One of the things I didn't figure out for playful was how to talk properly about collecting in play. Which I think is at least as important as pretending and equally neglected.
I still haven't figured it out, really, but there's one phenomenon I want to note: Junior Taxonomy. Arthur got massive satisfaction from sorting and resorting his Pokemon cards in new ways, new arrangements, new structures. Sometimes based on an overt taxonomy baked in by the card designers, sometimes in a scheme of his own devising. He's now doing the same with Match Attax. I remember doing this too. I think it's a basic impulse; we're practising ordering the world.
So, I bet designing for varied taxonomies would be as potent as designing for pretending. Even just putting random numbers on the back of things. You don't have to put the meaning in, leave it to be constructed/pretended.
I was lucky enough to go along to this last night. What a tremendous evening. I felt a bit of a spare part. Didn't know anyone there. But as soon as the stories started everyone just became audience so that was OK. Some were funny, some moving, some funny and moving. It was a brilliant way to spend an evening.
It's a simple premise, inspired by The Moth; people tell stories about their lives. Four were simple stories, one was a musician who talked about the song-writing process and sang a couple of songs.
I couldn't help thinking about it all the way home, some things occurred to me:
Malcolm Gladwell, (in this word backstage podcast) suggests that the people with the best stories are those whose jobs involve lots of sitting around with their colleagues; cricketers, for instance, or pilots. I'd suggest it's not just the sitting around, it's sitting around while half paying attention to something else (the match, the automatic pilot). This leaves enough room for proper story-telling, for holding court, not interrupted by sniping, conversation or one-up-person-ship. I don't seem to have that kind of life. The world I move in hasn't carved out that space. People would be embarrassed to be that central to everyone's attention, and it probably wouldn't be allowed by the group, we're all too competitive. That seems a shame to me. I might try listening for longer, encouraging people to luxuriate in their stories a bit more, not trying to top them all the time.
Musicians are much better at eliciting applause than story-tellers. The clapping for each of the Pugwash songs was way more enthusiastic than for anyone's stories, not, I suspect because they were naturally more applause-worthy (though they were great) but because musicians have naturally learned how to get people to clap. They put more energy into the room, they have really obvious endings, they raise their eyebrows and their arms. You almost can't help but clap. People telling stories haven't discovered the equivalent cues.
And I'm still not sure that story is that important to stories. You know, all that beginning, middle, end stuff, narrative arc blah, blah, blah. Games people go on about it all the time, and ad people are convinced they're masters of story miniatures. I think, very often, story is just something to hang all the important bits on. And not in a significant, meaningful way, like a backbone or a scaffold. It's more of a coat-hanger. The actual stuff that connects isn't about plot or narrative; it's texture, observations, images, jokes, juxtapositions, felicitous phrases and little moments of aha. That seemed true last night, all the stories were about something that had happened, but that wasn't the important bit. What sticks in the head is how the story was told, not what the story was.
That's what I'm telling myself anyway. Because I'd love to have a go at this and nothing like a proper story has ever happened to me.
As a semi-professional prognosticator I'm always tempted by the rhetorical power of statements like The Internet Is Killing X. But, of course, it isn't.
I also try hard to remember:
Something That's Growing Is Not The Same As Something That's Big.
Something That's Declining Is Not The Same As Something That's Small.
If someone offers to give you half of a record company, take it. They may be shrinking, but they're still big.
It's an extraordinary place.
Vast. Intensely detailed. Sometimes beautiful.
A tremendous achievement in world-building. Similar in some ways to the world-building that goes into a video game - painstaking, obsessive, team-based.
And like a videogame the obsessions and agenda of the makers sometimes leaks through in unintended ways.
This is Las Vegas. And what's the most conspicuous, prominent and iconic building in Las Vegas?
It's the station. Obviously.
And, of course, however hard you try, however comprehensive your vision, there'll always be some tiny detail that breaks the spell, gives the game away, shatters the illusion. There's always something that breaks the frame. That's the problem with world-building.
