The new entertainment culture

entertainment 2.0

i had the opportunity recently to crystallise my thinking around what i have here called 'the new entertainment culture' (but which was redefined as entertainment 2.0 for the purposes of this presentation).   

The main take-away is that all forms of entertainment are having levels of interactivity added to them - from the advent of reality television allowing people to affect the outcome of programmes, to theatre that you can walk around, to socially created literature, to film and tv drama that adds layers beyond the superficial fiction through guerilla campaigns on and offline.

At the same time social media is allowing us to create profiles of ourselves that help to create fiction around our lives - portraying the best, the most exciting, the most dramatic aspects (many people even editing away the bits they don't like that others have added). 

Meanwhile gaming itself is increasingly social - Spore has had a whole social media platform developed to sit alongside it, and the Nintendo Mii profile allows you to create an (often laughably) realistic avatar to both socialise and play games with. And games are becoming watchable in their own right as the cameras capturing the play become more sophisticated, and they are starting to be used to tell stories rather than merely displaying destruction or slick moves.

Finally there is a space in the middle where they all meet, which is only just starting to be filled in. The closest so far is probably Kate Modern, which allowed for interaction not only with the online soap's characters and storyline but towards the end even allowed its viewers to attend some of the events in the real world in which it was captured. And its sponsor brands were integrated into the plot all the way.

The next incarnation of Kate (from the original Lonely Girl team) will be Sofia's Diary. Which promises to take the interactivity to the next level, with more of a Choose Your Own Adventure viewer control over the narrative. But still the viewer will (for the main) be just that. The question mark in the middle will only actually be answered when the viewer / user / consumer / target audience becomes a genuine player, and is at the centre not the periphary of the action. Tbd... 

new Grand Theft Auto trailer

i pulled out the wrong trailer last night. Thise one is much more impactful...

The Citizen Kane of gaming

we've been getting excited about Spore, both professionally and personally. it has been called not only the Citizen Kane of gaming (ie, the first game to fully exploit a medium's potential and convince the world of its power), but also the 2001: Space Odyssey (as a game showing progression from simple beasts to space-conquering explorers presumably) and the Origin of Species (a game that revolutionises our understanding of where we come from and how the world works?? Not so sure about this one - i think they have just got confused / over-excited as the game centres around evolution).

so, if you don't know already, the game asks you to create your own creature and then guide it through the evolutionary process, moving from the swamps onto land, forming tribes that then vie for control of the planet before moving into space to colonise it. A pretty big ask, of the game as well as you, especially as they have developed a social media platform to sit alongside it (which could be why it has been in production for five years). We promoted Republic back in 2003, a similarly ambitious game about fermenting a revolution within an ex-soviet state that was the first virtual environment to have a permanent simulated existence, with hundreds of characters leading virtual lives for you to try to manipulate. it didn;t really work unfortunately, but this one is from the hands of Will Wright, creator of Sim City and the Sims and probably the most respected man in gaming, so the pedigree is tight and we have been waiting for it with anticipation (particularly after watching this video which was apparently the inspiration for Spore, and is interesting and entertaining, in a Look Around You kind of way).

Then at the weekend i watched the trailer for the new Grand Theft Auto. And got so excited i literally could not sit still. Spore is the future perhaps, but this is where it's at now. This looks to be the first game to truly deliver a narrative as slick and compelling as film integrated with exciting and dramatic gameplay and this game looks to truly deserve the Citizen Kane mantle...

theatre of voyeurs

a month since the last post?? strike me off the chartered institute of bloggers! apologies, i have been sick, snowboarding, in san diego, surfing and trying to survive at work...

so, it seems like the Lyric theatre is doing the most exciting stuff around just now (challenging Punchdrunk for the mantle??)

first of all the excellent Metamorphosis, which is fairly standard 19th century Jewish polemic theatre scholck (complete with chewy Czech accents and pigtails) apart from the extraordinary staging of Gregoire's bedroom onto the horizontal axis, where he creeps and swings and rustles like the big human cockroach that he is.

i was trying to realise why this felt so contemporary, when i remembered the Vertical Football campaign that Adidas did to upstage Nike in the last world cup. successfully.

so, if even billboards can have a human actor dimenson added to them, what of theatre, which still survives despite the ravages of hollywood SFX and reality television?

