Dublin's architecture... in the future!
This is just wonderful. Via the Dublin Blog, an artists rendering of a proposed development of Dublin’s northside city centre that’s due to be completed in 2010.
I love them. They look as if an optimistic futurist sat down in 1980 and drew what he thought the city might look like in 30 years time; brown suits, watercolour paints, modernist slipwayed architecture, geometric typography (Futura?) and all. I’m not sure if there was some sort of stylistic intent at work here, but they look to me like they could be postcards by John Hinde scanned straight from a back issue of Ireland’s Own.
The only thing missing is jetpacks, or better still Segways, which themselves seem to be quickly becoming a naive vision of 21st century urban living that we will soon look back at and laugh.
(For more on models of representation in architectural design see posts on scale models of cities from Design Observer and Fallingwater in Half-Life from Cityofsound.)
Local history
Paula and I were out walking yesterday evening; around Harold’s Cross and the canal and Portobello, a nice area of Dublin that we’re maybe going to start apartment hunting in soon. I stopped to examine one of those blue cultural plaques on one of the old Georgian houses on Clanbrassil Street which claimed that Leopold Bloom was born there, and we got talking to a fellow loiterer.
Apparently, he told us, the plaque was wrong. The old lady in the shop down the road had claimed that it was on the wrong street completely, and there was a plaque on the correct street that should have been here. The three of us ended up chatting for half an hour or so.
We heard about how the area had once been a melting pot of cultures: a stronghold of the Jewish community in Ireland (the man, who had grown up in the area, used to earn money every Saturday evening for turning on the lights in their houses because they refused to work), the working class (at least until 1969, when they moved out to the newly-built suburbs and a Northside/Southside socioeconomic divide was created), settled British army officers and their families (who used to display a picture of a horse in their window to indicate their loyalty), and local tradesmen and shopkeepers (like the butcher who refused to remove the swastika, an ancient and beautiful symbol, from his van just because it had been hijacked by Adolf). We chatted about famous people in history and local literature, listened to some anecdotes, and heard about the architectural and cultural changes of the last fifty years. All of it about the road we were standing on, every story (to get a bit floaty about it all), invisibly woven into the fabric of the street.
We walked back into the city centre as it got dark, enthused and fresh with one of those completely obvious but exciting realisations; there’s history everywhere.
Note to self: talk to strangers more often.
Theirwork at RGS 2006
Last week I was in London for the Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference. I gave a presentation along with Dominica Williamson on a project that we’ve been collaborating on called Theirwork.
We started work on the project about a year ago, and it’s been slowly building up since (slowness being a large part of what the project is all about). It’s a mapping/locative project that we’ve been piloting with a small community of people who live around a small lake in Cornwall.
It was great to hear some opinions on the project for some actual geographers, some of whom seemed genuinely interested. Theirwork isn’t ready to be publically launched, so I’m not going to go into any great detail about it yet. For the moment, here’s a transcript of my part of the presentation, which touches on some of the design decisions taken in developing the project (bear in mind this was delivered to a room mostly comprised of geographers, so some pretty basic techie concepts are explained). Dom introduced the project and then I took over to talk about my involvement.
Full set of slides: Theirwork at the RGS (1.1MB PDF), including Dom’s workshop photos, which are much nicer and truer to the project than my boring old computer screenshots.
SUSTAINABLE SOFTWARE
So when Dom and I had our initial discussions on this project we soon realised that neither of us was very interested in treating this as a classic software building project. Or more accurately, we were interested in using the process of the project as an additional area of study.
I think Dom recognised early on in her thought process that she would need a technical person to contribute to the project, but she was also very interested in working collaboratively, and integrating a lot of outside ideas into the process. In my own work I was very much interested in examining the approach and process that someone goes through when creating software, and lending this as much importance as the final product.
Because of this we spent a lot of time discussing and planning our philosophy in relation to the process itself. One of the ideas that we developed and felt it was important to strive towards throughout the project was that of “Sustainable Software”.
