The “Internet” is way too cool for me

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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The Political Economy of Player Generated Content

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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I made another game.

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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Exclusive Interview With Mr. Podcamp

This weekend was Perth’s first PodCamp, which also happened to be my first PodCamp. I’ve been to other camps: BarCamp, DemoCamp, SummerCamp, etc. There’s plenty of other coverage, of course, on blogs like this one, this one, as well as this one and maybe this one. But having a blog comes with the responsibility of filling it with redundant crap, and I’m not one to break the interrules. My overall impression? Plenty of pod, but there could have been more camp.

I always enjoy unconferences, because I generally do not enjoy getting dressed up and behaving like a pretentious ass. I like the fact that anyone is free to do just about anything they want. As mentioned in one of the posts I probably linked to above, communication in the sessions was a little unidirectional. Certainly, most of the PowerPoint slides were much better than I’m used at these things. However, the spirit was there.

Looking around the room at the start of the day, I could tell that pods are indeed becoming fairly ubiquitous, even here on the backside of the planet. I saw roughly an even split between Apples and PCs — that’s a lot more Apples than I’m used to seeing. Clearly, support for R153 in Apple’s newest pods is making a significant splash in the marketplace. This is to be expected, I suppose, as enthusiasts have been demanding greater pod-pod integration for a while now. I hear talk of pod-pod-pod integration on the horizon — we’ll see.

The first session I attended was, roughly speaking, on the future of the pod industry. The presenter started facetiously, declaring that pods are dead. This is a familiar refrain by now, ever since Steve Evans announced that Podder would be shifting its business model from pods to vods. With all the attention going to wiki-vods these days, and especially with the recent success of VodVod, it certainly seems that pods might go the way of cowboynet and blogfisting. However, the presenter went on to aptly note that with the continuous advances in awesomedrive space, we can expect our very understanding of media to change in short order. The recent 300 terabyte trans-temporal Wikipedia recursion will fit onto our future pods a million times over, with room enough left to store a complete collection of ultaporn.

After that, I popped up for a bit to grab a snack, as I had to prepare for my own presentation. I was skeptical about the pecan tart at first, but it turned out to be reasonably tasty.

I presented on the latest advances in pod-hacking techniques. A lot has changed since Jeff Barnes brought the entire North American pod-network to its knees using nothing more than a zombie scriptlet, a phase inducer, and a spunky can-do attitude. These days, you have to pay attention to the psychic IP stack, as well as the podcops. To be an effective hacker these days, you need your rollerblades to be highly polished, and your hair can’t just be dyed one colour — you need a whole rainbow of colours, and the RGB values need to follow the RFC1U1Z algorithm.

More to come? Pod-ssibly!

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Fun!

I’ve been told that all things pass, and I can personally confirm this, because a number of things have certainly passed. Currently I’m in Australia: the deadliest country/continent in the world. Do I fear for my life far more while I’m here than I did while I was in Nigeria? You’d better believe it. According to Bill Bryson, five of Oz’s creatures are the most dangerous of their kind. Not something to fuck around with.

The future, much like the land mass, is wide open, and occasionally blemished by furtive nuclear detonations by Japanese doomsday cults (another useful tidbit from Bill Bryson!)

In any case, I’m shaking things up a bit. This makes sense to me: I feel like I’m a dynamic person. I feel that I have dynamos within me. Also pistons and widgets. I’m gonna be a professional fun-maker! Wheeee!

This is, of course, not terrifically curvy as curveballs go, since I’ve been on this trajectory for a while. I have at least one extremely successful, overwhelmingly ambitious project under my belt; that would be TorGame. I founded the organization and directed its first project — a two week “live alternate reality game” with over a hundred players. I did so immediately before leaving for Nigeria, which was an interesting twist, as the logical follow-ups had to be put on hiatus. Now I have the opportunity to pursue the dream — the dream of making money off of this sort of stuff. Not that I’m particularly fond of money; it’s just that I’d prefer to develop my craft in the bright sunlight of day, rather than in the dark recesses of my basement, after-hours, my hands already transformed into RSI-disfigured claws from 8 hours of full-time, soul-crushing programming work. I am, in short, going to do what the hell I want (which is my own estimation one step up from working for a soulless corporation in order to pay the mortgage, and one step down from saving orphan babies in Cambodia.)

So what does a professional fun-maker do? Well, if you’re me, you call yourself a pervasive gaming consultant. Defining what precisely that means is going to be an essay-sized blog post in itself, but in short, it’s about constructive forms of social play that takes place over common modalities. I’m a lot more interested in the concept of play than games per se, but play is a rather nebulous idea that is effectively operationalized in the form of actual games. Also, if you say you’re a “play” consultant it makes it sound sort of like you’re doing something sexual. Nevertheless, I’m guided strongly by thoughts like this one:

“Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, not play.” -Johan Huizinga

That’s class, people.

What does a pervasive game look like? Kind of like ARGs, kind of like transmedia or cross-media storytelling, kind of like big games, kind of like urban games. If you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, that’s fine. I’ve got a lot of writing to do.

It also bears mentioning that my definition “pervasive games” is somewhat different from
other definitions, depending on who you ask. The interesting thing about trying to do business on the bleeding edge, though, is that you can largely make up defininitions at your convenience, because to 99% of the population it’s all fresh anyway. The only people you really need to worry about offending are the academics; and given my background, I’m quite capable of satisfying those types (hint: booze.)

I guess I have a real blog, now. =0

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