This is not the central point of my research, but I will always talk about how we use interfaces that reminds us of games. These are more metaphors and not always pratical or workable concepts.
Have a look at how everyone, everyone that matters, at least, used mashups with maps and shiny graphics to keep track of how the Swine Flu (ridiculously renamed Novel Flu H1N1 by WHO, CDC whatever).
Didn’t you look for jokes yesterday? I love April Fool’s Day. I just browse everywhere looking for practical jokes in media outlets that are, most of the time, serious.
The Guardian (that dropped the paper in favor of turning into a Tweetercentric site) made a list of some cons spotted through the internet.
And I have my personal list:
Google launches Cadie, an intelligent system that will help them in the near future in keeping the company as the most innovative. Well, there’s a learning curve…
Amazon announces the REAL cloud computing. They are taking computer up-up-and awayyy!!
CrunchGear became part of a line of cereals (crunch, got it?) of General Mills!!
Kodak shows its pretty Eye-Camera. Wow!! What a gadget!
Gmail shows it’s new amazing functionality: auto-pilot. The, hum, intelligent system answers your messages for you! As an example, they show how it would answer the classic nigerian prince spam.
And there is obviously a lot more around. Life is playground.
Big story of the week for Hollywood execs is the fact that Wolverine’s movie leaked and anybody with a peer-to-peer software is able to download it. So here comes the execs with those good old stories. The copies will hurt ticket sales! We are doomed!! Things like that.
For me it is very simple. Wolverine is a big action estravaganza. People that chose to see a movie like this in a computer screen, in a terrible copy, with crappy sound and poor picture quality, taken with a camera from a movie theater in some obscure corner of the world, would not pay for a ticket anyway. This is people that don’t care about going to a theater. Plain and simple.
Or else. Could be a really curious fan that wants to see the movie as soon as possible and, surprise, will go to watch on a theater anyway. Crap! He will go again, one week later, watch it on Imax. And, oh!, will buy the special edition in august too. So, enough with the screams!
The thing is. All these fireworks just hide the really juicy fact in this curious case: it is not the final movie, but a high quality copy with unfinished effects and soundtrack. It is the kind of thing that journalists and executives have the chance to see all the time, but not the crowd that would go to a theater. Hell! I don’t download this kind of stuff and this time I even was curious to see how this copy looked.
People will download it just to see how an unfinished movie looks. Plain simple. This case has an edge, a challenge embedded.
This copy has something completely different. Works as a souvenir for the fans. People will download it and, if the movie rocks, since they couldn’t see the finished effects, they will run to theaters on may 1st. This is such an interesting situation that, if I wasn’t such a nice guy I would even think that Fox leaked this on purpose.
But if the movie is terrible. Well. Fox is in serious trouble, because that first week crowd may not appear in such big numbers, after bad reviews start popping everywhere on the internet. In the end, whoever makes good stuff can have good results from positive buzz. But your product better be good, dude, or you are in serious trouble. New world, different rules.
Design is an absolutely relevant part of any product. I feel that launching a media product without design is like going to an UFC competition without any training at all. You will have you ass kicked big time. Well, even with training you can get your ass kicked. But i digress.
Off course that bad content with good design is just a ruse. But it’s almost the same thing the other way around: good content with bad design is just content that will not be seen. Good design influences (or at least should) everything in your product. It is part of that idea of asking your audience to a dance.
But enough of me, for now. We will have plenty of time to talk further about design in the near future. Just take a look at this video from TED talks:
Busy week. Next one I will deal with some final assignments and I think this website will start to see some real development and calrification of the issues at hand.
For now, just a nice slideshow I found on slideshare, about mobile journalism. It is slightly out of topic in a way (although it fascinates me and even helped me develop a website in Brazil called Urblog) , but serves to remind us about how we can break down, restructure and redesign almost any experience as a game of sorts. And sometimes, we don’t even know that we built one.
It is hard to think of better examples of Play Factor application than deep media products. You know them. TV shows like Lost, The Office, Battlestar Galactica, Gossip Girl. Movies like The Blair Witch Project, Matrix, A.I., Batman – The Dark Knight and Watchmen. Book series like The Da Vinci Code, The 39 Clues, music artists like Trent Reznor or the band Radiohead. And games. Oh, come on, they had to be there too, right? You can start with the Alternate REality Games and now wich some big titles like Halo and Dead Space. But it doesn’t stop here. If you just stop to look at Deep Focus and 42 Entertainment projects for a few seconds you will see the possibilities emerging.
They are everywhere, as the South by Southwest Conference can show us. And they use all the possibilities of the Play Factor. They try to engage the audience in various ways. They even are capable of engaging different demographics in the same fictional universe through different channels. But more importantly, they make people interact, play the products and with the products.
But, please, there is a difference between a product that is adapted for more than one media and a real deep media experience. Gone With the Wind the book became Gone With the Wind, the movie. Great. We are talking about a TV show like Lost. It has a mythology that transpires to the real world and make it’s audience enjoy it at various levels of complexity. Being complex, naturally chalenging it’s audience in subtle and sometimes in very direct ways, the show becomes more than a show, and the game, and the books, and the websites. The Play Factor is obvious here.
How did i get here? Why do i have a passion about playing? You didn’t ask this question, but since I am writing a blog on the subject I think that I should talk about this.
Firstly, it has an obvious link with my personal experiences. I collect games since I was a kid. I love playing for the sake of playing. And don’t care a lot about winning (although I like to win, of course), but I love to see people having fun around me.
