TinkerX

I saw Disney/Pixtar’s “WALL-E” yesterday with my son. Fun movie, excellent animation, some good laughs. A bit heavy-handed on the overarching messages about society side… but that’s Disney for ya. B+

Based on the film, I was going to write a quick post about how, apparently, in the film, singularity is achieved through waste management. Go read the Wikipedia article on “technological singularity” so I don’t have to do a crappy job summarizing here. [pause] Thanks.

Machine intelligence is a wonderful topic for when you’re hanging out waiting for a movie to start, or sitting around drinking wine coolers on the deck on a nice, early summer evening. It’s fun to discuss the differences between creativity, computation, cognition, recognition, etc. and go on about how men and machines may differ — both now and in the future — in terms of thinking-type activities.

My point, from watching WALL-E, was going to be that we equate (especially as children) emotional goals very specifically with self-awareness. You can have an animal (or a plant, a teapot, a statue, a car, etc.) in a movie be, essentially, a prop, and have no “feelings.” Or they may be rudimentary feelings that reflect back from the main characters. But for a creature to be “alive,” it needs to do thinky things that have more to do with its own well-being (usually emotional) than with sheer computing power. Thus, though WALL-E may be able to do many computational things, what makes him “thinking,” what has pushed him beyond the singularity, is his ability to formulate his own goals.

Interestingly, the “bad guy” in the movie [very minor spoiler] seems alive, too… but has received his goals as part of a program; ie, they are not his own goals, per se, but are direct instructions from a human.

That was about it for my original post idea… the thought that we base our idea (at least in a shallow, entertaining sense) on what is “real person thinking” on the ability not to solve problems, but to come up with them. To decide, “This situation isn’t ideal for me… I can envision another possibility.” Person-hood based not on survival (which requires all kinds of problem solving, and which animals do all the time), but on idealism.

That was the extent of it. But then I read a new post at Kevin Kelly’s The Technium about “The Google way of science.” The basic idea being that a new kind of cognition (or at least, though-work) is being done through super-fast evaluations of super-huge data sets. The example I like is the one about how Google provides on-the-fly Web site translation. They don’t have an translation algorithm, they just compare enormous sets of currently translated documents.

This is, as Kelly and other point out, a fantastic way to solve problems. You don’t worry about a model, you don’t worry about a theory or an equation. You just put trillions of cycles of computing power to work examining billions of data points, and then you figure out where new data points would line up.

Fascinating, important stuff, yes. But Kelly goes on to suggest that this kind of computation disproves Searle’s riddle of the Chinese room,  whereas I think it actualy *proves* Searle’s point in that thought experiment. If I had access to all the (let’s say) Chinese-to-English-and-back documents that Google does, I, too, could translate between the languages without understanding both. Maybe even neither. If you’ve ever tried Google’s spot-translation facilities and seen what it does to metaphor, you know that quite a bit of understanding is lost (ahem) in translation.

Kelly goes on to quote George Dyson in a response he (Dyson) made to an article Chris Andersen wrote in Wired on this subject:

For a long time we were stuck on the idea that the brain somehow contained a “model” of reality, and that AI would be achieved by constructing similar “models.” What’s a model? There are 2 requirements: 1) Something that works, and 2) Something we understand. Our large, distributed, petabyte-scale creations, whether GenBank or Google, are starting to grasp reality in ways that work just fine but that we don’t necessarily understand. Just as we will eventually take the brain apart, neuron by neuron, and never find the model, we will discover that true AI came into existence without ever needing a coherent model or a theory of intelligence. Reality does the job just fine.

By any reasonable definition, the “Overmind” (or Kevin’s OneComputer, or whatever) is beginning to think, though this does not mean thinking the way we do, or on any scale that we can comprehend. What Chris Anderson is hinting at is that Science (and some very successful business) will increasingly be done by people who are not only reading nature directly, but are figuring out ways to read the Overmind.

Now… I love science fiction. But I really don’t buy that dipping into enormous pools of data to look for correlations counts as any kind of “thinking” that we would recognize as being of an order even close to that of animals, to say nothing of the cute (yet not cuddly) WALL-E. Dyson himself says, “… though this does not mean thinking the way we do, or on any scale that we can comprehend.” Well… why call it “thinking” if it’s something completely different than what we call “thinking,” and on a totally different scale… Mama always said, “Life is like a box of semantics.” If I can call what the weather does “thinking” because it moves enormous numbers of things around and exacts changes and is involved in activities based on ultra-complex rules, then OK. What Google etc. does could be called “thinking,” too. If we open it up that far, though, we’ve lost the original intention of what we mean when we use the term to apply to us man-apes.

When you challenge a child who has done something stupid or dangerous and ask, “What were you thinking?” you’re not looking for an answer in terms of their problem solving abilities. If the boy-child has emptied 25 cans of shaving cream into the kiddie pool and is making “summer-time snow angels,” you may love the creative spirit, hate the waste of money (and how he smells afterward), but your chat with him afterward will be about making choices, not about air pressure and aroma. You want to know what led him to the choice to do the unwise thing, so that you can teach him not to lead himself there. You want to help him create better problems for himself, not, in many cases, solve them.

I can’t tell time anywhere near as accurately as a watch. But that doesn’t mean that a watch is thinking. Or, if want to say it is, it is only ever thinking about what time it is.

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PS: Irony of the week. The last line of dialogue in WALL-E was clipped slightly at my showing by the “pop” you get during a slightly crappy jump from one reel to another. A movie created using advanced, computerized digital effects about an advanced, computerized digital creature… partly f’d up by an analog zit. I was amused.

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Todays journey of metaphoric bliss: Alzheimer, buses, jewelry, YouTube.

Patients with Alzheimer’s and other cognitive troubles who wander out of their nursing homes are a danger to themselves, of course. And with short-term memory issues, folks can go as little as a block away and then forget how to get back or why they’re out. To help with this, some German nursing homes have put “phantom” bus stops outside their facilities. Patients remember the distinctive look of the bus stops and associate it with “going home.” So they stop, rest, and the workers from the home come and get them (link).

Paco Underhill did absolutely groundbreaking work in the science of retail shopping behaviors. The New York Times called him, “the anthropologist of the dressing room.” He wrote “Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping,” (Google, WorldCat) and has consulted all over the place. In a 1996 NewYorker article (by Malcom Gladwell, no less), titled “The Science of Shopping,” the concept of the “butt brush” theory is discussed. Full article here.

The quote that I’m most interested in today, though, is, “…the likelihood of a woman being converted from a shopper to a buyer is inversely proportional to the likelihood of her being brushed on her behind while she’s examining merchandise.” Which is the explanation for giant, wide aisles around the jewelry, perfume and watch displays in stores like Lord and Taylor, Macy’s, etc. When pondering a pretty purchase, we get into a kind of dreamy, fugue state. Being bumped on the behind takes us out of that state and puts us back into the reality of, “Holy crap… that watch costs as much as three car payments.”

[Note: I share this story with all my marketing and advertising students, male and female. It’s a good trick, and not just for guys with wives and girlfriends. Men go into this same state, I believe, when shopping for power tools, HDTVs, boats, video games, etc. My non-scientific assumption, though, is that men are more likely to break out of Shopper’s Fugue if you bump them in the testicles.]

What’s the connection to degenerative brain disorders and shopping for jewelry? Well… let’s move on to YouTube.

Douglas Galbi, over at the ever-intelligent and interesting “purple motes” blog, has an excellent recent post titled, “Stories largely missing in online video.” His conclusion, after going over some good stats, is that online video is not successful in telling stories. While I agree with him that the “short form” video — with YouTube as its major example — isn’t doing much storytelling, I’m going to point out some details that, I think, are important with regards to online viewing habits.

First, Doug is 100% right that the majority of YouTube videos are short, and a large percentage are repurposed  music videos that, in the past, would have run on MTV or VH1 or a similar network. A research study I was involved with at my day job provided much the same insight (”The YouTube Phenomenon,” page 2-16 of “Our Social Spaces,” from “Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World.”) Our survey indicated that 49% of the top 100 YouTube videos were music videos. Also, 63% of the top 100 videos were “professional,” in nature. This segment of the material is clearly not “user created content,” but maybe best described as “user uploaded.”

Doug also points out that online video viewing time only amounts to 3% of traditional TV viewing time. When considering this, lets remember that TV is, and has been for 50 years, the dominant communication medium in our country. It’s only over the past few years that even a decent minority of the U.S. population (23.3% as of December 2007, according to the OECD) has access to broadband Internet service, which is pretty much a requirement for watching online video.

My two points, and they relate back to comfort — which relates to bus stops and butt touching –  are simply as follows.

