Archive for the ‘Gaming’ Category

Blog, Conferences, Gaming, Interesting Stuff, Social Media

It’s Nice That – Future:Content

Date January 27 2011
Posted by Matt
Tagged with

A couple weeks ago I made my way down to Shoreditch Studios for It’s Nice That’s inaugural conference, Future:Content. As a big fan of the site I was excited about the day, although I didn’t really know what was in store. The only piece of information attendees were given prior to the event was this one liner:

A one-day event looking at how we engage with, present, and define content across a number of platforms.

However, after taking one look at the line up I was confident that an interesting, insightful and thought-provoking day was ahead of me.

Here’s what I have managed to piece together from the notes I made. There was so much good stuff I know I have missed a lot, mainly because I was listening rather than writing, nevertheless here’s what went down:

Anna Gerber & Britt Iverson- Visual Editions
“At a time of chaos it’s a good time to do something crazy”

First up were Anna and Britt from publishing company Visual Editions. As well as publishing beautiful and physically interesting books (in their spare time!!) they also had some really interesting ideas about books and the role they are going to play in the future.

They believe that by allowing people to read in new and completely different ways it opens up the book format to new and undiscovered opportunities. To Visual Editions books are a medium that are there to be played with, they want to push the boundaries of how we tell stories and give books a new lease of life.

Visual Editions were the first speakers of the day to emphasize the importance of physical objects to human beings. There will always be books because people enjoy physicality and like having a physical experience.

Essentially what Visual Editions set out to prove is that if you produce a piece of content that is visually exciting people will react to it. In their minds visuals are as big as the story being told.

Their practice and ideology is summed up perfectly by their latest release, Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer. A beautiful, physical, experiential novel that is well worth checking out.

Russell Davies – Ogilvy & Mather and RIG
“After being digitalized things are going to find ways to physicalize again.”

Next up was Russell Davies’ very entertaining presentation. Following on from Visual Editions Russell again brought up the importance of objects and giving people an experience. He believes that there is an emotional attachment to physicality inbuilt in every person and it’s not going to go away.

The future of content and media, in Russell’s opinion, is to reintroduce physicality into it. People see technology as precious and not to be interfered with. This is wrong. By taking digital technology, playing with it and placing it inside objects it creates a new and even more engaging physical experience.

Russell then went on to talk about future content being audience led. Giving people a platform to create their own content, he gave the example of his newspaper venture, The Newspaper Club. The company have access to newspaper printing presses and open it up to the public, so anyone can make a newspaper about anything!

He finished on saying that businesses are being out thought by people creating content as a hobby. An interesting thought, how do companies credibly incorporate these individuals into what they do?

Sanky – D&AD
“Anything you think of now… anything… you will be able to do it in the next 5 years.”

Sanky covered a lot ground in a very short amount of time… he began by saying that the communications industry is currently in a flux. Everyone has started to do everything and therefore perspective has been lost on what is actually interesting and relevant.

He was concerned about the reactionary environment we are currently in, brands and agencies are doing what they think they should be doing, forgetting that the content they are producing should be beautiful and valuable.

He then went on to talk about how the best way to design something is to really understand the content within. He gave the example of Agencytwofifteen’s work on the latest Halo game as a way of design by content… check out the video above to see what Sanky was talking about.

Sanky’s final thought was about the future of content, which, in his mind, revolved around building experiences that truly resonate, rather than designing things for the sake of it.

Francesca Panetta – The Guardian and The Hackney Podcast
“Its more important to create things you want to make rather than being forced through time constraints.”

Francesca was very inspiring to listen to, not only does she look after all of the Gurdian’s audio content, she also pretty much produces the Hackney Podcast by herself.

Speaking from a purely audio point of view it was interesting to hear about how the podcast is still an undefined format. There is no set time limit for a podcast; there is no set content guidelines… you can basically do what you want. However, if you want to get noticed in a sea of content you have to be bold, distinctive and original.