For us, this approach involves taking an “open” approach to planning and building your project, even while you are in the process of doing so. I mean “open” in many senses; open to new ideas, open ended in terms of what direction the project may go in, open access to anyone who wished to get involved or branch the project in a new direction that they would like to pursue.
These ideas aren’t particularly revolutionary in the hobbyist (and increasingly the mainstream) software world where “open source” software, meaning computer programs whose source code is made available for free to anyone who may wish to look at it, adapt it to their own needs — basically do with it as they please. In fact, there is a very rich ecosystem of software development that has grown out of this area, and there are many examples of successful software project that could never have happened, or been sustainable, without this model to support it. Linux operating systems, one of the only challenges to the virtual commercial monopoly help by Microsoft with their Windows Operating System, is one example of this.
To us, sustainable software is about more than open source, though. It’s about allowing the project to naturally find it’s own path to success. To avoid being overly deterministic, even dictatorial, in our planning of a project, and instead to encourage the most worthwhile results to emerge themselves over time. The hope is that this type of approach, which would never be possible if subject to the strict restraints of commercial software development, can eventually lead of to the types of results we could never have planned if we had just sat down and tried to plan it all out on a piece of paper from day one. In any form of guerilla activity — which is what this really is, guerrilla mapmaking — the main strategic objective is to exercise your agility and turn your weaknesses to your advantage, and that what we’ve tried to do here.
It’s also worth noting that although this model can be applied quite comfortably to software development, it’s an approach that can easily be applied to other models of production or organisation. We wanted to allow the sustainable approach to infuse all aspects of the politics and practice of our work, not just the programming part. So it’s quite adaptable to other fields of work. Although we looked to very much related fields like Green Mapping and Open Source for inspiration, we also looked further afield. Two other major influences that informed our approach come from completely different areas: the Slow Food approach, a culinary movement coming out of |taly, and Adaptive Design, an iterative approach to architecture and design were major influences.
One final subject that I’d like to briefly touch on in relation to Sustainability in our project is that of Open Data. anyone who has ever had to deal with Ordnance Survery licensing issues will (with apologies to any OS people who may be here) may relate to this, and it’s something closely related to the field of mapping. By making your data open and free, you encourage users to get involved without fearing their work will disappear into a black hole, and your work could in turn potentially be put to use by others in some way. The more useful material that we can put into the public domain, the more we contribute to an overall encouragement of widespread engagement in these types of activities, which is ultimately what this project is all about. For the same reasons of concern for sustainability and potential for growth that led us to to adopt an Open Source Software approach, Open Data is something that we very much wanted to build into this project.
THEIRWORK SOFTWARE TOOLKIT
So, to get a little bit more specific about all of this, once we had made some philosophical or political decisions about how we wanted to go about approaching these things, we needed to decide what to actually do.
An obvious decision that needed to be made right away was to plan how to build the software. Dom already mentioned why we decided to make the project web-based, but there are a lot more specifics to be planned out. For reasons that should be obvious from the last slide, we decided not to pay for the right to use commercial mapping software. One of the next most obvious approaches when deciding to create web-based maps is to use an already-available service like Google Maps. I’m sure everyone here is familiar with Google Maps and Google Earth, they are among the most impressive and useful advances in mapping technologies in recent years.
It’s also pretty easy for anyone to create what’s become known as a Google Maps “mashup”. That is, taking an existing map, and overlaying your own set of data onto that map. As an immediate technical solution to what we wanted to do, making a Google Maps mashup seemed to be the easiest solution. So why did we eventually decide not to use Google Maps?
Well, Google’s terms and conditions stipulate that they reserve the right to, at some point in the future, place advertising on their maps. To a certain extent this concerned us, in that we couldn’t definitively say to potential contributers to the project that their work would definitely not be used for commercial means at some stage in the future. The licensing issue is a complex one, but this was enough to convince us not to use Google Maps for our project. I do believe the approach that Google has taken with Maps, to allow users to create mashups, has done incredibly great things in terms of engaging the public in the process of mapping and geography. But I think our decision here serves as a good example of where we took a principled approach to what we were doing, and made decisions in favour of longer-term thinking and sustainability.
