Let’s Play!

Ooh it’s been a while since I last blogged. Much news at this end (more of that later). I’m off on holiday for two weeks where I will be blissfully offline, then updates and news-a-plenty will resume. However, in the mean time, the lovely and very talented John Willshire is working on a very exciting project with Cadbury called pocketgame, to encourage lots of people to have fun making games. Which is a bloody cracking thing in my book. He very kindly asked me if I would join some very smart and generally awesome people on the pocketgame judging panel, which I’m dead chuffed about.

We’re contributing over at the pocketgame blog, so crossposted below is my latest post all about social games:

 

Hello pocketgamers. Like my esteemed colleague Mark Earls, I’m definitely not a game designer. Or a game expert. Though I love games, gaming and most of all, plain and simple play. Stuff that’s just fun to do.

Stuff that’s fun to do together. Lots of games are great fun by yourself, no question, but playing with other people adds a whole other dimension.

Games have always been a social activity – and it’s awesome that more and more digital (console, mobile, computer, whatever device you choose to play on) games are becoming increasingly social, allowing you to play with – or against – both friends and strangers.

The term ‘social games’ has come to refer to social-networked-enabled web-based games, like Farmville or Scrabulous – which are absolutely ace, but it’s a bit of a shame to think of such a narrow meaning. Any game you play with other people is a social game – such as those illustrated in this fantastic infographic illustrating the history of social games from game designer Jon Radoff

And of course, you’ll notice when you look at this image that loads of these games aren’t ones that require loads of technology. They’re real life games, played with real physical things, with real physical people. And there’s something pretty magical about playing with your mates right there and then, together. Sure, you can all be sitting in the same room playing Xbox, and that’s ace. But it’s also pretty ace to be able to play a casual, pick-up game, that doesn’t require a shedload of specialist equipment, something you can just pick and play with, for that spontaneous moment of fun.

And wouldn’t it be just brilliant if that something was something you could, say, fit in your pocket…

I’m really excited about seeing what you all come up with. Let’s play!

July 6, 2010 in Communication | Permalink | 1 Comment

The Value of Real



[ photo courtesy ]

Digital technology is ace. The post-digital world is hugely exciting.

But sometimes what you really really want is world 1.0 – physical stuff. Doesn’t need to be internet-enabled, internet-of-things real stuff. Just real see-it and touch-it and take-it-home-with you physical stuff.

Now, I love me some online shopping. Most of the time I’d be happy not to have to schlep round the shops, and the more I can order online the better.

Except when I don’t.

Sometimes you really want goods you can touch and take home with you. And a real person you can talk to.

We all know that certain categories are always going to demand a physical retail presence, no matter how much their online sales may also flourish.

But with a physical store presence comes the assumption that you’ll be able to choose a product, buy it there and then, and take it home with you. Especially if the store in question also has an online presence – if you wanted to get the product delivered, chances are you’d have ordered it online. Obviously within reason: just because John Lewis sells sofas in-store doesn’t mean I expect to take it home with me.

But take electricals. We wanted to buy a telly. Ideally we wanted to choose one in-store and take it home with us there and then.

Except we couldn’t. No matter which big consumer electricals store on the big soulless retail park in Tottenham we went into, not one had a TV we could take home. You could only order for home delivery – and in any case they’d then advise you to go online to make your purchase to get the online-only price. The shop purported to be a shop, but really it was just a physical window to an online store.

So we went home, sans telly, and ordered it online.

On the day it was supposed to be delivered, it was chucking it down with snow. The country had ground to a halt. So understandably, we thought our delivery might be held up or cancelled.

So I thought it would be prudent to call up and find out if the delivery was likely to be affected by the weather. Except that there was no way I could do this. The automated system didn’t want to deal with any queries that didn’t fit into its allocated boxes. There was no way I could actually speak to an actual human being. I even tried the sneaky ‘press 0 to bypass everything and go straight to an operator’ trick, but to no avail. The system was fully automated and tough luck if you had a query that didn’t fit into the questions it was set up to answer.

As it happened, the delivery van arrived and we got our telly. It’s brill. Its HD goodness is fab for games and blu-ray. Lovely stuff.

But buying it wasn’t. Sometimes we just want a physical shop where we can buy what we went in for, instead of having to wait in all day for a delivery which will obviously right at the very end of the delivery slot.

And sometimes you just want a real human being to speak to about a query. Going through an automated system to get there might be a pain in the arse, but as long as you can get to someone who might be able to help you, it’s just about bearable.

Amazon is said to be considering establishing a high street presence, to allow customers to collect bigger items such as TV and PCs rather than have them delivered (along the lines of the totally awesome Argos reserve-and-collect system). Amazon have denied this rumour, but as more and more high-street retailers shift their business online, it can’t be just me that’s missing the retailer of old where you could actually take the goods home with you.

It’s a salutory lesson that although the digital world is fantastic, and all the shiny new opportunities it presents are exciting and open a wealth of doors, it’s crucial for brands not to forget about the importance of physical experiences with real live human beings.