Speaking about the Hackney Podcast specifically Francesca spoke of her dedication to creating good content. She doesn’t put anything out unless she thinks it is good enough… something she believed to be extremely important.

It’s better to take the time to put something out that you’re happy with rather than rushing it to meet deadlines.

Morgwn Rimel & Cathy Haynes – The School of Life
“Give yourself time to play.”

If I attempted to try and explain what exactly The School of Life is this may turn into the longest blog of all time. I encourage you to check out their website though, they really are doing things differently.

Essentially they are bringing ideas to the high street. They produce seminars, classes, trips and sermons revolving around a certain subject or idea. Most of the things they do involves expert understanding and trying to solve universal concerns. Everything they do is open to the public so anyone can get involved.

Morgwn emphasized the point that The School of Life focus is on genuine human needs. Locating them within their work rather than just trying to guess what people want and need.

Morgwn was then joined on stage by her colleague Cathy Haynes who repeated the idea that people crave experiences; they want to be immersed in things. Cathy also finished off by talking about how people had forgotten how to play – a basic human instinct. To truly innovate we need to encourage play rather than stifling it.

Deyan Sudjic – The Design Museum
“The sense of a physical shared experience attracts people.”

Deyan’s short and precise presentation started with him explaining that design sits on the edge of form and content. It is then the job of the designer to create content from form.

He then went on to echo the other speakers’ points by talking about experiences and objects. He spoke about how design goes past just being an object and how it should be part of the experience. There is a hunger for physical content and for it to be truly engaging.

He gave the example of the book to emphasize his point saying that the book has had to become more beautiful to survive. It has gone past being something disposable; books are now objects and people want to keep hold of them.

Adam Gee – Channel 4
“Twitter is like the Radio Times on a weeknight.”

Adam’s presentation revolved around the future of television and how he believed that getting people’s attention was the key to the future of media. This was universal though, for all broadcast content, not just programs. Advertising for example will become more imaginative, more targeted and more accountable to truly interest people.

Adam spoke a lot about how interaction in television had evolved, from voting, to interacting in shows, to now the very real possibility editorial control can be handed over to the viewer.

He gave the example of Seven Days, a recent Channel 4 programme that he worked on, and how virtual conversations on Twitter were influencing real life decisions and therefore the direction of the programme; something he could only see growing as TV progresses.

By allowing viewers to participate and collaborate it creates an emotional connection. A two-way conversation.

He named 2011 the year of one screen, with the internet soon to be built into TV with technology such as Google TV. This will turn TV into shared events; people have an urge to be in-sync… much like the old days when TV used to be a social event… the one screen system will re-socialize TV. Evidence of this can already be seen with the conversations happening on Twitter around television programs.

Phil Clandillon and Steve Millborne – Sony Music
“If your content is good and you know your audience it should do well.”

By far the most visually entertaining presentation of the day, Steve and Phil started with laser badgers and ended with a message that would have made any researcher smile.

Phil and Steve are a creative team at Sony and used the time to whizz through their impressive back catalogue of viral hits. Check out some of their work here and above; you have probably seen some of it before.

Their methodology was basic, but very effective. They used the research department at Sony to gain information about their audience, and then built their creative around it. Locating the areas where audiences interact is key to a successful campaign so innovate with what your audience uses.

They finished off by saying that as a creative team they don’t think outside the box, they just think inside the right box, where their audience is. Which as an employee of a co-creation agency was music to my ears!

Neville Brody – The Design Studio
“The decisions we make now will have effects on the next 20-30 years.”

The final speaker of the day was legendary designer Neville Brody. Fresh from the first round of the student protests, he had been in the action earlier in the day, Neville took a step back from content and looked at the creative industry as a whole.

He feared that future content will be severely damaged if the creative industries continue to be effected by cuts. He believed that young talents will not be nurtured and a lot of creative talent will go to waste. Finance will dictate who gets educated and therefore lots of potential will go under the radar.

