Song and Dance

Given the connection between community and communication (as can be easily seen in the English words, from Latin), I somehow was clued into the importance of music and dance as community reinforcing activities. Communities are, in some ways, where a group of people coordinate their actions with each other -- the same is true of dance (and the music that goes along with it). So I had an "of course!" moment when I read this:

The Sesotho verb for singing (ho bina), as in may of the world's languages, also means to dance...

From Daniel Levitin's This Is Your Brain On Music, p. 7. I'm not a linguistics expert, and I know English (sing, dance) and Spanish (cantar, bailar), and as you can see neither of those clued me in.

Cultural Play and the ASWCC

There is an object, humorously called the Aperture Science Weighted Companion Cube, in the game Portal. But, people like to play with things, and we like to play with the things we like, and we like to play in the spaces in which we like to play (on the surface, that's a tautology, but that's not just what I mean, I mean, we like to play in them and play sometimes means not following the rules), so, when people like the Companion Cube, they play with it across the spaces they like to play in.

Thus the Cube is not just in Portal.

People have included the Cube in...

1. Spore (by EA) [examples]
2. LittleBigPlanet (by Sony/MM) [example at 1:10+]
3. Second Life (by Linden Lab) [example]
4. EverQuest II (by Sony) [example]

One of these things is not like the other, however (and I won't claim that that is an exhaustive list).

Which one?

EverQuest II. In the first three, the majority of content is created by players/users; in fact, the point of those worlds is to have a lot of content created by players/users. (I include "users" since Second Life is not exactly a game.) In EQII the majority of physical (virtual) content is made by the game designers/maintainers at Sony. Mundane items, game actions, and conversation are content that are made by players, but a lot of important items are not made by players. Yet, in EQII there is the Cube (and many other cultural references).

We love to play with the things we love, and we will do so across the various spaces where we can play, even if that object is not from the space we are in. Thus, the Aperture Science Weighted Companion Cube is in a lot of places. Culture is not just objects and practices we create, culture is something that we further play with and redefine over time. I think "culture play" might be a good phrase for this fundamental human behavior, despite the title to this post where I use the phrase "cultural play", which is a better headline.

The four spaces in the list also include many other cultural references through cultural items and homage, because this is something that we, as humans, are driven to do.

New Media, Old Framework

I attended a taping of Al Jazeera's Empire, at the Columbia School of Journalism yesterday. Some of the panelists were Carl Bernstein, Amy Goodman, Evgeny Morozov, and Clay Shirky. Although some interesting, Twitter-friendly sound-bytes were said, ultimately there was little new or insightful, which was rather disappointing, given the combined (and individual) intelligence and experience onstage.

The main focus was new media and Egypt. But new media, or social media, was never defined, and at one point we watched Al Jazeera (television, which is old media) over the internet (which is new media). Clearly the two are not distinct. Maybe everyone except me knew it was a straw man argument.

Amy Goodman complained how only in two places in the US can you receive Al Jazeera over cable TV, which is a good point, except that you can watch it anywhere you like as long as you have an internet connection: Wasn't that the point of the internet, at least from ten years ago? You can go watch it right now if you like. Given that we had just watched President Obama on Al Jazeera streaming over the internet there in the room, and NYC is not one of the two places you can get Al Jazeera in the US over cable, it was a strange thing to say (although I agreed with her, but still).

Shirky had the odd claim that the cell phone network (which was mostly ignored in the discussion) and the internet were essentially the same, since cell phones can push and pull info over the net. That much is true, from the user's viewpoint, but the way they are run (in terms of organizations and technologically) and the way they are regulated can be very different from country to country. Also, 20 years ago I would sit in my dorm room and connect to BITNET over my modem, but no one would have said the phone system was a part of the internet.

Morozov had the nice point that the internet is neither necessary nor sufficient for revolutions, and he is 100% correct on that point. Revolutions have happened before the year 1990, and they have failed since (Iran is one). He had some nice points about other media being used to aid communication in older revolutions (like tape cassettes, I think). By understanding the common motivations behind using communication technologies to spread messages during different periods of civil upheaval (cassette tapes and broadcast TV in the past; Twitter, SMS, and satellite TV today), we can understand the important features and affordances of the technologies, and can make sure we build those into future technologies and try to protect them legally and technologically. (Much could be written about that, I will not try to do so here.)

Everyone did agree that revolutions are a form of organization, and organization takes communication, and that people will communicate with the best tools they have at hand. Today that is indeed some of the digital, online, internet, Facebook, Twitter, whatever you want to call them, whatever their labels are today, forms. But this media ecology also includes television, cell phones, and face to face, and a good analysis and understanding of human behavior has to include all of the behaviors, not just the newest and coolest ones.

