strategy map. When a unit is moving or fighting, the upper view zooms in on it, while the unit’s counter flashes yellow in the strategy view. This is a very subtle effect, though, and it took me a few battles to notice it.

In 1066 The silhouettes provide the game visuals, but the gameplay actually happens in the map view. The overall impression is a strategy game in uneasy cohabitation with a flash animation in the attic. Dispensing with the silhouette view entirely, and actually animating the counters on the schematic, might have been clearer.

Way back in ‘92, Dune II (and its sucessor, the original Warcraft) proved that 2D, top-down real-time strategy worked as a game genre. It’s a proven template, whose dynamics could have been adapted and tweaked to better reflect the historical realities of field warfare in the 11th century.

Dominant Strategy

The individual unit battles are resolved through a timing-based minigame. You have to hit the correct arrow key at the right time to get a combat bonus. But there’s no penalty for hitting incorrect keys – so the dominant strategy is to frantically mash every arrow key as fast as possible, which guarantees a maximum bonus every time. Unfortunately, the existence of a dominant strategy eliminates the need for skill, so melee combat feels rather flat.

On the strategic level, precise maneuvering isn’t possible, because the game space isn’t very high-resolution. This leaves the player with few interesting decisions to make. It is possible to outflank the enemy, but only just. In itself, this wouldn’t be a problem, if the actual combat mechanic was fun and interesting. But since there’s a dominant strategy on a tactial level, there’s really not much to do throughout the battle but run your counters into base contact with the enemy, mash the arrow keys, and wait for the computer to resolve the attack.

Bottom line: the player’s sense of control is eroded.

On the Plus Side

The graphic and audio design is great. Aesthetically, this game is tops – as you’d expect from the pros at Preloaded. The blood splashing on the screen during melees is a really nice touch.

All in All

Alice Taylor and Matt Locke have been doing great things in public service gaming.  Their decision to make a big push into games in 2007 has been paying off with high-quality titles like Bow Street Runner. The suite of games they published for Routes, their DNA season – Breeder, Sneeze, DNA Heroes and Ginger Dawn – were fun, snappy, and aesthetically slick. They are blazing new ground, and doing it well.

Preloaded has some great sucesses on their hands, too – Launchball, for instance, was a totally fun puzzle game that managed to teach scientific method along the way. I loved it.

With a few more iterations of playtesting, 1066 could have joined its siblings in the Pantheon of Awesomeness.

What happened? Chalk it up to a learning experience . . .

I was just on a panel presentation at Futuresonic’s Social Technology Summit in Manchester. The slides were a bit bare of text and we were short of time, so here’s everything I meant to say.

Our panel was tasked with answering the question: “How can companies, creative producers and developers prepare for a digital economy?”

My answer is – with video games.

This talk is about games in two ways. First, it’s about games as content – new things we can do in digital media, that we couldn’t do before the digital era. Games  should be a major component of that.

It’s also about games as content management. In the era of the fat data pipe – ubiquitous 100mbps connections, or fiber optic direct to your home – there will be a LOT of data floating around. I polled the room – of about 100 people in the audience, about 20 were tweeting, blogging, or taking digital pictures that they intended to post online. That’s a lot of information. And massively multiplayer games have some lessons for managing that information.

But first, games as content.

Here’s a story:  a kid from Halland province in Sweden buys a copy of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion set for World of Warcraft. He’s really excited. He takes it home, installs the module, starts playing with his friends. He starts on Saturday morning. Sun goes up, sun goes down, he’s still playing. Parents go to bed. Still playing. All through the night. Sun comes up on Sunday. He’s still going. He goes for a good bit of Sunday, as well, until finally he collapses from exhaustion on Sunday afternoon.

This is an important story, and not because of the obvious question of what the hell this kid’s parents were doing letting their son play non-stop for over 20 hours.

The point is that we have here a medium so powerful, so compelling, that people will forget to eat or sleep for using it.

Like any medium, it can be adapted to communicate factual understanding as well as entertainment.