First, we currently regard TV as, largely, a “comfort medium.” We sit down to watch, don’t interact much, and enjoy it largely as entertainment. There are good stories on TV, yes. Because stories are a big part of how we like to be entertained, especially in “comfort” mode. I would remind my several readers, however, that lots and lots of TV is also “short form” entertainment, lacking in real storytelling elements. We have talk shows, sports, game shows, reality TV, news, weather and informational shows that don’t have traditional narrative. And many of these have parallel elements in Web video. I just watched, for example, Clinton’s “campaign suspension” speech on the NYT site. It was very, very nice to have the transcript and a TOC right next to the video. I think that as more online video becomes nested within other activities, it will gain more usage. I also think that as broadband becomes more the norm, non-narrative video will seem much more natural online, both in aggregate and compared to TV viewing.

As to when we’ll get more narrative, storytelling content on the Web… well, it’s starting. Hulu provides free (ad supported) access to narrative TV and movies. I missed an episode of Battlestar Gallactica a few weeks ago and watched the hour-long show on the SciFi channel’s site to make up for my DVR behaving badly. I now have a desk chair in my home office for working on the computer… and a comfy chair nearby for relaxing and watching DVDs and long Web-videos. But, even when I choose to watch long-form video on my computer, there are issues. My spam-blocker, anti-virus software pops up in front of the movie screen and tells me it’s finished updating and update. Super. My IM pings, unless I’ve remembered to turn it off. My screen saver kicks in sometimes. Geez. I’m trying to watch TV on my computer and it keeps behaving like a computer.

The boundaries are melting. Slowly, yes. I agree with Doug that, at the moment, there’s not a lot of storytelling going on specifically within online video. I do think, though, that it’s beginning. And, also, that many online “stories” have video as one element, with other media embedding video as part of the story.

We like our comfort zones, and TV is a *HUGE* comfort zone for Americans. We head to the bus stop of our La-Z-Boy lounger because it means, “Here there be relaxation.” Major changes in how we watch long-form video will take time, and will require computers to become something other than “working machines,” and to stop touching us on our collective butts when we’re trying to enjoy a story.

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At work, I get to do some research about the information industry and related technology because, well, libraries are deeply involved in the mediasphere. So that’s cool. And last week I was reading up on teens (god, I hate the terms “tweens” and “screenagers”) and tech. And there’s a neat, very recent report from Pew on teens and writing, and another, older study from Fox about “Never Ending Friending” and a NYT article that asks, “Can Cellphones End Global Poverty,” another good report from Pew on the demographics of mobile data use, and on and on. Stuff about social networking, teens, mobile phones, games and media literacy. So that’s all in my head.

Then, this morning, I read Clay Shirky’s blog post, “Gin, Television and Social Surplus.” It’s good. Go read it and come back.

Clay is talking about what we do, as a society, to deal with radical shifts in culture. He gives the example of people going on a generation-long gin bender when the industrial age brought millions of people into cities. In order to deal, they got plastered.

Years ago, I read a similar theory about the pyramids. You had this ancient, Egyptian agrarian population that, like most of such, spent almost all their collective time farming and starving. Then some clever dudes figure out some basic math, engineering and astronomy, and put the knowledge to use to create an irrigation system that is N% more productive and reliable than the old methods. Whatever that “N” is, it provided a bunch of time that nobody new what to do with. So they built the pyramids. Partly as a program of public works… but mostly because they had a bunch of people with time on their hands and no idea how to spend it. They already knew how to build stuff… so why not build really big stuff!
Clay makes the point that TV has been sucking up brjillions of hours of our free time, and that we now have more choices about what to do with that time, many of which are creative, and that people like being creative, and so they are choosing things that are at least interactive as opposed to truly passive. Best quote of the post, imo:

However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

That’s just so true it makes my teeth hurt [note, I actually enjoy both of the above, but the comparison is valid as hell].

OK. So we’ve got new media literacy. We’ve got participatory media and massive social applications. We’ve got mobile phones that are increasingly used as tools for digital participation, and are less expensive (than desktop PC’s with Web access) and thus more readily available to folks in lower economic strata, and that includes kids. That’s all in my head. Don’t worry… it’s a really big head.

Some people have said that participatory media is a move back to a time when people made their own fun and entertainment. Up until the printing press, if you wanted a story, you pretty much had to *hear* a story. News and history were participatory media. Until radio, there were no mass, single-source, culture-wide stations. Then TV came along. And we had tens of millions of people watching “Leave it to Beaver” and “Dallas” and and and and. I grew up in the middle of that. I joke that I had three parents: Mommy, Daddy and Teevy.

It was, and is, a cross between beauty and horror. I love, for example, that there are now hundreds of channels of TV. We watch all kinds of history, science, engineering, etc. programs with my 8-year-old son (Hooray for Myth Busters!). But he also watches Sponge Bob and  Avatar and other stuff (so do I, btw). Big budget media can produce some neat stuff.

Soon he’ll start typing in earnest. And then, I assume, will enter the mediasphere as a participant; commenter, responder, linker, writer, poster, photographer, videographer, blogger, cartoonist, podcaster, IMer… something. Many things. Some interesting, some meaningful, some trivial. Just like life.

And that, I think, is the major difference between the old, top-down media (TV being god there) and what we’re getting into now — it’s more like life.

I’ve taken to saying that my motto for the new, participatory mediasphere is “verbs over nouns.” Whenever you want to bet on a new trend or idea or technology, ask yourself… is it improving (or growing) something “noun-y” (stuff), or something “verb-y” (activities). The line that many of my (older) friends use about much of the new content on the Web (YouTube and journal-style blogs seem to be the favorite targets), is that, “It’s a bunch of crap.”

Well, yeah. But for the people who created it, it’s their own personal crap as opposed to a small piece of a giant load of crap dropped on them from 30,000 feet up that also hits a couple million other people.

It’s also useful to keep in mind that the pyramids, when looked at a certain way, are crap, too. Engineering marvels? Sure. Wonders of the world? Of course. But what have they ever done for you? Would your life be any different if the pyramids were suddenly not there? Or if they’d never been? The Colossus of  Rhodes went away in 226 BC. Do you miss it? I mean, sure… it would be cool to see. But I’ve never, once, in my life, said, “Thank God for the pyramids!” (as opposed to penicillin, steam power, the printing press, blues, chocolate, etc.)

How will we spend what Clay calls our “social surplus?” Will we make more friends in more places? Spread knowledge? Create great works?

I don’t know. I feel that it’s inherently better to do things that are creative and connected. That time spent creating even the “least of these” in terms of blogs and YouTube movies is better than time spent watching a rerun of (shudder) “Welcome Back Kotter.” But I also wonder if partly all we’re doing is creating many, smaller pyramids.

The nice thing, with the new media, is that we get to decide what’s important. It doesn’t have to be a centralized project like the pyramids or TV. And, just like with the printing press, I bet (as does Clay) that many smaller voices will add up to something more important than one, big voice.

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For the record, I think Kevin Kelly is a genius and often am extremely gratified to find him exploring weird, wild areas of technology and the mind. Even when I disagree with him, it’s usually on small points or on wording.

In his latest post on The Technium, though… I just think he’s wrong and oddly so, to boot. Read the post, so I don’t have to paraphrase it too much, here. It’s short. I’ll wait…

So, where is he wrong? Well, let’s start with the idea that computer scientists are more comfortable with technological change because, “They grok that many of the tasks they used to do can be done much better by computers.” Really? There are computers designing computers and writing code? There are robots building robots? I haven’t seen much of that.

What I’ve seen is that computer scientists use computers in their daily business, and that computers do more tasks than they used to. But not tasks that used to be done by CS folks. The scientists are doing the same tasks, just with more complex, robust and cheaper tools.

I also haven’t ever seen good art created by a computer or good poetry or fiction (or non-fiction, for that matter) written by a computer. But many artists, designers and writers absolutely embrace technology because the tools are just so flippin’ helpful. The writers I know love word processors, for example, and the spell-checking, note-taking, formatting functions now available. I don’t in any way begrudge my computer the ability to look up spelling much quicker than I did with a dictionary back in college. Yet there isn’t a computer out there that could, as of yet, write this blog post.

Same with designers. Those of you out there with a graphic arts background, especially those who have come-of-age in the last 15 years or so, will understand why “Photoshop is God” is a popular phrase. Does the computer do a better job at some mundane (and elegant) tasks associated with design? Hell, yes. Doing layout with InDesign or Quark Xpress is hundreds of times faster, easier and better than using the old paper layout methods. But a computer has yet to design a great piece of packaging or ad or children’s book illustration.

In some cases, I think this is the opposite of what Kelly is saying. As a writer (and sometimes designer), I have absolutely no fear of adopting new technology, because I think it’s impossible (or at least waaay down the road) for a computer to “do” what is at the heart of what I do: create. I’d put many musicians and film makers in this bucket, too. Again… I don’t see any films being made by computers, but the movie industry is moving the tech ahead in many cases.