He also believed that traditional skill sets are now losing their importance. To be able to get ahead in the world you need to be competent at several things, a quantity over quality problem.

Neville’s speech was rousing and he finished by showing some of the photos he had taken at the riots that day. It was a sombre and thought-provoking end to what had been a really interesting day.

It’s hard to really sum up all the information from the Future:Content; all the speakers came at the subject from a different angle.

The main themes that really came through were the fact that humans love to have physical experiences; they love to interact and they love to play. All the content we consume has gone digital, and in the opinion of the Future:Content speakers we are going to see this reverse where physical will meet digital to create some truly interesting, innovative content experiences.

Whether this will happen or not we will see… sounds good though, right?

Check out It’s Nice That here.

Blog, Gaming, Innovation, Interesting Stuff, Wired

Incidental Media – Devices Won’t Be Passive Any More

Date January 27 2011
Posted by Marion
Tagged with

I just stumbled upon BERG and Dentsu’s latest video about their research on Incidental Media. It really is an amazing way of envisioning the future!

Media surfaces: Incidental Media from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

In my previous blog post about Transmedia Storytelling I described how stories could (and should!) be told across different media and therefore be conceptualized. It’s all about the way you design your project, upstream, outside of any particular media’s framework, in order to then build it across different media.

Incidental Media is taking this idea a bit further. Like Jack Schulze mentions in this post, which echoes my previous reflection, the future should not be as cold and aggressive as it is in Minority Report but the integration of media in our live should be more organic and subtle.

I like the idea of incidental media, for 2 reasons:

1) Incidents & errors in patterns (or asymmetries) is a sign of organic life.

I like to joke that the perfect snowflake is a work of God and anything else perfectly symmetrical is alien!

If, as beings, we are on Team Asymmetrical (at least I am!), then it makes more sense to create a media that plays on the irregularities of life and perceptions. Q.E.D.

2) Like mentioned at the recent It’s Nice That I Like Future:content conference “After being digitalized things are going to find ways to physicalized again.”

To me, that’s a great postmodernist vision of the way we should be going back to the raw, physical medium and integrating them in the way we communicate ideas.

By using the Incidental Media approach, every surface and screen is involved in an ambient stream of information surrounding the user. As opposed to the traditional vision, “incidental screens” have a meaning outside the direct interaction with the user: like a clock that still shows the time even when it’s not looked at.

I really like this idea of empowering digital – or not – objects as part of the user’s journey.

Media surfaces: The Journey from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

In the near future, devices won’t be as passive as the way they currently are (think about the way you use your smartphone to organise your life). They will participate in our everyday life and interact with us.

The French company Violet launched the idea that all things are connected. They then brought the first internet rabbit to life: the Nabaztag. As a proud owner of a Nabaztag myself, my tasteful companion tells me about the weather, reads news & RSS feeds, informs me about my emails as well as having its own personality and interacting with things. Karotz, the new generation, is to be launch very soon in the UK and should add visual recognition to the rabbit skills… which I’m quite looking forward to!

Another really interesting aspect is (again I mentioned this in my Transmedia Storytelling blog) to mix media and bring sources and channels together, if not as a traditional media hubs, then as creative and interactive platforms.

The question that follows this is how to make the most of this abundant, constant and “incidental” flow of information and deal with the procrastinative and short-termed nature of human beings.

Blog, Gaming, Interesting Stuff, Research Communities, Social Media

The Story Actually Continues… – Transmedia storytelling & Online Research Communities

Date October 19 2010
Posted by Marion
Tagged with

I know I have a fertile imagination; often the books I read or the movies I watch leave an incredibly strong print on my thought process and stay there for days after I have finished reading/watching.

One recent release in particular has completely emphasized this feeling for me (and put me in a trance for a few hours after I left the cinema). The film was Scott Pillgrim vs the World: another story that made the transition from comics, to the big screen via videogame codifications.