This is why games are valuable to journalists – because games are fundamentally educational. In fact, I would say categorically that there is no game that is not educational. Better minds than mine have bent themselves towards explaining this – I heartily recommend Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun for Game Design if you’re interested, or the first half of this presentation.

The short version is that games are challenge structures, which require skills to complete successfully. The process of playing a game is working out which skills you need to apply, and then developing them. So fun in video games is essentially skill-building.

On a hind-brain, survival intelligence level, we like games because they give us a dopamine rush. I’m no neuroscientist, but the basics as I understand them are that every time you satisfy a craving and get something you want, your brain releases a bit of dopamine. It’s what makes you feel satisfied.

Games do the same thing. Solving a game challenge makes you feel good, on a dopamine level.

So does scoring a hit of crack cocaine. That’s why well-designed games can be so powerful.

See why I think we should be using this communications medium for good things?

Here’s an example of how you could do it. Imagine this. You’re a taxi driver in Baghdad, 2005. The city is fragmenting into a patchwork of rival ethnic militias. You need to make ends meet, but the city’s functional geography changes drastically depending on whether you’re Sunni or Shia, Kurd or Christian. What’s a safe area? What’s dangerous? Well, reading about ethnic strife might not give you a great feeling for the reality, but trying to work your way through it might. So in the game you pick your sect, and see how your experience of the city changes depending on it. You could even pipe real-time news into the game to make the neighborhood alignment consistent with up-to-the minute reality. We pitched this concept at the BBC back in 2006, when Baghdad was still really hot.

Baghdad Taxi Driver didin’t make it very far, but here’s one that did – Six Days in Fallujah. I’ve described it in detail elsewhere. Unfortunately it was canceled by Konami after an outcry by veterans’ groups in the US and the UK. (Atomic, the developer, is still working on it though, so we might yet get to play it.)

I’m the first to agree that a real battle in a real war like this is a sensitive issue. But I agree with Matt Peckham: games deserve a chance to deal with issues like this. Why are veterans’ groups cool with something like Generation Kill, but not with a game on the same topic?

If any of you reading this is an Iraq vet, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. I enjoyed Generation Kill thoroughly – largely because it felt extremely honest and authentic. I thought the series presented US Marines in a very fair, balanced, and very human light. I see no a priori reason we couldn’t do this in a video game.

Some guys are already going for it, in true indie developer style: the guys  at Insurgency.

Again, I’ve written about this one elsewhere. It’s a mod of the Half-Life 2 engine, set in contemporary Iraq. The bit I find really cool about it is that it’s made entirely by veterans, volunteering their time. No accusations of distortion apply here: the guys making this thing are the ones who lived through the real version.

Now, a lot of people tell me that no matter how authentic or sophisticated these games are, they’re still fighting games, and that’s a bit limiting.

I agree. But there are a lot of other kinds of games out there. And the popularity of fighting games today is a historical artefact we’ll soon outpace. It’s down to the limitations of technology, and it will change soon.

If you think about it, what our game technology has been getting better and better at since the early 90’s is 3D modeling, physics and rendering. Game tech has gotten really, really good at creating fantasy 3D worlds that look and move just like the real thing. So it’s no big surprise that the top-selling genres of today are racing, fighting and sports games. They’re all genres that depend entirely on physics for gameplay. If we’re racing, and my vehicle’s rendered form passes a given point before yours does, I win. It’s simple. If we’re fighting, and the vector of your bullets intersects with the wireframe of my avatar, you win. Simple. Ditto with sports; ball wireframe, net wireframe . . . that’s all there is to it.

In the 70’s, when all computers could do was text, you got Collosal Cave Adventure. It’s what computers were good at then. As computers get better at more than graphics – like talking, for instance – I’ll bet we’ll see more interesting game types emerge.

If you want to get a look at the ur-version of what those game types might be, check out Façade by Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas. This is a game where you use free-language text to converse with two old friends at a dinner party. You arrive in the middle of an argument, and the rest is open to you. What will you say? You can steer the evening to several different endings, depending on which conversational tack you take. It’s well worth a play. (Procedural Arts, the company Stern and Mateas founded, is working on more games of this type – I’m looking forward to it.)

