Henry Jenkins Interview

Henry Jenkins has been interviewed by Steven Johnson at SXSW, and Gamasutra has a piece up on it. As ever with Henry Jenkins, it’s a torrent of incredibly valuable insight, and I recommend you read it. While his blog is prolific, the Gamasutra piece creates a nice snapshot of some of his thinking:

Asked Johnson, “Do you ever look at a new technology and think, that is just stupid?”

“It’s a momentary flash in my mind,” admitted Jenkins. “But people don’t do things, in the end, that are meaningless. We may couch potato out sometimes, but that’s meaningful to us as well. So the challenge is to dig in and figure out what is meaningful about it to the person doing the activity. It may not be meaningful to me, but it’s clearly meaningful to the people engaging in it. People aren’t idiots. They do things for a reason. And the reason is usually very interesting. “

On TV and work:

Whereas Lost seems to push us in a new direction in terms of what it is to engage in a television experience. “

“It’s amazing how much time people have,” Johnson added. “One person creates a map from 45 freeze frames – it must have taken 3 days – and they put it in the discussion frame, and then other people chime in with corrections and additions. But the time commitment is amazing. “

“Rather than pathologize that, and say what’s wrong with these people that they spend so much time this way, let’s ask what’s wrong with America that these incredibly intelligent people are given so few opportunities to demonstrate their intelligence in their workplace,” said Jenkins. “Right?”

Johnson is not someone I’m very familiar with, but he too has some great insights. He says of moral panic:

“The young people who grew up with these interactive media – what are they like?” Johnson asked. “If you look at the broad demographic trends, they are incredibly good. They are the least violent since the 1950s, they are the most entrepreneurial on record, and the most politically engaged generation since the dawn of the television. Do we have a crisis here or an incredible opportunity? People seem to be more engaged generally than they’ve been since the rise of mass media. The idea that there’s some kind of reason for a moral panic at this time is very strange.”

The Lost Ring

Jane McGonigal spoke a little bit about her new ARG, The Lost Ring, at GDC. It’s worth a look if you’re interested in them, since it’s probably the most ambitious yet: Eight languages, many countries, and running with the Olympic games. It seems to be the fulfillment of ambitions she’s had for a while. Here she was speaking about running ARGs in China a year ago:

How you would pull it off, I’m not exactly sure. That’s one of the things we’re working on, ARGs in China and India… The idea for that project is teens in American having to recruit allies across the world because missions will be taking place locally in, you know, Latvia, and Bangalore and you have to somehow get real people in these cities to play with you and work with you to solve stuff and coordinate. Coordinating with people in another state, that’s not really that big of a shift. So Hong Kong might be the city for that.

It will be fascinating to watch this unfold.

(Edit: Jane has posted her SXSW Keynote slides here)

Endemol Getting Into Casual Games

Endemol have been flirting with games for quite a while, but a job posting on their website has tipped a bit more of what they’re planning. They’re creating a casual games team in Los Angeles.

Endemol Digital Media is creating a dedicated team to focus on casual game development

From the job description:

Establish a creative and technical casual game knowledge and resource center to be leveraged by the company worldwide

After being scoffed at by mainstream developers, casual is definitely becoming more respectable. I caught this quote on Dean Takahashi’s blog just after GDC:

The market for online casual games, from Tetris (estimated 60 million sold in lifetime) on cell phones to Bejeweled (350 million downloaded and sold on mobile phones) on computers, hit about $2.25 billion worldwide last year, according to Jessica Tams, head of the Casual Games Association. She says she no longer gets those funny looks when she talks about her group. Before, people would ask skeptical questions. Can you make any money with those? Are those real games?

“Now the question is how much money can I make how quickly?” she said. Even hardcore game companies want to make their games more accessible to wider audiences and so they’re asking how they can add casual elements to their games.

The differences between the culture and the business of games fascinate me. While casual games have been scoffed at by developers, and still are by hardcore ludologists, they’re starting to generate a lot of cash at the intersection between games companies and media companies in other industries. If the flow of business continues in this direction, it will invariably change the culture of game development, and also what it means in wider cultural terms to be a gamer.

