May 5th, 2008
Did you know that LiveJournal was cool way before blogging was cool? As an academic in the social media space, it was really interesting to me how the interllectuals vehemently denied the legitimacy of LJ in the post-coital blogging glow of 2003-2006. “LJ is irrelevant,” they told us, “All anyone does there is write Harry/Ron slash fic.” Well, half a decade later, LJ is still around and still cool… but does anyone blog anymore? Hardly.
In any case, the point of this post is to alert my 4 readers that Kate is running for a spot on the LJ Advisory Board. You can support her nomination by commenting on this thread. Of course, you have to be an LJ user. And if you aren’t, what the hell is wrong with you? Seriously.
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May 2nd, 2008
It sounds like the plot of a B-grade American movie: dad goes away on holiday and his teenage child throws a party for 500 people in the backyard. But it’s a crushing reality for Tim Berners-Lee, who’s proginy, the World Wide Web, drew a rowdy and drunken crowd over the weekend for its 15th birthday.
Berners-Lee returned from a business trip on Monday to find his house in ruins, and the neighbours in an uproar. When reached for comment, a distraught Berners-Lee declared that “this time [the Web] has gone too far… this is going to stop.” The Web’s estranged mother, the Internet, could not be reached for comment.
This is far from the first time that the Web has caused turmoil and outrage. In recent years, its juvenile antics have made the news several times, and been a hot topic around water coolers and on daytime talk shows. The controversy reached an apparent boiling point several months ago, when a Youtube mashup featuring a puppy-riding kitten and Japanese tentacle hentai provoked a worldwide outcry. This weekend’s events indicate that the Web has no plans for reform any time in the near future.
“This sort of behaviour is common amongst teenagers with the kind of history that the Web has,” said Dr. Anne Andrews, a child psychologist. “The Web is one of the most well-known individuals in the world. That’s a tremendous responsibility for a 15-year old to bear. It’s the subject of legislation, the cause of both ruined lives and multimillion dollar fortunes. Not to mention the fact that 90% of it is shemale fetish pornography. When you consider how other child celebrities who have dealt with far worse have sunk far lower, it’s remarkable that the Web hasn’t simply overdosed on heroin yet.”
The Web’s storied history begins in 1980, but was officially born in 1993. For a few years it had a relatively uneventful life, content mainly to service a small cadre of computer geeks and their Gillian Anderson fansites. However, the Web exploded onto the world stage in the late 90s, spurred on largely by major commercial successes such as eBay, and niche cultural innovators such as SomethingAwful. Since then, breakaway triumphs such as Flickr, blogging, and the Tron Guy have ensured that the Web is not a name likely to be forgotten for decades to come.
A tearful Berners-Lee told press that for as long as the Web has been famous, it has been causing him trouble. “It just doesn’t even realize… it’s so meta and self referential that it doesn’t realize the hurt its causing for the people who love it. It won’t listen to me, it never goes to school… it just obsesses over the latest fads. Yesterday it was del.icio.us, today it’s Twitter, tomorrow it’ll be Squookee or fiz.zypo.op. It never settles down. Why can’t it be more like it’s cousins, Usenet or IRC? They have nice, stable lives.”
The Web, meanwhile, is unapologetic. “God, my dad is such a hater,” it stated in a recent press conference. “I mean, I’m totally great and everyone knows it. Where else can you get shit like this? Check this out — a Flash animation of Super Mario cruising for hookers to the tune of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” How about 645,000 images featuring dolphins, vaginas and lines from Back to the Future in various combinations? Whoops, hold on, someone just posted another picture of my nipples on Digg.”
Many believe that the Web’s problematic attitude started with the famous dot com bust at the start of the decade. “Before that, the Web was cocky, sure, but still relatively restrained,” said Andrews. “When the bubble burst, though, it was a tremendous blow to the Web’s psyche. Suddenly it was all ’social media’ this and ‘user generated content’ that. Since then, the Web has simply lost sight of any and all boundaries.”
Is there any hope left for the Web? Berners-Lee isn’t optimistic. “I used to think things might turn around as it grew up,” he said, “but things just keep going faster and faster. I just know that one of these days I’m going to find the Web coked out in a ditch somewhere, checking its Facebook wall on its iPhone with one hand, and pirating the complete set of Beavis and Butthead DVDs on its Vaio in the other. And on that day, I’ll simply walk away. It pains me, but I have a limit.”
The Web, on the other hand, has a brighter vision for the future. “Man, you can’t stop progress,” it stated. “Today, I’m all 2.0, right? But you know like, that Moore… uh, Metcalfe… Shir… uh, Shirky Boyd’s law? Yeah, like, everything is doubling, like… every second. So in like two years, man, it’s gonna be like — Web 2.0? Try Web Two Point Million. It’s gonna be all convergence, with dynamically generated sentient memes commenting on themselves, while the Hypersphere injects data fluid into all the media nodes hooked up to your noggin. Dude it’s gonna be great.”
