Philip Trippenbach ¦ Just Another Meme Vector

Britain’s Parliament just published a video game that’s meant to give a taste of what it’s like being a back-bench MP.

It’s pretty good.

WIN, in fact.

MP for a Week isn’t an action-filled extravaganza or a feast of beautiful 3D graphics. Instead, it’s an innovative interactive experience that uses good, relevant gameplay and good production design to attain WIN. The end result is a game experience that should give players a good introduction to what it is MPs actually do all day.

Relevant Gameplay

The beating heart of MP for a Week is relevant gameplay. To win, you have to apply good judgement in communication and time management. You don’t find this sort of mechanic too often in mainstream commercial games, except for the conversation trees in RPGs. It’s refreshing to see it as the basis of an entire game.

Time management is a big part of being an MP – there’s only so many hours in a week, and deciding what to do and what to skip also means deciding who’s more important to you. Do you go to a meeting with your constituents, or prepare to meet the Prime Minister? It’s not such a simple decision.

MP for a Week deals with this mechanic elegantly, through the constantly ringing smartphone in the corner of your screen. This is where you deal with messages from constituents, meetings and reports, as well as menacing messages from the party whip, reminding you to vote with the party on legislation.

Most of the game is about communication – speeches in the Commons, letters to constituents, responding to media queries. You do all these things with a simple drag-and-choose interface. It’s simple but it gives you a fair amount of flexibility, and it seems just right for the purpose of the game.

Juggling all this is harder than it sounds, because in every decision you have to make sure you’re satisfying everyone: your party, your constituents, and the media. Of course, you can’t please everyone all the time, so the game quickly turns into a balancing act of trade-offs. This is where you get to make all sorts of interesting decisions – and that’s what good gameplay is all about.

Production Values

A game about politics? Can you hear the groans of boredom already? Yes, but wait – aside from good casual gameplay, this experience is lifted up by good design. MP for a Week is well produced. It’s visually rich, but remains simple to play. Sound design helps immensely with the game’s immersion, bringing environments to life and punctuating the passage of time. The ticking clock adds a sense of urgency. The overall impression is slick and busy.

Some Problems

MP for a Week isn’t perfect. It’s quite buggy in Firefox – I could never get past Wednesday. Internet Explorer seems to work better. Also, it’s frustrating that I can’t create a profile and save my game to come back to it later. As it is, you have to sit through the half-hour to hour-long game in one go. It’s not that long, but having to start over again (if the game crashes, for instance) is a bit annoying.

Still, as I said, these are minor things. Overall MP for a Week is WIN because it uses a really innovative format to deliver good gameplay, with good design. Being an MP is complex and subtle, and after playing I feel like I understand what it’s like a little bit better.

Off the back of Adrian Hon’s excellent post on the Death of the BBC and the case for public service games, I’ve been taken up in discussions with a couple of work colleagues about whether the BBC should make games at all.

Some say that the BBC shouldn’t get into gaming, because then it would have to compete with blockbusters like Modern Warfare, Grand Theft Auto and Pro Evolution Soccer. If the BBC can’t make games on the scale of the big studios, goes the argument, it shouldn’t try.

This is defeatist rhetoric, based on flawed logic, and misses the point entirely.

Consider video. The BBC is one of the larger producers of video in the world. It spends over 2.5 billion  pounds a year on making video content, most of it broadcast on TV.

Why does the BBC bother? Even with that spend, it can’t compete with blockbusters like Avatar and 2012.

Of course this line of reasoning is bunk, because that’s not what the BBC is there for.  TV and the cinema are different markets – but that’s the same error of logic that one makes when one says that the BBC can’t make a game on the scale of Modern Warfare 2, and therefore shouldn’t bother.

The lead titles on consoles are like the international blockbusters of the video world. Panorama is also video, but it doesn’t really compete with Avatar. It doesn’t need to, because Panorama is a different kind of video, for a different kind of audience, with a different kind of message.

Similarly, games like Smokescreen and Code of Everand are fun, popular, and add public value – but they are aimed at different audiences from blockbuster releases on mainstream consoles,  with a different kind of message. This kind of content has enormous potential for informing, educating and entertaining people.

