Last year we worked on a Making Future Work commission from Broadway Nottingham and Arts Council England. We looked into Open Public Data in the East Midlands. We talked to data owners and compiled research (which we’re still compiling) with a view to making something with the data. We also wanted to help data owners see the value in opening their databases as well as artists, designers and developers see the potential for making new works and services out of them.

One dataset that we were successful in partially unlocking was the Arts Derbyshire membership database. This is a spreadsheet of artists, their practice and their location within the county. We were allowed to use the arts practice and location but not the name of the artist or organisation.

So, we made This Is Arts Derbyshire – a mapped visualisation of artists in the creative county.

It shows clusters of artists in a location. The more you zoom in, the more granular it becomes. You can browse by ‘Artist’ or ‘Organisation’ as well as by all the different practices that are registered.

There are a few interesting uses for this kind of thing that we can see already…

For one, it shows how creative the county is. In our experience working with people like the Creative Industries Network in Derby, the creative output of an area is intrinsic to its value – both in the appeal for people thinking about moving there and for the fiscal benefits of small businesses.

It can help people thinking about doing business there. The map can show a strong network or the lack of a service, depending on the business needs.

It can help local businesses find other businesses to work with nearby.

We’re interested to hear about other uses you can think of. Leave us a comment is you can think of anything.

We’re also interested in hearing from any other holders of data who would like to explore ways in which they can present their data like This Is Arts Derbyshire or our work on the Birmingham Civic Dashboard.

This year I am hosting the Symposium on play.

The digital revolution is over, the big ‘bit rush’ has passed, now we live in a post-digital era. Whether something is analogue or digital does not matter anymore. Digital and interactive are everywhere. Playing is a serious thing and meanwhile the digital migrates from the virtual reality to the objects around us. Along with MU and TU/e, STRP Festival will discuss the many forms of post digital culture.

Bruce Sterling is an American science fiction author, best known for his novels and his work on the Mirrorshades anthology, which helped define the cyberpunk genre.  Since 2003 he’s Professor of Internet studies at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

Dries Verbruggen studied at the the Design Academy Eindhoven. He is a multidisciplinary creator in fields ranging from interior, design and arts to architecture and video. Verbruggen is one of the co-curators of the MU exhibition

The Future of Art, KS12, Emergence Collective (GER) What are the defining aesthetics of art in the networked era? How is mass collaboration changing notions of ownership in art? How does micropatronage change the way  artists produce and distribute artwork? The Future of Art begins a conversation on these topics and invites your participation.

Russell Davies is partner at R/GA London (Agency for the Digital Age) and with the Really Interesting Group (RIG). He also founded The Newspaper Club. He writes columns for Campaign and Wired.

Mary Flanagan is artist, author, educator and designer. As Professor in Digital Humanities she’s associated with the Dartmouth College in New Hampshire (US).  Flanagan is the author of Critical Play: Radical game design.

Ben Schouten: The Role of Play Inaugural lecture by prof.dr. ben Schouten, department of Industrial Design,  Eindhoven University of Technology.

Oh and the music looks good too.

It’s but one week until this year’s Playful, and all the arrangements are coming together. It’s going to be a great day filled with talks from a wide variety of fields from gaming to doodling to science fiction writing. The one consistent strand is THE FUTURE – what is it? when will it get here?

We’ve got sci-fi author Pat Cadigan; app-maker Chief Wonka from Us Two; BBC Information Architect, Paul Rissen; Game Designer, Richard LeMarchand; Booming’s crazy social media provocateur, Marcus Brown; a doctor, a designer, more writers, and a load of illustrators.

The illustrators will be battling it out, doodling for their lives against each other in Sketch Tennis – our Overhead Projector and marker-pen inspired take in Coudal’s Layer Tennis.

We’ve also got a Stationery Shop, selling the finest high-quality imported pencils, sharpeners and notebooks from the foyer of Conway Hall, where the conference is held.

Last year we printed a Newspaper Programme via Newspaper Club. This year we’re going digital and have made a mobile web app for use on the day. There’s the programme, the shop, and speaker bios all navigable in a native-app like way, but without the rigmarole of app stores. This way we can keep everyone up to date with any last minute changes by updating the app live.

We’ve been working with Birmingham City Council for a while now on visualising their call-centre data so that the public can see how the council is performing in areas relevant to them. The project goes live today.

The dashboard was conceived in response to NESTA’s (the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts) Make It Local call out in 2010. NESTA wanted local authorities to team up with local developers to produce discrete open data projects with some of their data. Birmingham-based Mudlark took the basic idea for the dashboard to the council’s Digital Birmingham arm, and they embraced it. NESTA approved the joint pitch and the result is now live.

The original aim was to make public the data relating to what issues people are reporting to the council. The belief being that when looked at on a map and in real-time the accumulation of data would provide an insight into the issues facing both the citizens of Birmingham and the council itself as it responds to the issues raised.

It’s a pilot project, and we’re looking forward to seeing how it flies…

Links:
Birmingham Civic Dashboard
Nesta Project Page

Time is a big part of the Mudlark studio. Barnes is all about the future — jetpacks and that — whilst Richard is obsessed with time travel (even running a micro-publishing imprint for it). I’m stuck in time, having spent too much of it reading recollections of events and being an amateur eschatologist.

MemCode, then. MemCode is the formal, launched, face of the project formerly known to us in the studio as ‘Memory Thing’. It came from a lunchtime conversation about not needing to experience something to actually experience it. Sometimes finding out about an event, getting excited about it and buying the ticket and putting it in your diary – sometimes that’s the most exciting part. Or even false memories (implanted, perhaps, by something collective like cliche or advertising) such as “sitting on the bleachers drinking Coke from a glass bottle”.

The idea of the thing is enough, you can imagine the experience.

Memory is a funny, unpredictable, brilliant thing, and so is imagination. MemCode is designed to play around with this. It’s a story-toy, and part of our infrequent series of scalable models, following on from SCVNGR at the V&A and Derby[2061]. In essence, MemCode is a sort of short-form publishing project, with a large dollop of fictional context for good measure. You may recognise MemCode as the memory preserving/sales agency from Derby[2061], which was developed in parallel.

The first bit of the story is now live. It’s the corporate website of MemCode Plc. It’s better if you go and read it in MemCode’s own words, but here’s the story in brief:

1. MemCode are compiling your digital memories and formatting them for the experience of others.
2. Memories are being tested by ‘Readers’, and created by ‘Writers’. You can be a Reader or Writer, or both. Just sign up to the mailing lists on each page.
3. The first Memory they have developed is about to be released.
4. It will be released by e-mail this month to people on the ‘Alpha Readers Mailing List’

There are so many influences and inspirations behind this project. Some are buried deeply (Krapp’s Last Tape, Assassin’s Creed, Philip K. Dick, Murakami, Dirty Projectors’ version of Damaged), and some have been cropping up even as late as last week (Imaginary Image Blog, My Earliest Memory, Facebook Timeline, ten years of 9/11 propaganda, Thinking In Tumblr, the 20th Anniversary of Nevermind).

MemCode isn’t designed for truth. It’s designed for evocation. So, I’ll stop here.