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April 25th, 2008
A friend were recently talking about how great the internet used to be, vis a vis hilarious videos. It was a revelatory experience as it has literally been years since Magical Trevor, Salad Fingers, and the GI Joe PSAs last flitted across my consciousness. Naturally, being a well-renowned internet theorist, I had a duty to re-enjoy all those gems of yesteryear. Ahh, good times.
It was then that I realized a tragic reality: it has been ages since I came across something on the internet that really floored me. In the past, internet memes have given me some profound life-altering experiences. I don’t believe I’ve ever laughed as hard as I did at the All Your Base compilation video, and noone who has truly known goatse.cx can say they are the same person they used to be. These were heartbreaking memes of staggering genius.
Nowadays, internet hilarity is rampant. Many of today’s memes are quite solid. Some could be described as brilliant. But the vast majority are drivel. They are momentarily amusing but ultimately puerile. When compiled into the “blog” format which is oh-so-the-rage as of late, they can provide a consistent stream of pleasant diversions that is certainly a boon in the long run, but the individual offerings are generally insignificant. In short we are being inundated with crap.
At least, that’s what it feels like.
There is room for doubt here. It’s occurred to me that I’m slowly creeping up on a conspicuous age. Is it possible that I’m becoming… uncool? Out of touch? Am I merely a jaded old pill idealizing an imaginary Golden Age of Internet Memes? Isn’t the internet pretty much what is used to be… just moreso?
One of the really interesting things going on these days is the way the internet is going totally mainstream. Well, scratch that — the internet’s been mainstream for a while. What’s happening now is that the incredibly nerdy bits of the internet are going mainstream. Witness Kate’s blog post about rickrolling. It’s basically a microcosm of what happened to the internet proper from 1996-2006. Except unlike the basement usenet operators of the 90s today’s esoteric cult of nerds has a pretty good grasp on the dynamics of the media industry, so they are pushing outwards just as hard as the mainstream is pushing inward. I mean, it took, like, just a year before I heard the founder of icanhascheezburger being interviewed on the radio.
So memes are mainstream now and becoming increasingly so every second. And what happens when anything goes mainstream? It gets crappy, of course. Why does it get crappy? Well, you know… cuz the mainstream sucks.
Actually, I think something unique is happening. The whole online prosumer thing is hitting the world in force, and suddenly every 14-year-old (not just the geeky ones) are accustomed to the idea that something they do on the computer can make them famous. And you know, the great thing about computers, they make everything so easy. For the young north american, there is pretty much no entry barrier. And that’s great! Sure it is. But when you’ve got every single kid on the continent storming across that non-existent barrier, what you’ve got is a huge influx of dilettantes.
The really amazing memes that took my breath away in the early days were painstaking labours of love. But photoshopping some text onto a cat? It takes five minutes. In fact, many (if not most) of memes these days come about by accident, or on a whim. This is the magic of Youtube: sharing a moment captured via film requires only the barest modicum of effort. Turning on a camera and pressing upload is lightyears away from spending terrible terrible hours in Flash.
I’m no Andrew Keen. I believe in the democratization of media and I am not disgusted by the idea of consuming amateur products. But it does wear one down. Truthfully, there are still excellent memes out there, and there are budding animators and serious film prodigies doing awesome stuff every day. But the reality — and this comes down to one of my central gripes with the world today — is that a flood of mediocrity deadens one senses to the few drops of awesomeness. And you have to spend a lot of time sifting through the chaff to find the wheat. Am I mixing enough metaphors here?
You can’t argue with reality though. This is what the Internet is: it is the place where 16-year old girls go to glitterize their myspace pages. It is the place that is cooler than all the other places. Everyone is communicating and creating… but tragically, not everyone is a creative genius. We’ll always have memes (thank god!) but sadly, I think the days of wonderful little discoveries at every turn are behind us for good. At least, until Internet 2 I guess.
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March 3rd, 2008
A couple of posts got me thinking about the issue of player generated content recently. Tony Walsh writes generally about players as storytellers as a trend in multiplayer games. Meanwhile (well, a few months ago), Brian Clark writes about his plans for Eldritch Errors, which include a panoply of media products (book, comics, films, etc.) based on the events which are currently unfolding in the immersive narrative. Brian talks about the players of the game as effectively “starring” in the retellings, or at least being largely responsible for their eventual content. Of course, that’s a bit of an overstatement. Most of the creative sweat is being put in by the professional writers, designers, etc. behind the property. But it does represent a significant shift from the way games and entertainment generally is developed — it’s becoming a collaborative process, and the lines between the producer and the consumer are being blurred.