The future is interactive. People are spending more and more time online, engaging with concepts interactively instead of sitting by and passively watching them flow past. We know that games are the best kind of interactivity.

One day, someone will build the Panorama of the gaming world. Will it be for the BBC?

It is done. BeeBCamp 3 has come and gone, leaving a trail of tweets, photos and blog posts strewn in its wake.

With a total of 11 tables spread across 2 cities having simultaneous sessions, I can’t hope to give an authoritative summary of the whole day. An unconference like this tends to be a different experience for every person, as few people will attend all the same discussions throughout the day.

Roo Reynolds, Andrew Bowden, Charlie Beckett, and Paul Murphy of the BBC Internet Blog have already written up some of their impressions of the day. There are a lot of photos on Flickr already, and more will come.

One big new thing this time around was holding the conference in two places, with one table at each location  video-linked to the other instance.

Here’s what it looked like at the London end:

And, in Manchester:

We ran morning sessions from London, with Manchester attending, and afternoon sessions at the linked table were run from Manchester. It was the first time a lot of delegates, including myself, got to work with this kind of videoconferencing set-up, and it really worked surprisingly well. The image and sound quality is very high, with none of the lagginess and digital image artefacting you can get with something like Skype. As long as the session leaders remembered to make a point of including people on the other side of the screen, there was a real sense of presence. Definitely something to repeat.

What next?

It’s becoming normal at the end of a BeeBCamp to get people together and talk about what to do next with the energy and connections the day has mobilized. This time we had a joint discussion about this, across both instances.

One of the good ideas from this discussion was to keep the BeeBCamp vibe going by having more sessions spread throughout the UK – Glasgow, Cardiff, important regional centres. They could be smaller or shorter events, even just a lunchtime meetup. But they’d keep the open exchange of ideas and initiative flowing. It might even be an idea to hold a whole bunch of events simultaneously in various BBC locations across the country. They wouldn’t even need to be linked live; as long as the sessions had a way to report back – such as this blog – they’d all be part of the same general event. Annual or semi-annual BeeBCamps could then be the plenary session that brings it all together.

If you were at BeeBCamp 3 and want to take the day’s connections further, get in touch. If you couldn’t come, but think there’s something happening here you’d like to find out more about, get in touch! We want to do everything we can to find better ways of working together.

Huge thanks to everyone who helped make the day a success: to Ian Forrester and Simon Lumb for hosting the Manchester instance, to David Hayward for all his help, to Adrian Woolard, who was our captain and held all the threads together across the UK, to Angelique Halliburton for her help on the day, to Andy Wilson, Erik Huggers and Peter Salmon for supporting BeeBCamp.

And a really big thank you to everyone who came and everyone who pitched in. You’re the reason BeeBCamp works. I’ve noted down a few things about how we thought we could make BeeBCamp better. But hindsight is always 20/20, and good ideas can come with time. So if you’ve got any thoughts on how we could make BeeBCamp better – let’s hear ‘em! The comments field awaits.

Our victors' trophy - now with the Brixton Hive

Whew, it’s done. Hive Mind Challenge 1.0 has come and gone like a whirlwind.

You’ll remember that the Hive Mind Challenge is a game that Adrian Hon and I developed. It’s a cheating pub quiz – you’re allowed, and supposed, to use any means necessary to answer the questions. This includes searching the internet and calling friends. In other words, the game’s a test of collective intelligence. At first glance, this might seem totally easy, and for round 1 of the questions (see below) it was. But once you get past the ordinary-type trivia you get in normal pub quizzes, the challenge shifts into a whole new gear.

Overcoming FAIL

I arrived early at our venue, the Coach & Horses in Soho – only to discover a case of EPIC FAIL: the pub’s WiFi was down.

For a pub quiz based entirely on the idea that people are supposed to use the internet to find their answers, this was a Bad Thing (TM). But as the crowd assembled, they mobilized most impressively to get their answers. Many people had 3G-capable smartphones or dongles for their laptops. Others were more enterprising: a few people went to the bar next door and conned their way into getting a password for their WiFi.

