The Futures of Entertainment - working notes

Here are my thoughts on Jane's recent - and brilliant - post on the Futures of Entertainment. Not a rebuttal, nor a response. Just random notes and comments. Stream of consciousness. Zero punctuation. Association of ideas. No more. No less.

1. Synchronous Instant Communication Over Mediated Content

“Twittering, text messaging, Facebook, and the like” are certainly remarkable toys for people of all ages. But I personally have little interest in knowing that my friend is drinking a Double Latte at Starbucks in real-time. I'd rather use those tools to watch the Champions’ League final game with the same friend. Twittering, text messaging, Facebook, and the like" are fun, but potentially distracting and ultimately vacuous. That is: I don't consider them especially 'entertaining', although they are certainly exciting forms of communication.

I feel much more engaged when I’m sharing with my entourage (friends but also my clique of crazy interest-driven fans) a communal experience that has some potential 'epic' factor embedded - some gravitas, an aura of relevant liveness, I'm thinking of Auslander's work here -. So, let’s say I could a watch soccer game online, in hi-def (not some lame streaming from some obscure website), with people disseminate all over the world and have a “conversation”, a real-time commentary – “Dude, that was clearly offside!”, “Del Piero is, once again, stellar”, "How's Barcelona doin' these days?". 

Watching and talking with my brother in London, my friends in Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, Glasgow etc while millionaires in designer underwear try to score a goal, look cool, and make history. Now that would be really exciting. The soccer game becomes a pretest to share an event, in real time, with a distributed network of friends. Another way of saying this: “Twittering, text messaging, Facebook, and the like” are not enough - they become relevant to me only when/if they are means not ends.

By the way, what I have just described will become mainstream soon. Wired calls it “Social Video Viewing”. I mean, who 'just'  watches TV these days? We are all multitasking anyway - from the basic stuff (e.g., accessing a page of Lostpedia because Jack, as usual, has no clue, to chatting and responding to emails) to the most complex of tasks (like procrastinating/lingering/indulging on this entry instead of concentrating on that long over-due 20-page essay). Also: video social viewing is not that new - some might remember when, back in the days, teenagers used to watch MTV or soap-operas show and talk over the telephone with friends for an entire afternoon. Now you can have entire multimedia experiences with a dash of teleconferencing over the internet, for free. What's really new is the layers of metadata we leave behind... What does all this mean? Who owns this stuff?  Fragments of conversations, compliments, messages, emoticons...? Most likely, Hal 9000's sister, ARIA.

Vaguely off-topic (or maybe not): Recently I interviewed Greg and Satomi (50% of Deerhoof) for Rolling Stone magazine and they mentioned that on YouTube often the most watched videos of a band are shitty-looking cell-phone recordings of a concert/gig by fans. While they certainly appreciate the free advertising and bottom-up promotion, they are a bit concerned by the fact that many people, out there, use these fragments of sounds and videos to assess the quality of a band. "People that have never heard of us make an instant judgement after watching twenty seconds of 'us' on YouTube". Bands are not afraid of abdicating authorship, but they still want to retain some control over the performance... At that point we started talking about Martin Scorsese's Shine A Light as the antithesis of YouTube - the auteur's film watched on an IMAX screen vs. the multitude of crappy videos on a computer windows. Obviously, there is no right or wrong (and information wants to be free - and control is practically impossible). Radically different practices co-exist in the same media landscape, but their function and relevance is clearly not the same. 

Here's another story (another digression): in the Summer of 2007, during a performance, Italian popular singer Zucchero Fornaciari insulted a fan because instead of dancing to the music, she was texting somebody. "You make me sick! You repel me!", he screamed. He took it very personally and felt she was totally disingaged and rude. She replied by showing him the finger. The entire thing is still visible here (priceless - ironically, it was recorded via cellphone LOL). [to me it's as cool as Bjork punching a journalist at the Bangkok airport] The episode is interesting and shows how different band/artists respond to technology - technofobia, technophilia...

2. Tools [and Interfaces] *are* the Content

I totally agree with Jane here. Tools are the content. Also: increasingly, the content is tools. Most of the research done on The Sims’s user base show that many people out there that just “play” the editor and could not care less about the “game”. I would argue that editors are the real killer app (actually, somebody said it much better a while ago). Think Spore. I like the editor much more than the game itself. Spore is an editor in search of some compelling game content. Forget about the game. Why don't game companies start to design editors and let the fans figure out what to do with them? It's like muffin tops: forget about the whole enchilada, just sell the top. As Elaine noted, the top: is crunchy, explosive... It's where the muffin breaks free of the pan and sort of does its own thing".

Free the editors! We love to customize things and show them to the world (“Look what I’ve done, Mom!”). One of my students at CCA has cleverly suggested that we should be able to add our own personal tools and editors to games, incorporating something like GottaPark into Grand Theft Auto IV for example and thus introducing a new mode of playing the game (this somehow echoes Will Wright's idea of introducing a love story in Battlefield 1942, circa 2004). 

Avatars, Mii, Home, Second Life, Nike+Plus runners. It’s all about projecting bits of ourselves on the screen(s) and designing our ideal worlds in spite of reality. Face-in-the-game, SingStar home videos… For that you need a) good tools, b) slick interfaces, c) ever expanding communities (communities that need to be managed, not censored, by the way). 

Still, the emergence of professional amateurism does not signify the end of auteurs. Also, let's not forget that a considerable amount of YouTube's most watched productions are professionally made. I love Chris Anderson's notion of the Long Tail, but we often tend to overestimate the impact of new tools and the real impact of user-generated content. 