Soon, MemCode will release their first memory, and we’ll see what people make of it. Much like Derby[2061], we’re not really sure what this is, exactly. We’ve got our own ideas, but we’ll leave that until you’ve seen the ‘thing’.

Some Links:

MemCode

Alpha Reader’s Mailing List

Submit A Memory

This week the Derby Mill will be pretty quiet. Greg, Richard and Toby are off to Amsterdam for the Picnic Festival. It’s the first time we’re going to the festival and we’re all pretty excited.

Toby is doing a talk on Chromaroma and a look at designing interactions across a city, as well as talking with Ben Hammersley and others on an urban futures panel.

As the 8th Season of Chromaroma kicks off, it is interesting to look back and see what is working well in the game, and what could we have focused on closer or done differently.

Greg and Richard will be propping up a table in the Marketplace, where they’ll be talking about what we do here at Mudlark including Such Tweet Sorrow, Chromaroma (again), Derby2061, Civic Dashboard and more. So come and say “Ayup” if you’re there, but don’t push them too hard as they’ll have been awake for eight hours by the time they get there in the morning.

We’ll be posting photos to Flickr, as well as tweeting as we experience the festival.

Throughout the summer we’ve been playing with existing locative platforms. A lot of the time we get asked by clients to build them something using location, but a lot of the time it’s either just too damn expensive for the project, or would take away from the project by being tacked on to an otherwise nice tight package. Frustrated by the cost of new development, we decided to spend time messing around with what’s already out there. Even though we don’t like them so much, we started playing with QR codes to create contextual portals of interactivity, rather than strictly GPS-enabled gubbins. These were cheap, quick, easy like digital sketches. We tried out SCVNGR in a museum (in the V&A!).

Two of my favourite things are stories and time-travel. Everyone at Mudlark knows this. I like the layer that historical knowledge can apply to the everyday. It’s what Augmented Reality endeavours to do. Sometimes you don’t need apps, and sometimes you do. There are a few out there that have tackled history, so we thought we’d have a go at the future.

It started with Derby Train Station. I think we were just testing to see if Foursquare would let you make something up. It did. So we made an alternate version of the train station “location”. It was some time in the future, when a Monorail (the first sign of the future) arrives in town, and Toby started adding ‘tips’ about Memory Ports in the carriages (this set ended up setting the tone for the whole of the project).

On the next trip out of town, I checked into the future Derby Monorail Station on Foursquare instead of the present day version. The ‘Tip’, rather than a commercial for something around me, felt more like a story. It felt like a nugget of another layer. It made me want to find more. Add to that a healthy dose of Pat Cadigan and Philip K. Dick and the next thing you know there’s a spreadsheet and collaborative Google Map open and we’re barn-storming what Derby will be like in fifty years.

A bit of time and a fair bit of thinking later, and it’s ready to road test. Fifty locations scattered around Derby city-centre and Darley Abbey (where our studio is) exploring what the city might be like in fifty years’ time. There’s a story in it to find. In fact there are a few. There’s the story of new industry, of civilian life in a new culture changed by it, the story of buildings being repurposed, of politics, of clock-making and time. All told by a female guide from the future.

Luckily, Foursquare have just released ‘Lists’, providing us with an easy way to share the whole story with users. Click here for that. We’re also making a Wiki for all the bits of story we’ve invented, and hope to add more to it if people add nuggets of their own to the locations.

Greg’s still on the fence about this project. He keeps asking me what ‘it’ is. So, for Greg:

It’s an experiment to find out the following:

Can you tell a story on Foursquare?
Will users engage with it?
Will Foursquare and it’s user base let you mess with the program?
How does it square up as the surface layer of a deeper story (tested out on the Wiki but possibly transferable to long-form print)?
Is it just me being me, or can checking in to things that aren’t there feel like the future (or past)?

It’s right on time to be something for a load of southerners to play with when they come to Derbyshire this week to immerse themselves in old industry at our Laptops & Looms three-day event, where we visit the historical heart of the Industrial Revolution, sitting in silk mills pondering the future.

The new exhibition, Talk To Me, focuses on “the communication between people and objects”, and how “designers write the initial script that enables the two parties to communicate effectively and elegantly and features projects that “establish an emotional, sensual, or intellectual connection with their users.”

Chromaroma was borne of a desire to harness existing interactions between people and technology to create something innovative and fun, and to establish that emotional pull between traveller and journey, between commuter and station-entry-RFID-swipe-point. In the last 3 months, players have lost weight by walking up escalators and getting off a stop early, as well as improving their knowledge ofLondon at street level by visiting the other stations near to where they live. All this fun and positive behavioural tweaks and changes – all because of a change in the way players view their Oyster Cards, the way they approach the transport network of their metropolis, their home.

Not only are we very honoured and proud to be in the MOMA, we’re also proud to be therein the company of Stamen, BERG, Evan Roth, and MIT SENSEable Cities Lab.

Here’s the exhibitions uniquely visualised programme. In the museum itself you can see Chromaroma concept art and videos. We wish we could make it over to catch the whole thing. We’ve got a while though, and so have you – the exhibition is on from now until 7th November.

So far, we’ve seen people tweeting MOMA asking if Chromaroma is, in fact, real!

Photo by Brendan Dawes

The Birmingham Civic Dashboard maps, times and categorises the requests or “contacts” – calls, visits, website enquiries and emails – that come in to Birmingham Council every day, through its Customer Relations Management Centre. The Dashboard went live 6th October 2011.

Users can explore the Dashboard by location, category and time, drilling in to what is effectively a living heatmap of the conversation between the residents and officers of Britain’s largest local authority.

Each coloured spot on the map represents one contact. Its colour indicates where in the council – which unit – the contact has been sent to.

Users can zoom in to the map to see where the contacts come from – plotted down to the first three letters of their post codes – or click on a list of the city’s ten constituencies and the four wards within each constituency. Some contacts have no location associated with them – categorised as “not assigned”.

Users can also examine which of Birmingham Council’s nine main service units was sent the contacts featured the your map view, and, by clicking on a unit in the left-hand column, see the sub-units – most of which have their own sub-units.

The Dashboard updates every 24 hours, adding to the searchable archive of contacts. On the Contacts per Hour graph, a line for each main unit plots the volume of contacts against time of day, refinable along with location and category.

The dashboard also expresses trends, the relative activity of different service units, volumes of contacts within categories and a sample “ticker” of recent contacts.

Mudlark designed and built the BCD for Digital Birmingham after a successful application to NESTA’S Make It Local programme. This was designed to encourage local authorities and local digital media companies to work together in exploring innovative use of open public data, creating innovative user centred applications and digital services for their local communities and promoting further collaboration and innovation within local authorities.

Website: www.civicdashboard.org.uk

We’re proper into museums. Not in a weird way, they just hold so much stuff inside to play with and explore. The amazing exhibitions and collections, when they hit that inspiration point, still only scratch at the surface of the deep well of connections and histories.

The web is changing that, but the web is something that museums aren’t – fast. Museums by their nature are slow and cautious. Slow so they don’t miss anything. Cautious so nothing breaks. Maybe.

The Victoria & Albert Museum (you know, that big one in South Kensington, London) are holding a Web Weekend to engage their Friday Late and weekend visitors with things that the web can do that they might not know about. We’re very proud to have been invited to add to the weekend.

