[From the Red Herring blog, 2005]
1.
I was about ten when I saw my first video game. As a kid obsessed with science fiction, astronomy, and computers, Nolan Bushnell's Pong seemed like the coolest object this side of a telescope clock drive. Growing up, I would spend more hours (and quarters) playing video games than I like to think about: the worlds of Defender and Xevious came be to as familiar to me as my backyard, but a lot more exciting.
Like most kids of my generation, I thought of video games as an alternative reality. Not only were the games other worlds: arcades were inevitably dark, slightly space-agey places populated entirely by teenagers.
Of course, games have come a long way since then. In technical terms, video games are more complex, realistic, open-ended, and intense than in my boyhood, but they're fundamentally conservative technologies. Despite all the changes around the edges—the better graphics, the spectacular violence, the five hundred-button controllers that you have to learn to use in utero—they're still worlds in boxes, ultrasophisticated versions of arcade games or personal computers of old. Playstation and Xbox are incremental improvements over Galaxian and Pac Man: granted, they're very big increments, but my 10 year-old self would have no trouble grokking a Playstation.
2.
But the game world is poised to undergo a revolution. In the coming decade, everything that I took for granted about video games will change. They won't be alternate realities; they won't be confined to edgy spaces with names like Station Break; and they won't be arcade-like experiences. We'll have games without frontiers.
To appreciate this revolution and what it'll mean, we need to take video games serious. Too often, games don't get no respect. They're easy to dismiss as a social problem, to criticize as a waste of time, or insult as the lowest form of pop culture. But games matter. Video games have driven innovations in hardware, software, and interface design. For better or worse, they're big business, and major sociological phenomena. (This isn't just the case in the United States: the Korean multiplayer game Lineage has about 4 million subscribers—almost ten percent of the population.) Games metaphors are woven through our language, and structure the way we behave at work and approach relationships.
And playing video games isn't always the isolating, alienating experience that some critics make it out to be: LAN parties bring together game players, and Lineage clans will take over Internet cafes for an afternoon, playing together in both virtual and physical space. People can be just as creative around games as they are within them.
Multiplayer games have already capitalized on this fact. There are hardly any successful PC games that don't have multiplayer capability, and massive online games like Everquest are creating a new art form out of persistent, open-ended worlds. They show just how much farther we can take video games before we exhaust their potential.
3.
The future of video games will be driven by two kinds of changes: a proliferation of interfaces between games and players' bodies; and an integration of game-worlds and the real world.
It's strange that video games and exercise equipment have never gotten together. There have been a few exercise bikes with cycling video games, or video game controllers that attach to exercise equipment. But only in the last few years have we seen games that involve players' bodies, not just their thumbs. Dance Dance Revolution, in which players copy dance moves on a sensor-laded pad rather than a handheld controller, was the breakout game in this genre. Previous attempts to marry exercise and video games had been failures: exercise equipment companies couldn't make compelling games, video game companies couldn't figure out how to build interesting alternative input devices, and early products remained too expensive for the mass market. DDR showed that there was a serious market for games that involved more of our bodies, and that such games had an attraction that went beyond video games' traditional young, testosterone-heavy core market. In fact, for some players, DDR isn't a "video game," but serious exercise—a substitute for health clubs, not a competitor to Halo.
Other companies are building on the concept of video game as an exercise machine. Yourself!Fitness, which was released this fall, is aimed squarely at women. Some of its elements are drawn from exercise videos: it has a peppy soundtrack, encouraging instructor (Maya), and a variety of exotic workout locations (a desert resort, a Matrix-like dojo). But it also creates an exercise program based on your physical shape and fitness goals, chooses exercises that use exercise equipment (hand weights, Pilates ball) you already have, introduces new routines over time, and adjusts its difficulty depending on your performance. It's not a deeply interactive game in the way DDR is, but it uses customization to create an interesting variety, and to deepen the relationship that players have with Maya and the regimen.
4.