The most annoying part of the taping was at the beginning when we were all told to turn off our cell phones, since the wireless headsets of the camera people and the producers were running into interference problems (I thought this was why we had regulation about these things). No Twitter for you! Tons of people tweeted and re-tweeted the same sound bytes over and over, they may have been in the room or in the overflow room. The needs of old media (TV) had triumphed over new media.

The most amusing part of the taping was when the make-up person powdered Shirky's head.

The biggest let down was that Shirky and Morozov did not come to fisticuffs. People on the internet love to say how they are polar opposites on this Egyptian/revolution/Twitter discussion. They're not. They were seated far apart from each other. They actually agreed on mostly everything. Morozov had a wide range of examples of revolutions. Shirky had a nice analytical point, questioning when do we define the beginning of a revolution? Egypt had several uprisings and riots previously, they could easily be counted as "the start" of this most recent action.

All of this left me wondering about new media and old media. If I can get Al Jazeera (old) over the internet (new), then what does that mean about "old" and "new" media? I think it means the framework is not useful.

The alternate framework, more in use lately, is "social media," such as Facebook. I originally got on Facebook since a friend of mine, in about 2004, wanted to see what her undergraduate students were doing on this new (to UM) medium, but she didn't want her own account: Could she use my email address to sign up? (Facebook was still restricted to selected universities at that point.) She spent the next two hours laughing, reading some things to me (all of which were hysterical), but also exclaiming how some recent find was amazing but totally inappropriate to read to me out loud in a coffeeshop. She would turn the laptop around so I could read the post in question, and indeed, many were completely inappropriate to read out loud with other people around.

If you had told me then that a website, which was restricted to a few American universities and was exclusively used by American undergraduates to post writing that could not be read out loud in a coffeeshop, would, six or seven years later be used to foment revolutions and topple governments, I would have thought you were insane.

And you would have been, since that's not the Facebook we have anymore. It's open to everyone, and millions around the world can use it. And this is, I think, where we find the real difference between the things we are talking about when we talk about new media, old media, and social media.

It is a question of both content production and ease of group formation.

Newspapers have global distribution. They are all over the world. There isn't any one newspaper that you can get everywhere, maybe the International Herald Tribune (aka the New York Times), the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, or the Guardian (yes, all in English, but ok Le Monde maybe). You can write in and maybe they will print your letter to the editor.

The internet, too, is found all over the world. And newspapers are found on it.

But with the internet, so many more people can make content. And although the majority of content is, like so many academic journal articles, unread, it is much easier to find things online, and when you find written things, you often find the person who did the writing.

So I think that is the big difference, which is why "social media" is a better term than "new media." Social media let us create content, find content, and find the people who made that content much easier, and on a much larger scale, than ever before. Once we find those people, we can connect with them in some way: follow their Twitter feed, "like" or join a group they made on Facebook, or some other type of connection. And, thinking of Morozov's warnings about how the internet makes surveillance easy (in the 1990s we would have mentioned Bentham and the Panopticon), notice that I did not mention type of use, or who is finding who and following them: it could be friends, it could be the police arm of an oppressive state. The technology is, to some extent, use-neutral.

A small aside about industry, which wonders why we write-off television:

Television has done well in the last 20 years, there are many, many more channels than there used to be. Al Jazeera is one. In 1980 in the US, most likely you could only get the local, over the air broadcast channels, some of which would be part of a national network like NBC or PBS, however they were all ultimately local channels. Now you can get channels from all over the world, in all sorts of languages (I can get Spanish, various Asian languages, I think I've seen Greek, there are probably others, there's the BBC America of course). And there are many, many more channels (I do not actually know how many I get, well over 100), and most of them are national and have no local presence to speak of. I do not have satellite, but I have friends who do, and I am under the impression that there can be many, many more channels available.

The internet... well in terms of business, it's different. It did very badly ten years ago when the dot-com bubble burst.

But there are different components to both of these industries. The internet has, for instance, backbone providers, local connection providers (so, mine is Time/Warner sans AOL), web site hosting companies, blog posting sites, content providers like Apple/iTunes, Hulu, the New York Times, Gawker, and Salon, but also entities like Amazon who sell physical goods (and yes digital music and digital books). Television (from a US perspective) has local broadcasters, national networks (like NBC), national channels (like AE or Sy Fy), but also all of the production studios, cable providers, and satellite providers. Content production is not enough for success, as public-access cable was a huge failure in the US: the content produced by the local people who cared was generally terrible and no one watched. Yet do the same thing, generally speaking, on YouTube, and it might work--but the distribution is totally different (as is, I suspect, the content of successful non-professional material when compared to local access cable). (Sorting? Wider distribution? Sharing? The "long tail" of terrible material... You can't have the "short head" of great stuff without the long tail, but with searching and "liking" and such you can more easily find the "short head" that you're looking for. Something like that.)

