Creativity’s a funny thing. Not only is it often thought of as an intangible quality that is bestowed on a rare fortunate few , but we are somewhat used to thinking that those rare few work alone, or that they at the very least, call the shots. Creative agencies have people called ‘creatives’, whose job it is to be creative and direct other people who aren’t creative.

Now of course we have partnerships like Lennon and McCartney, Simon and Garfunkel, Morecambe and Wise, Adam and Joe, examples of people who were on the same wavelength to such an extent that they can produce things which are wonderfully more than the sum of their parts.

But lately I’ve got thinking that creativity itself is starting to take a different turn. Permit me to take you on a tangential dive into one of my pet loves.

Those who know me will know that I go on about gaming a lot. Too much, perhaps. And not in a l33t speak, last-weekend-I-played-CoDMW2-til-my-eyes-bled kind of way, but in a way which acknowledges that gaming’s move into mainstream is an event of real cultural significance, and that entertainment and art may never be the same again.

I have also been, for some time, fairly convinced of the analogy between a game having a designer and a novel having a writer – great novels can be crafted into works of art because often they are written by people with singular visions, who have control over every line, word and punctuation point (to a degree – I realise this is a somewhat naive conception of the contemporary publishing world, at least).

As gaming and the means by which to create games became popularised over the last, say, 20 years, it has become more and more possible for the creators of computer games to exhibit an analogous level of control over their creations. Picture lone programmer/designers, hunched over their machines in the late hours, just as the penniless artist might at their desk furiously scribbling / painting / typing when in the throes of an idea on a dark night, until everything is Just. Right. I believed that if the trend continued, you would eventually get games which were just as honed, just as artful, as great novels.

However, having worked at a digital agency for some time now, it hit me the other day that that vision is unlikely to be the future, for computer games. I’m not discounting the possibility that single individuals can produce captivating gaming experiences; people like Jason Rohrer and Daniel Benmergui. But the thing about games is that they can be so complex and so full of variables, and require so many different skills, that actually the creativity you need to produce a great game is of a very different kind. Some games like Aquaria are created by designer – programmer collaborations, so you get a kind of Lennon-McCartney partnership, more still are created by small teams, like a band jamming to thrash out a song, and others are created by vast studios, like an entire orchestra getting together and saying ‘hey guys, shall we write a concerto? Dave, you take violin.’

To give an example: Bioshock contains innumerable imperceptible touches contributing to the feel of the game as a whole – the way that desks are left open when they’re searched; the way that Houdini splicers teleport in a plume of blood red mist; the way that lone enemies talk to themselves in wrecked corridors as a manifestation of their insanity.

Now, although it’s entirely possible that the same person came up with all of these little ideas, is it really likely? Is it likely that all of these were dictated by the same person who came up with the Ayn-Rand inspired dystopia that is Bioshock’s setting? Is it even likely that whoever decided to set the game in a decrepit, dripping art deco labyrinthine city under the sea, is an individual, rather than a group of writers?

Or is it more plausible that all of these things fell out of when a group of people threw everything they had into a Magimix and pressed ‘On’? For the record, I don’t know who came up with those ideas. Perhaps not even the people who came up with them know. Or maybe it was in fact all one person with a savant-like ability to describe the minutiae of a nightmare they had after finishing Atlas Shrugged in a single sitting.

To bring it back here, the point I’m making is that digital experiences are now so complex, so involved, that to rely on one person to call all of the creative shots would be a nightmare. I’ve produced websites with little touches which I couldn’t have foreseen and told a developer to implement – these decisions come out of discussions and collaboration, and that’s where creativity lies now. We’ve all heard about megalomaniacal directors or musicians dictating absolutely everything on the projects in which they’re involved – but that’s a very difficult thing to do with a digital experience, more so than anything else, I would venture.

And as digital experiences become increasingly common, and increasingly admired, perhaps that will change our conception of creativity. I’m not for a moment suggesting that there’s no room for an individual’s vision, or for the leadership of a creative team, but perhaps there will be less of an emphasis on “genius” as applied to an individual – perhaps what will be most important will be people’s capacity to interact with one another. If games (and digital experiences in general) will become significant contributions to culture, and many of those games are produced by teams, perhaps some of the most valuable contributions to culture in times to come will be put forth by groups, rather than lonely artists. Your thoughts, ladies and gents?

Creative, crowdsourcing, games, Gaming, social media

2009 has been a truly dark year for the public image of piracy.

And I’m not talking about Somalian pirates, but the issue of digital rights, specifically in entertainment. It’s estimated that piracy and illegal filesharing costs the television, music and film industries £500m a year in lost revenues.