I’m pretty much a fan of this. And superficially, it’s all well and good. But there are some quandaries you get into when a significant portion of your content is materially attributable to an unpaid, uncredited player base. Specifically: Why aren’t they being paid? Why aren’t they being credited? Are the players being taken advantage of? If so, why do they let it happen? And if not, what safeguards can we put in place to avoid declining the slippery slope into outright exploitation?
Of course, player generated content is nothing new. But in most cases, this content is mainly incidental, and not comparable to the larger body of work. Generally, we’re talking about the output from a fairly limited functionality that allows self-expression. In any MMO, you can create and operate a character/guild/organization/etc, and this certainly goes a long way to building the experience for other players. An MMO would simply not exist without a wide range of player generated entities to interact with. But it would be tough (albeit possible) to argue that these entities represent significant content on their own, because (a) they are generally irrelevant outside of the game, (b) each one is generally only experienced by a tiny percentage of the player base, and (c) the capacity for truly creative expression is severely limited.
There are also games that are built specifically to be tools for storytelling or content development, like Neverwinter Nights and RPG Maker. But these are largely the same as other development tools, an essential property of which is the fact that what you create with them becomes your property. There’s a crucial point here: creating the expression engine is important work, and the expression itself is equally important work; both are valid and rewardable forms of labour.
Looking elsewhere, user-generated content is the talk of the town in the whole web 2.0, social web thing. The “next great revolution” is the “cult of amateur”, etc. And it’s quite obvious that Youtube wouldn’t be worth much without the videos, and Facebook wouldn’t be worth much without your annoying high school friends. Unlike the case of the MMO, there would be no content left whatsoever. However, it’s worth noting that (a) at least the content is explicitly attributed to the creators, who can use their page/profile/etc. to further their own ends, and (b) we are beginning to witness a backlash against terms of service which grant highly liberal licenses over user contributed media. In my opinion, this issue, and the broader issue of the commodification of individuals to make billions for investors, are issues ripe for some scrutiny. Luckily, some people are taking the task to hand.
Although these sorts of sites represent the clearest appropriation of user-generated content, they are a lot closer in this respect to MMOs then the sorts of situations that I envision when I read Tony’s and Brian’s comments; content-generation on these sites is usually either incidental or highly disparate. For me, Tony and Brian are predicting a future of games that looks a lot more like Second Life, where highly creative expression and consumption of that expression is at the heart of the experience, and where that products of that expression are recognized as goods that ought to confer the same benefits they would if created outside of the game.
Will the games that arise from Tony’s and Brian’s visions follow the example set by Second Life? Although SL represents the closest parallel for me, they’re still quite different things. Media in SL is still quite disparate, while ARGs/chaotic fiction/whatever tries to present a cohesive experience. I can imagine that it would be quite problematic if a player decided to try and sell some part of the story that they were highly involved with at some point — or simply deny the producers they ability to use what they had contributed.
It’s important to note that these guys are in a whole different class from the people behind Youtube and Facebook. The latter are merely [gross generalization] cynical capitalists [/gross generalization], while the former are well-intentioned designers exploring the frontiers of collaborative storytelling. In general, people in this community are super nice and frequently idealistic (I’d like to think I’m a super nice idealist myself!) What I fear though, is that this niceness and idealism will perpetuate an already nascent assumption that the relationship between producers and players will forever be blanketed by a layer of happy warmness that precludes exploitation. In fact, this is not terribly unreasonable. We are talking about very nice people, in most cases, here. But the reality exists that you can be the nicest developers in the world, yet still end up screwing over your players quite unintentionally. Business tends to have that effect. (Much respect for EE, but it’s a good example of what I’m talking about.)
My hope is that game developers who take up this vision, and turn it into reality, will take this issue to heart. And I hope that players will realize what they’re contributions are worth, and take developers to task when they don’t show the proper respect. I am consistently amazed by the amount of creativity, resourcefulness, and plain old tenacity that exists amongst the player-base for these games. Games frequently succeed because these qualities. But I’m also consistently amazed that these same players spend most of their time working despised day jobs, without really thinking about they could do with these skills. They’re having fun, of course, and that’s important; not all unpaid labour is “unpaid labour”; that is, not all of it is bad. But we are talking about a completely new dynamic here, and that comes with the need to ask some hard questions.
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December 8th, 2007
Yup, that’s what I’ve been doing.
In (very) brief, Ghost Town is a mashup between the physical world, SMS, VOIP and Bluetooth. Players look for stickers around Perth. When they SMS the codes on these stickers to our system, they get back response texts, phone calls, images, and MP3 files that tell a story and present puzzles that must be solved in order to progress. The story and the puzzles focus on Perth’s urban environment.
Was that too much text for a link? That might have been too much text for a link.
The meta-site is woefully under-developed at the moment, as we’ve been quite caught up in actually producing and running the game — which ends Sunday, so we’ll shortly be updating with more detailed documentation, press coverage, etc. And I’ll be talking a lot more about it once I regain my sanity.
I think this is pretty nifty!
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