This is, perhaps, an important distinction between "old" media and "new" media: New media such as Facebook and Twitter have corporate structures that are not at all connected to the content-generation of their sites or the editing of that content, but yet many "old" media have the two bound together -- the writers, content creators, and editors are all employees; not so for the masses of FB and tweet-land. Cell phones, as part of the telephone network, are interesting since today "smart phones" are really mini-computers with phones built-in, but phone networks have been around for over 100 years and we have always been able to speak our minds on them. Phones were not a communication tool with an easily-achieved wide reach. Yes you could call anyone, but calling everyone was much harder, even one-at-a-time or with a phone tree, where you call five people (5) who then call five people (5^2=25 + 5 =30) who each then call five more (5^3=125 + 30 = 155), etc. (People invented that method, that system, in order to reach more people--that is simply what we do, via whatever technology, and the current ones are the best we have for doing so.) I cannot fit phones easily into this framework, which shows that the framework isn't quite right, but also that we have diverse communication tools at hand, and that those tools in turn have diverse functions. This, I think, is a good thing.

In the end, it appears that if you put the tools of production into the hands of the people, great things happen.

Hulk Smash

Here's an image to go along with my story about Feep and the Purple Pants, which sounds like a Encyclopedia Brown story but isn't. I didn't want to grab one off the internet, this is a picture I took of a guy's sweatshirt (you can see the drawstrings).

The Hulk's pants... they are always purple, and torn. Bruce Banner could be wearing a three-piece suit or a bathing suit yet the Hulk always ended up in torn purple pantaloons pants (the pantaloons are the EverQuest II version, which is the point of the story).

Twitter, Facebook, Revolutions, and Spectacle

I think I should call this post, "Twitter, Revolution, and the Narcissism of Internet Commentators."

Internet commentators, such as myself, seem to have a certain fascination with the relationship between the Internet and political revolution. I think it is that, we derive our power from the power and importance of the Internet: If the Internet is powerful enough to cause a revolution, then we are powerful too.

But as we all know, revolutions do not need the Internet. Historically speaking, the Internet is so new that almost no revolutions can claim it (or, the Internet can't claim them). Revolutions need organization and power, and the Internet can help organize quickly and massively (for either revolutions or flash mobs of people who dance in stores). The American revolution had armies fighting, the French revolution had the Bastille, The Russian revolution had the red army and the white army and the murder of the Tsar and his family, the Chinese communist revolution had the armies of Mao and Chang Kai-shek. None of these had the Internet.

The recent uprising -- a failed revolution? -- in Iran had the Internet, and cell phones, and smart phones, and current communication technologies that allow people to organize and share messages on a massive scale with unprecedented speed. (The telegraph was the first communication technology to separate communication and transportation, and it was an amazing thing.) But the Internet, with its Twitter and its Facebook, did not bring down the regime there. Burma is still Myanmar, China is still slowly destroying Tibet, and there are other examples one could mention, each with its own history, complexities, disagreements, and more than two sides to each one.

Twitter and Facebook share in a criticism that has been made about television: That we watch it, we feel we are part of it, but we are not, we are in fact at home watching television (and many of us do so from our nice, safe, Western nations, vast distances from the real action, yet here it is in our living room on the screen). Twitter and Facebook, the technologies of the moment, are like this but to even more of an extent: We can see the tweets from people who we believe are actually there, on the ground, surrounded by riot police -- as long as they tweet in English, that is, and English is never the language of the nation in question, nor is it ever clear how educated one has to be, or what social class one belongs to, if one tweets in English and its not your native language. Clearly such people are not tweeting for their local audience.

That is not a criticism, however, but it is occasionally overlooked. Knowing your audience is always important, as is knowing about the message sender if you are the audience.

Somewhat akin to slacktivism, I am sure someone has written about this feeling of immediacy we can get from tweets before. I think these communication technologies are important, but their endless hyping stems from a misunderstanding: The current embodiment of digital communication technologies allows us to communicate widely and freely, which is an important change from past communication technologies. But it is not about Twitter, and it is not about Facebook, they are merely the names of the embodiments of the forms we are using today. This is instead a more enduring story, one of people, and how these technologies let us do what we have always done, that is, connect, be it to plan a meeting for coffee or an attempt at revolution.

Edit: This isn't to say we don't care about our fellow human beings, or that we don't want to see what it happening to them. Often we do.

Also, John Stewart and his team nail it, as usual.

See also this article (the second half mostly) at the New York Times by Scott Shane.

And see this blog post by Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, fellow academic.

The Memex Contains and Is You

I am sure someone has pointed this out before, but I was looking at a blog post and there was the now-common "Like this on Facebook" link, and it struck me that we are the connected document.