This, on the other hand, is a garden railway. This is something different. People who build garden railways don't normally go for the total vision of an HO layout. Because it would be so hard. The charm of a garden railway is that it exists alongside or within the ordinary world - like The Wombles or The Borrowers.
I think of this as bubble-building rather than world-building. It draws heavily on the awesome power of pretending.
And I started talking about these things because I don't know that much about games. Worse - I have really bad instincts when it comes to games. I always make the wrong console choice, buy the unfun game.
For example, when everyone else was buying Gameboys I bought one of these. Mostly because it had a TV tuner. That's why I can't talk sensibly about games.
In fact, when I think about games and playfulness, these sort of things don't come to mind at all. What pops into my head is evoked, a little bit, by this:
It's that experience of driving in the back of the family car, scrunching you eyes up at night to turn the streetlights into laser weapons and shooting other cars. Or watching the passing shadows on the road beside you, imagining shapes and rhythms.
These aren't games, like the industry thinks of games, these are something a little less, these are Barely Games. And these, are what I wanted to talk about.
Partly because they're just interesting, partly because these things, and especially pretending, don't seem to find their way much into the discussion about games. I listen to a lot of chat about games and hear lots about story and play, but very rarely hear about pretending, when, of course, pretending is central to the whole business. That's how video game reviews should start - "In this game you are pretending..."
(I'm not sure these bits about collecting and negotiation were that helpful, I should maybe have made the whole thing about pretending. They're a bit of a tangent, but I'll include them for completeness. I put them in because I think Collecting is really important and it doesn't get talked about enough. But I didn't really think of anything significant to say. If you don't want to read them scroll down and rejoin us after the picture of Mario.)
So, let's start with collecting, a huge part of play, objects you can pretend with.
Lots of things that are supposed to be games are really collections. Have you ever tried to play the official pokemon card game? It's intensely complicated, we never even got close to finishing a game.
So Arthur (my son) and his friends used to improvise their own games to play with them - usually some variant of Top Trumps.
Which means collecting has to turn into negotiation and collecting play becomes social. This, to me, seems to be the most valuable bit of most of Arthur's play - the negotiation and social problem-solving they have to do to invent the rules for their own games. It's clearly more interesting to them too, because they spend way more time arguing about and changing the rules than they do actually playing the game they're devising.
Of course, this isn't confined to kids. Lots of the fun in Tom and Tom's excellent Noticings game is in the ambiguity of the rules. There's social joy in the conversations around the game - and the arguments.
Some people are less comfortable with this ambiguity, they want the rules to be very clear. Phil Gyford for example, wants the rules of Foursquare to be clearer. This is perfectly smart and understandable, as he says, Games Have Rules. But Barely Games sometimes don't and that's what makes them interesting.
That's why I enjoyed playing General Jumbo so much. The central idea gave your solider collection enormously rich pretending value - they could be small and plastic and still be 'real'. And when you played with other people the negotiating became intense - working out what each little unit could do.
Anyway, not sure if that was useful, may have been a little tangential, so let's get back to the meat of the thing - pretending.
This used to be one of Arthur's favourite toys, partly because he's a huge Mario Kart fan, partly because he used to be not allowed to play with guns.
But when you ban guns you can't compete with the power of pretending. What were we going to do, ban sticks? Ban everything that's longer on one side than on another. Because any vaguely long, thin object + pretending can = gun.
And, it's not confined to kids. I bet we can all identify with the moment above and we all go through our lives with some part of our brain doing a tiny bit of pretending.
A lot of the power of the secret 'short' at Starbucks is that you can pretend you're an insider, that you know something special, you know the maitre de.
And part of the reason I installed this automatic watering system on our balcony was because that sort of automation (in fact any sort of automation) has hints of having a secret lair. Just like when I walk through the crowds on Oxford Street a tiny part of me is pretending I'm an assassin slipping steely-eyed through the crowds in order to shake the agents on my tail. And I bet it's not just me. I'm not saying I'm massively deluded, just that, very often, some bit of us is always trying to play those games, to make mundane things more exciting.
I think that's why we find Jason Bourne so resonant. It's easy pretending to be him. Because most of the time he's just commuting.
