My evil Thinkpad took one look at all the Apple gear here at SXSW and threw a jealous fit, vengefully refusing to recognise the conference WIFI. Add that to the half-functionality of a European phone that I can’t put in data roaming mode, without paying an arm and a leg, and you have a perfect recipe for feeling like…. well, someone without an arm and a leg, actually. At a Ballet Camp.
I’m up late today, with so much to report about yesterday, including a ghost story. Which is appropriate, as the best baroom conversation of the evening was at the Driskill, the
Haunted Hotel on 6th street.
Let’s start with Hummingbirds.
Chris Thomas reported on the Blah Blah Blah panel, subtitled Why Words don’t Work. I didn’t see it, but wish I had. Dan Roam talked about the verbal mind vs the pictorial mind, likening them to the way that a fox hunts vs how a hummingbird gathers nectar. One is linear, object oriented, the other is circular. He says that you can never fully understand something unless you can both describe and draw it, and talked of how Einstein didn’t think verbally, and struggled to commit his ideas, which came to him in images, to paper.
I work with brilliantly creative writers, and brilliantly creative visual people. I get this. It makes sense.
According to Chris, Roam reveres the Hummingbird. Trivia: only the aztec king was allowed to wear the feathers of the hummingbird. They were hard to come by, very small, they were scarce and so valuable. And that Nazca line drawing of a bird — that would be the Hummingbird of course. All hail the new mascot of the visually creative mind!
The (barroom) discussion veered to presntation styles. Roam was a brilliant presenter. Joi Ito was terrible, despite the fact he presents al the time. Yet Ito’s presentation was packed dense with information, it just was delivered by a guy who would drink water on mike mid-sentence and appear sometime to forget the audience was there. I found Valery Casy, Designing for Sustainability, to be a mediocre presenter with a fantastic case. (She showed, incidentally, a Greenpeace image, below, which she used to describe the ewaste issue perfectly). But she made a cold and information-driven case.
Here case is sound:
The people in this room create the products and services that are shaping the global community. How can our vision start to take into account the narrative of what a sustainable society would be? What if we used games to engage people in complex thinking instead of dumbing things down. What if social media was really about social impact?
This came across as pandering to the interactive industry since she failed to make a case about why they were so important, other than the fact that they were her audience of the moment.
I agree with her entirely, she’s a fantastic ambassador for the cause, but there’s no heart in what she says, few emotive triggers, it’s all brain. I think she needs to up her game, and take a lesson from Kathy Sierra (NOT HERE THIS YEAR????) in how to get a crowd hyped and psyched and seduced.
The greatest presnter I saw yesterday was Andy Baio, who talked about Gaming the Crowd, his term for ways in which non-game tasks can be made more effective or enjoyable using game strategy and game technology.
He started with a hilarious adventure into what he called “Meta Games”:
Desert Bus. You drive from Las Vegas to Tuscon in a bus. Real time. Eight hours. Low fi no scenery, and the bus constantly veers to the right. And if you do the whole thing, you get one point.
Game over: when your character dies, he dies. Restart the game? Nope. He’s dead. There’s a funeral, his girlfriend cries. He’s dead. What, you thought he’d “come back to life??????”
Upgrade complete: You have to buy EVERYTHING. The Menu, the characters, the buttons, the ending of the game, the credits.
(
Andrew Davies has links to the videos of these games over at
his blog, along with better notes than I took. Worth a look.)
He then analyzed what he’d been showing: each took one aspect, lives, achievement, whatever, of the games we play, and exaggerate for comic effect.
But what he was interest in was taking aspects of the game world and putting them to work to drive change in th real world.
He gave examples. Target cashout terminals show a score for the last 10 transactions to the person behind the cash register. Management doesn’t use it, it’s feedback that makes the cashier compete with themselves, and indeed staff spontaneously turn their score sheets into contests.
Obama campaign: Used game technology for neighbor-to-neighbor canvassing.
Environmental change: additoinal leaves for how efficiently you are driving reported in your card dashboard.
Nike Plus: Showing not only your own running activity in an online environment, but allowing you to pit yourself against others in virtual races.
Treadmill showing how many hamburgers you burn off.
Journalism: Guardian in the UK opened up nearly 500,000 pages of documents expense claims etc from parliament. Asked their readers to help them read them all, looking for suspicous material. They had leaderboards, credit for how many pages you looked through, and turned it into a vast multiplayer game.
Fundraising: KickStarter. Crowdsourced funding of art projects. Creates an all or nothing win scenario. Meet your target or no funding. Once a project hits 80% it never fails. When it’s above 20 more than half of them succeed. When it’s all or nothing it’s highly motivating.
And that’s where Andy isolated the elements of great games, that you look to apply to great game-the-task efforts:
Feedback
Recognition
Goals
Community
He then took us through Ribbon Hero, which absurdly turns Microsoft Office into a game. Microsoft built all these features into Excel and Word, but knew the average user uses only 5% of the features. How to get them to explore and learn? Make a game. As you use more advanced features of the application your score goes up. Adds challenges based on what you do.
Make a table narrow, e.g.. Hints provided. Balloons when you do a step right. Extra points for maximum efficiency, minimum clicks. You can challenge your friends on Facebook. Passes all the points above.
Followers on Facebook turns it into a game: how popular can you be. (This reminds me of one of Laura Kenyon’s comment that Facebook is just one big “clever contest.”)
Leaderboards? Don’t do them. It results in some kind of conflict. (This is true, we saw gaming of the system in the Iceland whales pledge and wounded outspokenness from the gamists) Motivating for the top 100, demotivating for everybody else.
Farmville: behvioural psychology. Reciprocation, loss aversion — crops whither and die if you don’t come back. done with Tamogatchi, but when your friends can see your farm dying it gnaws at your brain.
Andy closed with a fantastic creed that games can change the world. They can drive personal, social, environmental change.
But he said they can also be used for EVIL. And then he showed us auction site SWOOPO. Every bid costs .75, every bid increases the cost of an item by one penny and every bid extends the auction. So somebody gets lucky and gets a Macbook pro for 100 bucks. Everybody else feels they should get one too, but they’re 20 bucks in and not winning on the bid they’re in, nobody knows how to calculate when to cut their losses and run, so they are sucked into a game in which the real winner is always Swoopo itself.
Moving on to the good, the Zero Waste workshop featured an inspirational look at how you can live your life in a closed cycle, wasting nothing, from Steven Mandzik, and this:
The prototype, start-small, bus-station-sized scooter-charging solar station from Sol Design Lab. Great project. I LOVE the ironic use of retro-fitted gas (petrol) pumps!
And Beth Kanter’s Crowdsourced Crowdsourcing workshop was a blast — it was as if the audience took a journey into Beth’s all-synapses-firing-in-crowd-mode-all-the-time brain. Very cool.
So, the ghost story: That bar I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, that Andrew and I were directed to by a kindly stranger? It doesn’t exist on google. I tried finding it by every search I could think of, and it shouldn’t have been hard: it’s a bar in a derelict house. On Willow Streeet. I tried Google Maps, but the picture is of the house when it was a house, with what looks like a “condemned” sign on it. We met lots of interesting folks at that bar, but nobody we have met before or seen since. I keep waiting to hear the story about “Oh, that bar on Willow street? Burned down years ago, during SXSW as a matter of fact. Hundred people died, and it’s said…” Andrew doesn’t believe they could have been ghosts, because their ironic t-shirts and designer haircuts and porkpie hats were all up to date. But me, I figure a crowd of SXSW ghosts would, you know… keep up.
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