And about doctors… I’m not sure what docs Kelly is working with, but most of the ones I know are huge tech nuts; they love they new toys. The digital distribution of records and labs is something they *rave* about when I talk to them. Scans of X-rays go on the hospital computer system and show up on the computer screen in the patient’s room, maybe even across town, in minutes rather than hours. MRI and CAT scan tech relies incredibly on computer power, obviously. Genetic engineering of drugs is almost impossible without computers. Maybe there are some good ol’ GPs who don’t want to computerize their bills… but I think this is a micro-example of a pain-in-the-ass system that nobody even likes the old way, so they don’t want to spend time on it.

In short… I think this is just a weird argument. When computer technology disrupts your job to the point that you are totally disintermediated –  take, for example, the guys at the print shop who used to cut film — you aren’t, I think, going to be thrilled about it… but, to be successful, you may have to get on board. But there’s a pretty decent chance you’ll go the other direction and be pissed off. On the other hand, if computers make your job easier, you’ll probably be OK with them in other instances, sure.

Oh… and I know some UNIX grey-beards who absolutely resent new computer technology. They liked being part of a small, elite band of brothers who understood computers when they were big and important and separate. Now that there’s a computer in my cell phone, and kids can mash-up aps on the Web, they feel a bit massintermediated.

Turing proposed a computer that was indistinguishable from a person in a conversation. In Kelly’s examples, he seems to be talking about our tech (computers in this case) besting us on particular tasks. Well, that’s been happening  since spear-throwers came along. John Henry died trying to beat the steam drill. I’d die trying to beat a spell checker. Just because I respect a tool’s ability to multiply my value doesn’t mean I think it’s likely to replace my value.

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If you haven’t seen Garfield Minus Garfield, check it out. Pretty amusing.

The number of things you have to know about culture, psychology, etc. in order to find this funny is creepy in and of itself. The deconstruction of a comic strip, minus its star, points to a public that is increasingly sophisticated when it comes to choosing how to read material at any given moment.

Question for the gang… is this funnier if you hate or love Garfield in its original state?

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“At last! My arm! It is complete… again!”
– Sweeny Todd

A week ago last Sunday, my home computer, uh… well… the most accurate term is, “Shit the bed.” More technically, the motherboard shit the bed. [Insert standard 15 minute rant about how losing a computer sucks; how Time Warner sucks because they don’t support Vista; how Vista sucks; how technicians suck; how it sucks that it takes so long to restore everything (or anything) onto a new machine; etc.] Actually, compared to other new builds I’ve done, this one wasn’t too bad. Only 9 trips to the computer stores to get all the pieces-parts a’working.

The good news is, the new rig kicks righteous ass. I loaded on some games that ran, on my old box, at the lowest levels and, even then pitifully. On the new machine… mmmm…. meaty. And I finally, 10 minutes ago, got Adobe CS2  and my Wacom drawing tablet running. Thus, the quote from Sweeny Todd.

So… what’s up with the post title? Well, cloud computing is all about doing stuff at the network level. You know… keeping things on the Web instead of on your local box. I’d recently switched to Gmail, Google Reader and Google Bookmarks, and the death of my old machine made me very glad that I had. All my email, contacts, bookmarks, RSS feeds and even a bunch of documents that I had in Google Docs were untouched by my troubles with hardware. I could still get to the stuff from my wife’s machine, my work machine and even (in many cases) my mobile phone/pc thing.

When I did finally get the new computer up and running, about a half of the software (by number of installs, not volume) was stuff that I could download for free (open source) or re-download (purchased) from the Web. Many new drivers came to me from the friendly Intertubes, too.

So… much of my home computing experience now relies on “The Clouds.” I suspect this will continue. I’m OK with that.

When I talked to a friend about switching my email to Gmail, he wondered aloud to me if I was wise to trust Google with my data more than myself.

“Yes,” I replied. “Oh, yes. The odds of Google knocking over the ‘thing’ that holds my data while rummaging under the desk for Legos are small. The odds of Google frying their mother boards are small. The chances that a powersurge will take out all their backups are small.

“I, on the other hand, am an idiot.”

It’s not that I trust Google a whole heckuva lot. It’s just that I know how clumsy I am.

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This is one of those rambling, "I’m figuring things out while I’m typing" posts. No guarantee of clarity. But there are good links, so there’s that.

If you play games, and haven’t heard-of or read anything by Richard Bartle, you need to. He is one of the creators of MUD, which you also need to know about. Richard created the "Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology" that ranks gamers on four scales; achiever, explorer, socializer, killer. It’s kinda like Myers-Briggs, but for gamers. I am an ESAK. From the test:

ESAK players often see the game world as a great stage, full of things to see and people to meet. They love teaming up with people to get to the hard-to-see places, and they relish unique experiences.

Breakdown: Achiever 40.00%, Explorer 80.00%, Killer 20.00%, Socializer 60.00%

This reminds me a bit of my Myers-Briggs type, ENTP (Extrovert, iNtuition, Thinking, Perception). When I took the full MB test years ago, I was right in the middle on the first three (ie, not particularly extroverted, somewhat intuitive, and inclined, a bit, to prefer thinking to feeling). But on the "Perception vs. Judging" scale, I was hugely P over J.  

So. There’s been some discussion at Terra Nova about "A fifth Bartle type." Timothy Burke, the post’s author, speculates:

Where the attraction to design is a part of the experience of play, and where the player’s activities within the game are at least partially aimed at a kind of pure understanding of how the game or world functions (rather than an understanding which is aimed at maximizing achievement). It’s always seemed to me that this approach to play was distinctive enough that it could easily be called a fifth Bartle-type to go alongside achiever, killer, explorer and socializer. Call it subcreator, or if you want to get fancy, demiurge.

It’s an interesting idea; that playing the game to understand (or appreciate or accept or influence) the game itself is, for some, more fun than achieving within the game, exploring the content or beating or socializing with other players. On the one hand, if I want to stay pure-Bartle, I think that Burke’s proposed category could come down under "Explorer," where the player is simply exploring the meta-game as opposed to the game. It’s a role I enjoy, both as a player and as a critic. In fact, one could say that someone who plays a game in order to understand its mechanics, player motivation, changes over time, etc. is not really playing the game, but "playing at gaming" or "playing at play." Or, maybe, sometimes even "working at play."

This intersects in my head with a post at The Escapist (by way of Infocult) called "WebGame 2.0." Kyle Orland writes about how aspects of list keeping–especially numbers of friends, popularity rankings, etc.–lend game-like aspects to some social networking activities. Self-googling, of course, falls into this category of behaviors, too. I made (and make) a very specific effort to be at the top of the listings on the major search engines for "Andy Havens." Why? Because a substantial part of my life is now "lived" on the Web. And Google is the phone book for that life. Currently, I own the first two pages of results for my name, and the majority of the results for pages 3-5. At that point, you’re getting into comments on blogs that have better SEO than my own blog.* On the third page, though, you get a link to my Googlegänger, who (unfortunately for me, I think) is a marketing guy, too… but who’s got some Web pursuits that I find a bit… well, it’s just not my style. If he (she?) were a trombone player from Australia, somebody happening onto his/her Web efforts would (probably) realize that I’m not both an Ohio, USA marketing guy and a musician from Sidney. When the Googlegänger’s activities are pretty close to mine, though… well, I’ll keep working on my personal SEO.

But (and here’s the point related to the above), is the fact that I’m keeping score and indication that I’m playing a game? I don’t think so. Although many games have scores, not all scores are related to games. My weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, etc. are all "scores" of a type, yet I don’t monitor them as an act of play, but as something related to the decidedly non-play act of trying to stay alive. Similarly, many of the things we do to measure success (in a worldly sense) are scores–salary, neighborhood, quality of stuff, size of office, number of minions–yet are quite serious, non-play-y and not games.

There are all kinds of discussions about the nature of play and what is a game, etc. I don’t want to get into that, because others (including Richard) are much better at it and have done great work already. What intrigues me at this point, though, are the two ends of a continuum that seem to bracket a "play" experience:

1. Taking something that is intended for play (a game, in this case) and doing something with it that is non-play. Now, you can argue (I won’t) that the Fifth Bartle Type proposed by Timothy might be engaged in play. Sure, that might be the case. The act of building new resources for a game, for example, might very well feel like "play" to the modder. But it isn’t (usually) going to be within the scope of what the designers had in mind. You can make small totem poles out of baseball bats, but at that point you are not "playing baseball" in any sense of the word. You can write and perform songs about your favorite baseball team… but again, you ain’t playing the game.