We’ve got two things in there. They’re both web-based, but only one is manifested physically. Here’s an early version of it:

Chromaroma V&A from Matt Watkins on Vimeo.

It’s a re-jig of all the journey data played out in Chromaroma since our launch. There’s more than 150,000 swipes in there. Visitors to the museum control where they want to explore in London via an iPad. When a visitor clicks on points on the London Underground map in front of them, the visualisation zooms to that location and shows all the journeys firing through. As well as wanting to re-use our Chromaroma data, we also wanted to experiment with a new web technology – Unity. The original Chromaroma visualisation, found on the game now, is built in Flash.

Unity is really interesting to us, both as a tool and a company. Their main mission is to “democratize game development” via an accessible tool that’s got the broadest platform coverage.

So the Chromaroma Remix is both an experiment in a new web technology, and a visual exploration into how a web-based game can engage travellers as they travel by offering missions and awarding points, and also after the fact via visualisations. We’re pretty sure that a version of this will be embedded in the V&A website very soon.

The folks at the V&A also asked us if we could make a game for visitors to play. Now, we think about museums and games a lot. It’s not an easy problem to solve. Ideally, we’d love to work with the online Collections, linking them to a simple puzzle or treasure hunt game. Something with broad reach. Unfortunately we had neither the time nor budget to do something like that, so instead we’re taking the opportunity to try something simple out – SCVNGR.

We’ve been playing with SCVNGR a lot. I’ve been using it to prototype some audio-tour/locative storytelling stuff. It’s got promise. A lot of museums are using it, so we thought we’d give it a go at the V&A.

There are ten tasks to complete – one in each of the ten first rooms that you come to from the Grand Entrance.

What’s going to be interesting is to see the take-up of a locative experience by a very broad demographic of people, with links to SCVNGR and instructions on printed material around the museum. It’s not often you get to test something in an environment like that.

The Web Weekend line-up as a whole is fantastic, and we’re honoured to be a part of it. If you make it to the V&A Museum this weekend have a play on our things and let us know what you thought.

“A minibus will collect you from Hatfield station at 6:30 and escort you to the Secret Robot House”, was the only information from Alex (Internet of Things luminary and organiser of the evening). The minibus took us through a comfortable suburban estate and pulled up outside a residential house. A regular-looking semi-detached in a sleepy middle-class area of Hatfield. Alex waved us in and we entered.

It’s a real house, but not a real house. The first things I notice are cut-out spacial markers on the ceiling, dozens throughout the room. A desk covered in computers. Then a pair of robots by the bookshelf. One looks like an oversized Nespresso maker, the other Wall-E’s slightly junkier sibling. Everyone shuffles in an amused, but slightly confused, way. It’s a real house, but not a real house. It’s a robot’s home, a research space for domestic robots to understand human-robot relationships. We’re walking in the uncanny valley.

Nicolas Nova presented a short-talk that took us through the role of sci-fi in developing robots; robots being fictions from the very beginning, that people want to be real. We keep trying to make science fact out of science fiction. Nova talks so simply that it’s easy to imagine he’s not saying anything at all, but – and this is main the point of the whole evening – demonstrated how hard it is to design robots as robots. They will always be an expression of the designers’ beliefs, culture and understanding of others. Nova led us around the various ways in which people respond to robots and the ways that people don’t want to interact with robots (if they are humanoid, or animal-like; slide 11). It was an interesting wander over the developing rules of engagement of Human-Robot Interaction, what we are willing to interact with and what we are rationally uncomfortable about. Too human and we fear Nexus 6 Replicants; too much personality and we fear HAL 9000. And nobody really wants an internet fridge.

In response to Nova, Patrick Bergel suggested that robotics research owes more to old magic than it does sci-fi. He pointed towards the Sorcerer’s Apprentice as the defining example, an original manifestation of the desire for self-automated helpers to do our work for us. The brooms are robots in disguise. It’s true, inasmuch as the Golem is a clay robot, but it’s a little sophistic. We generally try to understand our futures by extrapolating upon the things that exist in our present. Magic and sci-fi are the same, except that magic is now electronic and cybernetic. Perhaps, if Walt Disney had been born thirty years later, the brooms would have been bots with screens.

Prof. Kerstin Dautenhahn (founder of the Adaptive Systems Group responsible for the robotics research in the house) gave us a deeper backstory to the research and the role of the house. She offered a better understanding of the limitations of robots and the perennial challenges that face the researchers. The research was about developing robotic companions — for the elderly, disabled or house-bound — to support and complete simple tasks. It is less about having fully functioning automatons that do everything, without input. Their challenge is to design and build Companions that are ‘useful’ and ’social’, but also adhere to current and future standards of robotics.

An interesting point Dautenhahn made was about robotics (particularly the robotics research they are doing) being a synthetic science. It is a mixture of engineering, psychology and sociology. The robots aren’t a species, and are inconsistent. They change regularly with each new design/build. Intelligence is redefined with each iteration, emotionally and in processing ability. A robot of today is not the robot of the future, today. What the ASG are trying to do is develop a kind of social language, the laws of interaction between humans and robots beyond Asimov’s Three. How does a human react when a robot does this, and why? What is the best way for a robot to deliver a drink, how can a robot avoid injuring humans in delivering simple tasks?

Coming back to Nova’s talk — citing Kevin Slavin, “it becomes real by behaving real, by demonstrating the behaviour of things that are real” — we keep asking ‘how much of a human personality should you put into a robot?’

Over the course of two demonstrations, it became very clear that the role of human-ness in robotics is important. The Care-o-Bot 3® had two clear facets to its construction: a human-facing front, delivering objects and scanning the room; a mechanical reverse with massive arm for task-completion. The Care-o-Bot 3® moves like Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca, eerily smooth and slightly jarringly. It is neither wholly robotic nor wholly humanised. The uncanny valley is dipped into as the non-human movement sticks out more than it bleating “HERE IS YOUR DRINK” to complete its task. Communicating with human terms after decidedly non-human movements.

The second demonstration was of the Sunflower robot: a machine that definitely chimes with our expected ideas of a robot. Short, boxy, arms and a head with ‘eyes’. The eyes aren’t real, but are simply there for human benefit — to focus upon them, rather than looking for meaning in the rest of the machine. The Sunflower is the stranger of the two robots. It navigates a space, stops, recalibrates where it is. Occasionally it looks a bit lost and frightened, before it gets where it should be. It nags for attention when the doorbell rings, and is satiated when its master acknowledges it. It is, in the words of Bashford, a bit like Reality Clippy. Unlike Care-o-Bot, it uses flashing light systems to communicate if it needs attention or if a task is completed.

The other interesting concept at play in Sunflower is the ‘Migration’ mode, to make your robot portable. The Sunflower system is being designed as an “UbiCompanion“: the robot is not the machine, but the personality users have refined and customised. It is the functions that users have tweaked for their personal preferences. In Migration mode, users can transfer the robot’s consciousness, for wont of a better word, to other objects (think transferring a Mii character on your Wii to another console). This makes for a smarter system that jumps between a dumb-box on wheels, to skype, to desktop computers and anything that is connected. It’s a connected thing of the future, and very real.

The trip to the Secret Robot House was hugely enjoyable, and made for some interesting thoughts about behaviour and future-relationships. Huge thanks to Alex for organising and to LIREC for opening up their dizzying research. More organisations should invite plebs into their labs.