Channel 4: £40M Digital Content Fund

Channel 4 has stumped up £20M for a new digital content fund, the 4IP fund, totaling £40M with match funding and planned to grow to £50M. Based in Birmingham with Advantage West Midlands, the fund is highly experimental, aimed at new platforms on a trial basis for the next two years. More cities will be added as commissioning centres after the scheme launches in July. More details are at the Guardian.

Disney Clickables

Alice Taylor flags a new Disney virtual world for kids, tied in with a range of toys that provide authentication and a few ways for kids to interact with each other in the real world:

…a new technology called Clickables that we are launching in connection to our new Disney Fairies virtual world. It’s a way for kids to take their online world experience into the real world. The core of it is a magical bracelet. By simply clicking their [real] bracelets together, girls become friends in the online environment. And it’s safer too because if you had to physically click with your friend that means they were in physical proximity to you, you saw them, and you know who they are.

Wow. I wonder how the longevity of toy lines and virtual worlds compare at the moment?

Grand Theft Childhood?

It’s a clunky title for a book and, *gasp*, they use comic sans on the website, but this may be some of the most vital research to backup games for a considerable time to come. It will apparently talk about the actual risks of videogames rather than hysterically imagined ones, and about how parents and teachers can manage them.

The Myths section seems quite noteworthy – while nothing there is really new to or not suspected by developers, it presents the information in a way that’s very direct and understandable, making it good for pointing people to:

MYTH: The growth in violent video game sales is linked to the growth in youth violence — especially school violence — throughout the country.

FACT: Video game popularity and real-world youth violence have been moving in opposite directions. Violent juvenile crime in the United States reached a peak in 1993 and has been declining ever since. School violence has also gone down. Between 1994 and 2001, arrests for murder, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assaults fell 44 percent, resulting in the lowest juvenile arrest rate for violent crimes since 1983. Murder arrests, which reached a high of 3,800 in 1993, plummeted to 1400 by 2001.

It also has a chapter on an actual, honest to goodness study of violence and games:

We may be asking the wrong questions, and making the wrong assumptions. For example, instead of looking for a simple, direct relationship between video game violence and violent behavior in all children, we should be asking how we might identify those children who are at greatest risk for being influenced by these games.

Preorders are open on Amazon now.

(via Bruce on Games, Sword in the Stone/Alice in Wonderland image by pingc)

Games and Personal Development

Ubisoft are making a weight management game. It sounds like Nike+ Lite (or maybe heavy). It’ll use a pedometer coupled with the DS and game mechanics to help people set goals and manage their weight. I love this kind of interactive work, and the technology to implement it has recently become a lot more basic and thus cheaper. Interactive has an incoming dark side though…

I’ve been using Nike+ since last October, and i love it. It’s a very game-like service. A sensor in your shoe connects to a sensor on an ipod nano, recording data and, as you run, periodically giving you vocal status updates on your pace, total time, distance covered, and distance to your goal.

Once you’re done, iTunes connects to the Nike+ website and uploads your run data, where each run can be graphed, compared to others, and mapped. As well as setting a mileage goal on the iPod each time you go out, the site also allows users to set and track long term goals, which keeps me motivated and thinking about running even when I’m not doing it.

Given that I prefer VLC to iTunes, and feel very queasy about Nike’s labour history, Nike+ has to be quite a compelling service to have snagged me so deeply. Tying things to game mechanics works, and providing access to data also turns people into self-educating geeks: From knowing virtually nothing and being prone to injuries in previous years, I’ve gone to knowing about running gaits, foot types and the right kinds of shoe for them, and as a result, am now able to run much further with far fewer injuries.

What’s really lacking is a social aspect. I know several people who use it, but we have no proper way to search, connect, share or look at each other’s data. There is no real way to communicate through the site or find others. The furthest it goes is to create challenges and either open them to everyone, or invite friends who’s screennames or emails I already know.