Some electronic games are recasting the relationship between bodies and game-play. Others use things in the real world as resources for games that you play partly in the real world, partly in game space.
The great example is geocaching, a game that draws on GPS and the Web. Shortly after the U.S. government sharpened civilian GPS signals (they had previously been kept purposely fuzzy for security reasons), people began hiding "caches"—usually just a few simple objects in a box—in various places, posting approximate geographical coordinates and hints about a cache's precise location on the Geocaching Web site (at www.geocaching.org). People who find a cache may take an object, leave an object, and note their find online.
The game is completely unregulated and unsubsidized, anarchic in the classic sense. It's also growing like mad. Today, there are hundreds of thousands of players and tens of thousands of caches worldwide. The caches themselves now constitute their own field, and are supporting the growth of new games: geobugs, for example, requires players to move marked tokens between caches, with the aim of fulfilling some goal—having a bug visit all 50 U.S. states, for example, or every country in the EU.
Interestingly, in its early days, geocaching was described as a kind of nerd treasure hunt, an activity that would appeal to gadget freaks, or the kind of sportsmen who buy radar for their fishing boat or military surplus laser sights on their deer rifles. More recently, however, as the cost of GPS units has fallen and the number of geocaching sites has grown, the game has been redefined as outdoor family fun—a way to get kids away from the Playstation and into the world.
Other games combine the power of the Web with information that resides in things. In Where's George (www.wheresgeorge.com), players tag dollar bills with a message to register a bill's serial number online, and to record the date and place they found the bill. The result is a kind of travel history of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even more fanciful is Skannerz, a handheld game based on the premise that warring alien species inhabit bar codes, thanks to an out-of-control nanotechnology weapon (I know, not the world's most linear plot line). Players build characters by scanning UPC codes, which are on virtually everything, and "collecting" weapons and talents (a quest that anyone exposed to role-playing games will immediately recognize).
5.
Geocaching uses the Web and GPS to help players find (and find out about) objects in the real world. Other games treat the physical world as a kind of game-board, and make physical proximity an element of the gaming experience.
Not surprisingly, the most popular of these games are played on cell phones. Mogi is a treasure hunt game in Japan, in which players navigate their way through Tokyo to locations where they can pick up electronic prizes. There's no physical good to collect—the prizes are virtual—but you can't get them sitting at your computer. Scandanavia's Battlebots, in contrast, operates not in specific physical places, but in social spaces: players cluster into cafes or parks to pit their bots against each other.
From a technical standpoint, these are relatively simple games: no one is hooked on Mogi or Battlebots by the bleeding-edge graphics, or the compelling storyline. What seems to be appealing about them is two other things. First, they fill idle time. Lots of Battlebots games happen on trains or buses, and Mogi prizes tend to be near public transportation stops. Second, they find serendipity in the random, often anonymous experience of traveling and living in modern urban cities. The person three seats down on the morning train may become your sworn digital enemy, but at least you've connected.
6.
So what will games look like in the future? Some people will continue to prefer the world of first-person shooters, and will look to their Playstations or Xboxes as a retreat from the world. On the other hand, other players will take electronic games more deeply into the real world, and create new kinds of games.
One obvious move will be to map video games into physical places. Imagine, for example, college students creating Everquest spaces that are only accessible on-campus; overlaying Doom 3 on a building, turning a student center or parking structure into a monster-infested death zone; or creating game challenges that can only be played in subway stops when more than four players are present. Games like Everquest and the Sims have shown that players are capable of exercising remarkable ingenuity creating online spaces and resources; giving them the ability to apply these skills in the real world could exponentially multiply a game's variety, difficulty and appeal. It would also broaden a franchise beyond the console, and bring in players who would never consider sitting down in front a screen.