I went to Primavera this year. it’s a three day music festival in Barcelona. It’s always sponsored by a big drinks brand. In previous years this has been Estrella Damm, but this year was San Miguel. If I was San Miguel, I’d be pretty hacked off this year.

In order to minimise cash losses over the bar, you usually have to buy a load of vouchers that you then use to get your water or beer or spirits. Bear in mind that you’re not allowed to bring anything in with you. Not even water. Aside from that, the analogue solution of branded vouchers the size of raffle tickets worked just fine.

This year, prior to arriving at the festival (but after having brought a ticket), you had to register for an account at the Primavera online ‘Portal’. Once you’d done this, you got a six digit pin number that you were asked to memorise. It wasn’t e-mailed to you, and they shall say this only once. Then you linked your bank account to your Portal account, so that you could top it up with currency to be used at the festival.

When you arrive at the festival you get your usual festival wristband, and also a card with a QR code on it. Next, you either go to a festival stall to have your card linked to your Portal account after giving someone your six-digit pin – or you do this with your smart phone. There’s only one problem – the Wireless Network access at the festival is shot from the word go. So you queue up even though you have a smart phone like they told you to bring. The queue is nearly an hour long, but you queue, and you miss the first band that you came to see. But it’s okay, because once you’ve done this you’ll be able to get a drink. You’re on holiday, you’re at a festival, you’re hot and bothered. You deserve one.

Meanwhile you call someone in England and see if they can do this thing for you on the internet. Only the Primavera website seems to be down for them. Uh-oh.

Finally, your QR card gets linked to your online Portal account by a guy with a thing in a booth. You head to the bar.

There are over a thousand people in the queue for the bar. So you go to another one. There are after all about thirty of them around the site. You find one with a normal sized queue, and see no drinks. They’re not serving people, except security staff who come up for pints and water. They get theirs. You check your e-mail for any reports, but there are no e-mails. You can’t buy water with cash, and you quickly learn that there are no tills, only iPads linked to a Wireless Network that doesn’t work, that is supposed to connect them to the online Portal that has gone down after being accessed buy a couple of hundred thousand people all at once.

On the second day they went back to cash on most of the bars. The functional iPad bars stayed open and serving both cash and card. Only they gradually went offline as the iPads were splashed with beer and became caked in Jagermeister. A final part of the whole UX mishap was the refund. You charged your QR card with cash via one of the credit card booths at the festival, and you haven’t been able to use it. Refunds start at 9pm on the last day and end at midnight. Or so we heard. There wasn’t any information we could find online. So we found the last working iPad bar and emptied them the analogue way.

Lessons learned:

1. Communicate your problems. People become more frustrated when they don’t know something.
2. Make the distance between your customers pockets and your coffers as small as possible.
3. If you’re going to make the distance between your customers pockets and your coffers greater, then make the experience of paying for something simple and easy.
4. You have your customer’s e-mail address. Use it.
5. Till systems are expensive for a reason. They’re durable. They’re tried and tested. iPads were not made for this and they won’t stand up to the test.
6. Have alternatives. You’re putting up a barrier between people and fluids. Always have a non-tech contingency.
7. Water. Water. Water. Come on San Miguel. It’s just water and it’s over thirty degrees out here. If we’re talking outdoor festivals, water is as much an essential part of the UX as being able to purchase a ticket.
8. Scale. The main problem was the Portal going down. It’s easy to estimate traffic when you know almost exactly how many people will be logging on all at once. If you’re putting all your trust in a network, make sure it’s sturdy enough to cope with your traffic.

Experiencing these gaps in design and execution can be applicable anywhere – not just a festival. We’re doing projects that use codes, phones, networks. You can’t ALWAYS rely on these things to be reliable, but the fewer stages there are in a chain, the less chance there is of something going wrong. Unless you’re throwing Jagermeister over absolutely everything.

It’s a skill to do things that you are rationally dubious about
11:07
that’s why blogging is hard
11:07
because it’s pointless
11:07
except when you enjoy it because you’re not doing it for an audience
11:07
and then an audience comes

11:08
yes yes
11:08
I guess that applies across the board
11:08
yes
11:08
if you’re doing things only for investment/commissions/etc
11:08
it’s hard
11:08
but doing them off own back,  the other stuff comes easier

Gregory Povey & Toby Barnes, SKYPE, one and zeros 2011

Some of these have been ludicly based, most entwined with some narrative.  A mixture of psychogeography, history geekiness, and a yearning to all be urban planners. A function to move away from “Pervasive games” as parlour game, or humorous activity toward a way to explore space, tell a story, design a future.

As part of this work we asked Indiana Hamilton-Brown (a writer from the South-East) to think about, write about and cause to think a little deeper on space, play, games and architecture.  We are going to post his thoughts on our blog as we publish them.

The first is a conversation with one of our friends, Jim Rossignol.”

Toby

——–

Jim Rossignol is a games critic, blogger, and author of This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities; Rossignol’s book is “a wonderfully literate look at gaming cultures”, according to The New Yorker, but also a interesting exploration of the impact of place on gaming. This is my discussion with him following up on some of the themes of his book, namely that of the relationships between places, spaces and games.

• • •

Indiana: For much of gaming’s history the environment has been a largely static entity in gameplay, although it shapes the way we interact with games, few games have truly explored the ways the player can shape the environment. However with the concepts of ‘destructibility’ and ‘viscerality’ coming very much into vogue with certain sections of the mainstream development community, with games such as Battlefield Bad Company 2 putting these features as some of their unique selling points, do you think we will see a shift towards less static game worlds in general? How do you feel the approach to developing and discussing spaces will have to change, if decay is to be incorporated rather than shunned?

Jim: Game design has been pushing against the boundaries of static, unchanging environments for a while now. One of the first ever game technology demos I witnessed was in mid-2000, when the “Geo-Mod” engine for Red Faction was first shown to journalists. The demonstration showed buildings being knocked down by explosions, glass shattering, and great craters being put in built surfaces by bombs and missiles, all in real time. It was a video game technology that, predictably, was focused on destruction, and it was also a technology that did not survive contact with the realities of game design. It ended up as a superficial layer over the top of two rather soulless, linear games. It was only the third game, Red Faction: Guerilla that reworked the goal destruction as being intertwined with guerilla attacks on infrastructure—defining destruction of structures as fundamental to progress—thereby making the demolition technology suddenly take on significance as the pulse in the overall rhythm of the game.

What Guerilla’s designers understood was that the challenge for technologies that have attempted to make their architectures and landscapes manipulable at the hands of the gamer, is to make the interaction non-trivial to the experience. Most games struggle with that. But not all. An early example would be Bullfrog’s Populous in which the player—acting as a God—could raise or lower land at will, literally sculpting the Earth and using geography and geology in their battle with rival deities. That’s being echoed again this year in From Dust.

The true issue for game design is to understand why a dynamic environment, rather than a static environment, is useful to creating an interesting game.

With this in mind it’s interesting to examine why game environments are static: it’s because the more static a rendered environment is, the more beautiful it can be—and beauty is interesting after all. If an environment can’t be deformed and rebuilt on the fly, then it can be far more detailed. That’s just the way that mainstream game technologies work but they don’t have to work like that—there are voxel solutions that allow dynamic remodeling for example—however that is how the majority of technology handles the demands of looking realistic with a limited amount of memory or CPU time.