The issue has of course been around since at least 2000 when Metallica took on Napster in one of the more bizarre judicial confrontations in media history.

But whereas that story and the more recent imprisonment of Pirate Bay’s founders were knee-jerk events that had us all wildly jabbering / twittering, I feel that we’re now in the midst of a more subtle undercurrent of significant change in the distribution of online music and television, sustained by almost daily reports of possible mergers and deals, new technologies and services, alleged crackdowns and constant shifts of responsibility for monitoring and controlling internet usage.

In 2000 the issue of digital rights was the almost exclusive concern of emancipated geeks interacting and sharing in a space seemingly designed both by and for them; apoplectic heavy metal fans; and a not insignificant number of terribly confused people sat awkwardly in between.

Jump to 2009, and the internet has become for many the first port of call when looking for entertainment. Mobile devices such as the iPhone plug directly into online music stores, and almost everyone has an iPod or other portable media device. Similarly, network improvements and the penetration of broadband has helped BBC’s iPlayer and its competitors to become almost as popular as “traditional” TV.

In other words, the developments in online media distribution have become mainstream concerns.

However, there remains a fundamental conflict between monetising these distribution services and a historic perception of the internet as user controlled, open-source, a community network without restriction. People don’t like paying for stuff online. Although digital platforms account for about 20 per cent of recorded music sales, 95% of all file downloads are estimated to be illegal. If we want to hear a song once, we might YouTube it or call it up on Last FM or Spotify – if we want it on our iPods, the stats say we are most likely to download it illegally.

Similar issues exist for television and film, where downloads and particularly streaming have been giving producers headaches. The most recent example would be the furore over online leaked scenes from X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which appeared several weeks before release.

(Why anyone would want to see this, for free or otherwise, is beyond me, but apparently it was an issue…) The problem is worsened by advertising – films and shows are heavily advertised on the web (i.e. globally) but release dates are staggered around the world and vary hugely. Inevitably fans are going to get impatient, and at present it’s just too easy to access content illegally.

However, things are changing. Responses to infringements are getting ever more serious and, as we have seen this year, it’s no longer empty rhetoric. The French are being typically Gallic about filesharing, just two weeks ago approving the “three strikes” bill.

The controversial bill proposes the creation of a new government agency, which translates rather grandly as “the High Authority of Diffusion of the Art Works and Protection of Rights on the Internet”, which could have the power to disconnect copyright offenders without legal recourse.

In the UK, creative industry groups such as the BPI, the Publisher’s Association and Equity and broadcasters Channel 4, BSkyB and Virgin Media, are all lobbying the government to force Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to police their users. Of course, this is the last thing the ISPs want to hear, and so they in turn are saying it’s the job of the content providers, leading to what John Woodward of the UK Film Council has reportedly described as a damaging “Mexican stand-off”.

To some extent this apparent impasse has already been breached by evolving the distribution channels and therefore providing more choice. Last year a raft of music subscription services, social networking partnerships like MySpace Music and new licensing channels emerged. Each day sees new reports of mergers, integration and innovation – so watch this space.

When it comes to TV, we’re also getting used to on demand programming. At the moment, broadcasters are giving us content for free, over the internet, and it’s brilliant. The BBC are the front-runners, though 4OD also provides a free catch up service on most of its programmes, (and recently, thankfully, opened its doors for Mac users). And if you’re the kind of person that enjoys pouring absinthe in your eyes, there’s the unforgivably awful ITV Player. But here, too, there are revenue-generating changes afoot. Both 4OD and ITV Player have “forced” adverts, and if the troubled broadband platform Project Kangaroo ever gets a buyer (Orange dropped out of talks just yesterday), on demand TV will almost certainly be delivered on a subscription basis.

The BBC are now behind Project Canvas, which plans to allow viewers to watch on demand services and other internet content via traditional TV – i.e. bring on demand away from the PC in the bedroom and back into the living room (although there must be more to it than that, as cable services such as Virgin Media are already offering on demand services including the iPlayer?)

These suspiciously named “projects” are controversial, in a way partly because of their ambition; the aim seems to be to partner with other broadcasters, channels and media companies to develop an apparently essential media platform, which is an inevitably fiddly business. BSkyB have already thrown an anti-competiveness strop over Kangaroo (which has all but killed it), and last week they accused the BBC Trust of “deficient” consultation over its more recent plans for Canvas.

There’s a more obvious complication for the BBC to grapple with: just where the licence fee fits into the various projects, (iPlayer / Kangaroo / Canvas) is, frankly, anyone’s business.