All the games I’ve mentioned so far are quite complex, but you don’t need a several-hundred meg download to make a good, thought-provoking game. Here’s a great example:

Budget Hero by American Public Media is a great way of exploring a complex issue like a national budget. It’s something of vital importance in a democracy – but very difficult to explain properly in text or video. Play with the data, though, and you begin to understand how things really work. Budget Hero has real data plugged into the backend. That’s why the ‘I.O.U.’ debt-servicing column is so huge now if you go play. What this system does is allow you to implement the fiscal policy changes you’d like to see in an accurate model of the real world. Go ahead and repeal the Bush tax cuts, for instance, or cut welfare spending. You can see how the system reacts, and get a real understanding of how interrelated factors affect tax and budget issues.

And it’s FUN. Well, way more fun than a budget report, anyhow.

Here’s another great example of making boring (but important) things fun through gaming. Sim City is fundamentally a game about three things:

1. Municipal tax policy
2. Infrastructure networks
3. Urban zoning laws

To the vast majority of people, these are not fun things. But playing the game makes you learn about them (see gaining skills, above) – and the game series has sold 46 million copies to date. Players play this game for dozens, even hundreds, of hours.

Still in the simple vein, games like Today I Die and Passage are showing us that games are capable of emotional sophistication and delivering subtle, poetic messages. If you haven’t played either of these, do yourself a favour and have a go now. They’re only a few minutes long to play through. Seriously, try them – they’re really good.

And when I say ‘good’ it’s as in ‘good art’.

And then we have Alternate Reality Games, which use the fabric of the web, the real world, and the player base itself as their play space. They’re simple in that they don’t usually use any special technology, but they’re very complex in the way they’re played – too complex to describe fully in this presentation. However, they do hold some interesting rules for social media management – which is the second point I want to make.

Games as Content Management

The lessons learned from managing massively multiplayer social media games like ARGs can help us make better social media journalism. (I’ve explored this point in greater detail in Five Lessons ARGs Can Teach Journalism.)

Publishing and broadcasting are dead.

Well, maybe not dead, but definitively mutated. Broadcasters used to be the biggest predators on the block; now they’re viruses, they’re everywhere. Anyone can publish, anyone can broadcast.

That’s Bill Clinton giving a talk in that picture. I once counted over 40 cameras pointed at him in this one shot. How many of those people will post their pictures online? How many will blog about it? Some. And some of what they have to say will be newsworthy. This is a system with intrinsically different grammar from the old one. As a journalist, you used to have scarce information and a silent public, soaking up your findings like dry soil. Now you’ve got a teeming jungle of signals, each more viral than the last.

This is a bit of a problem for an industry like mine that is based almost entirely on finding scarce information and distributing it. Our scarcity has dried up.

Now the task is being a curator, a sense-maker. But how do you tell a story in a social media world, where everyone can talk to everyone else?

ARGs like I Love Bees, World Without Oil, Perplex City and the forthcoming Smokescreen from Channel 4 are showing us how to do this.

ARG design is showing us how journalists can be a little like Game Masters from table-top role playing games, maneuvering the pubic interactively and iteratively through a landscape of information and helping them discover the truth for themselves. The same skills and principles that make for good ARG design help create communities for networked social media journalism:

For way more explanation on this than I had time to say in the session, see Five Lessons ARGs Can Teach Journalism. This kind of networked journalism is already happening all around the world. Jeff Jarvis and Charlie Beckett are two people worth looking up if you’d like to know more. There are even some examples showing up in the staid old BBC:

The BBC’s coverage of the Mumbai terror attacks last year was essentially a liveblog of the event, pulling in tweets, blog posts, and other information from people on the scene, sometimes with better information than the Beeb’s own correspondents.

BBC Panorama’s twitter feed is one of a few that various parts of the corporation have set up. The move towards social media is starting. Where will it all go? I don’t know – yet – but we’ll soon see.

(This is the metaphor I don’t have time for.)

