Russell Davies

day 23 - a song that you want to play at your wedding - enola gay

This is where I finally have to admit that this list isn't really for me is it? It's for someone much younger. Someone who gets happy and sad and has favourite albums. I'm a middle-aged man, I don't have emotions or certainty. I've already had songs played at my wedding.

And following this meme has certainly made me feel old. Especially doing it alongside Matt. I'm literally old enough to be his father - if I'd been more sexually successful at college. But it's been a treat to do it in parallel - a splendid glimpse into another musical imagination. It's also shown me how far I am from being a proper writer.

So, this is the song we actually did play for the first dance at our wedding. And it's for Anne. Because.

(And yes we know it's a slightly odd sentiment to associate with your marriage but loads of people have Every Breath You Take as their wedding song and that's just creepy.)

steal other things

OK. This is an attempt to come at 'pretending apps' from another direction.

(And, a big caveat upfront. I hate it, on the Today programme, when journalists and pundits bang on about something I know about. They always get it wrong. And I'm conscious that lots of people reading this know about games and play. Way more than me. So I'm bound to be getting it wrong, or at least stating the obvious. Apologies. You should stop reading now. This, I'm afraid, is how I do things. I learn by stating the obvious in public.)

We're seeing all sorts of people taking stuff from games at the moment. Mechanics like high scores, badges and leader boards are being extracted from games and sold to anyone who wants to get people to do things.

There is, of course, some logic to this, these are often compelling things, and they certainly map well to how a lot of organisations see the world. I suspect many of these mechanics are so popular with brands and marketing organisations because they fit with traditional assumptions about how you motivate people - give them rewards. We've just swapped badges and mayorships for BOGOFs and Miles.

And this isn't stupid, people do like keeping score of things and getting little badges, it scratches an atavistic itch.

The problem is, up to now, we've mostly experienced these point scoring mechanisms in the context of well-designed games. They're part of a larger experience - properly thought through by people who know what they're doing. We like scoring points, partly because, up to now, all the contexts in which we've scored points have been fun.

However, as I've slightly grumpily encountered myself, not everyone who wants a game wants to pay for a game designer. It's a bit like advertising, everyone thinks they can do it themselves.

Which means we're going to encounter a bunch of crappy sorta-games foisted on us. Those rudimentary game schemes are going to be rolled out by everyone with a rewards card, CRM system, loyalty scheme or something that can be plotted on a graph. And they're going to be no fun. They're going to drive us all mad. This'll either lead to wholesale abandonment of the whole idea or a recognition that proper games design is necessary. Not sure which way I'd bet, but that's not really my main point.

My main point brings me back to Pretending Apps. Because there are lots of other things you can steal from games, many other aspects of gaming that people find appealing and some of them might be more easily and usefully extracted.

The aesthetic context, for instance, might be more worthwhile; the role you're given to play, the cues that let you imagine you're not you for a bit. They might be more rewarding to dig out, especially as that's what quite a lot of brands already do. They surround a product or service with cues that give it pretending power - that help you fit it into a fantasy version of who you are. While also doing whatever practical thing you wanted it to do. But they don't often think of it that way. They talk about heritage and authenticity and positioning. They don't often talk about their pretending power.

Anyway. So this feels like a thing. That while the wholesale export of games mechanics to the world might get a bit infuriating, the export of the cues about pretend identity might be more fruitful.

And it brings me back to toys again, because they do that very well.

Anyway. Sorry. I'm thinking about loud here, without really an aim in mind yet. Ah well.

day 22 - a song that you listen to when you're sad - moody chops

I have no business being sad. Nothing terrible has happened to me. I've never been depressed. I have a family I love, friends and colleagues I like and a job I can bear. So if I'm ever tempted by sadness I listen to this and snap out of it.

not playful

I've been casting about for something to say at Lift. And one of the things I do, when I'm doing that, is revisit old talks and see what I got wrong and where I disagree with myself.

And looking at Playful, I realise that I wanted to say more than 'I'm not good at games' I wanted to say that there are loads of games I don't like. Especially many of these new social, interacting-with-real-people games. But of course, I'm always embarrassed to say this in person, so when invited to them I tend to just not turn up. Maybe that's why I'm writing it here.