It's like what they did in Caprica, which I thought was a good show. They portrayed the initial virtual world as full of porn and violence, and they built online independent avatars based off of the giant database of information about any particular person (and behavioral algorithms).

We can see the beginning of this distributed database, there is the more social side of it (Facebook, etc.), and the more commercial side of it (how that information is used to select advertisements to place on a page you visit). It is a web of connections and data, where you are at the center of it. Your online self is represented by this data, but in a stronger way that just it being a record of your actions online. With enough connections and enough data, it is you.

Play and Homage (and IP Theft)

People like to play with the things they like. If we play with snippets of music, we are called pirates by the music industry. If we play with other cultural items, like TV and comic book characters, and if we do it in spaces like Spore or LittleBigPlanet, it's seen as acceptable (although I am sure it is a bit more complex than that, I don't have any insider info from EA or Sony about it).

What is interesting is when branches of the big intellectual property companies, like Sony (with Sony Music, and Sony's movie and television production), have spaces where intellectual property is borrowed by the company itself (although since companies are not people, obviously this is done by the people at the company). So Sony's EverQuest II has lots of cultural homages (or theft) in it, placed there by the people who work for Sony Online Entertainment. One "homage" is the epic (or something) questline for the swashbuckler character class, which is loosely but obviously based on the movie The Princess Bride. Swashies are pirates, right? And pirates are an important part of the film.

(Hmm actually I should, to be thorough, see if that's a Sony film -- but there are lots of examples in EQII that aren't owned by Sony, so even if this is not a good example the point still holds.)

Ok Wikipedia says it is not a Sony-owned piece of IP. It's Fox and Lions Gate and MGM. We are still on here with this example, good.

And this is found across companies and virtual spaces, so I was pleased but not too surprised upon some reflection to discover another Princess Bride reference in Bethesda's recent game Fallout: New Vegas (developed by Obsidian). In one cave you will discover big cave rats, but, they are not just big rats in a cave, they are rodents of unusual size. If you know The Princess Bride, you know there are rodents of unusual size in the fire swamps. It is possible this is done with permission, but I really doubt it. (That would also put a big dent in this argument.)

But, the whole point of this post is that I took a photo of it (since I play it on my Xbox 360, not on a PC where I could take screen shots and have mods, which would be cool).

(The "S" down at the bottom of the photo is light hitting the S in Sharp, the brand of television I have currently.)

Microsoft's Kinect

Penny Arcade has had quite a bit of writing about the Kinect, they don't particularly like it, but others are fascinated by it. Whatever their take, I am profoundly disturbed by Jenna Wortham's writeup in the New York Times (indeed where one tends to find her writeups), especially the sentence that says how hackers are "getting the Kinect to do things it was not really meant to do," because this is not at all true (besides the "not really..." part, which any good Wikicultist would flag as "weasel words" and actually be correct about it).

The Kinect was not designed to be a motion sensing device that is inherently and only part of the Xbox 360, if it were, it would have been built in. It is not. It is a motion sensing device that you can connect to something with the right connector, with Microsoft hoping that would be the Xbox 360. And if you know anything about people, you know we like to play with things, especially things we like.

“Anytime there is engagement and excitement around our technology, we see that as a good thing,” said Craig Davidson, senior director for Xbox Live at Microsoft. “It’s naïve to think that any new technology that comes out won’t have a group that tinkers with it.”

Except of course Microsoft, or the people at it, were extremely naïve, because earlier...

A [Microsoft] representative said that it did not “condone the modification of its products” and that it would “work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant.”

Microsoft's model has typically been one of control. Control over Windows, control over the Xbox, control over Microsoft Office, and so on. It was Sony that made it easy to load Linux onto their PS3, not Microsoft and its Xbox 360, although Sony later took away this capability (I am not sure of the politics behind that one, it may be interesting). Note that hackers have adapted Linux for both platforms regardless.

But we've seen so many instances where people do like to play with things (it's a part of who we are). For instance, Bethesda's line of games, such as Oblivion, which is available for both the Xbox 360 and Windows. There are no mods for games or anything on the Xbox, it's not part of the business model. (Mods, made by players, opposed to patches and DLC, by the company.) On the PC, however, there is a thriving mod scene (which I have written about). Bethesda supports the modders, gives them forum space, and interviews them (here is one example, and you can check out their posts tagged "modding"). The people at Bethesda know we like to play games and play with games, and we will do so whether they want us to or not. Mods can, and do, fix bugs, add new maps, zones, characters, quests, and everything: for the game producer, your customers can be developers who make the game better, for free. It's not just win-win, it's win-win-win (producer, modder, players).

Here's a recent Ten Best Oblivion Mods list from PC Gamer. Keep in mind Oblivion is over four years old already. In part because it's a great game, but in part because of the mod scene, people are still playing it.