At this point, It wouldn’t be right to ignore what Bob Geldof thinks about digital TV, so here is what Bob Geldof thinks about digital TV:

“In the age of the internet, the notion of television itself is as archaic as the word wireless – even if that has been reinvented for the digital age.” (Bob Geldof)

To conclude a somewhat wayward post: it seems to me inevitable that our perception of the internet as a distribution channel is set to change over the next couple of years. There will always be infringers pushing their luck, and there will also always be a lot of good stuff available for free.

But we will, I think, also have to get used to the idea of paying money, or suffering adverts, to enjoy premium content on the internet.

No tags

‘Hi John, what did you do this weekend?’

‘Not much – Friday night I stayed in, but on Saturday a friend was having a youtube party, so I had quite a late one.’

Not true.  No-one I know had a youtube party on Saturday, and the notion of a youtube party is not something you are expected to know about, but are actually not aware of because you can’t keep up with the edgy new media vanguard.  However, it’s a sentence which I think is closer to being a standard piece of conversation than you might think, and here is why.

A funny thing happened to me the other night.  I was having a drink at a friend’s flat when someone mentioned a clip on youtube that they thought was funny .  Without a moment’s hesitation a laptop was produced and we all sat down to watch it, oh how we laughed.  Nothing particularly out of the ordinary, you might say.  However, what (quite naturally) happened next was that someone else stifled their chuckles enough to suggest another video, which we all watched and laughed heartily (again).  This went on for a good half hour, until we all got a little embarrassed and decided to stop being so damned geeky. 

Half an hour.  Isn’t that quite a lot?

I don’t expect this kind of an encounter is a rare occurrence.  It’s certainly happened to me a good couple of times and I imagine 80% of the student population do it all the time.  But if you think about it, prolonged, communal youtubery is quite an interesting phenomenon, for 2 reasons:  1, it brings an element of  face to face social interaction to the medium which I’m not sure the people who hailed the revolution of web 2.0 ever really meant.  2, this face to face interaction brings with it a whole set of intriguing social rules and dynamics.

Let me elaborate point 1.  Web 2.0 was (is?)  all about (among other things) people easily creating and sharing content with one another, with the web providing a means by which to do so.  People thought it was great that a guy from Uruguay could make a video about knitting which could be viewed, responded to and commented on by my grandma in Poland, or a janitor in Delaware, or the Queen.  It introduced openness of communication.  But what it also did was introduce content that could be discussed and shared in a personal context, not just by people firing off links at each other down the information superhighway, but shown to one another after dinner, whilst you’re getting ready for a night out, pointed at whilst crowding around a monitor in the office.  It provided content people could physically take someone by the hand and show to them, which is an altogether different thing.

Which leads to point 2.  For years marketing gurus have been mindful of the fact that you are much more likely to buy something if it’s recommended by a friend.  In focus groups we’ve run here at Online, we’ve heard that it’s important to someone sharing a link to something on the internet that they preserve some kind of  reputation.  If you post lots of trash on your friends’ walls you exhibit a certain lack of credibility that is not insignificant.  This kind of thing manifests itself wonderfully if you bring it into a face to face group dynamic.  Picture the scene: my friends and I have worked ourselves into a cheerful youtube frenzy via a string of  Japanese TV shows, childhood nostalgia,  dramatic rodents, and Hungarian rappers.  Then someone enthusiastically types in a link to this.  The group tries to get into it, but it’s a slow starter, and they fall into an awkward silence.  Energy drops.  Suggestor tries to pick it back up with this one, but it’s worse.  Mumbles excuses.  Gets coat.

Similarly you musn’t over share.  You’ve got to let everyone in the audience have their say, otherwise they feel left out.  You can get the youtube samaritans, who in the face of their friend’s poorly chosen pat them on the shoulder and reassure them that it was funny, really.  Picking a youtube video to share with people in this context requires a judgement of mood and possession / lack of sense of humour.  You need to deal with those maladroit ‘Hang on, we need to wait for it to load’ moments. You need to be sensitive to what certain people might find impressive, and what leaves them utterly nonplussed.  You need to be consider whether they’ve just had their lunch.

I’ll be the first to admit that it’s possible to over-analyse this.  But in thinking about how these technologies are changing communication we mustn’t neglect the possibility that it opens up new ways to interact with the person next to you, not just the Delaware janitor thousands of miles away.  Of course all of these communal internet encounters (’social surf sessions‘, if you will) occur as afterthoughts to what you or I might call ‘normal’ social situations – people just fall into them.  But 5 years ago no-one could possibly have imagined the way in which youtube wanders into our everyday exchanges now.  5 years hence?  Get your party invitations ready.

technology, web_2.0, youtube

So the media outcry about Street View continues. Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) today defended the roll-out of Google Street View to UK cities by saying that “We agree with the concerns over privacy… The way we address it is by allowing people to opt out, literally to take anything we capture that is inappropriate out… and we do it as quickly as we possibly can.”