If you analysed the movies they would probably break-down like this:
Or for another perspective let's think about advertising/branding and look at the ultimate pretending object - the watch...
Where's the value in something like this? What's the utility you're paying for? It's fairly clear...
A watch is an object built on pretending. The value watch-makers add is all about pretending.
As with lots of luxury goods. What we're really buying is an object that lets us pretend.
We don't have the sort of life that requires a Pelican case full of weapons, but we can get some barbecue tools in a case that feels a bit similar. Designers will talk about 'cues', brand people will talk about 'associations' but it's all pretending.
Indeed, when we dress up, when we're on display and at our most public, these are the times when our costumes get the most pretendy - we get married dressed as princesses and officers - then go back to our everyday lives dressed as squaddies, rockstars or resting athletes.
But it's not just a matter of dressing up. A successful pretending object has to delicately balance pretending affordance with not making you look like an idiot. That's why so many successful pretending objects are also highly functional. As anyone who's been down the Tactical Pants rabbit-hole can tell you it's easy to obsess for ages about exactly the right trouser configuration for your equipment (ooh-er), all with a perfectly straight face. But every now and then you have a moment of self-awareness and realise you're just pretending to be a cop or a soldier from the future or Val Kilmer.
And of course, what you're really doing is both things at once. You're being practical and thinking about function and you're pretending. But you need some plausible deniability - the functional stuff needs to be credible. Which is why pretending objects that are too obvious don't work. You're no longer pretending in your own head, you're play acting in the world.
Another thing - I've always wondered why software/OS makers don't do more with the power of pretending. Look, for instance, at the average desktop. It's using a pretending metaphor - but it's not much of an imaginative leap is it? It's a desktop on your desk. I can see how this would have been useful in the early days, getting people used to interfaces and everything, but surely there's more opportunity to have some fun now - to make software more compelling by adding some pretending value to it.
There have been some notable attempts at this; Tactile 3D make movie-like interfaces where you can fly around your files like an authentic 80s cyberpunk. And the genius of 3D Mailbox must be experienced to be believed. Trust me, you want to watch these videos.
So, why aren't we all using software like that? Why hasn't anyone harnessed the power of pretending to make work a bit more fun. For the same reason so many games are just a bit, you know, much. It's that inability to be subtle, that desire, shared by games companies and brand-marketing people alike to go too far, to do too much. Have a look at this:
That's how lots of games feel to me. If you're in it you're 100% focused, if you're outside it you're excluded. It's so total. We've built a world and you're going to be immersed in it whether you like it or not. Casual Games feel the same to me too - just for 5 minutes rather than 40 hours. They still want all your attention, just for less time.
But, as we've discussed, that's not how pretending works. Everyday Pretending is something you do with a bit of your brain, with the edges. It's a thing of inattention, not concentration. Compare, for example, the Theory Of Fun piano stairs with Greyworld's tuned railings. The stairs thing is fun and it makes a point, but it would drive you mad after a while, there's no subtlety to it, no joy in the discovery, nothing hidden, it's all on the surface. It's that totalising instinct of so many 'brand' people - make things obvious, make things clear. There's a parallel in the maniacal world-building instinct of games people - leave no detail unturned, offer no escape from the vision.
I'd argue that this sort of total vision is neither necessary nor helpful.
We don't need many cues to help us pretend. We'll find meaning in the noisiest noise - just give us a tiny signal and we'll come up with a message.
The smallest thing can be a basis for pretending. A lot of industrial designers know this very well.
Car dashboards successfully evoke cockpits without throwing it in your face - making you feel like an adolescent fool. Or that Nokia Matrix-phone was able to seem military and 'gun-like' without being too obvious about it. Enough cues to let you pretend, not so many you felt like an idiot.
Perhaps the ultimate pretending objects are Billy's Boots. All they need is a myth to give them power.
And, for other proof that you don't need much for successful pretending, have a look at the tremendous Pretend Office; a simple mailing list, a bunch of people pretending to be employees and you get a rich, complex, imaginative world. It doesn't need any more than that.
