NESTA Connect

Experiments in pervasive gaming

[two of the actors from Journey to the Middle of the Night]

This weekend saw me at igfest in Bristol, the UK’s first major regional festival of pervasive or urban games. 

Video games are of course well known as a massive global industry with the UK being a particularly big player - indeed NESTA as an organisation has recently become quite active in this sector.  My particular interest however and what took mein Bristol is this question…what is the impact on gaming as the web becomes increasingly mobile? 

The traditional answer is that mobile gaming is console gaming made miniature – and there is plenty of evidence of phone-based game downloads and well-designed small console devices to support that.  However there is another answer which comes from a radically different angle…the future is to use the phone as a device in which you interact with the physical world around you.  And of course this is made only more powerful as GPS-enabled phones become increasingly widespread. Welcome to the world of pervasive gaming.

Pervasive games, also known as augmented reality games, city games or big games, are old forms of play fused with new technological possibilities. Most share these principles:

• Integrating real-world play with digital technology
• Engagement & social contact through game narratives
• Using the city as your playground
• Transforming urban spaces into cinematic & theatrical stage-sets

[thank you to Hide & Seek Sandpit for this definition]

Instinct, while certainly an excellent thing, is rarely enough and therefore I went to igfest keen to get first-hand experience of pervasive gaming, which can be a nebulous concept at the best of times.  What therefore may be helpful here is to describe three of the games I played:

Comfort of Strangers.  Hi-tech.  Of a group of around 30, each player is equipped with a piece of kit which hosts Hewlett Packard’s exciting mscape GPS-enabled platform.  There are two teams, the Lovers and the Dancers but at the start of the game no-one knows which side they are on.  All players are dispersed in a crowded part of the city – a large public square works best – and once the game begins whenever another player enters into a pre-determined range of you (c.15 metres) a voice whispers in your ear…there is a dancer/lover nearby.  You are then told your life score and if it has gone up, you know that the person in range is in your team and if it goes down they are the enemy, thereby deducing if you are a lover or a dancer.  What follows is an exercise in exploration, teamwork and swarming with the goal to get the highest team score possible after an allotted time span. 

Bad Taste Party.  Lo-tech.  Again around 30 people are playing and there are two teams – the Fashion Anarchists and the Bad Taste Police.  A zone is set up in a busy shopping area with mannequins placed in the centre.  The anarchists have a stash of terribly ugly clothes which they don at the edge of the zone and then walk amongst the shopping masses aiming to reach the mannequins to deposit their hideous clothes.  At the same time the police patrol the zone and apprehend anyone they suspect of smuggling ugly clothes and then confiscating said items.  The winning team is the one that has smuggled or confiscated the most items after a specific time span.  As you may imagine, much hilarity/offence can result if the police attempt to apprehend a member of the public who is not playing the game.

Moosehunt. Hi-tech. A brave game designer donned a moose outfit and starting in the
forest of Dean 80 miles away, made his way to Bristol city centre of three days.  Players could text in to receive his GPS location and we then able to hunt the moose (with digital cameras).  A twist was that the moose would know when he was being tracked and from where so that he could change his route accordingly.  Players could also watch the chase via a map-based mashup.

Journey to the Middle of the Night.  Lo-tech as player, high-coordination as organiser.  This for me was the highlight of my time and was essentially a city-wide chase game in which you have to make it to checkpoints by certain times across the city while co-called chasers attempt to track you down.  If you are tagged then you in turn become a chaser and therefore the game becomes increasingly difficult as time progresses.  What was exceptional about this version which originated in the US was the clear influence of Punchdrunk, the outstanding theatre company who have a short-term residence at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol.  This resulted in the checkpoints being in effect immersive theatrical scenes with the most dramatic being when we marched through the corridors of a disused police station and alarmingly locked into tiny cells in order to get clues for the next destination.  This game had over 200 players...quite intense.

[short video of London's social games festival Hide & Seek in 2007]

Of my time at igfest, there were a few things that really struck me:

• One was the sheer liberation of experiencing the city space as my playground.  One co-player described it as starring in your very own computer game and that summed it up perfectly. 
• The ability of play to unite generations and backgrounds.  I was playing some of the games with children younger than ten but we were genuinely engaging as peers.
• How the incentive of play is such a powerful way to support people in working collaboratively – fun is a universal language.
• At no time in the playing of any of the games did I think I was doing something stupid, although it may have looked as such from an objective position.  For the duration of the games I was fully committed to them and that really surprised (and excited) me.

So what next for pervasive gaming?  My instinct remains that while it this new interpretation of play is currently a fringe activity, both commercially and socially, the fact that the core demographic is geeks and hipsters (and combinations of the two) deserves attention.  This is a demographic that one should not underestimate… just ask Steve Jobs.

Image credit: flickr user | edmittance

Over-Specialisation Nation!

Is it is possible to become too specialised?