Another move will be to create games that blend virtual and real economies. As economist Edward Castronova has discovered, players in massively multiplayer games may create thousands of dollars of wealth, and build elaborate underground economies in which they trade virtual goods—often using real money. There economies are currently black markets—game companies claim to own everything in their games—but eventually, a smart company will realize that this phenomenon is a feature, not a bug. But this doesn't have to be confined to trades of money for virtual goods: you might redeem frequent flyer miles for Elven chain-mail, earn strength points for your avatar by reaching your real-world fitness goals, or be awarded secret powers after making the dean's list.
The examples of geocaching and Where's George show that we should also take a broader view of what a successful game can be. They needn't be like board games of sports, with end-points and clear winners; geocaching isn't a competitive sport. For example, imagine a courier game consisting of teams of players scattered around the country. The objective of the game would be to get a digital package—which can only be passed between players via Bluetooth-enabled PDAs and cell phones, say—from one end of the country. Each player would be required to make contact with the package (so I couldn't just take it with me on a trip I'd already planned); but teams can recruit others to carry the package from city to city. In such a game, the fun wouldn't be in the rapid-fire play, but in the challenge of enlisting and organizing teammates and friends.
The trouble with tunnel vision is that it leads to tunnel design. We are designing all sorts of information technologies that make things more efficient, but not necessarily more effective. (John Seely Brown)
A few weeks ago a friend of mine announced that she was taking a break from Web 2.0.* She was going to prune her Twitter feeds, reduce her time on Facebook, and cut back on her time on IM. She needed to pay more attention to her real life, and to real relationships. Recollecting friends from high school and college was interesting for a while (Web 2.0 is a time machine for my generation, after all), but a large volume of acquaintances can't provide the same satisfaction and support as a handful of friends you can see-- or who can take the kids out to the park for an hour. Getting Tweets on her cell phone was also a poor combination of intrusiveness and minutiae. And there was laundry to be done.
As one of the digital lemmings who pushed her over the edge, the episode got me thinking. Why do I Tweet? After thinking about it for a while, I've come the conclusion that while it's certainly popular with lots of my friends, I have a couple serious questions about Twitter, as a writer and a reader.
First, I have to admit that my regular life isn't interesting enough to justify throwing out real-time updates about it. Nobody needs to know that I've just convinced the kids to make their own breakfasts, or have come back from lunch at Zao Noodles, or am trying to decide where to go on this weekend's hike. The exception is when I'm on the road or doing something else unusual: at those times, my life-- or my world-- might get interesting enough document in detail.
There's also the problem that I'm not sure what I get out of my own tweets. One of the signal features of Web 2.0, I think, is that it's not just broadcasting: it's self-documentation. Some of my friends use Twitter to jot down little notes about what they're reading. But for me, the absence of tags in Twitter makes it hard for me to find things I've looked at long enough to know I should look for them again later, or to keep track of citations; del.icio.us is still the better tool for that. (I suppose you could replicate a little of that functionality with #tags, but that's a workaround, and there's no auto-complete....) And I'm not sure I've gone back and looked at my own Twitter stream, ever. My regular blog is valuable because it's a way to keep track of my own life; this one has been invaluable for recording and trying out ideas for my book; my kids' blog has been a place where I could store huge amounts of detail about my kids' childhoods-- those pictures of them doing cute but ordinary things, or saying wonderful things, or just growing up. Tossing out tweets feels like shooting sparks from a wheel: the sparks may be entertaining, but it's the object you're shaping with the wheel that's really valuable.Finally, as a reader, I find that seeing the raw feed of even a few people's lives can quickly become overwhelming. In the last 24 hours, a relatively quiet time after Thanksgiving, I got 34 tweets; during a busy time-- when people are traveling or at SXSW-- I can get several times that, easily. There's an argument to be made, as Clive Thompson has done, that the minutiae of tweets resolve into ambient awareness... but as it's currently designed, the system still puts big demands on readers, who have to constantly read their friends' Twitter streams, develop a sense of the rhythm of their posting, and build up a model of their real-world state from their online behavior. In a world in which the challenge is not to broadcast a lot of information, but to generate a lot of meaning, the stream-of-existence quality of tweeting makes it easy to mistake detail for intimacy, quantity of tweets for quality of expression or depth of understanding. As a preview of the world of ubiquitous computing and ambient awareness, Twitter is an interesting experiment (an experiment that's being conducted my hundreds of thousands of people on themselves and their friends.)
