This week’s been buzzing and busy – everybody’s back in the studio after a week of holidays, festivals, and trips to India. That means the studio mailing list has been buzzing again, and so it’s time to take the cream of the links and get them onto the blog.
Matt J found Gearbox, a company making “smart toys” to pair with your smartphone. Their first toy is a ball that rolls the direction you tilt your phone in. They explain:
We are then leveraging the connectivity and computing power of the phone to create a fully interactive experience for the user. Our first app for the ball is Sumo. I throw my ball on a table, you throws yours on the table and then we can try and sumo each others ball off the table. However, while our physical balls are moving there is also an onscreen component with online stats, profiles, damage, powerups and other aspects of gameplay that aren’t possible with a regular remote control toy. For instance, when the balls collide they can sustain “damage” and roll slower or I could get a powerup to reverse your controls for a few seconds.
Aside from the games we produce we are also opening up the APIs for the ball so any app developer with no hardware knowledge can build their own games or applications and bring them to the real world.
Smashing; it’s the open-API that really sets these toys apart from something more constrained, like Sony’s Rolly. And this is only their first product!
Joey Roth’s ‘Charlatan / Martyr / Huslter‘ poster has been doing the rounds, recently, and with good reason – it’s lovely. But equally lovely is the attention to detail on the webpage selling it. Matt W sent it to our internal list, commenting on how the product page “communicates desire” – the closeups of the type and paper stock, the shot (reproduced above) of copies being stacked. It reinforces that it’s not just an EPS on a piece of paper; it’s a real product, and Roth’s website makes you want it.
Damon Zucconi’s Fata Morgana is, essentially, Google Maps without the Maps: roads, land, and water are all stripped away leaving just place names and street names. Even zoomed in, as above, the effect persists. Maps made just of names and streets aren’t a new thing – but there’s a strange juxtaposition in seeing them in slippy, interactive javascript form.
Here’s a short demonstration of an official version of The Settlers of Catan for Microsoft’s Surface. It’s a little underwhelming – very literal in some of its metaphors. That said, I loved the interaction between physical tokens and the board – in particular, the way the “visor” has an X-ray effect on cards underneath it. By making it a very realistic – and carefully masked – X-ray effect, the metaphor actually holds up better. It’s very much an understanding of the Surface as a Magic Table rather than a big window.
And finally – this is Racer. An old arcade cabinet; a remote control car on a small circuit; a remote camera, and timing circuitry. Put them together and you’ve got this charming and effective game. A tiny, remote-control version of C’était un Rendez-vous, if you like. This video of it in action is great – alas, I couldn’t embed it, so I hope the link suffices.
I was lucky enough to be invited to take part in the Wonderlab a few weeks ago. The official site described it like so:
[An event that brings] together some of the smartest creatives from the digital, gaming, theatre and performance fields, to spend three days exploring where digital tools and the ethos of play will take us next.
Ever since I got back from it, though I’ve mainly been asked what the Lab actually was.
Now that I’ve decompressed from the intensity of those three days, it’s easier to both write about the event itself, and answer that question. The short video above may provide some hints, but might also just look like a bunch of grownups talking and playing games. It deserves a more detailed explanation.
The Lab was a small event, with 10 invited participants from a variety of backgrounds – performers, artists, designers, technical types. We all were, however, connected by our interest in play or games. Given the tiny size, and that it was invite-only, it doesn’t feel fair to label it as a conference. And though there was a great deal of freedom in our discussions and sessions over the three days, the Lab differed from a conference in that a definite outcome was required: as a group, we had to present “our findings” – whatever they’d turn out to be – in the format of a card game.
You could have called it a three-day game-design workshop, except it’s not entirely fair to call it a workshop, either: the format of our conclusion may have been dictated, but what conclusion we were aiming for was not clear to begin with. We had a trajectory, the event shaped by tiny, five-minute talks from each of the participants and a range of guest speakers, all talking about something that “blew their mind”, and leading into subsequent discussion. We had a few sessions where we raised topics we felt relevant to the discussion of play and games, and as the Lab went on, definite themes emerged. And then, we would have to stop talking, and make things – tiny, prototype games to prove a point; collaborative rulsets in a session of Nomic; slowly putting what we “thought” and “believed” into practice. And then, from a practical session, back to discussion and analysis.
The term “Lab” eventually proved to be the most succinct explanation of affairs. It was a space that encouraged both exploration and experimentation, not favouring one of the other, and definitely emphasising the value of thinking through making. By the end of the three days, we’d designed about two-and-a-half games each, and explored countless others. Nothing focuses the mind like having to put your discoveries and beliefs into physical, playable form.