Anyway, when the constraint of looking realistic is taken away, something marvelous happens, as we’ve seen in Second Life. For all its problems, the world there was totally dynamic and could be imagined and reworked as its inhabitants saw fit. Taken even further, with Minecraft, and we have something that gamers actually enjoy. With the world abstracted to the level of cubes, suddenly the materials in that world can be added and removed on a whim, and the entire environment becomes dynamic and manipulable by the player.

I’d hope that the two trends can eventually meet in the middle—that we’ll steer away from sterile, unchanging beauty of static environments, without losing the artistic aspirations of these kinds of designs, and merge it worlds in which materials can be repurposed, and environments remodeled as the player plays their game.

Indiana: Similarly an idea previously confined to mainly architects appears to be beginning to take hold in game design, that of algorithmic architecture, most recently in Frozen Synapse and Subversion. The concept of procedural generation is not new in games however in this dramatic holistic focus alongside the change from static environments in both games, we see the possibility for games designers—particularly smaller developers—to radically expand the limits they can realistically create. Do you think we will see a shift in the way developers approach game spaces if only through pragmatism?

Jim: Procedural generation has always been an extraordinarily powerful tool when creating games. The game Midwinter made by the British game designer Mike Singleton in 1989 is a prefect example of this. The game featured a space of 410,000 km^2 of terrain, and the game itself was just over 200k of data. What it allows designers to do is to create spaces—particularly terrains—algorithmically, saving time on designing things by hand. What we’re not going to get, of course, are more games like that. I think what we’re seeing is another sort of evolving three-way balance. As with static vs dynamic environments, we’re seeing the power of the tools being increased by technology, while at the same time designers are finding a balance between what they need to do by hand, and what mathematics can automate for them, within those new tech constraints.

So while few people would find Midwinter’s vast, blank undulations convincing or interesting today, careful use of procedural systems underlying the creation of worlds can and will provide major feats of creation cut down to just moments. EVE Online, for example, had its entire galaxy created procedurally.(It was a program based on crystallization processes that was only ever run once: to create that initially galaxy structure, which was then manually tweaked by the designers both before and after the game’s launch.)

Procedural systems are certainly not a content-creation panacea, but they are a way for game design to more ambitious than it might otherwise have been. We’re going to see increasingly complex topics for generation too: cities and urban infrastructure will be the next wave, as we’re already seeing.

Indiana: Contrasting this indie pragmatic innovation, in the recently released L.A.Noire we’ve seen the archetypal AAA approach to game spaces with an entirely hand crafted approach; strong funding allowing the designers to attempt a simulacra—of 40s LA. With such investment going into the milleu of the player do you think we could ever see games spaces designed entirely by architects? Will we see Richard Rogers try his hand at Brink level or Gert Wingårdh reinvent the way we experience Quake?

Jim: Perhaps, but the truth is that many talented and qualified architects are ending up in game design precisely because there is no work for them—at least no interesting work—in real-world buildings. When game environments look as good as they do in Brink or Guild Wars 2, what use are “real” big name architecture firms?

Indiana: Mirror’s Edge was highly praised for its excellent aesthetic and modeling of its cityscape, I think its focus on the physicality of your interactions and its exploration of the city forced the game to have a much more integrated city design, as the players could truly explore the space rather than simply being shepherded by it, which gave the environment its own distinct character. Do you think that a trend away from static environs and towards modeling the physicality of not only the players interaction with the environment but the environment itself will promote a more integrated approach to in game architecture, and more importantly will this bring any benefit to the players?

Jim: It would be a mistake to think that this wasn’t always the case, I think. Game environment design has always been about accommodating the movements of the player. A more sophisticated movement system, such as the one in Mirror’s Edge simply requires a different set of parameters for level design. I don’t believe that it represents a more integrated approach to architecture than, say, the design of a Quake level. Creating the perfect capture-the-flag map for Quake’s supernatural movement physics is just as involved a design task as designing something for a “free-running” game character.

Indiana: The shift to a more DLC focused business model has allowed the the industry to become much more modular in the way it creates games content, can you envision a reappraisal of some the ideas of 60-70s avant-garde architecture, in regard to games design, with players free to bolt on modular components to their levels etc in a sort of Little Big Planet ’soft’ modding? For virtual space is inherently flexible in a way physical space cannot be yet few games seem to encourage toying with this flexibility outside mods; will we ever see a post modern approach to game spaces?

Jim: I hope so! I think it would demand some considerable vision from a studio to create something like what you are suggesting. Not that it’s not easy to imagine such a route. You could imagine, for example, a city create as the basis for a set of games, all with the same themes. I touched on this in references to Brink’s “Ark” recently. With that world’s art and culture defined, why not drop in different modes of gaming to a single world. A GTA-like game sandboxy story, a Mass Effect-like RPG, a racing game, a management game, all alongside the original multiplayer shooter concept. Borderlands has a whiff of it with its DLC. If they’d thrown in a racing game and maybe some more RPGy elements, it might have done just that.

As for the notion of a sort of cut-and-paste attitude, well, that might well be possible. You’re seeing it, I think, in things like Garry’s Mod. If and when those sorts of systems find their way into mainstream games—which as you suggest, they have done to some extent in LBP—then we could get truly modular, post-modern sorts of games.

Indiana: You have spoken on the increasing preservation of property and the problem this poses to architects wishing to create radical new designs, do you think that the blank slates of virtual spaces could be a fertile new outlet for architectural designs that are just too radical to be realistically implemented?

Will we ever see an architect propelled to fame through their work in games? Could games springboard architectural design to a wider audiences?

Jim: There are certainly some designers that the world seems to be taking note of because of their work in games—Viktor Antonov for example.

That is only like to increase as the architectural vision of games becomes more ambitions; and it will. I think would I would like to see are the buildings found within game worlds migrating back into the real world. Perhaps we could have some architectural cosplay—put up City 17’s citadel in an Eastern European town, for example.

Indiana: An interesting utopian off shoot of this is the possibility architects could game spaces as test beds for new designs, eg MMO cities being used a models for the new mega cities. Indeed thinking upon the possibilities of future games design, it is interesting to note the possibility of an EVE like MMO set in one city; a reinvention of Brink as an Archigram fantasy. Will these new possibilities in creating game spaces influence the way we play in future? Or perhaps the game spaces influence the way we live?

Jim: There was a beautiful survey result some time back—I don’t have the link to hand but it’s been raised on BLDGBLOG by me and others in the past—in which a number of architects they felt that LA should look like the dystopian vision laid out in Bladerunner. They felt that was architecturally desirable in some way. I think that’s a measure of how deeply potent images of what an built environment could be like push themselves into our consciousness. When a fantasy is powerful enough, we want or expect reality to cohere with it, even if that’s evidently problematic. It seems logical that game environments, if compelling enough, will provoke the same kinds of responses.