I found myself being lost in Scott Pilgrim’s quasi-gaming world and I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to be in my own game, have my own powers and be able to smash people through buildings. The world that was presented to me on a 2D screen well and truly engulfed me and I wanted more.

I immediately went online and sucked up as much information as I possibly could, reading, watching, listening… Thanks to transmedia storytelling the story continued for me way after the film had finished.

A long time ago, stories were only oral, transmitted from generation to generation – I recommend you to read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods to illustrate this idea. Then, Guttenberg & his friends (I know there’s a massive skip in the chronology but I’ll get to the point!) helped us to save, duplicate, share and spread our knowledge, culture and other content.

Content became multimedia, let’s say a decade or two ago, and it is now taking the next step with, on one hand, technologies such as HTML5 and on the other, the concept of transmedia storytelling.

In a previous post, I wrote about gamification and how we can make “boring things” more appealing using game mechanics. Another way to capture the world (or a specific part of it); is to take a narrative angle and tell its story, like our ancestors used to by transferring their knowledge. The way I see it is that storytelling is a postmodernist way of getting back to societies roots by making something more personal and “human-friendly”. Less cold facts, more collective warmth!

What is Transmedia Storytelling?

As illustrated and explained by Maud Serpin in her blog, transmedia storytelling is the concept of a story being told and transmitted across several distinct types of media. Serpin gives the early example of Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula, which has been re-enacted in various films, comics, shorts, etc. Nowadays, transmedia storytelling takes a more dramatic approach as, with current technologies, the use of different platforms/medias strengthen the story itself and let audiences participate, interact and engage.

In these days of real-time uber-fast paced media consumption transmedia storytelling is the best way to keep your audience engaged. In the long-term it offers a full experience… and also, potentially profit. The producers of Heroes, NBC-Universal, understood this when they built the Heroes 360 platform.

Heroes 360, the online component of the Heroes TV series’ multi-platform campaign, reportedly generated an additional $50 million in advertising revenue for NBC-Universal, and that doesn’t include sales of hundreds of thousands of hard copy graphic novels and prose fiction all set in the universe of the show.

Jeff Gomez, Forbes, 2009

How do you take part in Transmedia Storytelling?

The major challenge of transmedia storytelling is to actually come up and design something that will fit every media & platforms and make a smooth and… credible story. So how can you do that?

According to some of the masters of transmedia, Jeff Gomez and Serpin, you need to start with a media-neutral design, and then split it for specific media or platforms.

To me, the magic lies in the fact that “The story actually continues…” and, much like Gestalt psychology, there is a very strong mental model in this idea of continuity. If we can make the story-world last and persist, then we can keep our audience engaged.

There are drawbacks of transmedia storytelling though! People – probably nerds like me – may be expecting you to use all media available, or at least the most common i.e. the internet.

For instance I remember reading critics of the fake/real documentary movie, The Fourth Kind. The film didn’t even have it’s own website, let alone the extra facts, character info and further info audiences tend to want. This lack of attention to detail damaged the reputation and effect of the movie. Something that Mr. James Cameron maybe avoided by hiring Jeff Gomez to work on the transmediation of his blockbuster Avatar.

How do we apply this to our communities?

In our online research communities we engage with members during a certain period of time, to try and understand their lives, the decisions they make (in the least intrusive way possible) and engage them in co-creation.

Any community that we build and release has multiple types of task and tools. As well as many web 2.0 functions, our users can use their mobiles to tell us what they are experiencing in their everyday life – in real time, or video their thoughts and upload them to the community.

Therefore, when launching new online research community project, we make sure we create the following elements:

1) Make sure a story is told throughout the community. The way tasks are written should be appealing, personalized and should not shut down any potential thought processes or creativity. Users should be able to identify themselves – Remember the massive success of Friends 15 years ago? It was the very first series with characters people could very easily relate to.

2) Include transmediation upstream in the task plan and design process: especially when you have several cross-platform tools available, it’s important to use them, not as separated elements, but part of a 1 tightly designed concept.