This is actually not a bad lesson for designers. Creating ambient devices isn't about pushing information; presence isn't just about connection. Connecting people virtually is as much about quality and meaning in the digital world as it is in the real world.
Which is not to say that Twitter is hopeless. Twitter is strongest as a platform for conversation and reportage. It's easy to share a rapid fire of short notes at conferences, for example, and the final result-- assuming people are listening and paying attention-- can be useful. (I wonder if there are examples of Twitter being used by students in lecture classes?) A couple of the people I follow use it as much for pinging friends as for talking about what they're doing: for them, Twitter is a cross between the Facebook wall and a chat room. And I find Twitter useful for getting reactions to news events: I stopped watching the presidential debates this fall, for examples, after I realized that most of my friends were tweeting their reactions to them.
So what do I do with my Twitter stream? I'm not going to shut it down, because there are times when I'll want to provide moment-by-moment updates about what I'm doing ("Just cleared customs in Kai Tak! Where's the cab line?" "Have now been in Victoria Stations on four continents...."). But for me, when I do use it, the challenge will be to figure out how to write the Web 2.0 equivalent of Zen koans: to fit meaning into 140 characters, rather than to fight the limitations of the medium by posting a lot.
*After I started working on this piece, I got interested in what other people had written upon getting fed up with some service, technology, or channel. Turns out that the "declaration of zeroing" is almost a literary genre. I first became aware of it through David Levy (whose book I reviewed in the L.A. Times, and who gave a brilliant talk about this stuff a couple years ago), and his ideas of a digital sabbath and information environmentalism. A couple samples:
Edward Vielmetti on Twitter:
The basic idea is that in systems where there is an infinite capacity for the world to send messages to get your attention, the only reasonable queue that you can leave between visits to the system is zero, because if you get behind you will never, ever, ever catch up gradually. Never. No matter how much time you put into it, there will always be more to do, and you will lose sleep over it.
Carmen Joy King, after quitting Facebook:
The amount of time I spent on Facebook had pushed me into an existential crisis. It wasn’t the time-wasting, per se, that bothered me. It was the nature of the obsession – namely self-obsession. Enough was enough. I left Facebook.
Donald Knuth on email:
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.
On the other hand, I need to communicate with thousands of people all over the world as I write my books. I also want to be responsive to the people who read those books and have questions or comments. My goal is to do this communication efficiently, in batch mode --- like, one day every three months.
Mark Bittman on his "secular Sabbath:"
I do believe that there has to be a way to regularly impose some thoughtfulness, or at least calm, into modern life — or at least my version. Once I moved beyond the fear of being unavailable and what it might cost me, I experienced what, if I wasn’t such a skeptic, I would call a lightness of being. I felt connected to myself rather than my computer. I had time to think, and distance from normal demands. I got to stop.
And of course there's at least one blog about turning off all electronics one night a week. "Because of course," Ariel Stallings writes, "I can’t unplug without blogging about it! (Irony, is that you?)"
David M. Levy, Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age (New York: Arcade, 2002).
When I got the chance to review Scrolling Forward, I went to Kepler's, my local bookstore, to pick up a copy. I had seen a stack there a few days earlier, but by the time I arrived it had moved, and I had forgotten the title. I asked at the information desk about a book that had been on the "New Science and Technology" table that past weekend, had orange and blue on the cover, and was about documents. They couldn't remember the title either, but they remembered the book, and knew the most likely place their stock of half a dozen copies had been moved. So, despite not knowing the author or title, we found it in a matter of seconds.