Their resourcefulness was rewarded, as having fast internet connectivity proved all the difference in Round 4. I was very impressed.

Lessons Learned

This run through was an experiment, the Alpha run of the Hive Mind Challenge experience. We learned a few things that should improve future versions.

The first thing that seemed to surprise people was just how hard the questions were. When we asked Question 2 of round 2 (“What animal is depicted on page 7 of the November 7th issue of the Economist?”), an audible groan of disbelief rolled through the crowd. Once the initial shock had passed, everyone set to it with alacrity and we were very impressed with the quality of the responses. Here are the questions, and their answers, so you can get an idea of what to expect in future versions of the quiz.

The second thing that really made a difference was connectivity and hardware. Getting a good 3G signal is far from reliable in London. If the local WiFi is down, trying to get word out to your friends on the net is like talking through a mouthful of peanut butter. And it’s just as hard for their answers to reach you. The advantage in this quiz clearly went to those people who went the extra mile and blagged their way onto the WiFi network from next door. Next time, we’ll have to have guaranteed bandwidth, and encourage people to bring netbooks at least. This is a competition where you need processing power in your hardware.

All in all, though, I’m quite pleased with the results. Everyone seemed to have a good time and we learned a lot. I think our players were magnificent, especially considering the bandwidth issues with the wonky WiFi. But as one of the Brixton Hive put it, “Usually messing about trying to get on the internet is annoying – but this time it just made it feel all MacGyver.”

We sure had fun, and we’ll be putting lots of improvements into Hive Mind Challenge 2.0. If you have any suggestions, we’d love to hear them!

See you there . . .

What skills will journalists need in 2020?

This was one of the questions we discussed on Monday morning at Open ‘09. Will journalists need to know how to code HTML? To shoot and edit video for the web? To write stories in 140 characters? The more we talked, the more one simple answer coalesced in my mind.

They’ll need to understand collective intelligence.

Collective intelligence is the number one skill journalists need today, let alone 2020. It’s the ability to exploit networks effectively, to take advantage of the skills, knowledge and expertise distributed through the loose networks of people every one of us is plugged into.

Connections

Journalism has a lot of crafts – writing, shooting pictures, and so on – but the core craft that underlies all of this has always been about connections. Being a good journalist means, above all, creating and tending a network of contacts who trust you and who will be interested in talking to you when something important is going on. The writing skills, the photography or whatever aren’t really of much use unless you’ve got the nous and the network in place to pick the stories up in the first place.

And that’s the one part of journalism that is being changed more profoundly than any other – because of social media.

One of the reasons that social media is so popular is because it allows us to manage relationships with a lot of people efficiently. For journalists, this is of supreme importance. But this isn’t just another way of communicating and socializing (though that is very important in its own right).

Because it is so good a communications medium, social media allows us to do something quite different, and that’s to enact a sort of collective intelligence. Social media allows us to communicate widely and interactively with large groups of people that we know only tenuously, or even not at all. It is the most effective and least costly means of group formation and coordination – a subject explored in depth in Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. This technology makes communication so efficient that it actually makes possible entirely new behaviors and ways of working. Wikipedia is the classic example of this, of course. No one would have thought it possible before Wikipedia was published, and yet it is now the first reference of choice for many people.

In news, social media means that we can magnify our capabilities in information gathering and dissemination. For example, if I sent you a two-minute phone camera video shot in Arabic, how long would it take you to find someone to translate it for you?

If you’re working without social media, it could take hours. Depends if you personally know someone who speaks Arabic. But if you don’t? You need to start calling around contacts, and their contacts, and . . . this takes time.

A journalist adept in collective intelligence should be able to get a two-minute video translated from any language to any language inside an hour. I’d say fifteen minutes for common languages. I don’t have that many twitter followers, and even I can get a message out to a few hundred people instantly. With re-tweets, a message I send could reach thousands of people in minutes. That’s a lot of minds to tap.

This network of expertise and knowledge is immensely valuable. This is the hive mind, the collective intelligence. When it is accessed and focused in the appropriate way, it can solve almost any problem. Players of alternate reality games have proven this, by doing things like writing entire books and cracking military codes without payment, without command structures, or for any other purpose than their own enjoyment.

