one part truth, two parts mixer

Stories

A couple of weeks ago, I went to The Story. It seems like an age ago. I'm trying to get back into the habit of writing things down because I've always found it a helpful discipline in a) collecting my thoughts, and b) commiting things to memory. So, 9 things I found interesting: 

I
I'm a little young (and Southern) to remember the miners strike in much detail, but Jeremy Deller's reenactment of the "English civil war" was fascinating. He's currently got an exhibtion on at the Hayward, which looks aces and is definitely on my list to visit. But what I think I loved most is the fact that reenactment societies even exist. In Deller's words, "powerful, manly, amateur dramatics". I love the idea of getting people together to reenact something as a social experiment and way of understanding huge, dramatic events (in their case, mainly wars), and wonder whether it could ever be the next flashmob. 

Adrian Street, miner turned glam-rock wrestler. Nothing to do with what I've written, just an amazing photo. 

II
"All of my qualities make me suspect that I don't exist". One of my favourite talks of the day was Liz Henry's rollercoaster of hidden identities and internet sleuthing. She basically followed the story of Amina, a Syrian lesbian blogger, her 'kidnapping' and consequent outing as a Middle East activist studying at Edinburgh University following suspicion by the concerned people who were following her story online (more here).
Vaguely related tangent: In one of the breaks, I had an interesting discussion with Mark about the role of journalism in society, and that losing print media, etc is not the issue, but rather working out who takes up the mantle of uncovering corruption for the good of the people - TV journalism doesn't currently seem to do this in the same way as press. We wondered whether a self-organised internet vigilante-style operation could ever hold governments to task? 

Rubbish photo:

III
Back to The Story, and Anthony Owen, whose job desciption includes inventing magic tricks. His opening gambit - a trick where 6 random people in the crowd thought of a number from 1-49, which then magically appeared on a lottery ticket in his pocket - had the crowd eating out of the palm of his hand from the get-go. 
He talked about magic tricks being comprised of 'plot' and 'method', i.e. how it's done. "You should be able to sum up [the plot of] magic tricks in one sentence", because explaining the method can be too complex and ruin the magic. Sounds a bit like strategy.
Some other quotes:
"The best magicians are storytellers, they tell impossible stories"
"The core of a successful magic trick is that it taps into something that you want to happen"
And to finish, a fun trick that you can play on your friends (although freakily, I guessed the same shapes as she did. Maybe I'm pyschic):
  

IV
Matthew Herbert. Without wanting to trivialise what he does, he turns ambient sounds into music (that tells stories).

• I liked the idea that Mozart had the same instrument as Duke Ellington, but it took 300 years to get to jazz.
• I also liked the idea that our history is almost entirely visual: "there's nowhere to listen to 1982"
• He talked about the negative reactions to him using the sound from the Twin Towers collapsing in music. 
• I think he's currently creating a Museum of Sound, which would be interesting to visit.

V
Tom Watson and Emily Bell were in conversation about how the story of the News International phone-hacking scandal unfolded. I could have listened to them for hours, but I think it's one where you had to be there. Although one thing that I really enjoyed was Tom Watson saying that when faced with the first whiff of the story as part of the select committee, a situation that previous experience couldn't really help him with, he asked himself 'what would Lester Freamon do?' (the answer to which was, 'follow the money'). 

VI
Loved Scott Burnham's examples of 'urban play'. In his world design should encourage intervention with the city rather than prevent it, and create small moments that mean something to people. In my job I'm generally thinking about ideas with scale, but it's nice to think about ambient things that make only a few people happy.

These human dependent 'flying fishes' were great: plastic windsocks that became fish when people turned them into the wind - reminded me a bit of Tweenbots. 

Stefan Sagmeister's amazing design of 350,000 euro cent coins, which was cleared up by local police in the end. PS. A sentiment that rings true. 

VII
Recovering data-addict and artist Ellie Harrison talked through how her obsession with recording the things she did and consumed led her to the 'guilt of production' and 'to take responsibility for the things we consume', as that is the only thing we have control over as individuals. As such, her projects are not just art for arts sake, but use play to engage people to question the status quo, in terms of the economic, political, etc. 
I particularly loved the vending machine hooked up to the BBC news site, that dispenses packets of crisps whenever the recession is mentioned (I think it's currently looking for a home). 