(cross-posted to the WARC blog)

April 13, 2010 in Brands | Permalink | 2 Comments

Ada Lovelace Day – celebrating Brenda Laurel

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science, founded by Suw Charman-Anderson and named after the pioneering Ada Lovelace – widely regarded as the world’s first computer programmer, and described by Charles Babbage as the Enchantress of Numbers (as well as the star of Sydney Padua’s incredible The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage web comic).

Along with over 1500 other bloggers, I’ve pledged to write about a woman in technology that I admire.

 

Brenda Laurel is a designer, researcher and writer who focuses on interactive narrative, human-computer interaction and cultural aspects of technology. She’s described by TED as having been part of ‘several major revolutions in the way humans use computers: virtual reality, interactive narratives and gaming’.

She’s an incredible polymath who’s brought together an understanding of both arts and science – her groundbreaking 1991 book Computers as Theatre explored the incredible potential for interactive fiction created by computing technology. She’s worked as a software designer and researcher at some of the most influential Silicon Valley companies of the time (including Atari and Activision) and established herself as a talented entrepreneur through the founding of organisations like Telepresence Research (an R&D company specialising in virtual reality & remote presence), Interval Research (a legendary Silicon Valley think tank studying the connection between tech and everyday life) and Purple Moon (dedicated to producing software and communities to engage pre-teen girls). She describes the book she wrote about the experience of running Purple Moon, Utopian Entrepreneur, as “a guide to doing socially positive work in the context of business.”. The list of awesome – in both the ‘amazingly cool’ and ‘truly awe-inspiring’ senses – accomplishments goes on.

One of the standout pillars of her legacy for me is her focus on game design for girls. Much of her work stemmed from the fact that computer games seemed to be designed squarely by men, for men – leading her to research how and why girls played, their motivations, their mindsets and their values; and how to develop games to meet their wants and needs.

I love that she’s a techie and an artist, a thinker and a do-er, and has refused to be boxed in. She’s been dubbed a “digital diva”, living simultaneously in the worlds of theatre and computers, and in doing so bringing new perspectives on how we should think about the way people interact with products and services, and the way we should design these accordingly:

She brings a fresh perspective to the commonly-thought cold relationship between humans and their machines. She argues for the ubiquitousness of the technology, to the point that it resembles the kind of unity between theatre and audience, where the audience members becomes a part of the action, moving towards a single, united goal. She is also known as a proponent for the socialisation of technology to put it in the hands of ordinary people who find ways of using it to express themselves.

[ courtesy ]

 

Laurel shares some of the gems from her research in this 1998 TED video – it’s well worth a look:

 

 

Thanks Brenda – you’re showing the world how it’s done.

March 24, 2010 in Inspiration | Permalink | 6 Comments

It’s Time To Play – Introducing GameCamp 2010

Two years ago I wrote about a corking day talking about games, fun & play with a bunch of super-smart people at GameCamp 08.

The good news is that GameCamp is back for 2010!

It’s a one-day event for people interested in games, and interesting people in gaming.

We believe games aren’t just playthings; they’re one of the most important media of our civilization. Games have reach and power as great as those of video, music or the printed word. GameCamp is a forum to talk about this most powerful medium: how we make it, how we use it, how we can make gaming better, and even how we can make things better through gaming.

It’s an unconference, modelled on the BarCamp series of developer events. Which means there are no keynotes or invited speakers. No PowerPoint. But there will be fantastic discussions and conversations. There are no spectators at GameCamp – only participants.

Thanks to the lovely folks at eBay, GameCamp 2010 will be held at Whittaker House (the home of eBay, PayPal and Gumtree.com) in Richmond, London, on Saturday, May 8.

GameCamp is free to attend, however due to space restrictions, attendance will be strictly limited to 150 tickets. We’ll be issuing several tranches of tickets to give everyone a chance to sign up, so don’t panic if you couldn’t make the first release, there will be another chance to register.

If you want to attend then the first tranche of tickets will be released via EventBrite at noon on Friday 12th March.

For more information see the GameCamp website; for updates as they happen (including ticketing info), follow GameCamp on Twitter or Facebook (NB RSVP-ing on Facebook doesn’t guarantee attendance – you’ll still need to register via EventBrite!)

The event’s being organised by, er, me – as part of a team with the fantastic James Wallis, Mark Simpkins, Philip Trippenbach, Rachel Clarke & Rain Ashford – and we’re hoping to make it even more awesome GameCamp 08.

On a more practical note, we’ve got some fantastic sponsors on board, but as my co-conspirator James noted, we’re still looking for some more sponsors to come on board. If you’re in a position to offer us some funds to cover the cost of, say, lunch and thereby earning the love and admiration of an important & influential sector of the British games community then please drop me or anyone else on the committee a line – katy at gamecamp dot org dot uk).

Get your game on!

March 9, 2010 in Misc | Permalink | 1 Comment

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