2. Taking something that isn’t a game, and playing it. We use the phrase, "He doesn’t really care about you; he’s just playing games," to mean that the subject isn’t engaged on the surface level, but doing something else, using the activity in a different context. That we use the term "player" to describe a philandering male really brings home the idea that "playing" and "games" are often synonymous with a lack of sincerity or seriousness of intent. Someone who is not a player would, constrastingly, "work" at a relationship, neh?

I think Thomas Malaby said it best here:

Games… are domains of contrived contingency, capable of generating emergent practices and interpretations, and are intimately connected with everyday life to a degree heretofore poorly understood… Rather than seeing gaming as a subset of play, and therefore as an activity that is inherently separable, safe, and pleasurable, I offer here a rethinking of games as social artifacts in their own right that are always in the process of becoming.

Or (in Andy-simple terms), games ain’t always games, and play ain’t always fun.

The final point being a question: is there a model that describes a tendency to either "game that which is not-game," or "do ‘not-play things’ with that which is game?" Or does it depend on the game/situation? I have no interest in many of the social "games" that people play. Feh. And I do like to delve into the hidden, meta-nut-meat (what the hell?) of games beyond the surface. What does that say about me? What would those "types" look like?

• G vs. M = Gamer vs. Metagamer (in game spaces)
• S vs. P = Straightforward vs. Playa (in RL)

I’d be an MS. What that means, I have no idea. Yet. Let me play around with it for awhile…

 

 

 

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Since it’s the 4th of July, I thought I’d wax philosophic on the role of freedom in creativity.

Question? What is freedom? My dictionary gives me two definitions:

• The power to act or speak or think without externally imposed restraints
• Immunity from an obligation or duty

Note that both definitions are negative. "Without… restraints. "Immunity from…" Those make sense when applied to specific restraints, obligations or duties, for sure. In the case of, for example, a legal relationship, freedom would mean that you don’t have restraints imposed by the law on what you can say or do. If I am "freed" from a contract, it is no longer my duty to act within its bounds.

But we use the word in all kinds of vague, poetic, patriotic and aspirational ways. We want to be free. We live in the land of the free. We want freedom of expression, thought, religion, etc. But, again, when pressed… I think most people would equate these freedoms as expressions of double-negatives.

• Freedom of religion = no negative effects from exercising a particular religion, or none at all.
• Freedom of speech = not being punished for saying something unpopular
• Freedom of assembly = not having your ass kicked by riot police while holding a meeting

See? Those are all double negatives. And positive, aspirational statements expressed chiefly as double negatives are generally less specific, less helpful and less directional than positive statements that can be actually applied to one’s creative endeavors.

Do I want freedom of creativity? Sure. I guess. I don’t want bad things (double negative) to interfere with my creativity. I’d prefer that the state (or other authorities) not put unreasonable restrictions on what I can think, do and create. But, again… once you have that "I don’t want bad stuff" double negative in there… what does it mean for the process? How does it apply?

I believe that freedom of creation cannot exist — and certainly cannot thrive — without limits (negative forces) on your creativity that you understand, accept and embrace. And that by consciously balancing those restrictive forces, you actually become more ably creative.

I’ve said before that creativity, in general, involves breaking apart non-creative, natural or ordinary elements and putting them back together differently. Good writing takes familiar words, concepts, situations and characters and assembles them in surprising ways in order to provide a new, interesting vision to readers. In doing so, that creative act inflicts violent destruction on the old ways of thought or lack-of-thought that readers held. It destroys the previous space.

Same for the visual arts. A purely narrative photograph, intended to show a product or scene for informative purposes, may not be very creative. By applying various filters through whatever media is used, artists, however, change the scene in order to give us clues as to their vision. In doing so, they destroy the "pure reportage" angle and add elements from other pallettes.

We don’t think of this as violence or destruction, because many times the result is something we find pleasing, interesting or informative. Which is great. But the foundation of those good feelings is an act which, though largely unnoticed, broke apart previous models.

The audience isn’t really supposed to notice, except in the most extreme cases of shock art or genre-busting projects. The break/build sequence is like water in a cave drawing lime into pillars over time. Where before there were separate sets of rock, air and water… now there is a brilliant new structure, built upon the destruction of the singular elements.

What does this have to do with freedom? Well, if creativity is destructive in some sense, and freedom is the power to act without restraint, than perfect creative freedom would be the  ability to artistically destroy… well… everything. Which is clearly not particularly artistic.

For example, as a writer, I am free to use words in whatever order I choose. If I assemble them in new, interesting and meaningful ways — such as in a good poem — I have destroyed/created in a manner as to allow my readers to enjoy the process. If I just destroy, however, I may end up with a sequence of words which makes no damned sense to anyone.

Perfect freedom = no restraints = chaos.

What, then, is a good balance of freedom vs. restraint for the creative process? I think that you learn the most by accepting the most restraints. That if you create within the confines of very specific requirements, you will eventually learn to create with much more freedom. I’ve said before (especially as it regards marketing), that before engaging in "out-of-the-box thinking," you have to really, really understand the box. Because it’s there for a reason. And to understand the box, you need to completely accept its limitations and restrictions. You have to become un-free.

Why? Because freedom without restriction is license, and not art. It is chaos. Which can be fun and has a place on the 4th of July, for sure. We celebrate with fireworks and booze the fact of our independence, our freedom from another country. The rules and laws of our freedoms (and responsibilities) are complex and, often, odd. But today, we simply celebrate the fact of freedom; maybe symbolically, maybe immaturely. That’s OK. Celebration is not meant to be particularly balanced.

But creativity must be. And my guess is that the guys in charge of the most professional and amazing fireworks displays — the guys creating sky art — are not drinking too much before they handle their explosives. And that the gorgeous displays of light and fire we’ll all watch tonight as part of our feelings of freedom are very, very controlled in their creation.

So as we "creative types" celebrate the fact that we live in a great country that allows us to act, speak and create without many negative, artificial constraints… let us also celebrate the restraints we can and must apply to our own works in order to better serve our audiences, and create more fantastic displays of glory.

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Good article at the Financial Times about "Google’s Goals…" [By way of John Battelle’s Search Blog]. A quote in the piece from Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO is either hyperbolic, or scares the crap out of me:

We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation. The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ 

"What shall I do tomorrow?" "What job shall I take?"

Other questions that come to mind…

• "Should I trust Google to make life-decisions for me?"
• "Where have all the flowers gone?"
• "How can we get out of Iraq most logically?"
• "What number am I thinking of?"

When I get together with more than two-or-so friends, and we play the, "’What do you want to do tomorrow?" game… we spend at least half-an-hour shrugging, saying, "I don’t know… whaddayouwanna do?" Debating Mexican vs. Greek food. Talking about what we did last time. Answering phone calls from people who "might join up… depends on what you’re doing." Etc. Etc. Etc.

I guess, if Google could aggregate all of our personal search information at the same time — maybe through an online group profile, I’d be interested in answering the question, "What should we do tonight?" as it would save scads of time.

I expect the answer would involve clicking on several ads for restaurants, movies/shows, music choices, etc. If Google ever spoutted back, "You should just hang out and talk and eat some of the great new cheese that Bill has in the fridge," my head would explode. 

 

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So… I think about blogging sometimes. Which is natural, as I do it and I work in a marketing role that involves new media and my background is in writing and… and… and.

Why do we write? All kinds of answers to that question. When I was studying it in school, the answer was, “To get better at writing.” To obtain an easy facility. To hone the craft. To develop the tools. You write so that you can actually write. Most people, obviously, can string words together. That’d different than being a really good writer.

I can make macaroni and cheese from a box. I can feed myself. I am not a chef. I am barely qualified to be considered a bad cook.

I’m not sure that’s why most people blog. Maybe it’s about the same impulse that compels keeping a journal. Not in my case, as I never kept a journal. For me, it really is about finding a nugget of an idea and writing around it. The expression of thoughts in a way so as to convey meaning clearly. It’s an exploration. It’s art + science. Like poetry, but different.

From Infocult, I got a pointer to a post at Webomatica on “Why blogging sours.”

First off… “Why I nearly quit” stories kinda crack me up. When I was smoking, we (smokers) would always talk about how many times we’d tried to stop. So what? You didn’t. Shut up. Can I bum one? A long, well thought-out blog post about how you almost quit blogging is like when beautiful people complain about how they used to have damaged hair or skin problems. Look buddy… I got 11 toes the hard way; seven on one foot and four on the other, so shut yer pie hole.
He goes through a litany of his issues. Like, “A front page Digg is awesome, but I admit to a sugar-high let down when I realize all those Diggers just checked out one or two articles and left.”