So eventually, we decided to write our own software for representing the map on screen. Thankfully, there were some open source programming toolkits that helped greatly in doing this, and meant that we didn’t have to undertake this intimidating task from scratch. We exploited the work that others had made available, and stood on their shoulders and realise our vision in exactly the way we wanted to.
MAPPING METHODOLOGY
Of course, an additional result of not using or license a ready-made map was that we would have to create our own base map. We did this by walking around the perimeter of the lake in Cornwall that we wanted to map with a GPS unit, creating trackpoints as we went. We also took photos for reference. Other presentations today deal directly with the topic of people mapping their own places, and for us creating the map was a means to an end, so I’m not going to dwell on this for long.
However, it might be of interest to those who are wondering if this type of mapmaking is ready to break into the mainstream to note how difficult this process remains. These are the tools that we needed to map the lake that day (GPS, camera, notebook, etc.). It’s interesting to note that most of you are probably carrying more computer processing power in your pocket today that was available to almost anyone in the world twenty years ago. There are very few areas today where commercial technology, or hardware, is not yet widely available to easily create digital data. Yet the process of creating a map, or geocoding photographs or other digital media is still far from accessible to most consumers. The convergence of locative hardware, like GPS units, and other personal electronic devices has yet to happen. One has to feel that once the likes of cameras and phones become location-aware, the enormous boom in amateur photography brought about by the digital camera revolution will lead to massive amounts of locative data, and huge opportunities to present and map this data in all manner of innovative ways.
So here we see the raw longitude and latitude data collected by the GPS unit, and then that same data represented as a map. At this stage, we had created a basic map of the lake. Not a massive achievement, but when you consider the fact that this was virtually impossible to people of our means and resources just a few years ago (before the advent of GPS), it again points to the fact that we may be at the dawn of a new age of people-powered mapping.
FOLKSONOMIES
At this stage, we’ve got our interface, and we’ve got our base map. Broadly, the final area we had to tackle was how capture, process and meaningfully present the data that our user base would be adding onto our map.
Here’s where we have to ask ourselves some questions. What is a sustainable model of group data classification? Green Maps have repeatedly encountered the problem that their maps can be too narrow in subject if a strong editorial control is exerted, and too chaotic and unstructured if free reign is permitted. We wanted people to add whatever type of data they wished to the map, but we also wanted a coherent picture to emerge from the map as a whole.
Luckily, this is the type of thing that computers are quite good at; taking a lot of information and shuffling it, or slicing and dicing it, in any way we want them to. It’s also a similar problem that a lot of websites with user-generated content have experienced recently, that of trying to somehow classify all of this data without imposing structure. The aim is to somehow capture (to paraphrase a book title on this topic) the “Wisdom of Crowds”, and allow an emergent picture to develop from the teeming mass of individual actions happening within a system.
The solution here is to reject a top-down system of classification, or taxonomy, and adopt instead a system of labeling, or what has been dubbed “folksonomy”. This involves tossing out any notions of hierarchical classification, and instead allowing users to tag their data with keywords that describe it instead. A data point has many keywords pinned onto it instead of just being placed into a single category. This actually opens up the process a lot, and leads to a much more creative way of adding data. Users now have the freedom to use the map in ways that we may never have thought of in the first place, one of our major goals.
At the other end, when trying to discover or extract all of the data that I am interested in, I don’t dig down into a category to find the relevant items, but rather filter out all items by keyword. Think of it as viewing a cross-section or slice of all data, except that even within this single slice, there exists a lot more information still to be mined; many more strata of keywords that may line up, or move off in a different direction. The whole experience make for a much richer data process. This approach works great for open data in mapping, as it means that I can forget about worrying about misclassified information, or editorial control, and concentrate on extracting a meaningful signal from all this rich information.
WHAT WE ACTUALLY BUILT
So here’s what the “first draft” version turned out like. We’ve got a map, with data on it, an interface to explore it, and also a way of adding your own data to the map, live online, in your web browser.
It may also be of interest to note that Dom and I lived in different countries while we worked on this, which I think in retrospect served as a positive constraint in that it encouraged us to very much think of this from an internet-based point of view. We experimented with many different forms of online communication and different media to stay in touch with each other and our workshop group, such as blog, forum, wiki, and webchat.