PAUSE
So, I started thinking about what I'd look for in a Barely Game. And came up with these examples:
I like the way Noticings is a game you can play while walking around. That's often when I have time for playing. And I like the social aspects of playing around with the rules.
And I think of WideNoise as a Barely Game too. It's not a game at all, but it has some game-like mechanics, and it too is built for wondering around. And Foursquare and Gowalla are obviously more gamelike and work on the move as well. They only demands moments of attention, little glimpses of it. And they're interesting because they combine utility and futility in powerful ways - sometimes very practical, sometimes very silly. That's a good combination.
And these things; the elements of my personal informatic array are Barely Games too - you just walk around and you're playing a game without having to think about it.
So, from there, I got to this brief for something that's interesting and still barely a game.
And there's one mandatory requirement: "No Touch The Screen" - I'd love to build a mobile application that doesn't demand you stare at and stroke it the whole time. To me the attention-hogging aspects of most games has found perfect embodiment in the AR craze. They want to impose another screen between us and the world. There must be a way to harnass the power of pretending to create something that you can play with while walking around, that doesn't want you to look at the screen all the time.
(The best example I've found to date is RJDJ - again, not really a game, but it fulfills a lot of my criteria, it feels like a game without actually being one. And it is, of course, lovely.)
So we made a Barely Game prototype - The Situated Audio Platform, a browser for geotagged audio files. The idea is that it only has one button, the whole screen, which you use to switch it on, and then you never have to look at it. You can leave it in your pocket, monitoring the world for tagged files, quitely pinging, while you listen to your music. Then if it detects something, you hold it at your side and sweep the area until you home in on whatever it's found. You could browse AudioBoo with it, or get it to read geotagged wikipedia files to you.
That's the useful bit.
But if you wanted to do some pretending, and some stupidness, it could turn into a social fighting game. Where the files you explore are mines and traps laid by other people and you sweep and destroy them to stay alive. All while never looking at your device. (The video below shows the device held in view, that's just so you can see it on the video, it could all be done more discretely, at your side.) So you can be commuting in a crowd and fighting enemies in your head. We made a little demo. See what you think:
I think there's something in that. And once the platform existed you could do loads with it. But there, right there, is where I ran out of things to say and stopped.
Big thanks to Toby and Richard and the pixelistas. Playful was ace. I hope it happens again.
My dConstruct talk has arrived on the podcast, and huffduff, so you might want to listen to it. (MP3)
I haven't been able to bring myself to do so, but I can't imagine it'll be very coherent without the accompanying pictures and videos so I thought I'd do a sort of write-up here. I've not written too much, just the bare bones, so the best experience might be to listen to the podcast and look at these pictures. (It'll be a bit like watching cricket on CeeFax.)
After the usual introductory hooplah we dived straight into some quick thoughts on 'post-digitalness'. Considering three aspects of that:
Ever since Bruce Sterling coined the word spime, this has seemed inevitable to me. And we are, in fact, seeing more and more physical things with some sort of presence in digital networks.
And one byproduct of this will be an increased amount of bubbly writing and things talking to us in the first person - in an effort to make all these informationalised objects friendly and not scary.
Bubblino is my favourite example of this. It's an arduino connected to a bubble-machine connected to the web; watching twitter for its own name. Adrian takes it to conferences and it's always hugely popular. And I think it's so successful because there's a really magical equivalence between the significance and value of twitter and the act of blowing bubbles. It's a splendidly well chosen conjunction.
But this is probably the most interesting aspect - we're finally moving past the twin elephants in the room of technological conversation. Infatuation with everything shiny and digital, and that nostalgic, 'Lead Pencil Club' clinging to the past. We're finally getting to the point where we can decide which are the appropriate technologies to use based simply on their actual merits. And, we're starting to understand how to combine the analogue and digital in effective ways.
My favourite example is this: Things I Word Rather Read On Paper. Is it combines what the web does well; publishing, gathering, discovering and curating content (via instapaper) with what print does well; being readable, durable and portable.