Yeah. You write a post about how you “almost” quit, and include a reference to a previous, front page Digg. Sweet. So all of us out here who are blogging along with a few or a few dozen readers and whose chosen topics make us about as likely to appear in a Paris Hilton video as to get a front page Digg are supposed to feel motivated to… suck on a taxi’s tailpipe? Nice motivational style.
He closes with these takeaways:

• Think long term rather than short term.
• Be prepared for the long haul.
• Don’t expect instant success.
• Don’t quit your day job on day one.
  
• Expect to work hard on quality content and quality networking.
• Blogging in a vacuum sucks.

Correct me if I’m wrong… but those first three say the same thing. And “don’t quit your day job on day one.” Uh… I know dozens of bloggers personally. None of them blog for a living. Zero. For a very few, blogging is now part of their traditional day job, but I’m not aware of anybody in my circle making their whole nut off the medium.

“Expect to work hard on quality content and quality networking.” OK. Yes. If you want to do something well, expect to work hard. That’s… very… uh… specific.

And the last bullet isn’t a takeaway. It’s an observation. I know I’m being snarky here, I just really am kinda tired and getting over a cold and know many writers who struggle with actual writing issues. And a guy who gets 37 comments on a post about how he sometimes doesn’t get many comments… well, it’s just cracking me up.

So… I read this page and was shaking my head and was going to not post today because it reaallly motivated me to not write. Feh.

Then I checked my WordPress dash for incoming links and found that somebody I’d never met/contacted had added me to his blogroll. As usual in the blogosphere, I have no specific idea why. It’s always nice, and (one assumes) it’s because the person enjoys your writing. So I checked out his blog, read a few posts (he put up at least one original poem, and that’s always good for the universe), and found (through random poking) a very nice piece on his definition of success. It boils down to “have joy without screwing with others’ joy.” My very loose re-wording, so please forgive me, Mr. Hopkins.

I grok that.

And his piece caromed off my earlier, depressing thoughts about the “sour blogging” post and how to avoid it. In this weird, new world of blogs, YouTube, wikis, email, IM, WoW, SecondLife, etc… you know what? I don’t really need to be Dugg. I don’t need to make money on my blog. I don’t need hundreds of readers. What’s my definition of success for this little portion of my life?

When, out of the blue, one quality guy like E.C. Hopkins adds me to his blogroll.

If that’s not enough joy to keep you blogging for another six months, hang it up for real.

That’s my takeaway.

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[Disclaimer: By day, I work in marketing for OCLC, and our eContent division is NetLibrary, which markets eBooks to libraries, which then loan them to users. This post isn’t about that process, that product, our partner publishers or that space at all. It’s my own take on portable eBooks. Anyway… what I mean to say is that this is Tinker Andy’s thoughts, not OCLC Andy’s. Selah.]

So… two links from BoingBoing in the recent past about eBooks. One from Charlie Stoss on “Why the commercial ebook market is broken” that has lots of good ideas on the topic. It goes at it in terms of the economics, what people might/might not pay for an ebook, why we don’t have cheap readers, etc. etc. And there’s a second link to a Locus feature by Cory hisself called, “You do like reading off a computer screen,” that explains that we do like reading off computer screens… just not novels.

I don’t buy either of the arguments completely, and I’ll tell you why. It’s because I am, after almost 10 years of reading all kinds of content on various PDAs and Smart Phones, completely format agnostic. The main issue, I think, is this: reading for pleasure on a portable device requires a new skill, and learning new skills — especially those required for leisure — isn’t necessarily fun.

I love books. Period. Not pBooks, not eBooks. Just books. Got that ol’ English degree from Cornell to prove it, too. Got a house full of the paper kind lining the walls. Love to buy ‘em, borrow ‘em from the library, loan ‘em to friends. I love to highlight passages, turn down corners, write in the margins. The ones that are beautiful… I love to protect.

But back around when I got my first Palm, sometime in the mid-late 90’s, I began to love eBooks, too. I owe it to the orneriness of my friend Bill (Hi, Bill!) who insisted that I try reading books on my Palm. He was also the one who insisted that I buy a PDA in the first place. Since I had, and I loved it, I was inclined to at least hear him out on the whole eBook thing… but I was skeptical.

“It’s a crappy screen for a book,” I said.

“You just need to get used to it,” he replied. “Read two whole books on the thing and you’ll be a convert. I promise.”

I huffed, but I trust Bill. So I found a free reader that had decent scalable fonts, and I got two free books from Project Gutenberg that I’d been meaning to read. I spent a little bit of time formatting the raw .TXT files in Word before pulling them into the e-reader, and then I plowed into the process.

The first book was almost literally painful. It was the “Autobiography of Ben Franklin.” Reading the novel on that little screen… with weird, three-word line-breaks… and having to hit the page-down key every five seconds… it was horrible. It made me feel like my brain was itching or something. It was icky. It was hard. It was…

New.

And I hate, more than the pain of learning new things, refusing the pain of learning new things. I’m all about “The Beginner’s Mind” some days. So even though it made my eyes bleed and gave me meningital cramps, I finished the book. It took me three months of reading here-and-there. I think I read eight other pBooks in the meantime. But I did it. And then I took a break.

But Bill had said, “Two.” So I buckled down and loaded up “A Tale of Two Cities,” which I’d managed to not read for 30ish years, despite loving Dickens and being an English major. It started out hard… but by the end… I’d gotten used to the process enough that I was pretty much ignoring the pain. It wasn’t as easy for me as a paper book. But I could see a real difference between the first and second experience. Enough that I tried a third.

And by the end of the third book, not only was it easy… I was hooked. Because my Palm Pilot had my life on it at that point; schedule, phone numbers, notes, memos, games, to-dos, etc. And for one device to have all that PLUS a couple books to keep me occupied for 5-minutes-here while I’m waiting for a meeting and 2-hours-there while I’m stuck at the airport… forget it. Done deal.

Now I read just about every-other book on my Verizon Windows Pocket PC Phone Thing. Some I buy, some I borrow, some I get for free. And I don’t really go through all kinds of sturm und drang about whether or not I’ll have a “cultural artifact” or not. If I want to read a book, and it’s available as an eBook, and I see it there first… boom. I’m an American, for the love-of-mike. That’s how it works for us. See. Want. Get.

All the arguments Charlie and Cory make are good. People won’t pay more for eBooks than paper, and they probably won’t pay, in general, a lot more than 50% for eBooks, because you don’t get “a thing” that you can put on your shelf. Etc., etc.

But we sure pay a buck for iTunes don’t we?

Even at the right price, though, most folks won’t even pay 10-cents for a novel they love if it makes their eyes hurt. And they won’t use a funky full-sized book reader if it offers no space bonus over a paper book.

But once you get used to a new medium…

Listen, o best beloved… I own “Cryptonomicon” in hard-cover. It’s one of my favorite books of all time. Last year, it got to be time for me to re-read it. Before I picked up the 2.9 lb. tome, though, I checked out eReader.com. The eBook version was about $7. So I bought it. Again. Yup. Because it was worth it to me not to have to lug that brick around for the three weeks I knew it would take me to read all 928 pages (that’s print pages; on my wee screen, I think it was 4,500 pages… not kidding).

It’s about choice. My choice.

But I didn’t have the choice until I learned something new.

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I don’t talk about my day gig much in this space. Mostly because my day gig involves marketing, and if I’m going to write about what I do (marketing) and where I do it (OCLC), I should do it there, on the clock, get paid for it, and give the shrift to them what pays me.

This separation of blog and job should not be confused with any antipathy towards work on my part. I really like what I do and think my company does some very excellent stuff. I just don’t talk about it here. Much.

But the gang in our research division just launched something uber-cool that I’d like to point out to my buddies what ain’t already hip to the library land groove. WorldCat Identities.

This service pulls all kinds of library links from WorldCat into one page, based around the identity of… well… "somebody important." Could be an author, could be a character in a work. And it links out from one to the next, in a way that reminds me of a social networking service like LinkedIn, but for… well… "somebody important."

For example. Start with one of the biggest names in the cloud. William Shakespeare. Truck on down the page to the "Related Names" section and click on Julius Caesar. [Note: don’t click on the wee, litle "+" sign… that does something different. Well, sure. Go back and do that, too. But not right now].

Now you’re looking at works about and by Julius Caesar. Oh, right. Caesar wrote stuff himself. He wasn’t just a character in other people’s plays. That’s good to keep in mind.

Related people to Mr. Caesar include George Bernard Shaw, who wrote a play called "Caesar and Cleopatra." Right. I’d forgotten about that, too. Another related name is Joan of Arc, about whom George also wrote.

Now if you look closely at the Identity page for Joan, you’ll see a little link number next to it: 944.026. That’s a link to the Dewey Browser view of WorldCat… another cool tool from our friends in Research. Click there and look at the books you’d see next to books about Joan on the shelf at the library.