[back to dom]
The image of the city, then and now
Two photos of Shaftesbury Avenue taken from Picadilly Circus found on Wikipedia, taken 50 years apart. Click through for links to hi-res versions.
On Vox
I’ve started to post other small things on Vox now. Caveat lector: you will read about what my cat had for breakfast.
Florence Rasmussen, the old lady that appears halfway through Errol Morris' "Gates of Heaven"
I feel like I should preface this with some sort of spoiler warning. I’m going to talk about a shot in Gates of Heaven, Errol Morris’ documentary (superficially) about pet cemetaries, where an old lady talks meanderingly for a couple of minutes. I’m not going to give any big secret away, but I think it’s most affecting if you don’t anticipate it. Her monologue has almost nothing to do with the rest of the film, but for me the unexpectedness of hearing her speak and the depth of realness conveyed in her scene is the essence of what makes documentary filmmaking great.
Here she is, Florence Rasmussen:
And here is what she says:
I’m raised on a farm, we had chickens and pigs and cows and sheep and everything. But down here I’ve been lost. Now they’ve taken them all away from here up to that - What’s the name of that place? Up above here a little ways? That town? Commences with a ‘B.’ Blue. It’s - Blue Hill Cemetery, I think the name of it is. Not too far, I guess, about maybe twenty miles from here. A little town there, a little place. You know where it’s at. But I was really surprised when I heard they were getting rid of the cemetery over here. Gonna put in buildings or something over there. Ah well, I know people been very good to me, you know. Well, they see my condition, I guess, must of felt sorry for me. But it’s real, my condition is. It’s not put on. That’s for sure! Boy, if I could only walk. If I could only get out. Drive my car. I’d get another car. Ya… and my son, if he was only better to me. After I bought him that car. He’s got a nice car. I bought it myself just a short time ago. I don’t know. These kids - the more you do for them… He’ s my grandson, but I raised him from two years old… I don’t see him very often. And he just got the car. I didn’t pay for all of it. I gave him four hundred dollars. Pretty good! His boss knows it. Well, he’s not working for that outfit now. He’s changed. He’s gone back on his old job - hauling sand. No, not hauling sand; he’s working in the office. That’s right. He took over the office job. His boss told me that on the phone. But, you know, he should help me more. He’s all I got. He’s the one who brought me up here. And then put me here by myself among strangers. It’s terrible, you stop and think of it. I’ve been without so much, when I first come up here. Ya. It’s what half of my trouble is from - him not being home with me. Didn’t cost him nothing to stay here. Every time he need money, he’d always come, ‘Mom, can I have this? Can I have that?’ But he never pays back. Too good, too easy - that’s what everybody tells me. I quit now. I quit. Now he’s got the office job, I’m going after him. I’m going after him good, too - if I have to go in… in a different way. He’s going to pay that money. He’s got the office job now. And he makes good money anyway. And he has no kids. He has not married. Never get married, he says. He was married once - they’re divorced. Well, she tried to take him for the kid, but she didn’t. They went to court. It was somebody else’s kid. She was nothing but a tramp in the first place. I told him that. He wouldn’t listen to me. I says, ‘I know what she is.’ I said, ‘Richard, please, listen to me.’ He wouldn’t listen. He knew all, he knew everything. Big shot! But he soon found out. Now that’s all over with. I’ve been through so much I don’t know how I’m staying alive. Really, for my age… if you’re young, it’s different. But I’ve always said I’m never going to grow old. I’ve always had that, and the people that I tell how old I am, they don’t believe me, because people my age as a rule don’t get around like I do. (source)
I don’t really know how that reads, but when it came in the middle of the film I was knocked out. It’s like a brilliant photograph that lasts two minutes, a snapshot that captures events beyond what’s immediately visible. It’s all those things that writers struggle to convey: it’s universal, surprising, sad and happy, funny and poignant.
And despite being so out of place that it’s jarring, the scene somehow fits perfectly at the same time, evoking the same type of pathos that runs throughout the rest of the film, with it’s pet owners griefstricken at the loss of their dogs.