Which leads us to this rather portentous title, based, in the noble tradition of previous talks I've really enjoyed at dConstruct from Tom Coates and Matts Jones & Biddulph (MP3). All I've done is expand on their notion that the web it is moving beyond being a thing of sites and is becoming a thing of APIs and services. They've suggested that our data is escaping the boundaries of any particular website, I'm just suggesting that we are soon going to see it escaping the boundaries of the web itself - and of all those glowing rectangles.
And this excellent book has given me some intellectual backing for exploring this further.
First point worth noting - all technologies grow out of previous technologies. The more technology there is around, the more there is to invent with.
As technologies develop, certain elements come to be used together frequently and particular technologies cluster together in what Arthur calls domains. He talks about how a particular combination of pistons, turbines evolved into the aeroplane engine- and found a peak of development in the Rolls-Royce Merlin.
And many of us have been working in a particular technological domain too; that of the web and social media. One that's been extraordinary successful - economically and culturally. So successful that we were all Time's Person of the Year.
But all this success made me think of this little moment from the World At War - a French general talking about the construction of the Maginot Line, and about how clever and successful the French thought they were. And it made me wonder if we weren't in a similar place - starting to be a little too pleased with ourselves and our social media revolutions.
And Arthur talks about another phenomenon in the evolution of technology - how things that are used together often enough start to congeal into a single unit. We don't talk about the various components of the engine, we talk about the whole thing - as a single technology.
Which reminded me of the origins of the word 'cliche' - in the days of movable type it meant a set of letters/words that were used together so frequently that the printer didn't bother dismantling them. Which got me think about the cliches we're building, and about one in particular - the screen.
Because these glowing rectangles are appearing everywhere in our lives. Pouring out into the world.
And they don't always work well. They don't fail gracefully.
We haven't really learned how to design or write for them yet.
They're so common, you even get them in Kinder eggs. And they're only going to get cheaper and more ubiquitous. And I wonder if that's always a good thing.
Look, for instance, at this video - Drone Controllers Execute Hellfire Strike - it's hugely impressive and deeply chilling, and illustrates for me, the distancing effect screens can have, the way they can come between us and the world. Should we really be thinking about doing more of this, of putting more screens in the world, of deciding to walk round staring at everything through an augmented reality lens. Obviously it'll be great for some things - but should we not be considering some alternatives?
(If only because people don't seem that impressed with screens any more. You can do the cleverest, most expensive, most extraordinary bit of programming but put it on a screen and everyone'll think they've seen it before. And they probably have. In a movie.)
So, let's turn back to Arthur and see what he can tell us. For instance, doesn't this description of a mature technology feel just like the web right now? "encrusted with systems and subassemblies hung onto it to make it work properly, handle exceptions, extend its range of application, and provide redundancy in the event of failure."
By way of illustration I showed the audience this. It's designed to go in the hole in a coffee cup lid.
It seems like the ultimate example of a technological dead-end. It's useful, it does what it's supposed to, it solves a problem. But it reminds me of many of those applications built on top of twitter. We're solving the problems we created. Tinkering at the edge of things.
(And, of course, it's not the only way to solve the problem. There's a rich ecosystem of products and solutions around coffee cup lids.)
This is how a lot of web stuff feels to me right now. We're looking for ways to escape this way of thinking, but we're just encrusting the old model with new sub-assemblies.
Arthur suggests that the answer is redomaining - introducing new components and new ideas from a completely different technological domain. This is how we get something genuinely new - not just by improving what we already have. This is one reason I suspect so many of us are looking at analogue technologies - we're trying to find a new domain we can combine with our existing digital expertise.
There's something primal and irresistible about physical/analogue technologies. Compare and contrast the delight of this rocket engineer's 'brilliant' with the affectless 'excellent job' of the drone operators. Physical stuff reaches us in more fundamental ways than more stuff on screens.
And, actually, that's probably a good place to stop. I then talked about how some of this stuff had found practical application in the creation of Newspaper Club, and the lessons we'd learned doing that. I'm sure I'll bore you all rigid with that at some point in the future, so maybe we should end with the summary of what I thought I was saying. This:
And, finally, huge thanks to everyone at dconstruct - clearleft, the other speakers and the crowd. It was a tremendous day out.