Drawing on knowledge of its recent location, jacket design, general subject, and the way books circulate between display tables and shelves to find a particular volume may seem disorganized and baroque. It is, but it's how most of us work. Our complicated relationship with documents-- everything from Post-Its to encyclopedias-- is the subject of David Levy's Scrolling Forward: Thinking About Documents in the Digital Age. Levy, a computer science Ph.D. and calligraphy, is well-placed to compare the old and new. His books is organized around broad subjects-- reading, writing, and the like-- but each chapter is a meditation, written more on the this- reminds-me-of-that principle, rather than something more formal. Such an approach can occasionally get out of control, but at its best the book's style effectively juxtaposes printed and electronic documents, and calculates the gains and losses of moving information from one medium to the other.
The very fact that Levy is interested in this question indicates a growing maturity in our attitudes towards digital materials. A decade ago, the first important works on hypertext and multimedia-- George Landow's Hypertext and Jay David Bolter's The Writing Space-- declared that thanks to the computer, the author was dead, the reader reigned supreme, the book was doomed, and linear thinking was passe. They were widely praised within academic circles, and provoked defenders like Sven Birketts to assert the eternal value of the book. The debate that has followed has largely been beside the point, because it misses several things that Levy wisely considers in depth.
First, arguments over "the future of the book" focus on books, particularly high literature. But we live in a world saturated with texts: we might not read Dante every today, but we'll read street signs, scan newspapers, select from restaurant menus, answer e-mail, ignore ads, type URLs. To drive the point home, Scrolling Forward begins not with a discussion of encyclopedias or the Bible, but a... deli receipt. Even something so utterly inconsequential turns out draw upon thousands of years of history and complex social institutions, not to mention a host of technologies. "Over the centuries a complex network of institutions and practices has grown up to create and maintain meaningful and reliable paper documents," (162) Levy argues. This is as true of receipts as it is of Rilke: "To be a receipt is to be connected to cash registers, sellers, buyers, products, expense reports, the IRS, and so on." (29) It takes a village to make a document.
Levy's receipt was a hybrid, a printed record generated by an electronic system; therein lies a second big point. It turns out that documents have sloshed between electronic and printed form for decades. Checks and airline tickets were computer-printed from the 1950s. Mainframe computer publishing systems were developed in the 1960s and 1970s for newspapers and other high-volume publishers. (It is instructive that the early adopters weren't book publishers, but companies that had high-volume, varied, or rapidly- changing material. The Encyclopedia Britannica's publishing system was adapted from one developed for the Jehovah's Witnesses, who published countless pamphlets in dozens of languages.) In the 1980s, word processors allowed writers to create digital texts. In the 1990s, web browsers gave readers direct access digital works. This last, and most-publicized step, was a culmination, not a revolution. Seen in this light, the whole "print versus digital" debate seems irrelelvant.
The fact that the debate over "the future of the book" took off in the last decade suggests that what's at stake isn't just materials, but practices and cultural institutions. We pick up cues about the utility and reputability of printed sources from the publisher, the feel of the paper, even from a document's location in a library or bookstore; such cues have yet to be reproduced consistently online, and the social networks that add value to printed works weren't threatened by the computerization of typesetting and printing. Documents, Levy argues, aren't just information; they're also material things and cultural artifacts. Even digital documents aren't "just" immaterial bits. As Levy notes, "the ones and zeros of our digital representations... are embedded in a material substrate no less than are calligraphic letterforms on a piece of vellum." (156)
This is not to say that an electronic document can't have all the qualities of a printed one. It IS to say that those qualities can't be programmed as features in the next upgrade: they have to be created in the social world, and in the world of human practices and attitudes. Levy's concern is that we recognize that books and journals are much more than containers from which content can now be "liberated." They have influenced-- often to the good-- the way we read, organize our thoughts, and create order in our intellectual worlds.
From the always-snarky Sadly, No!
'[C]yberspace’ used to mean an interactive post-media nexus of transformative hyperrealities whose multi-dimensionalized datasphere you flew through as a bodiless post-human, via sitting in a farted-out desk chair typing on Usenet.