There’s a palpable sense of a next step that’s missing: That I’m on my own when I’m using Nike+, or that game mechanics are missing when I’m using Facebook.

It appears that this growing bubble of interactive services is going to turn my life into an MMO, and I largely welcome it. I’d like to shape its future development too, as I’m acutely aware that the technology is ethically inert. Jane McGonigal and Raph Koster talk about using games to save the world and that they’re the best medium to contribute to that, and I think they’re largely correct, but points and data alone are quite compelling when you present them to people in the right way.

Technically, the same kind of system could be devised to work with “sitting on your ass eating junk food and watching TV”. The Obama campaign is using Twitter right now, how long before a campaign actually uses game mechanics for influence? How sugar coated a pill could game mechanics be for drip-feeding people ideology or propaganda?

At first blush it seems like self-interest would limit the power ARGs and MMOs could have over people, but reading something like The System by Cao Yunwu makes it all too apparent that people are not always rational choosers. Of course there are going to be cultish, astroturf ARGs that exploit this one day.

(CC image by portfolium)

Geomerics Funded by Tech Strategy Board

We posted about the Technology Strategy Board’s funding for games industry projects a while ago, and Geomerics are among the first companies to make use of it. Not only that, but it’s in collaboration with UCL: The industry is gradually becoming more intelligent and open to collaboration. Via Gamasutra:

UK-based graphics and lighting technology company Geomerics has announced a new research collaboration with University College London, funded by an investment of £525,000 from the Technology Strategy Board’s Collaborative Research and Development program.

Following the launch of its first lighting technology product, Enlighten, Geomerics and UCL will work together to further develop the technology over the three-year project. Geomerics will receive £330,000 and UCL £195,000 of the total investment.

WiM Keynote, Raph Koster

It seems far more downbeat than usual, but Raph Koster gave quite a negative keynote at the Worlds in Motion Summit:

He showed photos of Club Penguin, and glamorous Second Life characters with torn jeans — and then followed them with unsettling slides of Darfur and Haiti.

“I look at what we do and I say, god damn, we’re kind of irrelevant,” Koster said, pointing out the schism between virtual reality and the real world we know.

It’s not a very new point, though Jane McGonigal put it across in a much more positive way during her Game Developer’s Rant:

I’m not here to rant about game designers. I’m mad, but I’m not mad at game designers. I think that compared to the rest of the world, game designers pretty much have it all figured out. We’ve invented a medium that kicks every other medium’s ass. As game designers, we own more emotional bandwidth, we occupy more brain cycles, and we make more people happy than any other platform or content in the world. And if you don’t already believe that, if you don’t realize that we’ve already won, then you’re not paying attention to the staggering amount of time, energy, money and passion that gamers all over the world pour into our games every single day.

So why why have we won? Because as an industry, we’ve spent the last 30 years learning how to optimize human experience. We know that our brains are made for playing games. Recently, some of us have remembered that our bodies are made for playing games. And we’ve always known that our hearts are made for playing games. So as an industry, we’ve spent three whole decades figuring out how to engineer systems that fully engage our brains, and our bodies, and our hearts. And we’ve pretty much solved that problem – or, at least, our solutions are working better than other designed experience on the planet. So our systems work better than anything anyone else is making to engage human beings. And as a result, the way I see it, right now, we basically rule the world.

That’s the good news. But the problem is, we don’t rule the real world.

Where Raph says we have a moral obligation to attend to the world’s problems, Jane is saying we have the power to do so.

(CC image of a riot in Paris, from Daniel Meyer)

Open Source Insomniacs

In order to help PS3 developers, Insomniac Games have announced the “Nocturnal Project”, an effort to share resources, knowledge and source code with other developers free of charge. Given the amount of difficulty developers have had with PS3 development and ports, this can only be a good thing.

Hopefully, it’ll also encourage developers to open up a bit more: Protecting your IP is one thing, but being paranoid and reinventing the wheel is quite another.