Which is not all to say that these things are bad, just that they're not for me. And, I'm not that special, so I bet they don't appeal to some other people either. And that might be worth thinking about. Because there seems to be some consensus that the more social these things are the better and I'm not sure that's true.

It's probably connected to some other things I don't like:

a) Theatre (I can never suspend my disbelief, I just see people shouting and spitting)

b) Any form of 'improv' (Always seems like a comedy song, you're supposed to be impressed that some joke-shaped thing has been constructed and not to worry about the fact that it's not funny)

c) Meeting people I don't know (I'm just a typical shy person. I like people I know, I don't like meeting people I don't. That's why the web has been such a joy for me, I've been able to 'meet' people and get to know something of them before I really meet them.)

d) Participation (I'll run a mile from any circumstance where I'll be called on to participate in an unplanned way; magic, street theatre, etc, especially when I feel like I'm being manipulated by some behind-the-scenes brain. Which is always.)

As I've said, I know this isn't right, I'm probably in a minority and possibly deeply flawed, but I bet I'm not alone. There seems to be some sort of consensus that the highest form of play is fully immersive, interactive live theatre. Well not for me. The rhetoric of these things is often about people making their own choices, being free to act, creating their own narrative, etc, etc. And I always end up feeling like a piece, a pawn.

Which means I find many of the efforts of the social and pervasive gamers a bit scary. Werewolf, for example, seems to be a codification and enforcement of all that's horrible about a dinner party. (Though it's intellectually fascinating, and if you like that kind of thing, exactly the kind of thing you'd like.)

So lots of my favourite games are only slightly social.

I love Echo Bazaar partly because the social aspect is fairly opaque. I might know who some of the people out there are, but I don't need to. I can avoid them if/when I want to. Drop 7's the same. The chat function on Word With Friends is about as far as I'd like to go with these things

I think that's why I'm drawn towards the idea of 'pretending apps' - they're not about imposing rules, they're about suggesting context. And you can play them in your own head.

Look, for instance, at Soundroid Rampage (iTunes link). It's an app that lets you pretend to be a huge mecha stamping around and lasering things. It's silly and funny and suggests all sorts of possibilities.

I realise that means they're not games, and I'm OK with that. Not everything has to be a game.

The best description that's occurred to me is Social Toys. Maybe that's what I'm trying to imagine.

They're toys because they're things for playing with, not for playing in.

And they're social because they're connected and you can play in a shared context. But it's your play, in your head. So maybe social's not the right word. But it's what I've got for now.

Anyway.

(As with so many things this was precipitated in my head by tweetage from Moleitau, but I won't reproduce it because he's private, I just wanted to acknowledge and testify.)

day 21 - a song that you listen to when you're happy - consider yourself

My happiest musical moments these days are when we're all in the car together. Singing along. Doesn't happen anywhere else. Arthur's musical taste is typically eclectic for a 21st Century Boy - songs he's picked up from Rock Band, FIFA 10, Pixar, Children In Need and the playground. He has no tribal allegiances yet. It's just music he likes, that we can sing, that feels good. 80s rock. Chumbawumba. Michael Jackson. Art Garfunkel. And - thanks to the good offices of his mother who took him to the stage production - the soundtrack to Oliver. I've never seen him so excited as when he came back from that and he immediately pronounced his intention to become an actor. (So I took him along one day to a stage school open day. We left after one glance round the door. He's clearly inherited our shyness genes.)

Consider Yourself is the peak moment of a perfect musical. Lovely sentiment. Belting tune. Best Internal Rhyme Ever in a lyric:

"Nobody tries to be lah-di-dah or uppity--
There a cuppa-tea for all"

If we didn't already have a company motto (Lorem Ipsum) I'd use that. Maybe we should have it engraved over the door as a mission statement.

a possible date for your diary

Right, here we go again, Interesting 2010 will be on October 9th. Usual arrangements. Specific details will emerge here and via @interesting.

That's it really.

day 20 - a song that you listen to when you’re angry - lovely allen

I don't think I ever really get angry. Not stomp-around-listening-to-guitar-music angry.