This is why I love documentaries. A great one can ostensibly be an investigation of a subject, a simple storytelling, but then gradually reveal itself to be about something much different, something much more important. A great documentary will stay with me for days the way no film can, and I won’t shut up telling anyone who will listen to me all about it. Watching something that scratches away at the surface of the ordinary is to realise how fake so many actors and dramatic writers are. Watching someone like Florence living out her story, abstracted on screen yet somehow brilliantly illuminated just by having a camera pointed at her, hammers the point home.
Video games and psychogeography
Third and final post for now about games. I promise. James Corbett points to Matt Jones’ observation on how virtual copies of physical space can allow us to relate to the space itself:
What realisations and reactions would we have if we could gaze into this mirrorworld knowing it was real, not a simEarth, and further more - the only we’ve got?
It would be the software-equivalent of when the space program in the late-sixties afforded us the first view back at the pale blue dot we’re stuck on.
This is a wonderful analogy. In 1966 Stewart Brand came to the drug-assisted realisation that if humankind could see a photograph of the whole of planet Earth as seen from space, it would prompt a revelatory moment for us all1. The image of the planet as a tiny island floating alone in the vast infinity of space would help people to conceive their relative size within the world and thus, the thinking went, the importance of ecological thinking. In other words, this representation of the world could help us to further understand the world itself. An alternative view can afford a new understanding.
The mirrorworld thing also reminds me of some of the thinking behind psychogeography, the line of thinking that started with the Situationist movement that looks at how paying close attention to your surroundings can affect how you feel. It’s the process of engaging and interacting directly with a place in order to understand it in a new way. The relationship between the engagement of psychogeography and the abstraction of representation is strange: they take almost opposite approaches, yet aim to arrive at the same destination, that of an alternative perspective of a reality.
This was supposed to be about videogames.
Playing a videogame is something between these two types of engagement. On one hand the game is a complete fabrication, an invented reality that sometimes reflects the real world and sometimes is completely alien. So when you’re playing a game you’re dealing with a representation, a mirrorworld. On the other hand, the act of playing a game can be an intense interaction with the environment, and a lot of the time the aim is to get completely lost within the act of being in the game, to focus on nothing but your immersive environment, just like alert walking.
Videogaming is essentaillty a postmodern activity — tied to the fact that it means engaging with a simulation, an image of a reality, but with with enough freedom to realise and undermine this fact — and so it’s plagued by all of the confusion and self-contradiction that comes with that label. Somhow though it has the potential (at least as a medium) to reach the same place via opposite routes, just like the different approches of representation and engagement can both open up new perspectives.
So I have exactly zero conclusions, but maybe that’s a reflection of the fact that the knot of gaming’s cultural impact is so difficult to untie. And changing so fast! Have you seen the promo video for the Nintendo Wii? It’s all hurtling along at a thrilling pace, much too fast for anyone to control or steer, or even criticise or pick apart with any real confidence. It’s fun to try to keep up though.
[1] Brand worked with Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan on this project, which is said to have infulenced NASA to release the Apollo missions photos of the earth in 1969. He also hung out with Ken Kesey during the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test days and helped Doug Engelbart deliver The Mother of All Demos in 1968. He founded the Whole Earth Catalog and now runs the Long Now Foundation with Brian Eno and Danny Hillis. Quite the fellow.
... and we're back.
Despite what the internet seems to be trying to suggest, I’m going to keep not taking the hint and carry on here.
Following swiftly on from The Great Comment Spam Siege of last month, there was a week in the dark here due to domain name problems. The matter wasn’t helped by my laying out in the sun and playing with my new Nintendo DS for a couple of days before noticing. All’s well now, but stay tuned, as I may well break the entire internet before winter.
But is it Art?
There’s been some discussion online recently about video game criticism, arising from The Lester Bangs of Video Games in Esquire and the response Why No Lester Bangs of Gaming? in Wired. A comparison is being made to music and film (as in the cases above), despite the fact that outside of blogs there seems to be little in the way of innovative, creative commentary on gaming. Most commissioned video game reviews are a couple of short press release-style paragraphs of what the game is about, not a substantial reflection on what it means.