This is a zoom lens. It was invented by Thomas Rudolphus Dalmeyer in 1891 . It’s common tech now, but it was a big deal in the early days of film.

The idea behind the zoom lens was that, as a director, you could save money during a shoot by changing the zoom on a lens, instead of taking one lens off and putting another one on. That takes time, and it’s cumbersome and expensive to have to carry around a lot of lenses. With the zoom lens, it’s simpler. You film your wide shot, cut, zoom in, reframe, roll, and shoot the close-up.

It was a while before the first actual zoom shot was ever filmed. (That is, actually rolling and exposing frames, while zooming the lens.) But when it did, someone realized you could use this. A shot zooming in conveyed emphasis, surprise, intensity visually. It was a new storytelling element made possible by a new bit of tech.

Right now we’re at a stage with digital journalism pretty close to the discovery of the zoom shot. We’re where radio news was in the 20’s, or TV news in the 50’s.

The first radio news was a guy reading out the paper. No special writing style, no field recorded audio. Just a guy with received pronunciation, reading out well-written sentences. Often they were complex sentences  with sub-clauses, because no one had even thought of a special writing style for the radio yet.

When the first TV news came along, they simply filmed the radio announcer. (So you could see the great big cigarette drooping from his mouth.) No edited pieces from tape, no live pieces from locations.

It took a while for each medium to attain maturity and to fully exploit its native advantages. Magnetic tape made it possible for radio to record ambient sound and and splice it together. Lighter TV cameras made it possible to go out and film real things happening and broadcast live.

Each medium attained fullness and a native storytelling grammar.

Right now, this is where we are with digital journalism and video games. We’re not quite at the beginning; we’ve seen where the future lies. It lies where social media and gaming meet.

Check out these books if you’d like to get a taste of the sort of future I’m thinking of: Halting State by Charles Stross, and Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge.

It’s an exciting place.

Building it will be a lot of fun.

Today opened with a very interesting talk today by Stowe Boyd. Here are my live notes – also available on the original Google docs, where the table at the end is actually properly laid out.

Stowe Boyd – A Well-Ordered Humanism

Society used to be full of ‘Centroids’ – mass identity – mass affiliation to large organization

Now: Defection from mass identity,  rise of the ‘Edgelings’

Social media = me first

Primary place you get information is through your contacts, your friends. Is this the beginning of a new kind of tribalism? Ultimately we’re switching away from larger identities (national, etc.) to more localized ones.

An example: Shift from e-mail to other comms forms like microblogging

Microblogging: the future dominant mode of communication –> the stream model.

With IM and microblogging – there’s a layer of presence information there.

“Everyone has three lives – a public life, a private life, and a secret life” – Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Email is secret. When you send email, no one knows. Chat is inherently private. Microblogging is a fully public mode, by default.

Context: email is a close relationship with your inbox. It’s the equivalent of having a filing cabinet. Most people dislike this experience. The best thing about it is when it’s empty. The best thing is – it’s over!

Chat: You’re in a room. potentialities controlled by the person who invited you. Asymetric relationship.

Microblogging: a stream model. No groups to join. Overlapping and non-exclusive networks. Subtle shifts, but they’re intense.

Email is dying – kids don’t use it. Instead text message, instant messaging.

“Get used to doing things publicly, it can have huge benefits. The great majority of things people are doing, when they’re public, open up opportunities for random people showing up and helping, being influenced – synergy, serendipity.”

“We will be shaped by social media the way rocks are eroded by water over time.”

Transition from centroids to edgelings:

Work and Politics top down, authoritarian vs. bottom up, egalitarian

(but these kinds of orgs are very very conservative and resistant to change)

Belonging Hierarchies vs. Networks

Family nuclear vs.  post-nuclear (tribal)

Political Scope nationalism vs. glocalism

Media mainstream vs. participative – e.g. social television

Environment exploitative, unsustainable vs decentralized, sustainable

Religion centralized, dogmatic vs. decentralized, enigmatic

“What people do on the web – it’s not motivated by the people they talk to, or what they’re talking about – it’s about defining who they are.”