But I do get grumpy and frustrated and I find a good answer to that is to get the drums out and bash along to some Holy Fuck. This, especially, because it's fairly forgiving, you can just flail around the kit for the fills.

how effective is mucking about?

Last week, during the leader's debates, we heard a lot about the various people Mr Cameron had meant. There was much amused twittering about his anecdotage. (Not that he was entirely on his own with this rhetorical strategy.)

You can imagine that his advisers might have mentioned it after the event. That seemed a little forced Dave. Or maybe they didn't. And maybe after the heat of battle has faded it didn't seem so bad again. Maybe worth trying it again next time.

And then the David Cameron Anecdote Generator arrived. Very clearly and virally pointing out what he was doing. I think it's possible, that even though most people in the country haven't seen this, it'll have a nagging influence on strategies for the debate. How can you persist in a technique which has been so thoroughly skewered? We shall see.

pretending apps

Dan has said much better than me lots of what I was trying to say here and at Playful. He makes the case that the narrative obviousness of Movie OSs might bear thinking about when designing computing interactions and that we could learn from animation techniques about how to convey what we're doing. ie a big file should look heavy when dragged and that doing something radical should look really dramatic.

Most of the objections in the comments seem to come from people who think this is going to get annoying after a while and/or that it's inefficient either of human or computer processing cycles or of screen real estate.

They're going to hate me then.

Because I don't think Dan's gone far enough. I think he's suggesting that we can learn from Movie OSs to make things more usable and easy to grasp. I think we should do it to make them more fun.

I'm wondering what Mr Shirky's idea that "abundance breaks more things than scarcity" might do to UIs and OSs. How would you write a note-taking app if you could waste as much processing power and screen space on it as you liked? You wouldn't add extra functionality, you'd add extra cool and humanity. You'd break all those ideas about efficiency and wrap other stuff around it instead. As in the real world; people don't buy Moleskines for the extra functionality.

Because while some set of application development is going to be about solving new problems and developing new technologies some other set is going to be about finding new ways to solve the old ones. And some of those new ways won't be about function or efficiency they'll be about beauty or values or context or fun.

Why, for instance, aren't there app equivalents of a Mil Spec Pen? Or a space pen? If NASA made a note-taking app, I'd buy it.

Wouldn't it make sense for the app market to end up more like luxury goods than anything else? Like pens, watches, sunglasses, handbags, shoes. Lots of innovation in design and craft, not much in functionality and most of the value in associations and story.

Why for instance are the likes of Brietling and Glycine offering free apps which replicate their watches when they could be selling $900 Premium Apps which promise superior handcrafted, pilot-influenced swiss chronometry.

And, significantly these Pretending Apps don't have to be all dumb and gaudy, they don't have to wastes of screen real estate, they have to be subtle. As I've said before, it's the difference between The Fun Theory piano thing (all on the surface, flashy, not long-lasting, no imagination required, the play's in the world) and Grey World's railings (hidden, restrained, permanent, the play's in your head).

Yes, a huge flashing WARNING icon would be annoying if it happened all the time. But if it happened very rarely it would be funny, especially if the regular app interface had some tiny subtle hints that it might have been made by Smersh.

day 19 - a song from your favourite album - let's get small / funny how time slips away

Two possibilities here. My two favourite albums - both only available on vinyl and relatively hard to get hold of. So they're not just my favourite abstractly, they're actual favourite objects.

Above is Let's Get Small by Trouble Funk which I first came across on this compilation and which completely beguiled me in every way. The graphics, the language, the noise. My favourite ever gig was Trouble Funk at the Brixton Acadamy where they, basically, played the same groove for three hours. My second favourite ever gig was Trouble Funk at The Fridge where they played it again.

The second is Funny How Time Slips Away by Joe Hinton from a brilliant compilation called If It's Not A Hit I'll Eat My Hat - lots of rare, early bluesy, soul-type stuff. Completely exotic sounding. Heard about it on John Peel, found it in a discount record shop in Derby the next day. Bliss. Promise me you'll listen all the way to the note he hits at the end.