I don’t believe there are any games that are sophisticated enough in their modeling of a city’s inhabitants to truly act as any kind of testbed, but I also don’t imagine that such a thing is too far away. GTA4’s metropolis might be little more than smoke and mirrors with talking mannequins patrolling the streets, but there’s no reason why the same thing in tens years might not be a genuine simulation of a “living” city. It’s all about the complexity of the models that games require, and as mentioned elsewhere in this interview it’s simply a need for the right balance of technology, creativity, and commercial application to come to bear for this to happen in a way that might have utility in modeling real-world architectural situations.

• • •

Indiana is a free lance writer and artist based in the South East of England. He co-authors the blog TCFTD, writing game critiques which have been featured on sites such as Critical Distance and Gamasutra, and can be seen twittering away here to any one who’ll listen.

]]> http://www.wearemudlark.com/blog/space-is-the-place/feed/ 2 http://www.wearemudlark.com/blog/fowd-and-the-responsive-web/ http://www.wearemudlark.com/blog/fowd-and-the-responsive-web/#comments Tue, 31 May 2011 09:01:24 +0000 jamesarice http://www.wearemudlark.com/?p=1596 I went to FOWD last week in London expecting there to be a strong emphasis on mobile. I wasn’t dissapointed. This brain dump is going to begin with the last talk of the two day conference in which Josh Clark debated the pros and cons of ‘native apps’ and the ‘mobile web’. It seems to me that in a lot of cases, a responsive website that can reformat itself for mobile, wins. Here’s why.

Leaving aside apps for gaming and the like that make perfect sense to run natively for obvious reasons, ‘web apps’ are often perfectly capable of offering an acceptable mobile experience. This makes sense when you draw from Ethan Marcotte’s ‘Responsive Web Designer’ talk in which he covered CSS methods, flexible grids and images to provide a single destination that responds to the device the individual is using. To my mind, this seems to make a lot more sense than encouraging people to go out their way and download a dedicated app or even to re-direct them to a seperate “m.” subdomain. It seems that today’s mobile web browsers aren’t being taken seriously (Do I need to mention HTML5 and CSS3? — technologies that give us locative capabilities and more). You can read Ethan’s A List Apart article on the topic here.

The word “App” has become somewhat of a buzzword. The constant bombardment of app-related marketing seems to have ingrained in us an ‘app culture’ since the explosion of Apple’s App Store. Every mobile platform seems to have jumped on the bandwagon, even Chrome as a web app store — but herein lies the problem.

Unless company x provides a great app experience that meets expectations on each individual’s chosen device, they risk leaving a proportion of their audience out in the cold.

I’d hedge a bet and say iOS is targeted most, and as a result I would imagine company x ends up spending their precious money,time and resources on just one platform. What I’m trying to say is: the web is universally accessible. Native apps are not.

If you look to the left you’ll see that Autoglass have gone all out. The image shows mobile optimised website to the left, native iPhone app to the right. The native app provided no more functionality than it’s web counterpart.

This begs the question: Why make both?

I think this can by explained by the notion of how we see our apps: as “show-off-pins”. They act as pin badges — you show off your favourite apps to your friends just as teenagers pin up movie posters on their walls. They’ve become little digital fashion accessories for your phone, often showing allegiances to the brands you care about. This attitude is exacerbated by the aforementioned ‘app culture’ which perpetuates the notion that a) Company x needs to provide a native app experience to meet the status quo. And b) User y shows their dedication to a brand with a app on their phone because their friends do.

Take a look at my quick responsive website here.

Stream Arts an organisation based in Greenwich, with a successful history of exploring new uses of technology to engage local communities in arts based activities, asked us to create something that would engage with people in Woolwich

We wanted to create something about the locations of Woolwich as it has many interesting historical features. The Arsenal (both the football team and the armoury) was based there and so is a large military barracks. So it has a long association with the soft and hard machines of war (soldiers and weapons). However we didn’t want to create a predictable tour guide experience that utilised history. Yet another GPS tour guide application Instead we wanted the player to game history in a multiplayer environment.

We took a hundred years of Woolwich history and placed key events on a timeline. We decided the game would happen for an hour. Following this logic, a hundred years would play out over the hour – as if hurtling through time.
The player had free reign to roam around Woolwich town for the hour with an Android phone. Some events were global and experienced by every player, the First World War for instance, however other experiences were assigned to key locations around Woolwich so only players physically present in that location would experience them. To make it interesting players create communities which evolve based on events in history but also as result of their proximity to other player’s communities. Essentially it is like a simplified version of Sid Meyers “Civilisation” but played in real space and time. Players could literally move their communities to areas of Woolwich that were safer or where they have a better chance of growing in numbers. The basic premise of the game is to have the largest community after an hour of play and a 100 years of history.

In order to work out the mechanics of the game we had to do some quite exhaustive playtesting of the game (see pics) to make sure it worked in the way we intended. Lots of parameters were worked out on paper before we could take them into the game engine.

In our pilot we also used the big screen in Woolwich Square to show the evolving game board. Which created an interesting embodiment of the game into the actual streets of Woolwich itself.

The pilot highlighted the public engagement with the work as we had people ageing from 10 to 70 playing and there was strong evidence that the initial concept was understood and exciting for those involved. The User Interface is still fairly rudimentary and there are still issues with connectivity and system stability but as a proof of concept it was definitely a success.

Expect to see a future development of the concept soon. Designed for a wider locale and more people.

It was developed in Collaboration with Horizon Digital Research at Nottingham University and Stream Arts.

Half The Sky is now extending out via a PBS special next year , a social action game on Facebook and a lot of work with NGOs, including the mobile games we are designing for Game For Change, the executive producers of the Half The Sky transmedia material.

I spent a week in and around Delhi with Games For Change and Indian developers and distributors ZMQ, meeting, talking and – most vitally – listening with and to a variety of NGOs, as well as visiting various communities at whom the games might be aimed.

We are designing for the very “established” Java, J2ME platform, because those are the sorts of phones you will find in these communities. Typically , there’s one mobile per family and it stays in the house , like a landline – in effect it is the landline. But everyone has some access to the key piece of technology and most of them are already playing games on their phones.

The constraints of the platform are also the challenges. The same goes for the issues we want to express and “play” in the games – both during the trip and since my return we have been brainstorming ideas for games that will help pre-natal health, get parents to let their female children stay in school after the age of ten, improve girls’ health so they can stay in education themselves, confront domestic abuse and even suggest the experience of enforced prostitution.

We are looking at twitch, puzzlers, platformers, tower defence, simple simulations… We want great gameplay on small screen that doesn’t require a lot of text and gets the player to think and learn, but also, most importantly, engage. Although the subjects are clearly pretty serious, we never want the games to be called “Serious Games”. We plan to blog about the project as it develops so watch this space.

Anyway, the audience were really into the idea of Chromaroma as a different kind of locative play. I got a bit of a (friendly) grilling in the Q&A after my talk, and at the end of the evening, and at a burger bar afterwards. Questions revolved around further development, data privacy and business models – and it was those last two that stuck in my mind afterwards.

Fast forward a week and I’m in Tower Bridge getting a grilling from a Times Travel journalist. I was only supposed to be giving a demo, and then answering some tourism specific questions about the game and its positive effects on a city. Half an hour later my jaw ached and my head was spinning after some really deep questions – again revolving around data privacy and business models.