Schmidt missed the point with great precision: the reason that many people feel uneasy about Street View is that it is impossible to find out if you are somewhere in there. You can’t opt out if you don’t know whether or where you are even included. Faced with this vast volume of information, it is simply impossible to manage your own digital identity. You don’t know what of you is out there, or how you appear (regardless of how many guilty secrets could have been snapped by Google’s roving cameras).

This is particularly significant if we consider that schools and universities spend considerable time and effort emphasising the importance of digital identities, teaching Twitter literacy, or interview technique (dangers of scandalous photos or inappropriate comments appearing in internet search). Many of us spend a good proportion of free time managing our online identities, whether through Twitter, Facebook, blogging, or massively multiplayer gaming. That people are concerned about the unknowable possibility of their presence on Street View is hardly surprising, regardless of whether they have something to hide.

Still, is it not a bit bizarre that citizens of one of the most CCTV-observed countries on the planet are concerned about a few static frames online? We could regard Street View as an exercise in open access to information, surely a step in the right direction, toward databases that presume freedom of information rather than hide from it.

Indeed, in the wake of exposure of inappropriate surveillance by our own government, it is slightly amusing that Street View now has a black hole where the Houses of Parliament used to be. However worried we might get about practices of surveillance, it is perhaps comforting that the centre of our state feels exactly the same as we do.

censorship, google, street_view, surveillance, technology, web_2.0

Fun end to the week at the Game Based Learning conference in the City of London. Highlights include a cabinet minister who actually gets technology and seems to want to support the industry (Tom Watson), the ever inspiring Derek Robertson from LT Scotland and Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell’s vision for the future of education. The latter caused quite a stir (shaking heads in the audience, grumblings on the twitter feed) as it appeared to envisage children in webcam-equipped cubicles and plugged into heart rate monitors to assess fitness levels. Refreshingly controversial! To say that some delegates had reservations would be somewhat of an understatement.

Derek Robertson and Ian Livingstone presented strong evidence that mainstream games (not ‘edutainment’ or ‘chocolate-covered broccoli’, as someone else called it) are having a fantastic impact on motivation and learning in schools where they are allowed/that are lucky enough to be able to afford them.

Gaming in general is changing, not just by making an appearance in classrooms. We are currently seeing a return of computer games into the mainstream. Nolan Bushnell and Ian Livingstone both made the point that 30 or so years ago computer games reached a mass audience.

Then, gradually, games became more complicated and generally more violent, causing the market to shrink dramatically. Game developers and publishers didn’t mind so much because the hard core gamers spent significant amounts of money and kept the industry going. Many casual gamers were alienated along the way, however. Now, of course, Nintendo is beginning to change all that with the Wii and DS platforms. You only need to look at their sales figures to realise that casual gamers hadn’t disappeared, they just hadn’t seen anything they liked for a few decades.

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atari, DS, Education, games, Gaming, learning, Wii

So.  The BETT show is over.  Online CC spent a great deal of time at the event, which for the second year in a row struck me as an unholy marriage of a livestock pen and a telesales call.  I only spent a day at Olympia, but the experience sapped my strength so much that it felt like a week.

I don’t have much of a problem admitting that I didn’t like BETT – it seems to be pretty much unanimously agreed by everyone I spoke to there that time at a show like BETT takes its toll; which isn’t to say that the whole thing is pointless or uninteresting of course.  It’s a very good thing for people in the industry to get together like this, and every year some real gems come up, which  make the over-priced refreshments and crawling through Learning Management Software stands worth it.

Take Rafi.ki, for example. Rafi.ki is an online learning community which builds partnerships between schools all over the world.  Pupils exchange information with one another, embark on projects together, and make friends.  Simple?  Yes.  Worthwhile?  Undoubtedly.  Successful?  It seems so.  The gent on the stand (one John Macnutt, lovely guy) pointed out that on facebook, most children simply collect people who are already their friends and remain in those groups.  Here was something that allowed children to make new friends, and work together on projects that can be extremely valuable.