Turns out that some of the books next to Joan on the shelf have to do with the history of the English longbow… and that’s directly related to the current historical fiction series that I’m reading. And to a lifelong interest I’ve had in archery, instilled in me by my maternal grandfather, who was a bowyer and fletcher.

WorldCat Identities is, I think, an incredibly interesting way to paw through content collections and areas of interest. Stories are largely about people; much more interesting (in most cases) than stuff or places. At least to me. And so a "data cube" that rotates around the people at the heart of stories — both them what writes ‘em and them what’s in ‘em — is a great way to navigate a sea of potentially interesting information.

This one was just way too cool for me to not share with my 9 regular readers. Major, major props to the guys in Research.

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In a recent post John Battelle talks about a NYT article on social networking in which (according to John… and me) the Times gets the whole idea of user generated content wrong, wrong, wrong. He quotes the part of the article that says:

User-generated content is basically anything someone puts on the Web that is not created for overtly commercial purposes; it is often in response to something professionally created, or is derivative of it. So, it could be a blog, a message board, a homemade video on YouTube, or a customer’s book review on Amazon.com

And then makes the point that,

there are so many examples of great conversational media [John’s term for user created content] that is both commercially driven and entirely independent of "professional media" (in our industry alone, there’s Om, there’s Matt, there’s Mike, there…and, and, and….), that making such a sweeping statement seems either ignorant or simply wishful thinking. Harumph.

I don’t think John goes far enough. Here’s the short version of why I think that:

There ain’t no such thing as somebody who ain’t a user. Or, to put it in the positive: we’re all users, and all content is user generated content. Or to put it in John’s lingo: it’s all part of the conversation.

The mainstream media seems to forget sometimes that its not "the originator" of what it reports on. That if a tree falls in the woods and there’s film at 11… the tree falling is the "thing" in the news. The news isn’t the news. The reporters are "users," too.

And so are movie directors and bestselling novelists and product design folks and advertising agency owners.

My 7-year-old son, Dan, just wrote a short book about dragons. It’s about five pages long. It has drawings and text, all of which he made up himself. It includes information about how to look for signs of dragons, types of dragons, what they eat, a dragon potion that will make you fly, and plants that grow near where the dragons live. I’ve also got a store-bought book about dragons that I picked up a few years back. It’s neat, has lots of cool pictures and even some stuff tucked into pockets and what-not.

Which book do you think is more valuable to me?

The idea, in our culture, that the value and worth of a piece of creativity, writing, content, etc. is inherently linked to either a monetary valuation or, similarly, to audience size or some kind of "official" authority ranking is, at times, almost offensive. Yes, in the abstract, I know that I am probably going to want to read a best-selling novel 99 times out 100 as opposed to one written by some random dude in a basement in Jersey. Unless that dude is my brother. Or my friend, Jake. Or… or… or… And, at some point, my brother and/or Jake are going to be bestselling novelists, so there, too.

Reporters, directors and published authors are just people. The words are the same. A 16-year-old can write poetry and post it on an open writing site or her blog… and it has just as much "right" to be beautiful as the words of a 54-year-old professor publishing in a magazine of the arts.

The wall was never there. Blogs and other cheap, easy tools just make it more obvious.

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Thomas say:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

 T.S. Eliot,
"The Wasteland: I. Burial of the Dead"

---

The tagline of  this blog is "Creative flux for our heap of broken images." It’s called TinkerX: "X" for my lost, forgotten, grungy, slacker generation that is caught too late for Woodstock, too early for Raves… and "Tinker" for the guy who takes (supposedly) worthless junk and turns it into tools, toys and trinkets.

This passage from "The Wasteland" is, I think, the most important piece of poetry to come out of post WWI Europe. The whole poem is hugely important, yes. But this one stanza is the best short, dense, beautiful description of what it’s like to live in a "mashup," "remix" culture. This is postmodernism.

This post was inspired by one at Raph’s site on his having seen "Happy Feet" and remarking on its connection to "March of the Penguins."

Yes, our children know nothing but The Mash. My son, seven, has never heard a fairytale told "true." They all have Shrek-like layers of hyper-referencing built in. The genie is Robin Williams. Or vice-versa. At best, the "classics" are the Disney versions. Irony? You’re soaking in it.

This is not a bad thing. But it has to be *taught to* if it is to be a truly good thing. As Raph says, seeing "March of the Penguins" really helps with a viewing of "Happy Feet." I didn’t know as much about Emperor Penguins until having seen that first film, and so my enjoyment of the second was increased tremendously.

On the other hand… in a mashup/post-modern culture, you also have to live with people mashing things up in ways that are clearly, er… disagreeable to you. From MIchael Medved’s remarkably… insane… review of the film:

As in so many other recent films, there’s a subtext that appears to plead for endorsement of gay identity. Mumbles (the voice of Elijah Wood) displeases his parents and the leaders of his community because he’s born different, and makes an impassioned plea that he can’t possibly change – and they should accept him as he is.

Uh… Right. Because the only possible way to be "different" in society is to be gay. Despite the fact that Mumbles spends the entire movie trying to win the love of a totally hot female penguin, and hanging out with a gang of "Amigos" penguins that are constantly on the macho prowl, almost offensively so, for chicas. In the end, we see Mumbles with Gloria, his heart’s true love… and their new baby. Clearly part of the homosexual agenda.

Damn it, Medved! I was different throughout school, and it had very little to do with sexual identity! I was a game-playing, D&D-loving, musical-performing, Latin-studying, church-going techno-dweeb with few friends who got along well with his parents. That made me a total tool in the eyes of the popular crowd. I received, at the hands of many of my peers, treatment almost identical to that lavished upon Mumbles — disapproval for not "fitting in," and having talents different to theirs. They could sing, I could dance. Not literally, as I could sing, and they could… well.. play sports. But you get the picture.

So. My son has seen "Happy Feet" three times. And I deconstruct it as a lovely, musical journey through the ideas of creativity, self-discovery and young love. Medved sees it as a gay propaganda, an anti-religious, anti-human horror, and "the darkest, most disturbing feature length animated film ever offered by a major studio."

There is, for freakin’ sure, shadow under this red rock. And I will show you fear in a feature length animated film.

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There’s a post over at Terra Nova talking about "playing with a manual" vs. game experiences that are more "natural;" i.e., require very little explanation. Part of the issue is the idea of experienced game geeks not needing as much explanation, vs. noobs who don’t know what HP, manna, skill-points, experience, levels, etc. are. Nate Combs asks:

I wonder how games and virtual worlds would look if their culture evolved with a less "seat of the pants" view towards knowledge acquisition?  What if players were brought along expecting to read  a manual, a really long one, before they could play?  I suspect there would be more freedom in what developers could design.

I have a confession to make: I’ve always enjoyed reading manuals, especially game manuals. Extra-especially big, fat, honkin’ thick manuals with all the lists of spells, abilities, units, buildings, factions, etc. If I’m going to spend 50+ hours playing a game, it has always made sense in my wee haid that I RTFM for 30-60 minutes.

I’ll tell you one thing that has always bugged me about most manuals for many complex and interesting games I’ve played, too: they are almost always insultingly apologetic to the non-manual-readers, with an included assumption that that is just about everyone. There’s usually a line somewhere near the beginning of the manual that reads something like this:

We know that most of you hate to read these boring and long-winded manuals. We do, too! For those of you who want to jump right into the game, please read the "Quick Start Guide," and then play through the "Tutorial" scenario…

Nothing like the writers and publishers of a game you’ve just dropped $50 on to tell you that part of what you’ve just paid for is boring and long-winded and should probably be ignored. It always made me feel, well… betrayed to read that.

There’s a fundamental flaw in that kind of thinking on the part of the game developers, I believe. And while I am intrigued by the heart of Nate’s question, I think the separation of "manual" and "game" that exists in many Game Gods’ heads is something that bears reexamining.

We are living in a much more technologically savvy time than even 5 or 10 years ago. And while there is still a steep separation between the true geek and the technophobe, we’ve moved well beyond the day when some people still said, with a kind of wry aplomb, "Oh, no. I don’t own a computer. I’ve really got no use for one." Remember those days? The last time I heard that was around 1998. Now, saying, "I don’t know how to work a computer," in that kind of smug, neo-Luddite way would be about the equivalent of saying, "I’m basically illiterate. I can read street signs… but beyond that, no. Can’t read much at all. Never found it very useful."

Kids all have cell phones. Everyone has a computer. More and more of us have high-speed Internet access, etc. etc. My point being that it’s no longer "normal" to be outside the computer circle. It’s normal to be inside it. And so the idea of "writing for the non-geek" has to begin to mean something else. Because the circle of non-geeks, by the old definition, is much smaller. We all use software at work that is scads more complex than most computer games.