I'm not sure, definitely, how old the modding scene is: the Internet itself is essentially a giant mod, so, 40 years. It depends on your definition. The Flight Sim mod scene is pretty old, dating back to at least 1990. That's 20 years (and Flight Sim is now, or was for a long time, a Microsoft product!). One would think that everyone would have noticed this long-standing given (I resist the word "trend" there, this is a not a trend, it is a constant).

Connect: Online Avatar Dancing

I've just started Musicophilia, by Dr. Oliver Sacks (author of several great books I have read), and so want to present a first-draft section I have on dancing, specifically why so many people are all about dancing avatars, videos of dancing avatars, and why we like dancing in general.

The footnotes are a bit unclear, but at least Scrivener did the copy (of copy and paste fame) well and automatically included them at the end, in a nice list format. I'll add some title information.

Dancing (draft), from Connect.

Dancing is a big thing on the Internet, especially YouTube, where you can find real dancing (like the music videos MTV used to show), and seemingly pointless but occasionally funny videos of avatars dancing in MMOs like World of Warcraft, EverQuest, and There.com. People like dancing so much that MMO companies have built dance moves into the capabilities for avatars. It certainly doesn’t help your level 7 elf battle orcs, but that’s what people wanted.

Not everyone is into online dancing, as the Reuters in-world employee, Eric Krangel, found out. “As part of walking my ‘beat’, I’d get invited by sources to virtual nightclubs, where I’d right-click the dance floor to send my avatar gyrating as I sat at home at my computer. It was about as fun as watching paint dry.”[1] The problem is Krangel wasn’t there for the dancing and the music and the text-chatting. He wasn’t a part of the community that likes that kind of activity. He was there as a Reuters employee to sell the Reuters brand. He could have gotten into it, but that he didn’t isn’t a big surprise.

Dance is a form of ritual, a concept that receives attention from researchers, and as a form of shared and coordinated play it can lead to community bonds. It is a very old human behavior. As psychology researcher Fitch observed, “music and dance are found in all cultures, and have been for many thousands of years.”[2] Lee, writing about the history of ballet, pointed out that, “Throughout the ages, a wealth of documentation in the form of cave paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphics, description of ancient Olympic games, and Old Testament references have attested to the importance of dancing in society.”[3] Garfinkel, writing about early human dancing, cited evidence for dance in the Middle East and Europe as far back as the 8th millennium BC.[4]

Although we have a lot in common with our fellow mammals and primates, McNeill observed that “community dancing occurs only among humans.”[5] In further contrast to other animals who have behaviors that we refer to as dancing (like bees), humans dance in groups in a synchronized manner to music, which other animals don’t have, and music is “fundamental and central in every culture” writes Dr. Oliver Sacks in his book on music and the human brain.[6] In fact, dancing and music are tightly related in our brains. As Berkeley professor Walter Freeman explained, “music together with dance have co-evolved biologically and culturally to serve as a technology of social bonding.”[7] A shared ritual that fosters community, the two are “the biotechnology of group formation.”[8] The current English word play is related to an older and similar Old English word, but, according to the Oxford American Dictionary, it is also related to the Middle Dutch word pleien, which, perhaps not surprisingly, can mean dance.[9]

Dance is a form of communal play, and is clearly an important part of who we are. Knowing this, we should not be surprised to find it online in some situations where it seems to have no point for the virtual world, as indeed we do.

[1] Neate (2009). ("The biology and evolution of music", in Cognition, v. 100)
[2] Fitch (2006), p. 199. (In The Telegraph.co.uk)
[3] Lee (2002), p. 1. (Ballet in Western culture)
[4] Garfinkel (2003), p. 106. (Dancing at the dawn of agriculture)
[5] McNeill (1995), p. 13. (Keeping together in time)
[6] Sacks (2007), p. xi. (Musicophelia)
[7] Freeman (2000), p. 411. (In The origins of music, by Wallin, Merkur, and Brown)
[8] Freeman (2000), p. 417.
[9] See also Huizinga (1955), p. 31, for more on play and dance. (Homo ludens)

Ukulele: Play, Create, Share

(To be clear, "Play, Create, Share" is the tagline from Sony and Media Molecule's game, LittleBigPlant.)

I had finished most of the book--all the research, and all the body chapters were roughly at first draft stage. It was off at some publishers, so I decided.... needed, to take a break from it before the final push to make the intro better, tie together the loose sections at the end, and write up the conclusion. So, I decided to take up the ukulele and learn how to play it. (Ukes are cool, check out the vids in this post.)

The ukulele is a decidedly non-electronic, non-Internet beast. It is real, and tangible, in your hands, as are the calluses you might get. It has no built-in spellchecker, but you can hear when you hit a wrong note, which is curious and encouraging.

