The first paragraph is always flavour text. The point here is that Ubiquity is a fabulous idea — the kind of idea that makes you think, “This is going to happen, and it’s going to completely change the way we do things.” And also, “Great, this is my chance to stay relevant!” And that’s when you know you’d better post a quote and a link.

The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:

• Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)
• Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)

It’s better if you watch the video

Cool mac users who have Quicksilver will recognize the similarities; Ubiquity is sort of basically Quicksilver for the internets. Both are the products of people realizing that GUIs are not the be-all and end-all of interface design, and in fact that command lines might have a role in modern interaction beyond the domain of leet haxors. Of course, we’re not talking about command lines per se, here. We’re talking about the idea that not everything you do needs to be something that you click on. The thing is that GUIs have so pervaded what everyone knows as the “computer experience” that most people have trouble thinking outside the point-and-click design pattern.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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!

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!

However, what’s really got me excited is their behind-the-scenes blog, where they’ve been discussing what’s going into this thing. I’m actually pretty disappointed that I haven’t seen this mentioned on (m)any other blogs, because this is something fairly novel. Anyone who’s been involved in developing & running an ARG knows the toll it takes on those at the helm; so it’s no surprise that, to date, there is little documentation on this process. So a blog like this is an incredibly valuable resources to anyone interested in the genre.

This isn’t the only way that Eldritch Errors is breaking the mold, mind you. I’m keeping a very close eye on this one, and I’ll probably be writing about it plenty more in the future.

For the uninitiated, chaotic fiction is a term coined by Sean Stacey to define a space of participatory creative works. I guess if you were so inclined, you could call it Fiction 2.0 (except you would probably get punched.) Although Sean came up with the term in an attempt to contextualize the ARG-definition controversy (and get everyone to shut up about it I suppose), the idea is that it describes a space that contains a wide variety of genres, so it’s not strictly necessary to even bring up ARGs in this discussion… except I just did, so never mind.

Chaotic fiction is a nice framework, because it situates a number of hitherto discrete genres within a single conceptual space. Moreover, it recognizes the fluidity of that space. Second Life may be superficially distinct in nature from SFZero, but there is certainly something similar going on there — a truth that is manifested in the way that virtual games and live games are bleeding into one another. Cross-media entertainment is the big thing these days, and I would argue that it’s not because of interesting synergies between unique platforms, but because they’re all part of the same delicious pie. I expect the media theorists have known this for a long time.

While I like the idea of chaotic fiction, it’s really the aforementioned theorists I’m waiting to hear from. The idea is inherently academic, but I haven’t seen it appear on any academic radars. This is unfortunate because (a) there’s little doubt that Stacey’s thinking overlaps with a significant corpus of previous literature, so discussing chaotic fiction without the benefit of those insights is at best arrogant and at worst profoundly misguided, and (b) there’s not been a useful conceptual framework that entered the world fully formed; there need to be iterations, there needs to be a synthesis of viewpoints.

A brief synopsis: chaotic fiction inhabits a 3-dimensional space where the three axes represent authorship (centralized or distributed), ruleset (loose or strict), and coherence (less plot or more plot.)

Those are some good axes, but they don’t really represent the full space of possible variations between projects. Of course, the set of possible axes is infinite: How much of a project takes place online? How many participants does it scale to? How many cats were tangentially involved in the creation process? Etc. The question is, how do you choose which axes are salient enough to include in this sort of framework? Stacey might have had certain criteria in mind, but unfortunately, he didn’t explicitly share them. He sort of implies that he’s looking at properties that exist independently of specific media, and focusing mainly on abstracted patterns of behaviour rather than material details. That strategy makes sense, but it doesn’t exclude seemingly relevant properties like scale. Is a project geared to handle millions not fundamentally different from one geared to handle dozens? If someone were to really build on Stacey’s ideas, I’d say this is the way to do it: refine and justify the choice of axes.

One of the other interesting things about Stacey’s analysis is the way he situates the space of chaotic fiction as being connected to the larger trend of participatory online culture in general. This is certainly an apt observation. My question is, what exactly is the relationship between these spaces? Do they exist alongside each other, or is one within the other? How much overlap is there? Tellingly, if you treat “coherence” simply as a measure of structure, rather than a measure of plot, you get a space which very clearly includes projects like Wikipedia and GNU. Stacey has constructed a very thin barrier between what he calls chaotic fiction and virtually the entire sphere of participatory projects. In this model, all that distinguishes an ARG from a collaborative encyclopedia is the presence of narrative — and narrative being a fairly subjective concept, that’s not much of a distinction. Far from being a bad thing, all this means is that the ARG-definition controversy is inherently very silly, something which Stacey himself implied very strongly in his essay.

Enough theory. A framework isn’t very interesting unless you actually try to frame things within it, something that only Stacey has actually done so far (to my knowledge.) Stacey framed various projects within each individual axis, but when you’re in a multidimensional space what’s really neat is the interaction between axes. With 3 axes, you’ve got 8 sectors, each of which can be construed as a distinct category. Looking at each of these categories ought to be an interesting thought experiment. Of course, this is a ruthlessly mathematical way of looking at things, but I’ll save that critique for a later post wherein I refute everything I’m currently saying on the basis of postmodernity.