Journalists gain a powerful skill if they learn how to be a part of this collective intelligence, to work with it and within it. It is an ability and an attitude as much as a skill, but it can be learned (that’s one part of the thinking behind the Hive Mind Challenge).

Writing, photography, video and all the other skills of journalism production can work with the material gleaned from collective intelligence, but it remains the base.

And above all, this is what journalists in 2020 will need to be: masters of the hive mind, the focal points of collective intelligence. They will need to be constantly permeating the network, collecting disparate scraps of wisdom and collating them into powerful insights. They will need to be expert network tenders and community managers.

Heck, they need to be this way now.

Yesterday I spent the morning hanging out in a nightclub, talking about the Future of Journalism™. It was a part of Open 09, a creativity and innovation event organised by the good people at UCLAN in Preston.

Talk about the future of journalism usually seems to revolve around a few big questions:

1.    How do we deal with the shocking pace of change in the industry?
2.    What skills will journalists need in the future?
3.    And (the elephant in the room) how do we fund all this?

We talked around all three in the morning.

For me, question 1 has a really simple answer: Trust in your core values, and improvise the rest by any means necessary.

By Any Means Necessary

Trust in your core values, and improvise the rest by any means necessary.

This is really about staying agile. Agility is essential for any journalist or news organization nowadays. The pace of change in media is famously fast.

A project might get millions of hits if it went live today, but if it takes a few months to come to market, it could be passé or even simply obsolete. But this sort of time scale is normal in TV and magazine production, as well as some interactive projects. Investigative journalism in any medium also operates on this time scale.

So we have a problem. It’s a challenge for an organisation with a big command structure to be fast enough. This goes double when institutional factors become involved, as they often do: company-wide strategies and operating procedures exist for a reason, but they can sometimes delay an otherwise promising project beyond relevance. What’s the answer?

Reinforce your core values, and improvise. Extrapolate from a diamond core of what the organisation is really about.

What is the purpose of the organisation? To be the first to get out the news? To cover one area especially well? To report on a particular issue or subject? Or to reach an entire nation comprehensively? Whatever the core mission is, ignore the SOPs and just do it, by any means necessary.

I know companies don’t work this way – and that’s exactly why they’re having trouble adapting to the pace of change. This is why startups are inherently more flexible than established organisations. It’s not just their size; it’s because they’re new enough that they aren’t beholden to established ways of doing things and corporate procedures – they just get out there and do it, using whatever tools are at their disposal. Their reduced institutional baggage means they can be more agile, amorphous and flexible, and this is a huge advantage. New tools, production techniques and public behaviours are evolving all the time. The advantage goes to whoever can engage and implement them the fastest.

What do you think?

image by Madmolecule on Flickr

One evening a couple of weeks ago, my mate Neil called me. He wanted to know something specific: which of the Great Lakes drains through Niagara Falls?

This isn’t usually the sort of thing he calls for, so I was a bit surprised.

But it turned out that his girlfriend was at that very moment taking part in a pub quiz. Or more specifically, she was cheating at a pub quiz: she was texting Neil for the answers to questions, and because I’m a geography geek (among other kinds of geek) he called me when it came to the Niagara question.

Nice to know that I rank ahead of Google in his regard.

But this sort of thing happens all the time in pub quizzes. They’re supposed to be tests of how much data you’ve got stored in your head. But everyone has a mobile in their pocket, and with that, a connection to someone with internet access – or even, internet access on the device itself. The totality of human trivia is nothing more than a few thumbclicks away. You might think that pub quizzes might be an endangered species, with smartphones spreading the way they are.

But is it really relevant these days to have a lot of data in your head? I mean, it’s all out there – with a search engine and ubiquitous broadband, you don’t need to actually know a lot of stuff. You just need to know how to find stuff out.

That can be a lot harder than it sounds.

And if it’s hard, that means it can be fun – if it’s done right.

With this in mind, Adrian Hon and I have a new project going: the Hive Mind Challenge. This is a pub quiz, but it’s not like the ones you’re used to. Google is your friend. Bandwidth is your friend. And you’ll need all the friends you can get – because the sort of questions you’ll be answering just aren’t that easy to solve on your own.