My cousin, who plays in a Uke band, made me a song book with chording tabs--these show you where your fingers go on the strings in order to play a certain chord (a combination of notes). The tabs are from the Internet. I email her, a friend, and my uncle, who was in a real band for many years, about playing stringed instruments. (I also have a few other relatives I can email about these things, but focus on the Internettedness of it all.)

There are tons of YouTube videos with people playing ukulele. They just do it. (My point is that we are driven, psychologically, to play with things like musical instruments, to create things like videos, and to share them -- all of the activities create and reinforce community, because we are driven to connect.)

Note this one of this kid, which has almost 24 million views in under a year. (1:18 ftw!)

There are also thousands of tablatures online, for a variety of instruments (although I mostly pay attention to uke and guitar tabs). People have made these, put them together, and put them up to share with others so that others can play too. (One frequent note on them is a rather weak write up defending the tab in terms of US fair use, which could be written a lot better.) Here's one with all of the songs by The Smiths (and it uses the same layout as this blog). (Hmm I had one for the Beatles which was kinda cheesy but did the job, but I don't see it now. Oh here it is, click through to a song hosted on the site and you'll see what I mean.) You can tune your uke online.

There are also groups, of course, a.k.a. online communities, like the Ukulele Underground, who host discussion boards and have instructional (and awesome) videos: ukulele lessons, ukulele minutes, and member videos. Yes, member videos, made by people and posted to the site.

Play.

Create.

Share.

It doesn't matter if it's video games and mods, it doesn't matter if it's a more physical and just as visceral object like a ukulele, it's what we do, and the Internet allows us to express this playfulness, this creativity, and allows us to share these things we love to do, since everyone loves to do them. (I'll point you to Stuart Brown's Play if you don't believe me, and you can check out the NPR/SOF show where he was interviewed.)

And, as I said before, and as Brown points out (in the book at least), these are all community creating and reinforcing behaviors. I could also talk a bit about the visceral, long-time importance of dance and how our mental structures which relate to dance are connected to the ones that relate to music, but it's been a while since I wrote that part of the book so it's a bit rusty. Perhaps later.

The thing is, we do this (connect) with possibly everything.

Community

"It's this right here. Hanging out with your friends and fellow artists."

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?n=1348

(Reminds me of ICA, and my "once a year" friends, as it should, since it's the same fundamental human need, the need to connect and form communities.)

Feep and The Purple Pants

This is the current opening to my book proposal, trying to ground the higher-level ideas in an understandable and positive story. Granted, it's a story about pants, but a little bit of humor is good too.

One evening, when I was playing Sony’s massively multiplayer online game EverQuest II, one of my guildmates, whose character’s name is Feep, dropped a link for a pair of pants into the guild chat channel. He had just killed some evil creature, and the pants were part of the treasure he had received. Specifically these pants were torn purple pantaloons, which I had never heard of before. The name was unusual. I clicked on the link in the chat window to learn more about these purple pants. Up came the item description and statistics for the pants. They had a spell on them, called rage, that gave the wearer increased strength and stamina but took away intelligence and wisdom. These were not your typical pants or armor from the mythical world of EverQuest II, these were something quite different that really had no place in the game. They didn’t belong to any creature in the game, and they were from another company’s intellectual property altogether. These purple pants belonged to The Hulk from Marvel Comics.

Feep’s purple pants are just one example of the many ways connection and play are experienced on the Internet. People are playful, so Feep and I, and many others, were playing EverQuest II (often called EQII) at that moment. People like to connect, so the creators of EQII at Sony designed the game so that players would do better if they joined forces. People can form long-term guilds, and Feep and I were members of the same guild (although we had never met in real life). The programmers at Sony also made a guild chat channel, so all guild members could text chat with one another, because we like to connect, and communication builds and strengthens a community like a guild. Sharing can strengthen communities as well, and Feep was sharing information.

The homage to The Hulk was playful. The pants had to be made and placed in the game. People can make in-game items—from the mundane, like arrows, to the more spectacular, like fish tanks, and to the completely unnecessary, like toilets. People are driven to create things and are not just passive consumers. Players also make a lot of things about the game that are not in the game, such as guild websites and wikis.

But the pants were not created by players. EQII does not allow players that level of creativity. The Hulk’s purple pants were instead playfully made by the programmers at Sony. All people are driven to play, and play itself is a behavior that builds community.

To play EverQuest II, you need a computer that is connected to the Internet. Although EQII is in some ways tightly controlled (such as with what players can make), in other ways it is not (such as with the text and voice chat channels). The Internet is controlled much less than EQII, which was why Sony could go ahead and make the game run over the Internet without asking anyone’s permission to do so. EQII works, in part, because it runs over the open Internet, and players can make websites, wikis, and have real-life meet-ups. EQII as a whole takes place in many more places than just the EQII game world. EQII works because the designers knew that people like to play and, more importantly, like to connect.