The Lab fostered a growing literacy of games, considering “literacy” as Alan Kay did – the ability to read and write in a given medium. Early on, we played a simple parlour game called Chairs: the goal being to stop a slowly walking player from sitting down on the last available chair by moving between chairs yourselves. It’s a simple game, and yet as a group, we were terrible at it. But after the initial burst of hilarity, we took it apart: what’s going on, why are we failing, what are the simple guidelines to ensure success. We were still lousy with our newly considered perspective – and I would love to build an AI simulation just to prove how dumb you can play to win the game – but we were beginning to understand our lousiness. And thus the Lab continued: talks, discussions, or games would be presented, taken apart, put back together. I valued being asked to prove or embody a belief; the test was not to succeed, but merely to try.
What did I actually get out of it that I can explain in a concrete sense?
One overriding theme was the ethics of game-design. It’s a huge topic, especially in this post-Jesse-Schell universe, and we explored it very thoroughly in some of the sessions. By the end, we’d designed both a game you could only lose, and a game where everybody would win. We created rules that were, in the real world, entirely unethical, but within the closed system of the game we were playing not only ethical but effectively irrelevant. We considered ethics of structured, rule-based play – games themselves – versus the ongoing act of unstructured play.
For someone so interested in games as systemic media (to quote Eric Zimmerman), I was surprised by how enamoured I became in the performative aspects of games. That was no doubt in part down to the insight brought to our sessions by the numerous particiapnts with performance backgrounds. In my notes, I wrote
Games don’t have to be performance-based, but games that don’t afford performance are weaker for it
This is, I guess, what Matt J has previously described as toyetics – it’s the fun you can have with a system, the ways it affords non-structured play, the ways it encourages you to interact with other people in a social capacity. It’s the fun you can have just playing. Games aren’t just rules – they’re rules you can play with, and the best games often afford the best play.
I also finally became convinced of the value of MDA [pdf] as a framework for understanding games; previously, it had never really clicked with me. In particular, I came to appreciate the value of rules and Mechanics emerging from Dynamics – often in the form of exploration or improvisation. If the act of play isn’t fun, or challenging, or interesting, why should a game that demands non-fun actions be any good at all? Guest speaker Tassos Stevens put this much better than I currently can in his wonderful short talk, Make Believe:
Game arises from play. A ruleset crystallises a set of actions distilled from an experience of play. That crystal can be popped in your pocket to be played with again and again, any time, any place, with anyone entranced by its sparkle. It gets chipped and scratched, then rubbed and polished… the very best thing about it is that if we want to, we can smash it up and grind it into paste to make believe anew.
What we were doing at the lab was learning how to make games arise.
The game we eventually presented, to a small invited audience, was Couple Up: a site-specific parlour-game, based on getting the guests invited at the final session from one room (where they were socialising) to another (where there was booze). It used cards as a social token, but the game was played in conversations between players. From the video above, it might seem slight, and whimsical; it’s certainly a little bit broken, and needs some revisions. But at it’s core are a few things we wanted to explore: designing ethical games; designing games that forced you to learn to “read” them; games that afford performance; games that exploit hidden knowledge (both on the part of the players and game-makers. That explorations happened not only in the making, but also in watching our guests play the game, and subsequently discuss it with us afterwards.
The standard of discussion and quality of the participants and speakers throughout the lab was fantastic. The fact we were reigned-in, asked to stop taking and start explaining ourselves through making, was an important challenge, and a visible reminder of the value of thinking through making. And, of course, though our subject matter was play through the lens of games of all forms, I can already see the ways many of the lessons I learned apply to my work in design.
Some of the output of the Lab was very immediate – new colleagues, new ideas to take away. Some of it is lodged into my brain, not taking form right now, but burning away, and will no doubt nag me for the rest of the year. It acted like so many of my favourite conferences – not a reminder of things that I’ve failed to do in my work, or things that have to change immediately, but things to be thinking about in the long term, and to be incorporated into future output. Not One Big Idea, but a hundred ideas, percolating away, growing and mutating until they’re ready to use. I’ll be making use of what I learned in so many projects, and so much work, from here on out.
As such: it was a privilege to take part; thanks to Margaret, Miranda, Alex, and everyone at Hide & Seek who organised the event, not to mention LIFT and the Jerwood Foundation for their support – and, most of all, to the other participants, who all brought something wonderful to the mix.
(You can see all the participants’ short talks, and a succession of more general videos, at the Wonderlab 2010 Youtube channel. My own five-minute talk, on the German boardgame Waldschattenspiel, is here)
I accompanied the Prime Minister’s trade mission to India last week, part of the business delegation visiting Bangalore and Delhi to meet with companies and government. Alongside the business delegation were sports, education, local government and technology.