The dramatic events of last week on the financial markets are one example how, I believe, specialisation can cause major problems. The ever increasing (so called) 'sophistication' of financial instruments have become so complicated that they can't be understood by enough people, certainly not the financial regulators, and therefore the products that end up having no bearing on genuine economic reality, leading to the recent bubble and subsequent credit crunch.

Similarly, I have long felt frustrated at specialists in academia or industry who are so narrowly focused on their narrow niches that it is practically impossible to understand what they say and what they are working on, and only a handful of other people can even question them let alone understand them.

Don't get me wrong. Without question we desperately need well trained and educated specialists who understand complex issues in great detail, be it financial or philosophical. The world is a complicated place, and I'm not for one moment advocating a retreat to creating renaissance men and women, however appealing a romantic notion that may be. It's simply not possible for individuals to be sufficiently knowledge about a breadth of issues or disciplines as it once was.

However I think when swathes of business and academia get so specialised and riddled with jargon that they become practically incomprehensible, then I think we've gone too far and need to take a step back. I think businesses, academia and governments need to create more space for specialists to interact with larger groups of people across traditional boundaries. This is what we try to do with our NESTA Connect programme. As I've said previously this space might be provided by talented people who span multiple disciplines themselves, or organisations that act as intermediaries.

This excessive specialisation is a global phenomenon, and yet the UK is interesting in that a) it has one of the most specialised education systems in the world, and yet b) the opportunities open to graduates of a particular discipline tend to be wider here compared with Germany, and possibly the rest of Europe, for example.

So in conclusion, I believe we should no longer tolerate the uber-specialist who talks to no-one but their immediate micro peer groups. Else we run the risk of losing the ability to discuss, debate and question other people, leading to the ludicrous situation that precipitated the recent crash in financial markets.

Social Innovation Camp invites you to go LARGE

December 5-7 sees the second installment of Social Innovation Camp, an experiment in using social technology for social change.  Over the course of a weekend, some of the UK's best web development talent will work together with people like you to rapidly develop and prototype web-based solutions to BIG problems. 

What big issues do you care about?  What ideas have you had bubbling away that might just make a difference?  If you have ever talked yourself out of something because "it'll never work"...perhaps that's just because you've never worked with the people to help make it work?  Now's your chance.

Yesterday saw the launch of the call for ideas which is open until Friday 7th November - so we all have 8 weeks to work up our ideas using this friendly framework as a guide.  So let's get going...

For some people technology can be seen as the be all and end all.  For others it is one step too far.  The way I see it, SI Camp sits elegantly at a fulcrum point, recognising that while technology is in the foreground it is equally in the background.  In fact, it is increasingly clear to me that in any successful needs-based collaborative innovation process such as this, what is absolutely key is having passionate people who understand those needs leading from the front. And it is these people, people like you, from whom this call for ideas invites responses.

For those of us who can't wait till the main event in December, Team SI Camp are starting an exciting new monthly event to develop the community of people interested in the social web for social change...whatever your particular background or area of interest.  The first one is on Weds Oct 1st at the Hub Kings Cross in London - sign up here.

Engineering serendipity

I met an interesting company yesterday called CellCentric, a cambridge based company that has developed a network of specialist academics (in the field of epigenetics). In essence what they do is find links between the work done by the academics generally working in very narrow specialist silo. They then can more objectively assess the ideas and also spot opportunities to develop the intellectual property and sell on the IP to big pharma companies. This type of collaboration would usually only happen by chance very rarely.

With more distributed organisations and specialised knowledge, the need for these type of organisations is increasing, who can organise integrate knowledge and organise innovation between organsisations. And it's organisations like Innocentive, Kluster, Innovaro, The Disrupters, Innovation Arts, WhatIf and CellCentric that all create value by aggregating knowledge and brokering relationships. I’m going to coin a term and acronymn and describe them as an engineering serendipity businesses (ESB), which I also think is the business NESTA Connect is in too.

Other organisations like the IPGroup do something similar to Cellcentric with the academic research base, but on a much broader disciplinary scale. Can their success in unlocking the potential of epigenetics be transferrable it is to other disciplines, or sub-discipilnes, or sectors?

I'm always keen to collect examples of interesting ESBs so please do send me details of other good examples.

Video and final stab at social networks and cities

Readers of this blog or attendees at Nesta's recent events will have heard me, or others talk about the theme of 'social networks as the new cities'.

I don't intend restart this discussion again in detail but for anybody who is interested, find here a video of a talk I gave earlier in the summer at the NLab conference in Leicester, on this topic.

It's something of a stream of consciousness exploration of the subject but hopefully gives a flavour of my point of view. Namely that cities arn't just simply analogous to social networks, but rather some of the functions that cities provide (proximity, economies of scale, random interaction etc) are now increasingly being provided by social networks.

And most importantly, we are only just beginning to see the impact on our cities and places which will be profoundly impacted by the web, just as they have been historically by other disruptive technologies.

Anyway, enough on that, but as always I'd be interested in any thoughts and feedback as ever.

PS. Thanks again to Sue Thomas for curating the event and inviting me to attend.

There's something about Toronto

This post is part two in a potentially ongoing series on interesting and innovative places.

