December 1, 2011
My company, inkle, announced Frankenstein today. I could talk at length about it, but it’s probably better that you just visit our website here:
Or read the press release here:
http://www.inklestudios.com/press-release-nov11
On another note, you might’ve noticed that this blog hasn’t really been updated very frequently. Oh well, it was a nice idea, but the lack of posts probably means I’m spending more time building inkle’s next project!
July 23, 2011
Development, Mac Leave a comment
Yesterday morning I was merrily announcing to my colleagues that I was going to be sensible. I wasn’t going to go straight out and buy Lion. No no, I was going to wait a month until all the initial bugs had been ironed out. I was going to wait until everyone had formed some sensible and balanced opinions about it.
If you know me, you’ll be unsurprised to learn that I lasted all of 12 hours or so.
On the good side, the thing that hasn’t annoyed me is the reversed scrolling. Perhaps because I was prepared for it. I’ve started to adapt to it – seems okay to me!
However, here are a few things that are annoying me.
1. Spotlight kills your computer for some multiple of 10 hours. It starts re-indexing all your files as soon as you start using Lion, making everything grind to a halt. Mine’s currently on 29 hours remaining.
2. Your previous version of Xcode is incompatible. It refuses to run at all until you download the multi-gigabyte update. There goes an evening of productivity.
3. No re-ordering of Spaces. I’ve decided to try and modernise my usage of Mac OS X. Previously I always command-tabbed between applications, but I decided that a three-finger swipe to navigate between spaces was pretty cool. However, you can’t click and drag to re-order spaces within Mission Control. Why not? I’d love to keep Spotify in its own space on the far right, but if I make a few space, I have to take time to re-shuffle everything.
3b. Spaces re-order themselves by frequency of usage (by default). Which means you can be swiping left and right while it shuffles them behind your back. Keeps you on your toes at least.
4. Launchpad has everything. In… some kind of order. Launchpad, the view that shows your apps in a grid like on an iOS device, is indiscriminate in putting ALL your apps there. Including many that you’ve accumulated over the years that you forgot about. That on its own isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the way it’s managed is all a bit of a mess.
Because it mirrors iOS, you can’t select multiple and drag them around (as far as I can tell). So it takes bloody ages to re-organise them. You can’t right-click on them to do useful things like “Show in Finder” or any of the options that you could use in the dock. It turns out I have two copies of Google Sketchup on my computer somewhere, and both are in Launchpad. However, I can’t find the one that isn’t in my Applications folder.
Visually identifying the icon you want in an 8×5 grid (on my machine at least) isn’t quite as easy as doing the same on an iPhone with a small screen and a 4×4 grid. (Or 4×5 including the dock).
5. Finder: “All My Files” view – will this ever be consistently useful? Maybe it’s just the types of files that I keep on my computer, but showing all my (most recent?) files in this view doesn’t give me very useful information. Its vertical axis shows different file types – most of which are currently displaying fairly irrelevant files. Maybe because I’m not frequently working in the finder with presentations, spreadsheets, music files, movies.
If you’re using your laptop to demonstrate something to a colleague or to a client, do you really want it displaying a random selection of files from your computer by default.
6. Multiple graphical glitches. When I re-positioned my dock from the left side of the screen to the bottom, bits of it got left behind when moving between Spaces. When I tried to save a draft of this very document that I’m writing in TextEdit, it gave me the effect that you see in the screenshot. Launchpad got the icons of my apps all jumbled up, with some of them missing. It just still feels a little bit like a beta.
7. Xcode failed to install fully. While I was killing time by writing this blog post, I was installing Xcode. I had to leave it going overnight since it didn’t quite finish installing. But it never did finish installing, so I’m trying again. Right now it’s on “2 hours and 31 minutes remaining”. Well, at least Spotlight’s finished indexing.
Ooh, you know what would’ve been really sensible? Perhaps if I’d waited a month (or more) before buying Lion.
July 6, 2011
Design, Digital Fiction, Transmedia 3 Comments
Joe’s Reporty Thing – Now at least 80% free of bias!
Last night’s Transmedia London meet-up, was easily the best meet-up I’ve been to since the Book Hackday in May. We (Jon – a designer buddy at Sony, and I) turned up, not quite knowing how many people would be there, or what form the evening would take. It was awesome – we were pleasantly surprised at the number of people, the enthusiasm, and general organisation. It was held at swanky BAFTA HQ, near Picadilly Circus. I’d been there last year for a a great presentation by Peter Molyneux (the closest thing you’ll get to a celebrity video game designer in the UK). The venue was great (although the post-talk networking space was a little too compact for my liking).