What can I say? To see even a glimpse of India’s colossal and vibrant democracy was invigorating. And it was only a glimpse: the two days were tightly managed, and I saw mostly board rooms in the Ministry of Commerce and the futuristic landscape of the Infosys campus. My experience of India was a ribbon seen from a coach going between venues.
Watching the discussions between ministers and CEOs was like watching a slow ballet between planets. India will lift hundreds of millions out of poverty before the decade is done, and the infrastructure required needs engineering and financing (to mention just one topic of conversation). It’s always been a fascination of mine how individual action integrates into society-wide change, and it’s good to have a brief look at one mechanism and one corner of that puzzle.
I’ve returned with a new picture of India. The level of entrepreneurialism, the careful attacks on large problems, the energy… it can only be good for the culture of the UK have closer links with this. I don’t know how I or we can be involved, but I’ve made a few connections and will do my best.
Of course being so close to government was good. David Cameron took a number of ministers, and there are particular issues close to my heart: how the Internet start-ups and small businesses in London can somehow ignite into a stronger community, and contribute to the recovery. I asked for thoughts and advice, and I’ve come back with a few ideas about what could help there.
And the conversations with various CEOs etc: it’s not often you have this kind of access if you’re not in that orbit, and in as much as you can learn anything in snatched conversations between events and on coaches, I feel like I have a much better understanding of that world.
On a personal note, it was a joy to see India and meet people there. I’ve never visited although I’m half Indian myself (my mother is East African Indian, and moved from Nairobi to London in 1970). So for me there was a happy and proud confusion of personal and racial identity that permeated the entire trip.
I’m going to follow up on a few conversations this week. And also get a massage to try and fix my back, which hasn’t forgiven me for the amount of time I’ve put it in aeroplane seats recently.
One emerging trend on the internal mailing list has been a steadily growing number of threads about robots – covering both big mechanical things, and also more domestic models, and even (as in the case of Barbie below), barely-bots. Time to start gathering those up!
Gadgetwise point out the Barbie Video Girl Doll. It’s a Barbie doll, with a video camera embedded in it, so you can make movies pointed from her point of view, and a slightly immersion-breaking screen in her back. You can also transfer videos off the doll via a USB connector. And, as the Gadgetwise article point out, “because the doll can be posed, she doubles as a pretty good tripod.”
It’s more than just a doll because it’s a sensing object, albeit not a very smart one. Still make it walk and you’d have something not unlike a telepresence robot for kids.
The Wall Street Journal last week covered Autom – a robotic weight-loss coach. Weight-loss programs could be just be software applications, but the vaguely anthropomorphic robot perhaps adds a layer of reassurement and engagement:
Autom also uses social cues to seem more lifelike, a big psychological difference from working with a static computer screen. She blinks her eyes, turns to look at who she’s talking to, and ends conversations by saying, “I hope we can talk again about your progress,” in a female voice.
From the end of 2008, it’s a map of the top 10 countries of the world by Robot Population Density, as part of this IEEE Spectrum article. Of course, it’s very specifically talking about industrial robots, but it’s an eye-opening set of figures nontheless.
And finally, some fictional robots – namely, this gorgeous set of illustrations for a Russian children’s book from 1979, entitled Your Name? Robot.
The July release for Schooloscope is now out. The release includes all manner of bugfixes, thousands of new OFSTED inspections, and easy output to Facebook and Twitter… and also these beautiful papercraft schools that you can download for any school on the site.
Tom is hammering away at Schooloscope. He’s off at a conference about play and invention next week, so hoping to get this month’s feature release cooked before then.
Nick and Matt B are in the other room, working together on new product development. They’re aiming to take a tech proof of concept to minimum viable product.
Two other products – one near term, the other medium – are also taking shape.
Campbell, Timo, Jack and Matt J are working on a film called Future Magic.
There’s been a lot of business development this week. Lots of exciting conversations. And accounts: it was financial year end recently, and that’s a good chance to revisit processes with Kari. I like that company administration runs so smoothly, like a machine. I’ve been making higher level metrics, attempting to attach meaningful numbers to the budgets of cash, attention and risk.
Last week I was in California with Matt J, recharging, hiking, and attending Foo Camp. There was a lot about robotics there – everything from articulation to low-cost development to fractional A.I. – and it has influenced my thinking considerably. Most of my thinking happens in conversations, or while writing, or while drawing.