That being said, though… how much do we want our leisure activities to resemble having to program an Excel macro? Not so much, eh?

Here we get into the differences between:

• complicated vs. complex
• frustration vs. exploration
• mastery of interface vs. mastery of game
• technical help vs. game narrative

All those first things are not so good.

Complex vs. Complicated

Complicated means having to choose between many options with limited or incomplete data. Some games are, by nature, complicated. There is a joy to mastering a complicated game for many people. Most flight simulators (mentioned in the TN post) are complicated. Why? Because flying a plane is complicated. Some racing simulators are complicated. They are often differentiated from their less-complicated cousins by the term "arcade." If it’s an arcade-style simulator, it means that there are fewer choices. For example, in a flight sim, you don’t have to worry about fuel, ammo loads, guns heating up, weather, etc. All kinds of options that make the game more realistic, but also harder to learn to play well. In the time it takes to play a 25-cent (or, today, $1) arcade game, you can’t expect a player to learn about 38 variables. Only 3 or 4.

Complex, on the other hand, refers to a choice among many like things. A "complex" (the noun, not the adjective) is a "conceptual whole made up of related parts." A shopping mall, for example, is a "complex." But most malls are not very complicated, once the concept of "mall" (not a very difficult one) is made clear. A mall can have one hundred shops and you can get to them all very easily. On the other hand, getting to a similar selection of shops in a non-mall geography — let’s say, a downtown area — might be more complicated; it would require more steps, more intermediations, more options, more decisions. Do I need to drive? To take a cab? The subway? Etc. Etc.

Lots of choices is good. Understanding how to get to them quickly and for the appropriate reasons is good. Not knowing even how to get to the right information is bad. Being confused about the necessary data is bad.

Manuals are often thought of as necessary for clarifying complicated processes. Maps, tables, glossaries, indexes and lists are provided to help with complex choices.

Frustration vs. Exploration

We all know the good feeling we get when playing a neat game that tests our skills. That’s fun! Right? Whether we’re doing a challenging crossword or jigsaw puzzle or on a quest in an MMO. That’s a feeling of exploration. Often, what we’re exploring is the edge of our own competency. And hopping back and forth between exploration and frustration isn’t unusual at all. Because getting a bit pissed off at ourselves or the game or the puzzle or the search is part of the challenge. If it was easy, or could be done the first time through… that’s not much of a challenge.

But the exploration-edge-of-frustration should always come from within the game itself; inside the magic circle / 4th wall. You should not, for example, find a marble in your jigsaw puzzle box and have to wonder, "What the heck is this for?" Which brings us to…

Interface vs. Game

In real life, the interface often is the game. When you "play baseball," there is no difference between "how you hit the ball" and "how to hit the ball" and "hitting the ball." The bat is the interface is the tool is the game element. There is no intermediary. As WB Yeats said in, "Among School Children:"

We can’t. We don’t. Which is the point of much of real life. In some computer games, too, this is true. Tetris, Pong, PacMan, etc. and many other cursor or joystick-jerkers rely on reflexes and hand-eye coordination. What you do is what you do. On the other hand, most of the complex role-playing and strategy games rely on knowing "how to do a thing to make another thing happen." There may be an element of "move joystick left to move your character left." That much may be "the dance." But you may also need to know countless interface "rules" involving adding equipment to your inventory, equipping such for use, preparing spells, grouping units together, assigning actions to various keys, etc. etc. And those interface issues may require different actions for different games… to accomplish the same task.

Imagine if turning on a light switch had a different effect depending on what house you were in. That is… frustrating and complicated.

There are "interface traditions," of course. And Nate mentions that at TN: "Geekdom in a niche has at least one virtue: there is less to explain." For example, in most RTS (real time strategy) games, clicking and dragging around multiple units "group selects" them. In many role-playing games, health is measured on a red bar, and manna (magical energy) is measured on a blue one. There’s probably a list of about 50 or so of these that die-hard gamers could go through for you.

None of them swing pine, though.

And, by that, I mean that none of them are, inherently, "game" related. There is no reason rooted in some universal game reality that RED = HEALTH, except it looks, I guess, like blood. But it might as well be green, because GREEN = GO for traffic lights, and GREEN = HEALTHY in nature, or white, because BLACK = DEAD.

Once in awhile, you get a game that tries to eschew the typical interface. Peter Molyneux’s Black & White comes to mind, as do a few of Peter’s earlier titles. In these, the interface was (more or less) embedded within the game. In B&W, you, as a god in the game, saw your own hand hovering in the game space, You cast spells and moved game elements (people, animals, trees, rocks) around by moving the hand. Deus ex cursor, writ large. It added a great deal to the sense of being "in the game," since the computer screen became more of a window on the experience than a dashboard. Which brings us, finally, to…

Technical Help vs. Game Narrative

In many computer/video games, there is a tutorial that leads you through the basics of navigating both the game world and the interface. The tutorial is almost always explicitly removed from the main "body" of the game. One of the neatest things about World of Warcraft is that the early, "tutorial" stages flow extremely smoothly into the next, "journeymen" phases of the game with nary a bump. But mostly, you get a stage (that you can skip) where a drill sergeant (or your butler, a helpful faerie or disembodied voice) prods you along a path full of obstacles where the buttons and menus are explained.

This is about as immersive a game experience as an ad for Miller Lite in a medieval setting. It has the benefit over a manual of letting you practice the interface in situ… but it is not, well… the dance. It’s dance instruction.

None of this to say that it’s a bad thing. It’s just… not really "part of the game." It’s technical help embedded within the interface itself, possibly with a bit of game narrative thrown on top to help the medicine go down.

The Challenge

Here’s my challenge to the game industry: stop thinking about manuals and training and technical help as separate from the game experience. In fact, it’s a challenge to anybody designing a user interface experience, which kinda makes it a challenge to me in my day gig, too.

Why shouldn’t the "how" of getting to know a game be embedded in the game itself? Why should learning the interface elements of a game require a manual that is separate from the game? Why can’t the map of the thing be the thing in many cases?

I’m not sure how to accomplish these things. I just know that I enjoy reading a good manual and finding out how to make a game do what it’s supposed to do. That joy shouldn’t have to be separated from the joy of playing the game itself. And if the discovery of how to play the game can be interwoven with the playing of the game itself… much cooler.

Why are we separating the gamer from the game? It seems to me to be much less beautiful when that happens.

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My son, Dan, a first-grader, was given a writing assignment earlier this week. The directions said, at the top of the sheet, "The sky is full of dark clouds. It is very windy. A light flashes across the sky. Make a prediction of what is going to happen."

He wrote, "A aeleein (alien) will come down and sae, ‘We can’t sleep on Mars.’ And it is nite. There is a lot of litening and rane."

He got a smiley-face and an S+ (which I guess is good). From me he got a, "That’s amazing!" He explained further to me that what he meant was that all the probes and robots and landers and stuff we’d sent up to Mars were making the light (the one mentioned in the directions), and that was what was keeping the alien/Martian awake.

He put in the rain and lightning because he was pretty sure that that was what was happening, too. On the back of the sheet he drew a UFO-style space-ship with a little alien coming out of it… wearing a stocking-cap.

Totally cracked me up. Be creative, but cover yer ass.

This blog is sometimes about being more creative. I’m lucky in that I get to do that kinda stuff as part of my job. I’m even luckier that I get to do it as a Dad. In this case, because it reminded me of an important rule about creativity — look both ways… up and down the ladder of purpose.

Usually, when we are being creative, we start with a goal; a purpose. We want to write a story or a poem or a headline or a novel. We want to design a process or invent a better mouse-trap. We want to paint a picture, improve the city’s light-rail system or craft puppets. Whatever the creative task, we almost always begin with a purpose-driven ideal. A statement in our heads of, "This is what I want to achieve."

Which is fine. Except that it’s not. Because, when you are finished with almost any major creative undertaking and look backwards — down the ladder — what you will find is that you have accomplished many different, diverging and (hopefully) wonderful things. And so, if you only have one of them in mind at the beginning, you automatically cut yourself off from creative possibilities related to those other end states. You may also avoid equally beneficial end states. Which is (duh) sad.

Take Dan’s assignment. The "real" purpose is to practice writing (and, in this case, specifically, "end marks," which we used to call "periods"). But Dan’s still too young to just fill-in-the-blank without having some fun with it. And that’s what amused and delighted me. Of course the light in the sky is all the crap we’ve put on Mars, and of course it’s annoying the aliens. So they come down to complain. Beautiful…

What is the secondary purpose of this assignment that Dan discovered? To be a springboard for a story. Now, the authors of the assignment probably felt that they were giving kids a fairly straightforward prompt. It’s a storm, eh? Well… What if they’d been a bit less direct? I mean, Dan is *my* kid, after all. I train him to be a bit more berzleplazzgick than the norm, so while I’m thrilled he found the aliens in his homework, I’m not surprised. With a bit more planning (and a bit less rigidity), though, this assignment could have been a story-seed for a much greater percentage of Dan’s classmates.