It’s not like we haven’t done an incredible amount of thinking and talking on these subjects before. We obviously know and care deeply about data privacy in respect to our own data as well as the data that our players share with us in order to play the game. It’s all handled with the utmost respect. We’ve obviously thought about our business model, where it could go and how it could pay for itself. But maybe it was the perspective of being exhausted and in a strange place (both times), with a mind freed from the technical wrangling of development and able, for the first time in months, to look at the game from outside in.

Or maybe it was this question, asked more than once: Have you thought of how valuable all the travel data you hold is, and how you might profit from the sale of it?

The answer is – yes we have thought of it, and no we won’t be selling it. First and foremost we believe that if you create the data then it’s yours. But the more I thought of business models and answered questions about how we plan to make the game profitable through in-game purchases, apps, and sponsorship, the more I thought this:

If someone profits from your data (through its use, not necessarily its sale) then what are your rights to a share of those profits?

I’ve been doing a lot of PRS music registrations of late, and entering mechanical/broadcast royalties shares and whatnot, so maybe that added to the thinking as well…

It’s a really useful addition to the different lines of enquiry I’m following in my research for the Making Future Work project, where I’ll be trying to uncover data sources in the East Midlands and analysing the attitudes towards Open Data held by the people who gather and control it here. Possible outcomes are APIs that application developers and artists can use to make useful things out of. But there’ll always be that question – in the future, if we’re going to make work that pays out of public data, what share of that pay goes back to the people that create the data in the first place if (and one would hope that this be the case) they truly own it?

I meant to write about Bangkok when we returned, but the pitch treadmill has kept us occupied and Toby’s only just finished uploading his terrabyte of photographs. Whilst there, we spent a few days walking the soles of our shoes bald, meandering through the streets, underpasses and markets, taking in far more sights than our brains could cope with. It turns out we were doing a ‘Systems/Layers walkshop‘, but that just seems to be nature and human inquisitiveness coded.

Now that we’re ready, I’ll have a stab at trying to explain it. I think it’s important for you to put this on first.

To start: Bangkok is the future.

This seems a bit of a strange thing to say of a city that has been around for hundreds of years, with ostentatious remnants of legacies dotted so freely around it, but it feels like the logical conclusion of something. It is potentially the way all cities will be. It is so full of life, everything is turned up to eleven and senses are wholly washed in noise. Even the weather is all in — 90% humidity and thirty degrees C.

Like every major city: commerce is the dominant beast. It is what Bangkok’s city planning is built on. Planning is used loosely, here; Bangkok doesn’t have urban development regulations — the perfectly gridded map of Manhattan is completely foreign to them — buildings sprout where there is space. If something is knocked down, a market will spawn there before new developers can get get their fences up.

In Bangkok, existence is a sales opportunity. Every possible way you turn there are pop-up shops selling huge knives, twigs, good times, mobile phones, fruit juices of all kinds, scavenged metals and simulacra watches. At times it felt like the streets are organised by product, not purpose or design — Material Street, Sports Street, Tourist Services Street, Red Light Street, Mechanical Parts Street. Entrepreneurial pop-up shops and stands rub shoulders against the globalised Super Brand malls with their air-conditioned conception of reality and skin whitening cream. Overlooking the city are skyscrapers flashing LED screens with ‘JOY IS BMW’ or ads with Manchester United covering entire office blocks.

The lack of regulation extends to the infrastructure — the city’s infrastructure is exposed and the ‘Networked Urbanism’ is ever present. Water pipes lurch out from buildings into the ground whilst electricity and telecommunications cables dangle at head height, sagging over-burdened pillars to acute angles. Information flows within arm’s reach, not buried underground. The city’s development is already so far gone that digging up the pavement to hide water pipes, electricity, telecoms would cause too much disruption.

The traffic in Bangkok is similarly intuitive. There are systems (traffic lights, pedestrian crossings etc) that are observed, but loosely. Mopeds encroach on junctions as lights change, cars weave in and around each other with Swarm Intelligence. Traffic lanes adjust to flows, a dual carriageway becomes a three-lane/one-lane during busy periods. Movement is constant, and always seemingly with a purpose. Aimless walking is viewed with suspicion as tuk-tuk drivers beckon you, to get you where you’re going faster.

Even faster is the Skytrain: the overhead train of the future, today. Nestled in the kind of brutalist concrete that makes our hearts flutter, the Skytrain curves its way around the more salubrious parts of the city. It offers perfect eyelines of model skyscrapers, whilst obfuscating the shanty towns and underpass markets below it.

It is this strange relationship between poverty and opulence that makes Bangkok feel more futuristic than anything else. It is possible to walk out of a hotel with two pools straight into a massage district, walk from a riverside shanty town into an air-conditioned, Westernised mall. It feels more like Blade Runner than Monocle’s sanitised, Scandinavian dream of the urban environment — and all the better for it.

As cities’ resources get stretched, and land becomes scarce, they will turn into Bangkok. Poverty will flock to opulence, shops will sprout where there is enough space, every activity will be for sale and we’ll continue to build upwards. This can happen to the benefit of all, or can be horribly exploited if we’re not careful.

This is a very Modernist vision, but it’s still very much true. We shouldn’t give up on the ideals of Le Corbusier because they didn’t work once.

We are still capable of designing better futures.

Greg has already proved an impressive addition to the team – calm and witty in his presence – smart and structured in his thinking . Richard still a bounteous source of originality – “Travel Like You Mean It”, the new Chromaroma motto is all his. Toby a nearly unbridled source of energy – this is his Train office (next to the recharging point).

Matt meanwhile battles, with the other Matt, to get the Birmingham Civic Dashboard live, trying to marshall the mysterious forces of Service Birmingham. And Tom practices dance steps while Emma keeps us all sorted.

Last week saw the opening of Digi-Play, a project that we have been working on since Christmas. It began late last year with a chat with the UK crew of the British Council, the TCDC, and representatives from the Thailand office of the British Council. I was asked to present to them a “round up of the British Games Industry, a look at what’s next for the sector”, as well a “who is interesting right now” talk thing last October.

Now I am sat on the 16th floor of a hotel in Bangkok, writing a blog post after a day of overwhelming sights, sounds, tastes and heat.  From those initial chats, to curation, design, writing and a few talks.

Digi-Play is a month-long exhibition of UK and Thai gaming talent, 3D animation work, and a look back over the last 40 years of game design. We helped curate the exhibition, talk with developers and publishers in the UK and Thailand and develop a program of activity.

We wanted the show to be as diverse as possible, not just Global Publishers flexing steroid arms but a look at the ever interesting indie scenes.  This is why we have a playable version of Papa Sangre from Somethin Else, alongside Little Big Planet from Media Molecule. Chromaroma (oops that’s ours – how did that slip in there?), Kinectimals from Frontier, DJ Hero 2 from Freestyle Games and Chime from Zoë Mode.

The exhibition looks amazing, the space is huge, the number of playable games has been really important for us (not just a screen and a poster) and the documentary videos look great. I will post some more photos once the build is finished.

We helped organise the programme of speakers too. We wanted people to hear from some of the game makers themselves, Sir Ian Livingstone is here (and on the golf courses) to talk White Dwarf, Deathtrap Dungeon, Lara and Square. Hugo Sands from Passion Pictures is here to talk about zombie drummers, rabbits, and Postman. I was asked to talk and got the tricky end of the deal: an hour on “the future of digital”.  Blimey.