VIII
Phil Stuart and Tom Chatfield described their game The End. It's another Channel 4 education project, using philosophy to explain death. It was nearing the end of the day and I didn't make any notes apart from 'if a story is open-ended then people can come back'. I desperately want to have a play, but it looks amazing:

IX
My favourite thing about Danny O'Brien's talk was learning about sea-steading, a game for idealistic billionaires,where you create an island and try and implement world-changing ideas on it. Also amazing was the idea of an Anarchist Yacht Club, a bunch of anarchists who can sail (trustas?) and basically squat unoccupied yachts. 

I think The Story is now my favourite Conway Hall event, not least because the running order came printed on a bar of Paul A. Young chocolate. A very thorough write-up here by Ellen de Vries and a storify from the day here.

Playful in pictures

Playful 2010. Trying to remember why I took these pictures:

I can't remember who's talk this was from (Paul Bennun's?), but I think I loved the idea of calculators being gaming devices. I think I meant to take a picture of the slide before. That dude is probably the guy who created Nintendo.

I'm a contrarian too (Richard Hogg). Although I like music you like.

Sebastien Deterding. Games can be bad. I think the idea of the game Varmint Hunter drove me to fits of giggles. He had a couple of other slides which were more useful and less hilarious:

Playtime 2010

So it was Playful last week, and there have been lots of good write ups (including here, here and here) and heck, some of the speakers have even put their own talks up (here amongst other places). But I thought I'd add my two cents anyway. Or the bits I can remember. I was massively hungover and had only had 4 hours sleep.

• "You can experience "flow" in audio games (but you look like a dork)" - Paul Bennun

I'm in love with the work that Jim Huggins (?) and Made in Me do, and he made a couple of points that were interesting to me (maybe because its massively relevant to what I'm working on right now):

• I liked the definition that games are predetermined and [the role/purpose of] toys are determined by who picks them up, i.e. there's no preset objective
• User generated content problem which asks/allows the user to do to much: Where should you allow decisions/controls to be transferred to a the user/reader/participant
• The idea of 'child-centred learning', i.e. where there's interest, there's learning and it doesn't have to be of the measurable skill kind (apparently need to watch this talk)
• "Technology is not a discrete category for kids"

I think Daniel summed up the morning session quite nicely:

Jonathon Smith's talk was also massively relevant to me, hence I remembered quite a bit:

• The idea that when you go to school your idea of play becomes less freeform as the context of success enters stage left and becomes critical
• Players in games don't want total freedome, they want to be directed within a system - "only when they understand the boundaries will they 'free play'"

Some other bits and pieces:

• Sebastian Deterding's warning that gamification of everyday activites can have unintended (undesired) outcomes, for example, BMW drivers inflating their tyres past the point of safety to break fuel economy records
• James Wallis, one of the Pocketgame finalists, had a nice thought about the transformative powers of chalk - i.e. from pavement to hopscotch. I liked his take on the famous French slogan: 'sur les paves, la course'
• Margaret Robertson live demoed Minecraft, but the thing I loved was the 'darkness, of the kind you don't get in games'
• I'm absolutely captivated by Betrand Duplat's paper video games (pictures below). Sigh.

Second post to come. With some more bad, blurry pictures I took.

I own this town

I've been a vacuum for the past couple of weeks, vaguely following the outside world via Twitter. I had heard about Nike Grid but seeing as it was all going down on the day after d-day I knew that I was going to be horrifically hungover and not really in the mood for a run.

So I continued to live vicariously through Twitter for one more day. This tweet made me smile. I like the idea of abandoned infrastructure being utilised for games, but not as much as I like the mental image of a queue of sweaty people outside a red phone box.

If only I'd been in a better state I might have taken on the mysterious 'Phillip' to claim the SE1 crown. Because I'm lady of this town, I just ain't proven in yet.
 

Obliquity

Mainly, it's a silly word. I went to see John Kay speak at the RSA a couple of weeks ago and while what he was saying was mildly interesting, his delivery was the stuff of caricatured maths teachers (my maths teacher was in fact lovely, and read us Winnie The Pooh as reward for doing our GCSEs early).