The story of Feep and the purple pants highlights two fundamental human drives: the drive to connect and the drive to play.

Connect, in Serial Format

Since enough of my book is written and off at publishers where it should get picked up, I thought I'd present some of the writing and ideas here in condensed, serialized form. The working title is Connect: Why the Internet Works, or perhaps Connect and Play: Why the Internet Works, but I am partial to the shorter title. (Note that is is not How the Internet Works, as one of my friends objected that Why might be about TCP/IP which it is not, this is why, not how.)

Why it works is because it allows people to connect.

The major sections are the introduction, the Internet, CompuServe, Videotex, and the conclusion. The Internet is the majority of the work since it is the system that is still with us, the one that succeeded where the others failed over time (although CompuServe was with us for a long time). All three systems were started or conceived of in the late 1960s (videotex is a bit different since it is not a system like the other two, but a type of system, but the comparison works and is still narratively compelling).

I look at what we do with the Internet, and discuss two fundamental human drives that are important for what we do online: the drive to connect (with others) and the drive to play. These are what make the Internet work.

CompuServe and videotex didn't allow people to connect enough, or to be playful enough with content. CompuServe adjusted over time, but couldn't compete. Videotex was designed with control in mind, and failed miserably (no no, Mintel was different, that's a long story, but it wasn't at all like any of the US videotex efforts although no one over here seemed to realize that).

People are extremely social (the drive to connect), and many mammals (and even some birds and octopi) are playful creatures. When a systems allows us to be who we are, we use it and it succeeds. This is not just true in life but also a key to success in business (for example, see the books Drive by Daniel Pink and the IDEO book The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley).

Most of the book looks at what we do online in a social way, so most of my examples and ideas will be based on Internet activities.

Look for posts with the Connect label. This is the first intentional one under the idea that I am going to do so, but I have some previous posts that stem from the work, so I'll go back and put the Connect label on them as well.

Second Life, eh?

As part of my current research, I checked out Second Life on and off for about two weeks. There is some interesting stuff there, since it is almost entirely community created content and user generated content, but let's face it a lot of people are creepy when you give them anonymity.

A lot of businesses had trumpeted their entry into the brave new world of Second Life, then silently withdrew when they realized they had been snookered by marketing fear-peddlers yet again. So, lots of Google results for "company name" and "Second Life" which give you articles on their awesome new presence in-world. Ha. Nothing for when they leave, though, but I did finally find one article--thank you, Rupert Neate at the Telegraph. There are so many good quotes in it, you can read it and choose your favorite, since I can't choose just one to print here to entice you to go read it.

Ok ok, here's one, but the entire article is full of win (that means it is all really good).

While the site is still beloved by geeks and the socially awkward, Deloitte’s director of technology research, Paul Lee, says it has been “virtually abandoned” by “normal” people and businesses.

Eventually I decided I needed a haiku, encouraged by some work about craigslist. Here it is:

Second Life presence!
The press releases blooming!
Silently we leave.

When New Was Old (ARGs and CCC)

ARGs, Alternate Reality Games, and CCC, Community Created Content. We sit down this week with long-time computer enthusiast and writer (from laser printers, to Word, to flight sims), and bigtime PC fanboy (i.e., not a Mac fan, oh, the horror!) turned TV reviewer (not the shows, the TVs), Alfred Poor (a.k.a., Uncle Alfred).

Well ok no we don't do that. This recounts two conversations I've had with him recently, one on a 34' boat, and one just two days ago on Thanksgiving. But you can imagine it was one thematic sit-down.


CCC: I was explaining Spore to Uncle Alfred, and he then told me part of the story of one of the early flight sims, Flight Simulator, which would later be bought by Microsoft. But even before the Microsoft purchase, there was a community of flight sim users who would create and share content: airplanes and airports. So, years before it became a big thing, CCC had already been out there, been tested, and succeeded.

ARGs: Somehow this holiday, The Beatles came up. Alfred recounted the whole "Paul is dead!" thing, and how he followed it. Lyrics that had been placed in reverse on a track (so, spin the vinyl backwards to hear the actual words). Various other lyrics that indicated that Paul was dead and had been replaced by someone named Billy Shears. Barefoot on the Abbey Road cover. A phone number in reverse in some album art, which he called and was told "Mr. Shears is not available."

It seems impossible to tell if it was intentional, or if the band realized fans were taking interpretation way too far and decided to run with it, but it all seems very ARG-like.