The week before that we handed over Mag+, the end of a 9 month journey. It went from R&D design concept to iPad app, and from there to a constellation of systems and processes (production tools and help-desks), which were finally divided up and stitched back into a broader corporation to run as “business as usual.” That’s how R&D should happen. I’m pleased.
On our last night in San Francisco, walking back to the hotel from hosting drinks for our West coast friends, we passed the Apple Store, and just as we went past the giant iPad in the window started playing this. A great sign-off to Mag+.
It’s odd to be back in the studio, able to pay attention once again to health, growth and direction. It’s wonderful. This is a self-sustaining spaceship now. A culture garden full of my favourite people.
I can see the mountain-tops. I can see the stars. And I am impatient for them.
I liked this take on what a Digital Holga might look like (the Holga, if you’re not aware, is a little toy camera). It’s well presented and has some lovely illustrations, but the two things I liked most were: the rotatable control panel, making it simple to convert for left-handed use; and the idea that, whenever it might exist, it should always use a previous generation of sensor technology. Built-in nostalgia.
Giles Turnbull coined a nice neologism in his write-up of Economist direct – “impulscriptions“; not a true subscription, but one-click issue purchasing when the current edition takes your fancy. Lovely service.
“Hybrids are smooth and neat. Interdisciplinary thinking is diplomatic; it thrives in a bucolic university setting. Chimeras, though? Man, chimeras are weird. They’re just a bunch of different things bolted together. They’re abrupt. They’re discontinuous. They’re impolitic. They’re not plausible; you look at a chimera and you go, “yeah right.” And I like that! Chimeras are on the very edge of the recombinatory possible. Actually — they’re over the edge.”
Last Saturday, Matt Webb and I hosted a short session at O’Reilly FooCamp 2010, in Sebastopol, California.
The title was “Mining the Trough of Disillusionment”, referring to the place in the Gartner “Hype Cycle” that we find inspiration in – where technologies languish that have become recently mundane, cheap and widely-available but are no longer seen as exciting ‘bullet-points’ on the side of products.
While not presenting the Gartner reports as ‘science’ – they do offer an interesting perspective of the socio-technical ‘weather’ that surrounds us and condenses into the products and services we use.
In the session we examined the last five years of the hype cycle reports they have published – it’s kind of fascinating – there are some very strange decisions as to what is included, excluded and how buzzwords morph over time.
After that we brainstormed with the group which technologies they thought had fallen, perhaps irrevocably, into the trough. It was fun to get so many ‘alpha geeks’ thinking about gamma things…
Having done so – we had a discussion about how they might breed or be re-contextualised in order to create interesting new products.
These “hopeful monsters” often sound ridiculous on first hearing, but when you pick at them they illustrate ways in which a forgotten or unfashionable technology can serve a need or create desire.
Or they can expose a previously unexploited affordance or feature of the technology – that was not brought to the fore by the original manufacturers or hype that surrounded it. By creating a chimera, you can indulge in some material exploration.
The list we generated is below, if you’d like to join in…
It was a really fun session, that threw up some promising avenues – and some new products ideas for us… Thanks to all who attended and participated!
Nick found this lovely work from Karsten “Toxi” Schmidt: a cover for Print magazine. The final piece of work – a 3D print-out of generated text – is lovely; just as beautiful, however, are all the steps in the process, “growing” type through reaction diffusion. The video above is one such illustration, but the whole write-up is fascinating, and definitely worth your time.
Thinking about what defines a particular game medium, one doesn’t always consider elements like the player’s physical posture, and where they sit relative to their fellow players. But the experience of playing a digital game with a friend on the iPad proves quite different than that of sitting side-by-side on a couch with Xbox controllers in hand, or sitting alone with a mic strapped to your head. Your sense of posture and presence is part of the game’s medium, as much as the material of the game’s manufacture.
Presence as part of a medium – fantastic.
I enjoyed this gigantic, Lego-Mindstorms-powered chess set. Not as much for the technological “wow” factor as the little details: the Knights’ legs pawing at the air as they move, and, best of all, the way the pieces politely get out of each others’ way as they move about. Machines embody politeness in a most curious way.
Art Lebedev have redesigned the Moscow Metro map. Never an easy task, subway mapping, but the result is striking. I’m not sure how much better or worse it is than the previous map: I’m not a Moscow local. But it’s clear from the fascinating “process” page just how much care and attention went into the design. The inner ring is clearly iconic, but their more eccentric representations are perhaps the most interesting – the topographic versions in particular.
And, finally, how’s this for proper augmented-reality: NYC The Blog report that stencilled compass roses are appearing spray-painted outside subway exists, to help travellers’ get their bearings. Brilliant, and not a screen held at head-height in sight.