3. The Future of Entertainment is Not What it Used To Be

Often, the most successful inventions are just a subversion of tools and products that were designed for completely different reasonspurposes. Take machinima. Take MySpace and FaceBook (danah has written extensively on the evolution of these social network sites, among other things - what I find fascinating in her accounts is the gradual transformation of these tools - the ongoing frictions between designers and users - the wisdom of the crowds vs. the intentions of the planners - great stuff). Think Yelp! – if you think that this is a mere review site, think again: this is the greatest matchmaking tool since the invention of, hmmm, high school and super-markets?

Also. The future of entertainment is going to be transforming boring stuff into exciting games. Everything from giving up cigarettes to lose weight. From organizing the perfect wedding (apparently, marriage has become a sub-category of survival horrors) to finding a new boyfriend. Shakespeare and D. H. Lawrence on the DS? Why not? Will fitness games take over music games, profit-wise? Who knows, at this point, anything is possible. EA making fitness games... Will the FPS genre become a niche-of-a-niche? When will Climax develop a parking simulator? Who cares about racing games any longer? And what about a shopping simulator? Experience the thrills of shopping at Whole Foods in this realistic 3D adventure! Survive Black Friday (This game is for mature audiences only)! Buy virtual stuff at IKEA and H&M! (oh, wait, they already made those games, oh well...). SkyNet is the limit. 

And I won't mention again the Nike+Ipod combo because it would become clear that I am getting paid by the companies to promote their stuff (just kiddin'... And, yet, not that unrealistic... Think about Jane's notion of 'advertising with integrity' (the Penny Arcade example)... Or think about William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, the ultimate form of product placement: 'random', 'casual' conversations in bars and club about 'sponsored' goods and services - actually I am kind of hurt that Nike has not contacted me yet to start some sort of, hmmm, collaboration). Still, the potential is huge, and not just for running. Make "it" a game - whatever "it" is - and you will have mllions of adoring suckers.

By the way, I love my Nike+ MiniMe.

4. The Future of Entertainment is going to be a subscription

Now that we have instant and persistent access to gargantuan archives of entertainment - all the music, all the movies, all the books, all the games - all you need is a magic key that opens all the doors. A single subscription to Entertainment Now. The entity that will provide that service, will rule pretty much everything. What's going to be? Microsoft-Comcast? Murdoch-Sony? Google-Disney?

5. On Immersion

Jane mentions 'immersion' and 'transparency'. Let's focus on 'immersion', a term that carries many different meanings and nuances. When I think about immersion and entertainment I think about some of these things:

• -  the cathartic experience of watching a powerful movie on a big screen - I cried for what it seemed an eternity in the last part of Synecdoche, New York -A story of a man condensed in two hours (mental note: not bad for a movie that tells you that times does not exist.), It's the big screen. It's Dolby. Home video is not cinema (the iPhone is not Cinema, either). Darkness and light. Everybody silent except for the ghosts on the screen, users are (mostly) excluded from the performance (exception: when the audience becomes the performance, think Rocky Horror Show screenings, horror films where the audience reacts and provides a lively, often sarcastic,commentary to what's happening on the screen, to dilute the tension)
• -      the overwhelming immersion generated by a music gig – a concert, a dj set, a rave – music and visuals  loud and powerful - they simultaneously annihilate you and make you feel fully alive, dancing, singing, sweating, alcohol/drugs, tribal, dark venues, one to two hours of full immersion where carnival-like behaviors are not only tolerated, but encouraged, users are part of the performance
• -      The achitectural/topological immersion generated by a TV series, especially when you indulge in binge watching, a marathon of three dvds in a weekend. An entire season compressed in few hours or days (still, always longer than a movie). The resulting feeling for me is less emotional and more architectural: you feel like you truly inhabit a space: Jack Bauer's CTU . I’m Jack mysterious island. The steamy offices of Steling  Cooper in New York. Hank Moody’s apartment in LA, Dexter’s flat in Miami. You really know these places and these characters. You dream about them. You know your way around their houses - where they keep their gin and the guns. You build a mental map of their worlds because you visit them so often and for such a long time that you start living in them. Users are not part of the performance (but they contribute in other ways: criticism, fan fiction, ARGs)
• -      The ludic co-creative immersion of a videogame – that requires full engagement, co-creation, lots of skills (technical, social), time, and competence (problem solving routines). Not much empathy, definitely a lot of architecture -spaces of possibilities - users are an integral part of the performance – they make it happen - not many drugs involved, usually - games require full attention - although a few beers obviously enhance a session of Rock Band or SingStar.
• The immersion of a live sport event - I'm thinking in particular European soccer games - watched in stadia not on TV - dangerous appeal - the feeling of "It's us against them" "we are going to get you" - racist chants -often, alcohol/drugs - violence always present in various degrees - verbally explicit, could easily degenerate  in physical violence - usually does in Italy - think hooligans - audience is part of the performance (in fact, when a game is played without a lived audience it is just not fun) and could even influence the outcome of the game. 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - ---tobecontinued 

More to come. As somebody wisely pointed out, the future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed. Another way of putting it is that the past never disappears... Layers layers layers (this movie shows it really well). In some places, it just sticks longer than it should. Still, entertainment has no expiration date, so it's all good. It's not about games, it's really  about play. 

Related (in Italian - I wrote this in 2007: it's about how game-like mechanics could reinvent the way we watch TV)