All in all, it is an exciting project and its great to see what has been accomplished in three months. A big thank you to (now departed) David, who put in most of the heavy lifting, getting go aheads for a lot of the show material.

As the exhibition set is being completed, we have been able to engage in the final stages of the new Chromaroma build – talking to dev teams in London, the Mill in Derbyshire, as well as satellite people across the countryside of the England (thanks to a bit of hotel wifi  Skype, Propane, Google, and Spotify).

Whilst we are here in Bangkok, Greg and I have been absorbing as much of a true 21st century city as we can.  Walking streets, taking photos, watching the flows of the city, understanding how it ticks. More on that shortly.

In the longer term, as the Northern hemisphere tilts over for the brighter half of the year, Mudlark is leaning into new chapters too. Next month sees a the launch of Chromaroma’s new shiny look, and we look forward to seeing how we do with Chromaroma at the Media Guardian Innovation Awards – along with Such Tweet Sorrow on Thursday.

We also launch the Birmingham Civic Dashboard in April, our NESTA-backed project with Birmingham Council.

We were asked to develop an exhibition, speaker programme, and present our thoughts on the future of digital at The Thailand Creative & Design Centre. TCDC is an amazing resource centre set up to provide Thais with easy access to design inspiration, encouraging entrepreneurs and creative thinking.

Playing with a 500m2 space, we wanted to look at the UK heritage over the last 40 years of UK game development, have a playable area of current UK talent and show a number of  up-and-coming  Thai developers and 3D artists. For the exhibition of current UK talent, it was important to us to show indie games (Chime, Hohokum), mobile innovations (Papa Sangre) and University digital design showreels (Abertay, Newport, Teesside), as well as small number of large publisher offerings.

We worked with Ian Livingstone at Eidos, Hugo Sands at Passion Pictures, as well as the teams of the British Council in the UK and Thailand.

Waag Society, the City of Amsterdam and Hack de Overheid (Hack the Government) are challenging developers, hackers, entrepreneurs, corporations and students to turn massive amounts of raw data provided by the City into new Web and mobile applications that benefit the public. These applications will be based on raw data such as traffic data, demographics, historical images, various incidents and many more. The data links are here – http://www.appsforamsterdam.nl/databronnen

Toby Barnes, presented Chromaroma at their opening event on Saturday 12th March.

The Apps for Amsterdam Contest is open to everyone and runs until early May. Participants will compete for cash prizes that will allow them to further develop their applications and offer them to the wider public. The contest is modeled after Washington’s Apps for Democracy, which yielded 47 web, iPhone and Facebook apps in 30 days: an estimated value to Washington of US$2,300,000 based on an actual cost of US$50,000.

Our one is about Redundant Systems and, by association, open data. Rather than doing a hacking project, we wanted to do something that was the start of something else. The start of myriad things in fact.

We work with data quite a lot. From our game Chromaroma that uses people’s Oyster Card data to make travel into a fun and imaginative experience, to the soon to be launched Birmingham Civic Dashboard. A few of us at Mudlark reside in the East Midlands and it’s a small cause of frustration that (seemingly at least) no work is going on in the region to work with civic data in the ways that London, Bristol, Birmingham and Manchester are doing. After seeing what good can come of open data, we want it here and we want it now. So the first part of our project is a Scouting Mission to find out:

a) what data is out there in our region
b) who owns that data
c) is anyone doing anything with it
d) if not, why not
e) what can the East Midlands learn from other forging forward with open public data

The next bit, after collating all the research together into something useful and browseable, will be to speak to developers, designers, data wranglers and artists to brainstorm what could be done with the data that exists and is available.

The outcome of the whole project will be, if all goes to plan, a comprehensive guide to civic and derived data in the East Midlands, where it is, who’s got it, how to ask for it, and what you might do with it.

We’re really excited about speaking to people in the region and introducing them to thinking behind and the benefits inherent in open public data, as well as working with Broadway, QUAD, iShed and everyone else involved.

Armed with a spreadsheet, a telephone, and a flask of weak lemon drink…we’re off!

That seems to be the primary thought process behind iHobo, an iPhone app/game created by Publicis for the homeless charity Depaul UK and released last May. It’s an honourable cause, so it’s a bit of a shame that to be mired in horrifically executed game mechanics.

iHobo is like a Tamagotchi, but with a recently-homeless person instead of cute Japanese animal characters. You have to pay him attention, offer the correct solutions to his needs, and generally keep him on the straight and narrow.

It feels a bit callous in its realisation, but that’s not the major issue. The main sticking point is right there in its marketing spiel — “once you’ve tried to help a virtual one, you’ll feel more inclined to help a real one.”

There’s the problem: “once you’ve tried…”.

I’ve tried. Three times. I gave him everything he needed — a sleeping bag, a sandwich, some change, love and plenty of attention — the ‘game’ still reached the same conclusion: I’m a lousy carer and my poor iHobo is now on the drugs, possibly infected with HIV.

Play it again. It happens again. There’s just no helping him.

And that’s interesting.

It’s a fatalistic game. A game you cannot win. There is no alternative outcome for our roofless protagonist. Various horrible incidents happen over the course of the narrative which you can address adequately or just ignore: the trajectory is the same.

He will become down and out, hooked on drugs, no matter what you do. That goes against the desired aims of the application, to promote helping the fragile in real-life.

A long time ago, there was a lot of fractious dialogue in cinema and theatre journals about the deadening effect of Realism, or Naturalism. The argument being that the representation of real-life on screen/stage narrows the scope for change in real-life. Realism is intrinsically tied to fatalism: this is the way life is, it says.

Why try or help if it has no end effect?

I wonder if this applies to gaming as well. In looking at narrative games, it is obvious that they must have a resolution, an end. Players can continue to collect items and ‘complete’ side-missions, but there needs to be an end to the narrative element.

You play the middle, and games don’t need to have a ‘start’. The beauty of games is that you are thrown into a situation and you learn the rules quickly. You know what happens if you walk into spikes, or jump off a cliff, or starve your Sim of food and sanitation. Tom talked about this very eloquently at Interesting North last year.

The idea of The End is most interesting. It usually feels like an achievement, rather than a fatalist resolution to an already-defined path. Although most games are fantastical, or heavily distorted version of reality, there is a certain level of inevitability to them.

We start, we play to the rules, we finish where we are told we will finish. Players are motivated to fulfill a destiny without really knowing why, or necessarily knowing or agreeing with the outcome, such as in Train, or Defcon (thanks, David).

It’s interesting that we celebrate getting to where we always knew we would, and strange that it doesn’t feel like a con.

Anyway.

Why not have a play of Molle Industria’s Every Day The Same Dream now? It is worth trying to discover the conditions for a ‘win’ and whether you consider that a win.  It challenges the idea of realist fatalism.

Jon Kingsbury started the day with some interesting facts about how we might work our way through the current economic difficulties.

I did a talk firstly on how we work with data, TFL, and STS. and then wandered around my ideas on the connected city and the need for more service design for people using cities.  I had 5 mins to prepare after Jon asked me to change my tack, so wrote most of my talk on the stage.

I have uploaded the slides to slideshare here.

and there was some great liveblogging from Chris at Meshed Media