Four projects were presented, and all were interesting in their own way…
Andrea Philips talked about America 2049 over skype to the audience, and was blown up on the large cinema screen (As in, her video feed was enlarged. Don’t worry, no writers were sacrificed). The charity ARG project is organised by breakthrough, and was designed to raise awareness of human rights issues. Its central hub is a Facebook game, with impressively high production values – they managed to get some well known actors to work for free to produce video clips to support the narrative. I’m not much of an expert on ARGs though, so I’ll leave you to visit their website if you’re interested: http://america2049.com/
Noam Sohachevsky surprised me, by interesting me in something football related (gosh!). His company, Picklive, makes a type of live fantasy football game. You watch a match on your TV, and simultaneously earn points by betting on real-time events, as they occur, using Picklive’s website. To enter, you pick three players, which you earn points for as they pass, score goals etc, over the course of five minutes. It reminded me of the Apprentice game that the BBC hosted last year. You could make predictions throughout the show on who you thought would be fired, and could see rest of the country’s predictions displayed as a bar chart, which changed in real-time. Although it could be distracting at times, it gave a great sense of community while watching, and the gamification was well integrated.
There was a hint at the psychological theory of attention that was involved in designing a game that can be played on your laptop while watching TV (what did he call it? “dual-screening”?). I guess this is partly what I found so fascinating. Noam showed graphs of the type of attention patterns that you might see while watching a football match compared to watching The Apprentice. There are clear points where a match requires your full attention. For example, as a striker approaches the goal. Compare this with the down-time when the ball goes out of play. If you can synchronise your game design around these patterns, the two screen activities are likely to integrate more seamlessly. The Apprentice is a good example of a show with a very noisy attention graph – high and low points come and go unpredictably. And in fact, this is a problem I found with the BBC’s web-app – it was easy to miss important parts while you diverted your attention to updating your predictions.
I’ll quickly mention the final presentation on The Code – a collaboration between Six to Start and the BBC. Like America 2049, it has high production values. I’m embarrassed to say that I don’t remember enough about this one because I was still thinking and tweeting about Varytale (see below), and each presentation was pretty short! Here’s some info about it though: http://www.sixtostart.com/onetoread/2011/the-code-coming-soon/
The real reason we were there was for Varytale – the upcoming interactive story platform brought to you by the guys who made Echo Bazaar, and was presented by Alexis Kennedy. Their general visual design is lovely – light beiges with modern sans serif for titles, with bookish serifs for body text. The V of their Varytale logo splits into organic branches on one side, echoing the branching narrative. They showed examples of their automated book cover design process. What I wasn’t aware of was that their design algorithm takes into account the relative prestige of the author. Depending on how well rated(?) the writer or their work is, the book cover is automatically designed to have increasing visual distinction and exclusivity. Cool.
I spoke to Alexis briefly afterwards. He’s a nice chap. He emphasised the fact that they’re building a service more than they’re building any particular book or content. They want to create a platform that, in the long term, will be strongly community focused. For now though, they’re aiming it at authors who have capability to produce quality interactive narrative (apparently avoiding an influx of “dark elf slash fiction”). There was a clear emphasis on creating interactive text that won’t alienate non-gamers.
I’m intruiged to see what the initial content offering will look like – are the writers going to be actual proper real life published authors? Or are they going to be specialist hobbyists drawn from communities such as the interactive fiction world? I also wonder exactly how their monetisation system will work – they’re keen to point out that this is a key element of their strategy.
And of course, the biggest question for me is whether there’s a sustainable market, let alone a mass market, for interactive fiction. I really hope so.
Oh yeah, I can also point out that the Varytale business cards look very tasty indeed:
June 28, 2011
Digital Fiction, Publishing Leave a comment
James Spackman wrote an interesting blog post about The End of the Book – I strongly recommend you go and take a look. He suggests that publishers should make use of the opportunity to talk to readers when they their thirst is greatest – when they have just finished reading their book.
I love the idea of having a little biography (that’s interesting and relevant) about the author, or even better, a Q&A. Although James found that people weren’t interested in being advertised to at the end of their book, I think it can be done. It just needs to be in a more congruous way, and in context. For example, a biography could talk about the various influences that caused the author to write about a particular subject, and how that relates to other novels that they’ve written.
Although James was talking about physical books, I think the opportunity is even greater for digital. With the inherant interactivity that’s possible in digital media and connected devices, there’s a huge amount that can be done.
On a mobile device, an app could include an embedded webpage that is the author’s biography on the publisher’s website. For this to suit the reader’s needs, it would have to primarily include interesting information about the author, but then also relate to other books by the author. It could secondarily have a section along the lines of “…if you liked this, you might also like…”, providing the best of both worlds for reader, author and publisher.
The more mature ebook reading platforms become, the easier it will be to link authors’ works together, and I predict that we will increasingly see this in the marketplace.
It has to be done sensitively though – providing the reader with information they’re really interested in. Readers’ awareness of other books should simply emerge as a delightful side-effect from the point of view of a publisher.
June 20, 2011
Digital Fiction Leave a comment
1. LESS INNOVATION, MORE QUALITY DESIGN
It’s true that the future of books needs innovation, but only as a outcome of great design, not arbitrarily as the primary goal.