Anyway, to the point. Basically the theory of obliquity says, when chasing complex goals it's better not to attack them directly. Things like wealth and happiness. John Kay feels that the wealthiest people don't necessarily chase money, but instead are driven by doing/making/being the best - which usually brings lots of cash.

I've been thinking a lot about shareholder value and how it's basically what is wrong with the current business set up, and therefore the economic set up and therefore the world (this is just me trying to reconcile my fairness meter with a job in advertising). It means we're all short-termist in our pursuit of money and if there's one thing I know, it's that short term gain always comes from the loss of someone else. 

In Drive by Daniel Pink (which I've misplaced and will now horribly misquote) he writes about a new business model, a for-profit that is about long-term shareholder value and real social responsibility built into the revenue model rather than the model we currently have. I think stuff like this is awesome, good capitalism if you will.

The flipside of obliquity (silly word, but I do enjoy it) is that simple tasks are best achieved directly. Going back to how we get more play in our lives, would it not be interesting if we put more indirect thinking into getting milk or the Sunday papers, or cooking an egg. Life would be more entertaining that's for sure.

Pumping iron

I spotted this in one of my local patches of green space as I walked home from the [overly-expensive] gym:

Inspired treadmill design:
 

I do like the idea of free gym equipment, and most of the weight stuff works using your own body weight so no need for changeable weights etc. I can't imagine actually using this equipment because I don't really like the idea of people watching me work out. But still, I'll be interested to see if people do use it.

Story telling

God it's been a while, hasn't it? In fact I got a rather sweet email from a friend this week reminding me that I've been neglecting this little patch, so here goes.

A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to make it to The Story, an event put on by Matt Locke celebrating the joy of stories. It was a pretty non-linear event so I can't really do a report, but I will note the couple of bits and pieces I scribbled down:

• I liked Cory Doctrow's thought about 'how do you make people fall in love with books' and the fact that bookshops being for people who already love books.
• I'm really looking forward to the podcast of John Spooner's talk. The bit where he highlighted the Carpenters Song 'Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft' as a genuine attempt to communicate with extra terrestrials, using the minds of mortals to amplify the message into the cosmos was priceless.
• Everyone seemed to have heard of Tim Etchells before apart from me, but my first introduction was good. He read from his 'Endland Stories' which was full of 'good sentences'. I loved the bit where one character asks another if he has kids, he replies 'you want to see a picture?'. 'Yes'. 'Give me a pen then'.
• Tassos Stevens and Annie Mees talked about their project A Small Town Anywhere which sounds awesome. It's basically a play where the audience participate as characters of the story and in effect become co-authors. I like the idea of 'adventure-making' and the possibilities that holds.

Some pictures:

I had an interesting conversation with Charlie and Katy about forgetting to be playful in the day-to-day. Once upon a time every contact in my address book had an nickname, but now that it's all synched to my google contacts so it's real names. It's little things like this that keep us inventive. Must do it more.

Farm wars

We joked about it, but Zynga, overlord of Facebook games, has now started cross-pollination between it's games. Check out this screengrab:

For the uninitiated, that is the Farmville market screen where you can buy stuff. As you can see, in the top left hand corner, the rather spiffy tractor is only available to people on a certain level in Mafia Wars. Interesting. 

(Those that have noticed that you can buy it without having played Mafia Wars obviously have lives. The note-type of cash is in short supply and you kind of have to spend real money on it, unlike the coin-type cash which is the games point system.) 

The magic number

The only good thing about being ill is that you get to finally catch up with all that stuff you've meant to read. Came across this in last month's Wired. Humour me and play along...

Think of a number.

Double it.

Add 12.

Divide it by 2.

Subtract the original number.

What's the number you've got? 6? I thought so.

I remember stuff like that from the playground. But it still has the capacity to make me smile. Simple magic and reason tricks, things that delight, equations that equal 'boobless' on calcuators - need to find a place for these in my adult life. But I always thought that 3 was the magic number?

Linked gameworlds

I realise that Johnny meant this as a joke:

But, why not? If there is one Zynga universe in which you have one wallet but lots of different ways of earning cash (via different games), are people more likely to play two games? They currently just try and spam you into doing it. I must admit here, that I am mildy addicted to Farmville. I find a Cyworld/Habbo-like pleasure in my little farm. Yes, I'm sad. You never have to speak to me again.