I am 36. I saw a great part of the evolution of the world we live in now. When I was a kid, I played pong, then Atari, then computer games, then Nintendo, PS2, Wii, DS, PSP, Iphone games…
When I saw the first ATMs, in the eighties, in Brazil, it seemed to me like really simple arcade games. Only I was playing with money. When internet banking started to really work, I looked at that and thought: geee, it looks like Sim City. Then came Friendster, Orkut, My Space and… Facebook. Now we organize our social lifes as they were… games. As if we were playing The Sims (the most popular computer game EVER).
But, ok. Come on. It is just the games inside our life, right? But what if we finally admitted the fact that play is a part of what we are? Animals play all the time. If you have a cat or a dog, you know what I mean.
A long time ago, I read a book, an old one, called Homo Ludens. And boy, it made me feel so bang on the subject. We need to play. It is part of us. Simple as that. I didn’t want to be a real game designer, but I wanted to make my work as editor of magazines a good thing. Because of that, I became a deep lover of design and always looked for ways to make the pages of my magazines pretty and engaging. But I am not a designer. So it becomes a search for the person that will be able to translate that vision and go forward with it. Add something. Do something special, amusing, interesting. Some times it worked. But not always.
Last year, while I was making a new magazine called Época São Paulo for Editora Globo, in Brazil, I was reading every local magazine possible: many different Time Outs, Los Angeles Magazine, Chicago, Washingtonian, New York and those many New York Times magazines. That was when I saw a great cover article about the subject that I love: play. It made me have long talks with some of my friends about our relationship with this urge. How we look for fun in so many different ways.
Now I am intensively researching the subject, looking for different ways to approach play and a circle closed. Looking at TED lectures I found Stuart Brown’s session and he starts it talking about that article from the NYT magazine. And the session, of course, is amazing.
I think it will help to put some light on what I am trying to do.
We are more sophisticated by the minute. You don’t expect that with all the technology, all the interfaces surrounding us, all the stimulae we would keep doing things the same way, right?
We change and evolve. We look at old things and make them different and new. Let me give you an example: the good old building blocks. Everybody with a heart liked them as kids. They are colorful, have shapes, texture and we can move them around and build things. We can play with them and we can play games with them, if we develop the right rules.
Wood blocks. Beautiful and simple.
A few years ago, in a toy store at New York, I saw these blocks here: Cubeworld. Simple as they were, they blew my mind.
They were just an amazing idea. See? There is a game component, some rules about assembling. But the whole thing is more like a sandbox where you put things together and just ave fun with the result.
Really, really interesting. But, as I said, I saw it years ago. You couldn’t think that things would stop there, right? The MIT guys agree…
Now, think about the possibilities. Think about the fact that play is a lot more than just games, puzzles, sudoku and crosswords. Playing could be something more subtle, a small challenge that people don’t even realize that is happening but that is able to move them.
Look at the building blocks and open your mind for new ideas. Shuffle them and think again.
Update: The prototype showed here ended up in a company called Sifteo. Check it out.
One of the first lessons some companies learned (or not) when playing with new media is that this is a different kind of beast where, instead of a monologue, you have a conversation (ok, I heard it som many times that this phrase annoys me). Even when you don’t want to.
A few years ago, GM launched a campaign asking internet users to make video ads about one of its cars, the Chevy Tahoe. Oh, you can imagine how excited they were. How modern to make such a campaign.
The, hum, “problem” with these kind of ideas is that when you give power to the people, it is difficult to take it back. The users started making ads about how the Chevy was a terrible car that was bad for the environment. L-o-t-s of ads. If you want to give control away. Give it and go with the flow. If you do it the wrong way, backlash is coming certainly. This was one history for the books about do’s and dont’s of the new era of advertising.
But it seems that some people don’t read these books. Or don’t have a good memory at all. Skol, a beer brand from INBEV in Brazil, launched a campaign that was supposed to be hip, modern, smart and oh! so cool. They hired two of the best comedians of the new generation in Brazil and made videos where these guys told jokes about Carnaval and made a call to everyone: send your jokes and stories and we will tell the best ones here.
One guy liked the idea and developed his videos. But not exactly what Skol’s marketing people had in mind. He made a video telling sad stories about drunk people driving and killing bystanders or just beating their relatives. But he told all of that as they were really funny stories, copying the aesthetic of Skol’s videos.
It became a huge hit instantly. And it didn’t take long before he was “gently” asked to take the videos out. He told the story in his blog and changed the video. He took off all the graphics linking his video to Skol but kept the text. The result is even stronger, if you have the context.
Even though you don’t understand portuguese, just take a look at the three videos and get the spirit of the story.
Here is the video from Rafinha Bastos.
This other one is from Danilo Gentili.
This is the video from Ronald Rios that talks about how drunk people can do bad things. He tells terrible stories as if they were really funny. Notice that he took all the graphics off, to break the visual link to Skol’s campaign.
What Skol’s guys didn’t seem to understand (like GM’s marketing guys didn’t see in 2006) is that the internet and social media doesn’t work their way. This is the first stop in our journey about knowing what game you are playing.
In the metaphor I am trying to develop in this research, you need to know if you are playing Game of Life, Risk or Monopoly. If you are playing with Legos or woodblocks. If you are painting together with a group in a room, or just looking at a naked model.
You need to understand the game you are playing, the play and then develop or read the rules. With that in mind, the next step is to call the right people, to the right place to play. When you start to understand that, things become more and more clear.
But you still have a long way to go.
(With thanks to Trabalho Sujo)