I run into this all the time at work with projects that have both a product goal (something that needs to get done) and a repeatable process requirement (the way that we do things). Can we improve the process? If you don’t assume the answer is, "Yes," you leave money on the table. So the purpose of any given project is to both "do the thing" and to find out how to do it better, eh?

Examples. We need examples. I hate windy blog posts without examples and I write too many of them myself. Here we go:

• When you write something at work, Purpose(1) is often to make a particular point to a particular audience. Can that audience be multiplied? Can you invite someone else to join you in the writing process? Can you radially change the writing to fit another medium?
• If you are drawing or painting or otherwise being artistically creative, Purpose(1) is to create the object. The explicit Purpose(2) is often to improve that craft skill. Can you involve prayer or meditation in that activity or time? Can you invite a friend or child to join you, making it a shared, social event? Can you film yourself doing your thing so you can watch it later and learn from that experience? Can you create on a radically new medium that you were planning on throwing out (pizza box, old CD ROMs, rags, coffee filters) in order to experience the simple thrill of new textures?
• If you are writing creatively (let’s say a poem), can you force yourself to include details that require study and new learning?
• If you are doing a hobby craft (scrap-booking, sewing for fun, jewelry design, etc.), can you think of ways to make multiples of the same thing more quickly in order to monetize your product? Can you invite someone else to learn from you or to learn from? Can you explore literature or movies that include your craft before or during the process? Or other cultures? Can you incorporate hidden ("DaVinci Code?") meanings into your work?

My point is just this… Before beginning any creative venture, write down what it is you are trying to accomplish. Your first purpose. That’s important. Because you clearly want to get that done. But don’t let that goal be a restrictive box. Let your creativity be bigger than that.

Ask yourself, "When I have walked the road to this goal, what else will I have seen?" And then, before you begin, widen the road.

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The Age of Content Redux

Democreatization? Yes, I’m coming up with dumb new words again. At some point, I will figure out that this makes me sound like a nut-job, and then I’ll stop. But we’re living in a mash-up world, and I like doing it, and this is my blog, so quit yer whinging.

Two-and-a-half years ago, in March 2004, the first newsletter I published for my then consulting firm was titled, "Welcome to the Age of Content." In it, I argue that we have moved out of the "Information Age," where the ability to move data around is the quantifier of success, into the "Age of Content," where the ability to make creative use of that information is the key ingredient of success. To quote myself (which always makes me a wee bit itchy):

I believe we are in the first decade of the Age of Content. And by "content" I mean the creative use of information to establish meaning… In learning theory, "knowledge" is one step above "information," which is one step above "data." But in the case of content, we’re not necessarily talking about leveraging information to increase knowledge. Some services do provide
learning (an increase in knowledge) as a byproduct of content. But the raw, basic definition of "content" is information that is manipulated, arranged, categorized, crafted, and tweaked in order to provoke in participants a sense of value received from original, created meaning.

The gist of the newsletter was about the role of content creation in marketing and, specifically, brand creation. The idea of storytelling… how bringing "thought ownership" to your brand gives you the ability to associate valuable, unique, identifiable, legally protectable content with a product or service. Since I was selling marketing consulting services at the time, I had to tie the ideas back to marketing, after all. But the overall point was about how, in a world that we’re now (thanks to Friedman) calling "flat," creativity and content are becoming more and more the ways in which we understand, transfer and distinguish value.

What Engine for the Age?

Go read this MacArthur white paper now. I’m dead serious. I don’t point y’all at 60+ page tree-killers very often, so please print out the PDF, kick back, fix some chai, and have at it with a highlighter and an hour or so. It’s called "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century." This is the best friggin’ thing I’ve read on the Age of Content ever. Period. Makes me wonder who this MacArthur guy is and why we don’t hear more about him on the talk shows.

In the executive summary, the paper notes:

• Forms of participatory culture: affiliations (memberships, eg Facebook, MySpace, guilds, clans, board), expressions (new creative forms, modding, sampling, mash-ups, fanfic, zines), collaborative problem solving (Wikipedia, ARGs, spoiling, guilding), circulations (blogs, podcasting)
• Policy and pedagogical needs: the participaion gap (unequal access to oppos, experiences, skills), the transparency problem (learning to see the ways media shapes perceptions), the ethics challenge (breakdowns in traditional forms of training and socialization that prepare for public roles as media makers and participants)
• Skills needed for participation: play, performance, simulation, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking, negotiation

And the summary then goes on to say that, "Fostering such social skills and cultural competencies requires a more systemic approach to media education in the United States. Everyone involved in preparing young people to go out into the world has contributions to make in helping students acquire the skills they need to become full participants in our society."

OK. Let’s merge that with some neat data from just a few pages later in the paper.

According to a 2005 Pew Internet and American Life project study, more than one-half of all American teens, and 57% of teens who use the Internet could be considered media creators — someone who created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations. Most have done two or more of these activities. One-third of teens share what they create online with others, 22% have their own websites, 19 percent blog, and 19% remix content.

So… we have a situation where half of teens are now creating content and a third are sharing it. And where we, as adults, educators, parents, voters, policy-makers, etc. are supposed to "contribute" to that world. You know… all of us old farts who spent 5 years watching our VCRs blink "12:00:00" rather than reading the manual. I ain’t saying there aren’t grown-ups who can’t play on the Web, and new data suggests that there are lots of adults on MySpace, etc., and gosh-durn-it, old foggies built the Web and all… but I’m guessing that the numbers of 30-40 year olds who create content on the Web ain’t 50%.

Participation is one way of terming the engine of content. And participation is also at the heart of what we’ve been terming "social" networking, computing, online platforms, etc.

No, not all participation will result in content that is very interesting to very many others. As a friend of mine is fond of pointing out, "It’s mostly crap." That may be true. But I’d point out that lots of stuff that’s hit the mediasphere prior to our current age — stuff that was part of a much more official, but much smaller participatory circle — could certainly fall under the rubric of "crap" as well.

Implications of participation-based culture

The McArthur paper has lots of good stuff to say about education and participation ’cause, well… that’s the subject of the report; the skills kids will need to thrive in this environment, how to teach and enable participation for all children, who should do it, etc.

What I’m thinking about today, though, are the memetic implications of a new cultural system — widely, easily available, easily shareable participation in content creation — that is, at its heart, rooted in so many self-reinforcing routines that tend to spread "thought contagions" extremely easily. Because one of the root tenets of memetics is the rule that those ideas which promote the promotion of ideas are more quickly and easily spread.

It only makes sense, but it’s a basic function that is often ignored. The most widely used example is the "Big family vs. small family memes." If one group of people believe that having big families is a good idea, the various concepts and defenses of that belief will spread more quickly. Why? Because they will simply have more children to teach them to, and parents have the strongest platform for teaching family-related beliefs. Family "A," with ten kids, has ten chances to pass along any "Big Family is Best" memes. Family "B," with two kids, has two chances to pass along their "Small Family is Best" memes.

That’s a very simple, physical example. It gets more complex when you talk about concepts that are less… biological. For example, education. Does "Education is Good" contain a set of self-enhancing memes? Some argue that it is, because education tends to lead to higher income, and to situations where the meme can then be shown to have had positive effects. Others say that it doesn’t, because you can’t truly understand the benefits of education until you have one; i.e., the price of admission into the meme is too high.

Examples aside, examining the list of new "participatory skills" given in the MacArthur paper in terms of their self-enhancing memetic capabilities is a good way to see how social context and participation will be (and already are, to some degree) going to be incredibly important in our culture.

These skills — play, performance, simulation, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking, negotiation — are almost all highly "contagious" from a memetic standpoint, and also require mastery not just of tool or craft skills, but of high-order social, group, cognitive, game and ego-balance skills. They can be easily manipulated by folks with bad intentions, and can go all pear-shaped and akimbo even when intentions are good.

In short, these are dangerous toys.

I may come back to them on an individual basis in future posts, as it seems a good list to work off of when breaking down what makes up "social" behavior.

Thanks to Nate Combs at Terra Nova for the link to the MacArthur paper.

* * * * *

Also… reciprocal link-love back to Walt Crawford, who mentioned my "Enough 2.0" post in the November issue of his "Cites and Insights" publication. Note: Walt really liked the "Enough 2.0" logo in that post, and, if you click on it, you’ll get taken to the site where it was created, Alex P’s "Web2.0 Logo Creator." I linked the logo to that site previously, but didn’t note that source explicitly in the text of the original post. I’ve done so now.

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