Rohan blogged recently (here) about interesting stuff going on in Bristol, UK, but I can't stop hearing about interesting people and organisations in Toronto, Canada. Some of the stuff that has appeared on my radar in the last few months from Toronto include:

• Richard Florida on the creative class
• Jane Jacobs on cities 
• Naomi Klein on globalisation and brands
• Don Tapscott on Wikinomics
• Rotman Management School on integrative thinking
• The MaRS innovation centre

I'm sure there is lots more that I've missed, but the fact that, without looking for them, these things keep cropping up appears to point to a creative and innovative place. Perhaps it's because Toronto (as I have recently learned), has half of it's inhabitants from outside Canada, and this diversity drives innovation as I've blogged about previously here. What else is it about Toronto, or any place, that makes it an innovative hub?

I just thought I'd capture that there does seem to be a buzz about the place which is hard to put your finger on, but you know it when you see it.

Big science and the $6bn dollar man

This Wednesday will finally see the start of the biggest experiment in human history, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. It has cost somehwere in the region of $6bn so is understandably getting lots of questions asked about how to justify such mind boggling expenditure.

The classic response to these sort of questions is to say that Big Science projects like CERN/LHC have led to all kinds of major commerical spin-offs. For example, the world wide web was invented at CERN, and famously not patented. However to judge something based on it's unintended consequences is a strange justification. A much tougher sell is the fact that the discoveries that result from big science may often not pay back for decades or even centuries. Creating space for that type of research requires foresight but also considerable political courage and conviction.

One of the major scientific discoveries at the LHC is prediced to be the discovery of the Higgs Boson, sometimes called 'The God Particle'. This is the particle which is what gives matter it's mass. You could well ask 'is that worth $6bn?', but I think that's the wrong question.

On a personal aside, Peter Higgs was one of my professors at Edinburgh University and it was the toughest course I ever did, but very satisfying in a very geeky 'maths as a performance art' kind of way. Anyway, we'll hopefully know soon if he was right and hand him a nobel prize.

I believe we live in an overly productivity obsessed age and we don't have the space to think/innovate in a our public and private organisations. I think we need the foresight and investment into big science where the outcome is deliberately unknown and unclear. To paraphrase Tim Berners Lee, 'If we knew where we were going, it wouldn't be called research'.

We're heating things up in our Crucible again...

We are just about to launch our new Crucible scheme - where we get a whole load of researchers together and see what sparks fly.

Our new programme is called Carbon Crucible and focuses on sustainable eneregy. The project is a collaboraiton with the

UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) to foster interdisciplinary collaboration on the big issues in energy research, such as demand reduction and environmental sustainability.

The new programme differs from NESTAs own Crucible programme in that it has a focus on a particular topic rather than just looking for new innovation and knowledge from a serendipidous meeting of minds.

We have been thinking about the difference between the two programme as comparable to the difference between 'work' and 'play'. Carbon Crucible is the 'work' model, with its focused topic. It will, we hope, provide a serious mechanism for projects to be created across disciplines in areas of research that are calling out for cross-disciplinary collaboration.

NESTA Crucible on the other hand, can seem more like 'play' as any collaborations formed are a result of ideas that are developed within a totally open framework with no particular research agenda. It will be very interesting to see how these differences affect the outcomes. I am wondering whether a structure based on play could in the end provide more of those precious creative sparks that arise out of diversity.

Convergence of Media Production

Broadcasters have for years now been talking about developing content across different platforms.

When it works well - BBC's coverage of the Olympics, Channel 4's Big Art Project - it is wonderful.

But TV producers and digital production companies have traditionally faced a key barrier to innovation. Their differing business models, ways or working and the issue of intellectual property ownership have meant that collaboration to produce convergent content is more difficult than it ought to be.

NESTA teamed up with PACT to sort it out, and they have produced some useful legal templates and a guide to allow firms to contract more easily to work together.

What we'd like to know is whether they can be used outside of these media sectors. If relevant to your business, please feel free to try them and let us know?

Guide to collobaorating

Jon

mysingleorganisation.com

You want to work with someone. You have a common interest, there are obvious and significant benefits to a collaboration and you have all of the online/offline tools and resources you could possibly need. But it just doesn't really work. Why?

Collaborations involve human beings. As most people have experienced (or at least heard stories about), two people who are the 'perfect match' can go home telling friends all about their 'worst date ever'. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, people who are perfectly suited just don't 'click'.

Surely it wouldn't be illogical to suggest that the 'click-factor' complexity exists in the formation of other types of relationships like collaborations? If so, how can we understand more about this 'click-factor'? Does it concern psychological compatibility of individuals, 'personality' traits of organisations, a mixture of the two or perhaps something else altogether? Whatever the answer is, I think that human factors play a larger part in determining which collaborations are successful and which aren't, than we think. Learning more in this area, can only be beneficial.

A whole dating industry thrives off the difficulty people have in finding that 'click-factor'. Do we set up a 'dating agency' to help partner organisations go through the process of finding the relationship that 'clicks'?