So, just for fun, let’s take a look at a few sectors in this space of chaotic fiction. In particular, those where distributed authorship lives, because that’s all that’s worth talking about anyway these days, right?*

1. Distributed authorship, loose ruleset, low coherence. People sort of just do whatever they want. Absolute anarchy is (arguably) not particularly worth exploring, but finding a magic balance with just enough rules and just enough coherence can lead to some highly empowering and compelling experiences. I’d argue that Second Life inhabits this space — it’s really quite chaotic, and despite the presence of a shared world, there is very little about the world itself that actually encourages any sort of normalized behaviour. There aren’t many examples of other scaled environments that allow users to do almost anything, probably because it’s hugely risky and challenging to give so many people so much freedom. On the other hand, there’s a plethora of small groups who create their own personalized spaces for these sorts of activities. Kupopolis, for example, is used by about 20 writers to write stories within a shared universe — there aren’t many rules because there aren’t many people. Unbounded freedom on a large scale is a tough thing to harness, but I’d wager that there’s a lot of room for Big Ideas that could pull it off.
2. Distributed authorship, loose ruleset, high coherence. It’s somewhat difficult to think of a system for distributed authorship that could facilitate high coherence without a significant set of rules. About the closest I can get are the “interactive story” communities like Kupopolis — a small group of authors trying to create something reasonably coherent, where strict rules are unnecessary because of participants’ like-mindedness. It’s an interesting concept, though: let users run free while somehow compiling their output into something that is greater than the sum of its parts. ARGs get rather close. They tend rather closely to centralized authorship and a strict ruleset, but one can certainly imagine an ARG with less of each. The trick, I expect, is finding a minimal but effective management/planning strategy that’s capable of coordinating emergent, unstructured behaviour without getting in its way. Well, duh, that sounds like a cinch. Arguably, something like Wikipedia does this well — but the extent to which that sort of output is coherent is debatable. Still, an ARG that borrowed patterns from Wikipedia would be rather intriguing.
3. Distributed authorship, strict ruleset, low coherence. This is pretty much the baseline for Webs Two Point Oh, and is consequently a space littered with the detritus of a million mediocre startups. Consider your standard YASNS (Yet Another Social Networking Service): it’s built entirely on the users’ backs, you’re pretty limited in what you can do on it, and ultimately there’s not really much to it. The idea is to reach some sort of level of coherence — a point at which the swamp of unassociated data comes together into something magical, like when you look at clusters in Flickr. Most don’t succeed…
4. Distributed authorship, strict ruleset, high coherence. …but when they do succeed, it’s something to get excited about. Of course, the kinds of projects I’m talking about don’t strictly fit into the realm of chaotic fiction. But, as I argued in my previous overlong essay, there’s a lot to be learned from the internet at large.

*My other reason for not probing the entire space in detail is the fact that I wrote most of this post about a month ago, and only came back to it now. You ever try starting a lengthy blog post and coming back to it after several significant life events? It doesn’t work. No thanks.

]]> http://www.mobilefono.com/2007/10/01/speaking-of-chaotic-fiction/feed/ http://www.mobilefono.com/2007/08/17/day-of-the-figurines/ http://www.mobilefono.com/2007/08/17/day-of-the-figurines/#comments Sat, 18 Aug 2007 01:48:19 +0000 Fono Pervasive Gaming Art http://www.mobilefono.com/2007/08/17/day-of-the-figurines/ (x-posted from Wero Notes)

Blast Theory is an artists’ collective in the UK that does a lot of work with pervasive gaming, amongst other things. They are mainly famous for their games Uncle Roy All Around You and Can You See Me Now, both of which are games played in cities in small groups of online players and street players who are equipped with fancy schmancy GPS-enabled PDAs. The games are very innovative and creative, but they are not consumer products and are not available for general consumption (not that that’s a bad thing, I’m just saying.)

The reason I mention them is largely because one of their other works, Day of the Figurines, has got me thinking. In this piece, there’s an actual miniature village full of figurines.

To begin the game, players are invited to create their own figurine: to name it, answer questions about its past and how it is represented to other players. They then see him or her placed in the town. Thereafter participation in the game is via mobile phone. Players receive a minimum of one text a day updating them on the progress of their figurine and are invited to make increasingly challenging decisions over the fate of themselves and other players in response to deteriorating circumstances. Players can join or leave the game at any time. One of the key aspects of this new form of artwork is that it is situated within players’ daily lives and can be accessed at any time.

This is interesting to me because players can participate in a narrative space through lightweight, structured interactions.

I love the idea of narratives that are molded through audience participation, and I love the idea of open source worlds like Saijo City. The problem in my mind has always been finding a model of participation that is relatively undemanding but still significant. On the one hand, very unstructured bottom-up participation, such as the kind practiced by fan-fic writers, is hugely compelling to those involved but ultimately pretty inaccessible. On the other hand, highly structured top-down participation, such as being able to vote for who the protaganist of a TV show should date, is cool but not very rewarding for the individual decision-maker. Day of the Figurines points to an interesting middle ground: participation that is structured and accessible, but still acknowledges the unique contributions of individuals. Despite the lowkey nature of participation, players still have a meaningful investment in the world, as manifested by their tangible avatar. Of course, there’s no reason to stop it there — you could have a sliding scale of interaction, moving from the structured to the freeform, so that engaged players who want to contribute more can do so.

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