World, Life, Self – a well-ordered humanism, an ethos for a new age.

Tonight I’m in Manchester for the Social Technology Summit, part of the Futuresonic festival. The opening gala event was a chili-and-chocolate mix of performance and prose.

The chocolaty bit was provided by Tim O’Brien and Mark Pilkington. O’Brien works at the Jodrell Bank radio telescope observatory outside Manchester, and Pilkington is a musician. For their performance, Touch the Stars, O’Brien remotely controlled Jodrell Bank’s 7-metre radio telescope through a laptop on stage. 20 miles away, the dish slowly swept its arc along the curve of the milky way, picking up the radio squeals, hiss and murmurings of distant sideral masses. The input was piped to Pilkington’s sound deck, where the musician tweaked, cajoled and played the noise into haunting and alien music.

They were followed on stage by the spice of the evening: the summit’s keynote session by Jamais Cascio, a futurologist at the Institute for the Future. His talk has been summarized in detail by Martin Bryant. Like good chili pepper, it was hot, impossible to ignore and left you with a lingering sense of pain. Cascio’s main points:

1. We, as a species, are in very grave danger, as climate change effects wreak havoc around the world.
2. Hundreds of millions of lives are at stake.
3. Even if we act now, the systems we’ve perturbed (oceans, atmosphere) function on such a vast scale that latent heating effects will still result in widespread damage.
4. Nature, in a sense, isn’t natural any more – we’ve entered the ‘anthropocene’ epoch, the part of Earth’s history where homo sapiens is a prime determinant of the way the biosphere works.
5. Conclusion: we should begin a large-scale geoengineering effort to change Earth’s albedo, sequester carbon and give us a breathing space in which we can switch to a low-carbon economy.

The talk was thought-provoking, though marred by extremely impolite heckling from a drunk lady in the fourth row, who had to be forcibly removed. I agree wholeheartedly with the first three points up there. When I studied at McGill in Montreal I did a minor in Environment, and I recognized many of the statistics and principles Cascio was quoting from the courses and seminars I attended.

On a philosophical level, I disagree with point 4 – I don’t see how we as a species can be considered as being outside nature. The structures we build are as natural as coral reefs. The changes we make to the global biosphere aren’t unprecedented. When photosynthesizing plants first appeared in the Late Archaean, 2.9 billion years ago, their oxygen-producing metabolisms obliterated a global anoxic ecosystem.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t care about the damage we’re doing – it’s just that every creature produces wastes, and most creatures harm others in some way in the normal course of their life. It’s natural. We, as a species and as a civilization, are natural.

On the geoengineering point – I concede expertise to Mr. Cascio, as I’m sure that he has studied the science of this in far greater detail than I. But the whole thing makes me deeply, deeply unseasy. Cascio himself said that sucessfully using geoengineering effects to counter global climate change would require a massive, even unprecedented, research and modeling effort. The amount of understanding we’d need to acquire, about an enormously complex, chaotic global system, simply boggles the mind. Sequencing the human genome would stand as an insignificant mote of data next to such an achievement. I’m going to need a lot more convincing that it’s a good idea.

This post will necessarily be brief, as I am a classic journalist by temperament and therefore do almost everything at the last minute. (Reporting the news, by definition, is something you can’t really do in advance. This statement is, in fact, totally untrue, but it remains one of the chief reasons I chose this profession.) I must prepare my presentation for the morning – blog post to follow!

Here’s a great little example of a game where aesthetic design and innovative game mechanics all come together to make something really special.

Daniel Benmergui’s Today I Die is a poetic experience, very much a genre on its own. The experience of playing it is all the more valuable because it’s intrinsically interactive – this isn’t something you could get from a movie or a short story. If you still need proof that all games aren’t all hyperstimulating adrenaline-laced smashfests, this is it.

Like jason Rohrer’s Passage, this game is an example of the emotional subtlety and sensitivity that games are capable of. Both of these games use very simple graphics and technology. That’s part of their charm – but what will we begin to see in the future, when designers like Benmergui and Rohrer get access to bigger budgets and more powerful tech?

[via Raph]