The good news is that this strategy of undirected innovation isn’t entirely failing at the moment, probably because the app store encourages a disposable app culture. So, even if people don’t spend more than 10 minutes with the app, they’ve already spent their £1-£3, and told their friends, which is all that counts. I’d love to see whether app usage metrics would confirm this…
Everyone’s furiously innovating and experimenting, and it’s all very exciting. But I believe we need to be focusing primarily on making something that’s actually good!
2. THE INFINITE DIGITAL DESIGN SPACE
For my day job, I work at Sony’s Cambridge studio, developing video games. The other week they sent a few of us on a creativity training course, where we learnt a bit about De Bono thinking strategies (he’s the guy who invented the term ‘lateral thinking’). In one technique, we used random stimuli of words and music to help us brainstorm ideas.
The tutor cited a real-life example of when he used the random stimulus of a car tyre to help the employees of a chocolate company to come up with new product ideas. The car tyre inspired the word “black”, which in turn inspired dark chocolate ideas, and the tread of the tyre inspired ideas of etching a textured surface onto the chocolate.
I think a problem with digital platforms is that you can make almost anything. There are very few constraints. At the creativity training day, there were around twenty of us in the room, and we were each told to come up with around four ideas each using the random stimulus. Our ideas were crazy. (Unfortunately, I’m probably not allowed to tell you what they were). They weren’t terrible ideas, and all could conceivably be put into production. All of them would’ve been very interesting experiments for different reasons. But would they have actually been good? I doubt it.
Just because an idea is feasible, different and interesting, it doesn’t make it good. Let alone commercial.
3. GOOD INTERACTION DESIGN
In the video game industry, there’s a strong focus on prioritising the gameplay design over everything else. The gameplay is the interaction design of a video game, and any designer will tell you that’s by far the most important element to get right, for good reason. Good gameplay is what makes a game fun to play. A game can be beautiful and a technical marvel, but without good gameplay it will be a flop. As with most media, there’s terrifyingly little that separates a good game and a bad one.
We might not have a special compound word for it (yet!), but the interaction design inside digital fiction and other literary apps are just as important, and there’s definitely room for improvement.
This all sounds like a big long rant, and perhaps it is. But I should probably point out that there are a few developers doing a great job at this. The Waste Land app by Touch Press and Faber & Faber is good example. The interface when reading the poem is minimal and does its best to vanish, allowing the reader to concentrate on the content. There’s audio and video, but it doesn’t feel tacked on – it supports and integrates perfectly with the text.
4. SCALABILITY AND REPEATABILITY
The Waste Land is also designed in such a way that the format is repeatable, making the design scalable from a business perspective. Conceivably, the app design could be used to fit any poem from any writer, with the follow up apps on a relatively low budget. (Whether Faber & Faber decides whether to produce more apps in a similar format remains to be seen, but I certainly hope so!).
I think repeatability will be a vital consideration in the design of future apps. Aside from the obvious reason of the economies of scale, there are many benefits:
May 24, 2011
May 17, 2011
I wish I could remember what excitement was on my screen at that moment…
May 17, 2011
Inspired by one of many interesting discussions from last weekend’s Book Hackday…
One problem video games have faced is the awkward transition between active and passive sections. You watch a cutscene, and you’re itching to get back into the action. And yet you’re perfectly willing to sit back on the sofa and watch the latest episode of Lost. Or, The Only Way is Essex. Not me though, obviously.
People don’t like being disrupted. Sometimes when I’m feeling tired, I can’t be bothered to go to bed. Okay, that’s an embarrassing example. When I’m in the middle of work, about to make a breakthrough, I don’t want to be interrupted. When I’m watching TV, it takes mental effort to get in the mood to play a video game. When I’m playing a video game, I don’t want to watch a cutscene.
Predictably, this necessarily affects all interaction design. Reading a book, for as long as we’ve known it, has always been a very pure activity. It engages a very particular area of your brain. Throw in ANY interactive features, and this gets messed up a bit. You’re no longer able to focus on one single task. Concentrating on the text will be more difficult.
So, what can designers and innovators of digital fiction do about it?
Finely chop your experiences. Blend them together finely. Don’t make them chew on a whole carrot and then make them swallow a tablespoonful of humous. If the reader-player needs to have a certain part of their brain active, make sure it’s switched on at the beginning, and keeps being used throughout.
Oh, you mean you want a real example that doesn’t involve carrots and humous? Don’t make the reader-player read 1000 words, then make them play with an interactive toy, before throwing them another 1000 words. That’s work. There’s no flow. Blend the two experiences as well as you can. Depending on the context, you could read some of the text aloud with audio clips as they play with the toy, or have small paragraphs appear as they play.
A lot of this depends on the user interface design. Every element of the design needs to feed into the cohesive whole, as one seamless experience.
Books have the ability to create extremely immersive experiences, despite their minimalism, because the reader can focus on one single task. Likewise, the most immersive video games are often ones that ask the player to focus continually on a simple interaction mechanisms.
Finely chop and blend!
May 17, 2011
Welcome to my blog. I’m planning on using it as a space for thoughts that don’t fit into one tweet.
…
So I guess I’ll be posting to it about once-per-year then.
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