3) Preserve the continuity and the logic. Like in a story, and everything else in life, people get confused if there are disruptions in the flow of the project. For instance, we try and keep the number of tasks per day consistent and released at a smooth pace.

4) Creating versatile tools that can take the story outside the online community -platform and allow people to interact with the project as a continuity of their life.

I’m definitively looking forward to designing more transmedia storytelling tools in the near future… Consider this part of the Face story To Be Continued!!!

Augmented Reality, Blog, Gaming, Insights, Research Communities, Research Communities 101

Research Communities 101: Is Gamification the Cure to Boredom?

Date October 13 2010
Posted by Marion
Tagged with

As a relative newbie to the indoor climbing world, I’ve noticed that I am at my Spiderman best when my climbing partner is challenging me to complete a higher-level route (at least higher than I am used to). Much like many other situations, the thrill of the challenge spices things up, produces better results and makes the whole experience a lot more fun!

The positive effect of a challenging situation is something that a bunch of people have started buzzing about online, and are trying to replicate in non-gaming environments.

What is Gamification?

As we’ve touched on before in regards to WoW or Second Life, the appeal of RPGs (Role Playing Games) lies in the fact that they blur the line between gameplay and real life. Gamification is about collapsing the last frontier and making “real life” as fun as gaming life, especially in very boring/dull/no-fun fields such as science or accounting.

David Helgason, from game development company Unity comments “It’s funny, because [accounting] has to be the most boring field, but I mean that’s the point. You can make it slightly challenging and give people little reasons to sort of play these tax tools — beyond, you know, not going to prison!”

Now, the question is: can we gamify the whole world make and make boring stuff more bearable?

Why People Love Playing Games

Brian Sutton-Smith gives an interesting interpretation of games as the perfect occasion for people to re-enact survival situations and therefore practice their survival skills and instincts, such as assessing risks and opportunities.

Game situations give us a safe, but real space where we can assess strategies of human sociability. Sutton-Smith’s summary is “we ‘potentate’ or die”. Kids, I hope you’re paying attention here, because this is your best excuse to play another few hours of The Sims or L4D2!!

Face Communities and Game Mechanics

Mindbubble and Headbox are evolving and growing. We are continuing to gather loads of users into research and co-creation projects – they’re always happy to earn a few quid or win an iPad in return for their precious participation!

2010 has been a year rich in improvements for our community platform, shifting from a pure online research community to a platform with its own social dimension.

Is gamification the next step towards the future of online communities? Can it be applied to our research communities?

Gamification in the Online Space

To me, in the digital & social space, the theory of gamification may be a bit limited, for the simple reason that:

+ The web, and especially the social web, is based on users volunteering, as opposed to, erm… work.
+ The web is already a massive playground.

Therefore, the gamification of online space has another, more subtle dimension: UX designers are more interested in using game mechanics to keep their users engaged with their website/software, like a permanent & personal challenge (to climb higher!).

To achieve that, users must have:

+ A personalised interest
+ A personalised recognition (by peers and also by the software/brand)
+ Intrinsic constraints, to create a challenging aspect & keep them focused on the app. – a bit like Joshua Porter explains for designers in Week 35 – http://52weeksofux.com/

However there are a few pitfalls to avoid in the design of a platform’s game mechanics:

+ Avoid trolling & grinding: these can happen when users with wrong intentions simply try to over-flood the system by either commenting a lot (more than necessary) or by starting arguments in the conversation.

+ Avoid discouraging “noobs” or users with a lower level of understanding of the online space while keeping “higher level” users engaged (something that Blizzard mastered with the design of World of Warcraft)

+ From a general perspective, adding challenges and ranking will make your users compete against each other in a fierce race to top the leaderboard, which can literally cause damage to the essence/social object of the community.

When the social object is to encourage users participation in market research and co-creation projects, the design of our game mechanics become all the more complex as we cannot risk bias research results by “incentivising” users with points and badges.