We’re hosting the inaugural Hive Mind Challenge at the Coach & Horses pub in Soho on Wednesday, November 25th. You’re invited. Check out the registration page if you’d like to come, or check out the homepage if you’d like some more info.

See you there!

image by Andrew Northrop on Flickr

For a big part of my life, I’ve made and maintained friendships through violence.

Not real violence, of course.

But simulated weaponry and fantasy combat is the glue that binds my gang in Montreal. It’s also cementing the connections between members of the pick-up Halo team that I play with here in London.

Playing together at lunchtime has turned what used to be a bunch of anonymous guys in the next office into my mates. The game’s fast-paced fragging is what we socialize around, to the point where we know each other mostly by our Halo call signs. When I arrive for our lunchtime match, I’ll be greeted with “Hello, Moxie,” (my callsign is Moxidas) and I know the others as Maz, leTang, El Meteor and so on. It can be a stretch if we actually want to use the office email to communicate, because we have to try and remember each others’ real names.

I pwn you because I’m your friend?

It’s not strange that playing together makes and deepens friendships. But it’s something of a paradox that competing against each other seems to strengthen friendships, as well. Especially when the competition is so overtly combative.

You blow up another player with a rocket launcher. His limp corpse cartwheels through the air, propelled by a blooming explosion. You laugh manically. He curses and thumps the couch with his fist in frustration. How can this make you grow together as people?

Of course, there’s more going on here than just the game. There’s a whole cloud of specific social interactions that grows up around playing video games together – team communication, talking about what happened in the last match, and of course smack talk – endless smack talk. This, especially, is a delicate balance, where everyone seems to follow unwritten rules. For instance, though there are stronger and weaker players in our team, no one would ever say to one of the newer players “Wow, killing you was so easy. Shame you suck so much. I’m way better than you!” It would seem to break some rule.

So we pretend to kill each other, but it makes us friends. We talk up our victories and insult those we’ve bested, but not too much.

It’s the testosterone, baby.

I’ve learned a lot about this apparent paradox from reading Dan Cook’s excellent post about this. Playing games of skill or chance, with strangers or with friends, are all wildly different experiences, that give rise to very different emotions.

The game you’re playing may be quite combative, but it turns out that if you’re playing with friends, the pre-existing social patterns smooth out the peaks and troughs of victory and defeat:

Competitive game play with friends becomes less about winning and more about shared experiences. This is a very different emotion. The ability to tell player stories, communicate, discuss and joke with one another are all features that enable the core delivery of value to the player. In some sense, the actual competition is secondary to the bonding that occurs around the activity. The ‘fun’ that comes from playing with friends is completely different than the ‘fun’ associated when playing with strangers.

Playing against strangers happens in the anonymous mode of the internet – the same world that gives rise to forum trolls and flamers. Without pre-existing social ties, all bets are off and naked competitiveness comes out. That’s why online play can be a merciless and disheartening experience. This goes double for skill-based combative games like first-person shooters.

Beating strangers is a guaranteed source of entertainment. If you want a highly reliable, inexpensive means of making your game fun, toss some strangers together in a game of skill (it barely matters what sort). To boost the emotion even further, place the winners on a high status pedestal. Voila, instant fun, at least for the winners.

Yes, for the winners. When you rise to the top of the pile in an online kill-em-up, you get a real fiero boost. But if you’ve ever been in an online game server where you’re always trailing the pack, you know it’s no fun to be the loser when you’re playing against strangers.

One of my favorite games is Call of Duty 4. I play online quite often (my callsign there is Moxidas too, if you want to join in some night). But I always play in teams, because I frankly can’t stand the sort of testosterone-laced smack talk that happens all too often in the free-for-all version.

But when you’re playing with friends, the combat and smack talk tempered by a lot of things, like smiles and other body language – gaming in the same social space is accompanied by really high-bandwidth social communication.

Dominance behavior dips sharply if you win in front of friends. Friends are generally are people you need to get along with in order to live your life. Imagine for a moment, if you were to win a game and then yelled at them to lick your boots (and you meant it). They probably wouldn’t be your friends for very long. Our innate social response is to repress our instinctual dominance urge so as not to damage our friendships. [...] The loser is under threat of being put in a low status position. However, once they receive signals that their trust in their friend is justified, they have no reason to fear a loss of status.