What Spore Got Wrong

And What LittleBigPlanet Got Right

Spore is not a good game. It is actually a terrible game, despite all the awards it won before it was released, because it is not really a game at all. The designers thought they were making a game, but it appears they became too wrapped up in making an amazing feat of programming that allows dozens of different parts to be connected, resized, and painted by the users but yet have these parts work as a whole. It is also visually beautiful. But the designers forgot the importance of narrative structure in a game (this is why Second Life is not a game, it has no narrative structure).

I have Spore. I have played it. I wanted to like it, but there is little to like, and it is difficult to choose a starting point since there are so many which are equally damning. Spore has nothing to do with evolution. The cell phase has nothing to do with cells. The tribal phase feels like a bad hack added at the end to try to justify the evolution angle (and it completely lacks design of any kind). The space phase holds the most promise and the most annoyance. There are no empire management tools whatsoever (you have to rescue planets from ecological disaster, which means killing 5 infected wild animals, since apparently the people on the planet cannot do it themselves).

Most immediately annoying is that almost all design choices you make have little or absolutely no consequences. I can design a house for a city, add lots of parts, resize them in multiple dimensions, and give it a custom paint job. You can take an unpainted sphere and proclaim it a house. No door. The two houses will function absolutely the same, since most things in Spore don't function much at all, they just act as placeholders. All houses are merely a house. All city halls act the same. All spaceship designs act exactly the same. You might expand your spaceship with additions that, one would think, might necessitate a larger spaceship, but no, you keep the exact same one. In the creature phase, and the cell phase, the body parts do make a difference -- faster, better at charming or attacking other species, and so on -- but these differences are thin. Give a creature one set of long legs, and another the same set of legs but shrink them, and there is no difference, because feet determine speed. But resizing the feet doesn't make a difference. Maybe it shouldn't, but this issue permeates Spore throughout.

It's not a game since there is no narrative to speak of. "Find the Grox" is the end game, but I haven't found that quest satisfying at all, and it is the only one. The Grox, a nod to Star Trek's borg, are one of several sci-fi borrowings in Spore, along with monoliths from 2001 and spice from Dune. Nice touches, but a game needs more than that.

Consider a game like the theater. There is a stage, there are the sets, props, actors, and the script (I'll ignore the audience for now). Spore gives people a stage and a lot of control over set making. You make creatures, buildings, ships, and can terraform and sculpt planets -- these are the sets and the props. But none of that has any effect on the script, which is too minimal to support a game. That is where Spore fails. Having content from EA, the company which made Spore, and content from other Spore users added to your game doesn't add anything either, except for more diverse visuals. (World of Warcraft, the MMO, fits very well into this "game as theater" framework, and this also explains why I don't like Starcraft and the original Warcraft -- there is no narrative except "build a huge force to crush the opponent" and the occasional "we need to mix things up so here is a maze level" in the single player).

Another game, a real game this time, which uses community created content like Spore, but allows the users to not just make props and settings but also narrative, is LittleBigPlanet. LittleBigPlanet is a PS3 exclusive, and I don't have a PS3, but I have seen a demo (at PAX), read about it, and watched the G4 people play with it with the developers. That's all I need to know they did it right. As far as I can tell, LittleBigPlanet is essentially a puzzle game, where you and maybe your friends solve levels. The LBP community of users makes levels, so, just like Spore, the community created content is essential. But with LBP this content is in a completely different area: it's the script. Each level is its own script, driven by the design of the level. If you don't understand the draw of puzzle games, think about the popularity of tetris, or sudoku, or Portal (which is essentially a puzzle game and was totally awesome).

So, LBP has the really amazingly designed and programmed design capability for the users like Spore has, but here design matters: it is feature rich, not meaninglessly superficial. More than that, though, the designing is for the narrative of the game, which is just as important as mechanics. We've seen that visuals aren't everything, gameplay mechanics are behind the success of the Wii, which was written off as graphically underpowered by people who don't understand games. Amazing graphics, like Spore, are only part of the story. Mechanics, which I have not discussed here, are vital, but so is the narrative structure that carries people through the game. In my opinion, games like Gears of War, Half Life 2, Oblivion, and the Halo series have all of these elements. I also like the Katamari series for the same reasons. I wanted to like Okami, which was visually striking and with a well-constructed narrative, yet on the PS2 the cut scenes couldn't be skipped, and this killed it for me (the cut scenes are long) since the mechanics were off. Narrative can be too heavy-handed, such as in games where there is only one path to success like in Condemned, but narrative is a vital component of game success.

This is why Spore made a big splash until just after it came out and people started playing it. LittleBigPlanet, on the other hand, continues to generate buzz.

Update: EA seems to have noticed this problem, and is coming out with an expansion to allow users to create missions. Sadly, I don't see how the game mechanics are going to allow anything interesting. Here's an accurate comment from a gaming site that sums it up, with a spot-on reply.