Clive Thompson deals nicely with spelling out the answer to the immediate Lester Bangs question in the Wired article — editors don’t know enough about games to appreciate the good writers, the good writers do exist and are already self-publishing online, games take too long to play before reviewing — before getting to the point: everyone just got here, and nobody has yet figured out how to contextualise games, or the act of play as something more meaningful than vapid entertainment, especially in relation to other media. He points out that gaming is simply too different to expect it to fit in the same sphere of criticism as music or film. A broader perspective is needed to assess the cultural significance of games:
You don’t write about Grand Theft Auto as if Rockstar has shot another Godfather. You write about it as if it Rockstar had created the next football.
But that’s not how games are being written about. When it comes down to it then, the question is not yet “where are the cultural critics of this artform?”, but rather that old chestnut that faces any medium finding it’s feet “is this really art?”
It’s not difficult to draw loose comparisons between the history of gaming and that of other media. I think you could say that the heyday of shareware games was gaming’s underground punk phase; people in there for the love it, three chords and the truth being passed around on rewritten floppy disks like cassette mix tapes, guys getting together in basements to tear up the rulebook and just make innovative and edgy new things as quickly as possible, before the whole scene became co-opted and packaged and went mainstream.
Or maybe games today are like cinema of the first half of the twentieth century, advancing only as quickly as the still-developing technology will allow, struggling against the perception that it is are nothing more than entertainment, certainly not an artform. There were well-respected films being made for years, but it wasn’t until the 1970’s that American cinema went through it’s own punk phase and became the most relevant popular artform of the decade. It’s probably a bit trite to say that video games are currently in the same state of infancy that cinema was a century ago, but I’m tempted.
Another analogous medium: photography went through the same growing pains, for years having to justify and defend itself against the philosophical and practical criticisms levelled at it. Susan Sontag wrote an essay about this in On Photography:
For about a century the defence of photography was identical with the struggle to establish it as a fine art. Against the charge that photogrpahy was a soulless, mechanical copying of reality, photographers asserted that it was a vanguard revolt against ordinary standards of seeing, no less worthy an art than painting.
The fact that questions about the validity or value of any medium as an artform exist just goes to show it’s relative immaturity, or at least it’s perceived immaturity. It seems to be a rite of passage that new artforms need to go through.
And once all that’s done, and video games are finally high art, we can get around to arguing that the game is in fact not art at all, but the playing of it is.
What next for online gaming?
I’m getting back into gaming a little bit, having pretty much dropped it for a few years. These things seem to go in cycles - Aldo’s Adventure, Kings Quest… the NES… Sim City 2000, Lucasarts adventure games… Metal Gear Solid, GTA…
Now. Shadow of the Colossus (flash site) is a Playstation game, and it’s very nice.
The philosophy of the game is pure wabi-sabi, the very definition of simplicity. It’s interesting to note that the (very little) dialogue in the game has not been translated from it’s original Japanese, the lingua franca of all things beautifully simple.
The first thing that strikes you is how bare everything in the game is — simple, stripped down. As pretty much the solitary living being in the world, you feel isolated and in control at once. I’ve never played a game that evokes such a strong sense of space. It’s completely uncluttered, without buildings, characters, enemies, coins, weapons, power-ups. There is no need for a map in the game; the landscape is the map.
In traditional character-based games, the avatar is presented as the centre of the world, with the environment revolving around him. When I command my character to turn to the right, he doesn’t actually move to the right on screen: the whole world moves to the left. A rather medieval view of things.
Anyway, Colossus feels different. The main character moves through the world. The aim of the game is simple and singular, to defeat sixteen giant monsters, or colossi. The scale, both of the environment and the colossi, is phenomenal. And it’s a different sort of phenomenal to the dense, detailed mass of Grand Theft Auto, in the same way that standing in the centre of a towering city inspires a different type of awe than standing on the edge of a cliff.