The answer was there being watched as we came out of Kafka - Contains Violence was being acted in the buildings opposite the theatre, while the audience watched through binoculars and listened on headsets. Didn't seem like the most thrilling of plots, but the point was that it was the next thing to step off the stage and into the real world, and that soon i hope people will be looking up at buildings  in the street, fiddling with their itrip's trying to find the secret performance going on around them... 

virtually real, virtually here...

just a quick one on the futurologist Ray Kurzweil predicting that blood cell sized computers will soon (25 years) ennable us to lead virtual realities, what he calls 'fully emergent games' - kind of the holodeck, but inside our own heads -

And if that's not enough to blow your mind, check out the rest of his thinking on his site

this comes at the same time as Nokia shows off the first concept version of its new nanotechnology phone, that can be worn as a bracelet, will be powered by the Sun and can allow you to take photos of things in the real world, and then download information about it.

gnnuurgh...

secret cinema

very much part of the new entertainment is the Secret Cinema phenomenon that is rapidly losing its secrecy (6,000+ members on Facebook already, God knows how many on the actual site, but then it has been in the Guardian). Still they have managed to keep the secret well, and only a handful of people have written about the experiences to date. Although this could just be a lack of follow-up buzz rather than well managed covertness:)

The premise is to show a film in an appropriate location, but also bring that location alive. So they showed Funny Face at London Fashion Week. Hopefully the next one will be slightly more mysterious...

INterestingly this week the Zutons have announced that their new tour will be taking place in forests across the country. Not sure what Scousers and trees have in common, but seems to be part of the same movement to give us entertainment in unexpected places...

vanity lair vs the future

a year or two ago i made a flippant remark about television being a 'disappointing medium'. this has become a quote that is repeated often to me, in particular by my old housemate who works in tv.

i was planning a post rescinding this quote after watching paradise or bust, master chef (in which said ex-housemate got her first producer credit) and in particular having seen a case study on Picture This at the 360 entertainment conference, which combined a community and tuition on taking photos with a more traditional television competition (although not in quite as integrated a way as they had hoped).

these programmes seemed to represent a new wave of television which revolve around harnessing people's attributes rather than playing to the lowest common denominator, and which linked back to websites and the real world to make a positive difference to it.

then this weekend i decided to have a lazy day and surfed cable for a couple of hours. the high point was unexpectedly coming across an episode of the old robin of sherwood series from the eighties, which has stood time remarkably well (which the current iteration will almost certainly not).

when this had finished i flicked onto a show on that parasite of glossy american angstcoms and reality television T4, which was proudly showing off its latest experiment in social behaviour Vanity Lair. This surely has to be the nadir. Contestants on the show vote each other on and off (no inclusion of the viewer interestingly - probably following the phone vote debacle from last year) purely on the basis of how attractive they find them. there is some conceit that this is in order to explore the notion of what makes someone attractive, but of course really this is about watching beautiful people be either sycophantic or cruel to each-other. there was a brilliant comment as the first beautiful person left the house from one of the remaining contestants that she had been one of the only 'real' people in the house, and that most were really false. to which you had to ask what exactly they themselves were on the show for.

one of my favourite books - The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse - posits a future in which a Platonic society looks back on our present with amazement at how shallow and short-term everything is. i hope and trust that we will end up somewhere similar, that most often change is for the better, and that the positive, creative programmes win out over the LCDs. that the age of social media and tagging will allow people to become known for greatness rather than aesthetics, and that entertainment will become increasingly exciting and engaging as we get to play an increasingly active role within it.

sound and mortar

Just came across this quote on Gamesindustry.bizfrom Glenn Entis of Pacific Data Images (part of Dreamworks), which kind of endorses my last couple of posts. Sound is vital, but not as much as functionality / playability...

' What's interesting is that they've done experiments in movies where they've degraded the image but the sound quality was great, and people put up with it. Then they had perfect image quality but degraded the sound, and people would leave the theatre.

And in games it's the weakest link - but obviously the most important of those is going to be control. I can't imagine a situation where a character looked good, behaved well, then the interface wasn't well implemented, which didn't lead to a horribly dissatisfying experience.

So, for games, control is as important as - or more important than - anything else for that emotional believability.'

Which is possibly why i am addicted to the brickbuster game on my blackberry at the moment...

a proper example of sound and vision...

i was feeling guilty for not providing a more up-to-date example for great interactivity and integration of sound into website design. i had been trying to find a great 3D jeans website from early last year, but failed to remember which brand it had been (those were pre-delicio.us for me, how did we cope?)

serendipitously half an hour later Mr Paul Borge sent round a link to what he described as the best thing he had ever seen. ever. which happened to be an even better example, from  IKEA...

sounding off

Andrew Peggie wants us to add a sound dimension to websites, saying that this is the most neglected aspect of new media and that designers 'don't have the same awareness of how music can work as they do with the visual elements' . However, if you visit his own website it has music embedded on the first orange flash animated sunrise page, and then powerpoint icons on the remaining plain pages so it seems he is doing the same thing in reverse. 

Certainly music is crucial to all other visual media, and in producing video it is more often the sound than the visuals that indicate poor quality. Yet having sound enforced upon you on a site is one of the most intrusive and irritating experiences on the web (possibly second only to banner ads for smileys)

I think Andrew's point is valid, but only where this has been done to enhance the overall experience interactivity, and ultimately the playfullness of a site. The best example of this i ever came across is www.infinitewheel.com (and happens to use the same colourscheme, but with slightly different intentions). this site is six years old now, but still worth a visit, particularly if  you're partial to a bit of dub...