Too Much Game Kills the Gamification

With the release of Facebook places, a great competitor to Foursquare in terms of collapsing frontiers between games and reality, mayors, badges and other leaderboards are entering our everyday life, and gamification has become “the new online buzzword”.

But, as Naomi Alderman warns us in her article for the Guardian we must not succumb to the pitfall of gamifying every single activity in order to make it more “fun”: both because you cannot genuinely make a game out of any goal you have to reach, or task you have to perform in life, and also, you cannot always get authentic results by turning an activity into a game.

Because, as Alderman wisely concludes: “You run the risk of losing everything that made the thing worthwhile in the first place”.

So what are the right measures and balance to add a bit of game and engagement to boredom and routine?

Pawned. Gamification and Its Discontents

As well Sebastian Deterding’s guidelines in the above presentation, there are rules to follow when using gamification and designing game mechanics, for instance:

1. The game itself is not fun. Fun comes from a good design.
Literally, you cannot “add a bit of gaming powder” to the recipe to make an activity or an app more engaging for users. The game mechanics should be designed, prototyped, tested etc, as part of the whole project.

2. Rewards are not achievements.
Once upon a time, companies/brands/bands were giving away free mp3s (indie bands still do it, while huge pop stars got their album leaked!), pretty computer backgrounds or other cool free stuff. In 2010 the reward can simply be points, badges or ranks (that goes with a pretty title you can share on your Facebook profile etc). But this cheap logic of giving points for action isn’t sustainable: accumulating points doesn’t make the users engage (they may be too bored to really start grinding…).

3. Good game design should be built around a well tighten, progressive story.
So what makes users engage? It’s the challenge of improving their result and reaching the next level – Reminds me of doing the same climbing route over again and again until I can’t feel my arms!

To conclude, this quote from Deterding’s presentation gives a perfect illustration on how tricky game design is and how the gamification process should be used carefully:

“It is an invariable principle of all play, that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot play.”

James P. Carse finite and infinite games (1986)

Blog, Gaming, Interesting Stuff, Pulsar

Never Send a Human to do a Machine’s Job?

Date October 07 2010
Posted by Marion
Tagged with

Recently I was involved in a conversation about Pulsar and the human/machine elements of its approach. Pulsar is an amazing tool that scans and monitors the infinite comments made on social networks and produces brilliant visual results. However much like any machine it always needs a little bit of human magic to get to the final result.

This got me thinking back to a pretty amazing example of machines and humans working together to make something good into something great.

Scientists were working out the composition of a molecule in their labs and decided to use the software Rosetta, commercialised by the company Foldit, to help visualise how that molecule should be built in a 3D space.

The problem is well defined, with its components (amino acid) and rules (saving energy and keep hydrophobic elements inside and therefore far from water), however the 3 dimensional aspect gives billions of solutions that even powerful computers would struggle with.

Foldit gives users the chance to help with important scientific research.

The software happened to be able to start well, but always stalled and kept getting stuck at one point of the calculation. That’s where the genius is: users of the software contacted Rosetta developers, telling them they could see why the machine was failing!

Foldit started to integrate a hybrid interface on their programme where users could interact with the interface, “borrowing” features from online gaming communities, such as “leaderboards, team and individual challenges, user forums, etc..”

Foldit developers challenged users and therefore were able to recognise patterns when humans beat the machine, or where a human could pick up trivial errors the machine would struggle to find.

In that case, the symbiosis was perfect: the software could start the 3D modelisation users wanted, and then helped the machine to optimise the configuration…

Going further, like in video gaming, each user (I should stop calling them humans now!) had their own specific set of skills to apply accordingly to the right stage of the process…

It is a fascinating turn of events, showing the combination of technological power and human intuition can really produce the best results. I’m glad we’re still more or less out of the Matrix, Neo…

You can find the original article here: Gamers Beat Algorithms For Finding Protein Structures.