Or Roar Educate’s  “Us Online“, an ‘online learning module’ which allows children to learn about what exactly you can do on the internet, via the experience of a set of fictional characters.  I saw a demonstrator show how a learner can help a girl set up a myspace page, from choosing her screen name and picture to making friends; and it’s only once you’ve set up a profile picture of the character in her underwear and befriendied a suspicious individual called fluffybunny73 who says he ‘likes to play’ that the program takes you step by step through what you’ve done that might have gotten you into such a situation.  This kind of digital literacy is working its way up the agenda as people accept that things like Myspace are now a fact of life, and learning through experience and simulation is a great way to get across the idea that your actions in the digital realm are not without consequences.

Or Pixton, a really fun site that allows people to (fairly) easily create and share their own webcomics.  I don’t know a great deal about ‘Pixton for Schools‘, but there’s been a lot of talk about video games’ ability to present content to children.  Comics, as another staple of my youth, show real potential to do the same.

Rambling around the upper levels I stumbled across some charming gents from Rolling Sound, who run multimedia courses for schools, community groups and young people ‘at risk’.  Roll 7 is a recent expansion of Rolling Sound, and are a company making socially responsible video games, actively recruiting from the young people that complete courses at Rolling Sound.  Their flagship piece is a game called ‘Dead Ends‘, which managed to make it onto Channel 4 News in its treatment of knife crime.  It’s even got Jon Snow in it.   I also almost tripped over Serious Games Interactive’s very small stall; these guys make a series of games called ‘Global Conflicts’, which aim to inform on the (extremely complex) issues behind some of the most intractable and damaging conflicts in the world.  As ever, I’m a sucker for video games and so must admit to taking a disproportionate amount of interest in stalls like this…

Finally, I did a double take at the back of Olympia Grand Hall when I walked a stand where grown men and women seemed to be playing Dance Dance Revolution on the kind of wet-pour rubber surface that you get on playground floors.  It turned out to be Smartus by Lappset, an intriguing hybrid of digital game based learning and physical exercise – whether it’s stepping on marked tiles in the right order, or running round posts as quickly as you can, Smartus has developed installations for playgrounds or indoor halls which have children taking orders from weather friendly consoles.  Though I didn’t partake myself, I imagine it to be like performing mental arithmetic whilst playing ‘tag’.

I’m not sure I like the sound of that.

BETT, marketing, Publishing

Everyone at Online is looking forward to the BETT conference this week. It is always a great opportunity to catch up with old friends and to see some of the exciting current developments in our industry.

The great success of the event in recent years is testimony to the fact that for educational technology, practical show and tell displays are a great way to convey ideas.

BETT will open in London just as another massive technology event closes: the Las Vegas-based Consumer Electronics Show. The difference between the two is telling. CES was marred this year by hyped up press coverage of the economic downturn, every gadget and gismo now being judged according to whether or not its lifespan will be nipped in the bud by straightened consumer spending. In the light of this grim message, BETT seems much more positive.

The future of learning will be the dominant theme at BETT this year. There is a special exhibition area entitled “Future Schools” in the galleries upstairs. It can also be expected to drive Stephen Crowne’s keynote speech, and has no small connection with the success of the Beyond Current Horizons programme of research and development.

Beyond Current Horizons is a project launched at last year’s BETT and has come a long way since then. With the immediate future looking rather economically stagnant, the government is looking further ahead to sunnier climes, and has therefore been well advised to invest in education. The motivation behind Beyond Current Horizons (a DCSF and Futurelab project) is to make sure that the UK has a workforce equipped to drive the country back into prosperity in the longer term.

What this means right now is that policy makers are attempting to ensure that the teachers of the present and near future are properly equipped to prepare their students for the circumstances of the more distant future. Investment in keeping learning abreast of technological change is not just a matter of seeking better ways to teach the same old lessons. It is a matter of seeking teaching methods for teaching the new kinds of lessons that will be salient in times of new technologies requiring new kinds of skills and work.

Dan Sutch has recently commented to this effect in an article on the BCH blog. In the terms he sets out, in the next few years, educational technology is going to become an even more exciting industry to work within, one of the most optimistic industries possible in the present economic climate.

But while things may look up for this industry as a whole, I can’t help thinking that the optimism for the learners themselves is just as significant and may lie somewhere slightly different. Matt Locke, Channel 4 Education’s Commissioning Editor, has pointed out that the future needn’t be some great monolithic thing, confined to great utopian or distopian vistas, that “the vernacular is both the wake of detritus that is tidied up to make history, and the tiny atoms of our potential futures”. He is encouraging us toward points of view very different from those of policy-makers and centralized planning.

The optimistic thing for students today is clearly not the provision of tools to build the British economy in the future, but tools to build the future itself, to imagine the future through their own specific vernaculars. With BETT dominating our work this week, we should keep this in mind.

DCSF, future, futurelab, technology