Game dynamics for fun and friendship

This is why combative games can be very exclusive. You have to be good to play against people who exult in their victory, or come in to the game through a pre-existing circle of friends. But it is possible to make a game that’s inherently combative and co-operative.

The game that does this really well is Left 4 Dead. You play against a horde of zombies, but in a close-knit group, where the story and game dynamics conspire to create bonds between you. For me, this is the game’s greatest achievement. You really need to stick together and help each other to survive. Over the course  of an hour-long game, the cumulative effect of this  is so strong that I’ve found myself feeling genuinely fond of people who I know only from their gamertag, even if they haven’t said a thing during the whole match.

There are plenty of games out there that reward collaboration and explore the mechanics of social relationships. It’s something I’ll be exploring further. In the meantime, I recommend Dan Cook’s post. It’s well worth checking out.

I spent a lot of today in Stories From Numbers, a day of talking about data-driven journalism and linked data from the BBC’s Future Now project.

It was a dense day full of interesting talks. Here’s one of the highlights.

More or Less

Richard Vadon, Richard Knight and Olly Hawkins are from the team at Radio 4’s More or Less. They led us on a fascinating trip through the world of statistics. Debunking bogus numbers is one of the things the show does best. And they’ve got plenty of targets, like this video:

It’s alarmist and discouragingly popular (over 10 million views so far!). More or Less debunked the stats with some good primary research, but sadly their video hasn’t been viewed nearly as many times as its xenophobic instigator.

They shared some tips on how to deal with figures:

1. If a number seems bogus, it probably is.

No one is immune from this. Richard Vadon, the show’s editor, showed us some examples of BBC News at 10 stories based on data that turned out to be completely spurious. Where did the journalists get their data?

The Home Office.

Even official government material can contain errors, dubious analysis, or . . .

2. Beware of Chinese Whispers

Just because a number is repeated often, doesn’t mean it’s right. “Bad stats are like zombies,” said Vadon. “They never die and they’re hard to kill.”

Doubly dangerous are studies that quote other studies. The Home Office figures that led to a false News at 10 report were quoting an independent study, which itself quoted a previous study. But statistics are sensitive. With each quotation, distortions can creep in along the way, and before you know it even government policy can be based on completely wrong information.

3. Read the Original Research

It’s oft-repeated that the UK is the most surveilled nation on earth, with 1% of the world’s population but 20% of the world’s CCTV cameras. The average Londoner is supposedly filmed 300 times a day.

It’s bollocks.

These numbers originally come from a 2002 study. A look into that study’s methodology shows us that the statistic is highly questionable.

There are a lot of CCTV cameras in the UK, but they’re not on a central database anywhere. They’re put up by local councils, private landowners, local governments, companies and even privte individual. The only way to find out how many there are is to actually go and count them.

That’s what this study did. The researchers went along Putney High Street and Upper Richmond Road in southwest London, counted the number of cameras they could see, and marked that down. Then they extrapolated to all of London, and from there to the whole UK.

There are some big problems with that logic. Which means that the BBC News story I linked to above is just plain wrong.

4. Ask: Is it a Big Number?

In 2006, one of the top stories was that the NHS, the UK’s state health provider, had a budget deficit of between £800 million and 1 billion.

That sounds like a lot of money, and by most counts it is.

But it’s only about 1% of the total NHS budget.

For comparison, the UK Treasury applies a margin of error of 2% when it assesses the budget of the entire UK government. So if the NHS can accurately count a shortfall of 1% on a scale of £1 billion, they’re actually doing really well.

One of the things I found most heartening about this talk is that the guys from More or Less  were quite candid about their qualifications. “We’re all arts graduates, like most journalists,” said Richard Vadon. It doesn’t take a mathematician to do this kind of journalism – just a bit of applied intelligence. That’s good news for an arts grad like me.

“Journalists as a whole aren’t very good at spotting bad numbers. but we should get better,” Vadon said. Amen to that.