For a console game, it’s pretty innovative in it’s treatment of space and openness. Online gaming would seem to be the key to opening this type of innovation up even further, but to me games like World of Warcraft seem rather stuck in a self-imposed genre lockin with restrictive rules in all the wrong places. Rather than expand upon the sense of freedom hinted at in single-player games like Shadow of the Colossus and GTA, online gameplay still mostly deals with artificial concepts like points and levels to indicate progression and missions to structure activity.
The comments on this post (incidentally the most worthwhile comment thread I think I’ve ever read) suggest where the future of online multiplayer gaming might go from here:
I’m going to guess that WoW is as big as the current style of grind-until-you-level, static, old school MMOG play can get. … Given the popularity of the high fantasy game setting it seems to me that a logical continuation is actually implementing something like Lord of the Rings. Perhaps one side could take and hold cities, eventually even winning the war (and the game) on that particular server. … I’m looking forward to a game experience where your actions and contributions as a character have lasting meaning beyond a stats rat race. … Dynamically changing worlds in which players can have a real impact on the entire world will be the way games are evolving in the future. … Once a player is gone, there’s little to distinguish them from all the others who have been. Impermanence, rather than stifling, endless congruity, is the watchword. … I think the next big step should be a collection of missions that are designed to help an overall war effort. I am a big fan of WOW but I have to say that no matter how many missions you complete or fail, it makes no difference in the game as a whole. Nothing Changes.
There are also some ruminations on why MMO gaming is mired in the fantasy genre, and whether fantasy has the legs to sustain growth or has only a finite appeal. No word yet on the chances of any other literary genres at success. Why not a sci-fi or noir crime game, or more to the point, an illegal immigrant drama game or postmodern Japanese fiction game? A top-down developer-designed game like this probably isn’t going to be released any time soon, simply because (as with console games, Hollywood movies and any other expensive to produce media) the smart money in online gaming is with the established genre; the free market stifles innovation. All the same, changes are inevitable.
Here’s a table of how freedom to effect change on in-game environment has evolved as I see it:
Text-based 2D 3D
Linear Text Adventures King’s Quest Myst
Participatory MUDs Ultima Online WoW
Emergent MOOs [none?] Second Life
It’s interesting to note that each column progressed from top to bottom before moving onto the next row, with King’s Quest coming out around the same time as MOOs, and Myst appearing just after Ultima Online. This trend would seem to indicate that multiplayer gaming is ready to enter a new column, a new medium (location based gaming and distributed social presences would be contenders).
However, on not much more than a hunch and what the above commenters have to say, I’m guessing a new horizontal row in the table will be created next.
What will this new game look like?
Some guesses. It will be more flexible that WoW, but more mediated than Second Life. It might be more like TV than a computer game, or at least like TV in the loose participatory sense that the media surrounding Lost is like TV. there will certainly be more cross-pollination between the game and the web, and between your activities in-game and your activities on the web. Just like your real life bleeds into your online life via your blog and your Flickr account, that reflected online persona will in turn become drawn into your gaming persona. Gaming will probably become a pretty poor label for what eventually emerges (as it becomes less about play and more about interaction and creation), but the name will stick, just like “talkies” never really caught on over “movies” in the cinema. Virtual space will feel more like an actual space (it might even be actual space), more like something you inhabit than somewhere you pass through. You’ll leave traces of where you’ve been behind you, and you’ll return after a break to see the traces of others that were there in the interim, and this sense of effect and permanence will infuse the entire game and encourage continued interaction, just as the gradual accumulation of an archive of blog posts rewards the ongoing effort of writing.
I’m sure it will all come in drips, as online games, TV, the web, consoles and all the other bits and bobs of interactive media iterate and undulate, attracting and repelling each other, crawling along like the proverbial emergent slime mold. You might see an element of it in every piece of innovative interactive media of the next couple of years.
[image credit: football pitch on flickr]
Comments are back
The good news is that comments are working on this site again, having been laid to ruins by comment spammers. It looks like the database simply decided it had seen enough and sat down, and to be honest I can’t blame it.
Unfortunately in the restore I lost the last four months or so of comments. Apologies to everyone who had something great to say here since February, and I promise to back up more often from now on.