What happens next?

New website

2011-01-05T09:55:00.000Z

To mark the new year, I have an exciting new website at tomchatfield.net which this blog will shortly redirect towards. I'll be posting all new material over there. Do check it out and let me know what you think (it has comments and everything).

Gawker, Wikileaks and online insecurity

2010-12-14T10:19:00.003Z

I wrote a comment piece for The Independent today, looking at the social impact of the Gawker hack and the growth of privacy and security concerns in personal online spaces. This is a slightly longer, pre-edited version

With every new hack, we are a little less impressed. When over a million Gawker user accounts were compromised, and hundreds of thousands of Twitter accounts starting spewing adverts for a diet relying on acai berries, sighing users registered the inconvenience; changed their passwords en masse; and life went on. This wasn’t Wikileaks or government secrets, after all. The digital world is just a little older and wiser.

Or is there more to it than this? Digital identity may not be on the same level as diplomatic cables, but it’s a serious business. With an increasingly important component of many lives playing out across social networks—which now connect close to a billion people across the world—and via online consumption, sharing and commenting, the hijacking of any part of this personal jigsaw is both an intense emotional blow and an assault on assets with a growing real-world value.

In a world where an inappropriate photo uploaded on Facebook can cost you your job, or a tongue-in-cheek Tweet can mean criminal prosecution, it’s clear that the notion of a clean division between “real” and “virtual” spheres no longer applies. This has made privacy and data security vital issues over the last few years. Beyond this, though, are larger cultural questions: how and where do people feel confident in expressing themselves, and free to build an identity?

One message the Wikileaks affair has broadcast is the power of digital records to damn those who create them. There is an extraordinary vulnerability that comes hand-in-hand with the extraordinary communicative potential of new media. And in this respect, sensitive diplomatic records and sensitive personal details aren’t too different: it’s only what you haven’t written down and recorded that can’t hurt you.

The post-Wikileaks political world is set to be both a more paranoid and a more old-fashioned one: more reliant on personal meetings, phone-calls, even written messages; less promiscuous with its networking and digital recordings. But high-profile events like the Gawker hack suggest that some aspects of social life, too, may experience a paradoxical pressure towards the offline, old-school realm—where authenticity can be guaranteed, discretion expected, and no records kept.

At the least, concerns over platform security and privacy are entering the mainstream where once they were the preserve of a tech-savvy minority. The firewalls are starting to go up: around governments and corporations, but also around individuals. Smartphones and tablet computers—the two classes of device on which the future of digital culture is increasingly being forged—tend to offer both a more limited and a more secure online experience than open browsing on a traditional operating system. The humble text message is already a more important social instrument than email (the average American teen exchanges over 3,000 texts a month) thanks in part to its greater security, specificity, convenience and relative immunity to the clogging forces of spam.

As our online activities play a steadily increasing part in determining what we and the world conceives of as “us,” it seems inevitable that we will become both more discerning and more paranoid digital citizens. After the last few weeks, this process may have taken another leap forward.

Wikileaks and the rise of the bland

2010-12-08T11:18:00.001Z

A short piece first published on the Prospect blog, looking at the link between Wikileaks and the world's rising tide of banality.

Press deadline is upon us in the Prospect office, meaning I've been awash in news, emails, press releases and items that may or may not make it into the next issue. The news has been overwhelmingly, fascinatingly full of the twin WikiLeaks and Assange sagas; the rest trivial by comparison; and yet I've been sensing an odd connection between the great political debate of the moment and my own daily wade through digital puff.

While bloggers and writers revel in the unprecedented freedoms of expression the web allows, for almost anybody working for any kind of institution, a crushing constriction applies. Anything that they mail, write, or say in front of witnesses might just end up echoing around the world—to be interrogated, or quoted out of context, or mocked, or praised, or misunderstood, or quite possibly all of these. This is one of the glories of our age. Yet it also creates a powerful pressure towards a particular form of dishonesty: blandishment.

It's an older phenomenon than the media itself, of course. But the pressure towards cliché (and worse) has never been as intense or ubiquitous as it is today. Publicists wouldn't be doing their jobs if any unvarnished honesty crept through the scripts. MPs find themselves roasted over slow fires for letting their guard down even in supposedly off-the-record briefings. Both public and private institutions have not a word to say to the world that hasn't passed first through the mills of communications expertise. The media has—kind of—an interest in truth; but you can't quote what has never been said or written. You have to play the game if you want people to talk to you. And the exponential weight of evasive, self-serving verbiage that threatens to overwhelm almost every inbox and browsing experience has its own dampening effect.

In fact, for those seeking power, or profit, or just profile, it's only what you don't say that will never be able to hurt you. Among other things, the WikiLeaks revelations suggest that an awful lot is going to go unsaid and unwritten in an increasingly information-savvy future. And the connection between what doesn't get said and what doesn't get thought about is a concern with a rich political history.

Angry Birds and the casual gaming revolution

2010-12-05T13:02:00.000Z

This is the pre-edited version of my December comment piece for the Observer on casual games, and why they may be a better guide to the digital future than blockbuster titles.

As Christmas approaches, it’s becoming difficult to board a train or watch a film without being bombarded by adverts for the season’s round of blockbuster video games. The latest expansion to the all-conquering World of Warcraft, out on December 7th, has cinematic trailers that put Hollwood to shame—and it will assuredly make more money than any seasonal movie.

On 10th December, however, a rather more modest digital entertainment celebrates its first birthday—and marks, in its way, a more radical digital development than any of the big screen’s pyrotechnics. The game is Angry Birds: a cute and casual slice of play whose 36 million admirers include our prime minister, the chancellor of the exchequer, and quite possibly half of the people sharing your carriage on the next commute home.

Plying Angry Birds is a defiantly silly way to spend a few minutes: you whip out your smartphone or iPad, and stroke the screen to start launching cartoon birds from an elastic catapult at a bunch of nefarious pigs. It’s self-evidently absurd. Yet its physics-based puzzles (the pigs insist on hiding behind a rickety series of wood and stone fortifications that you must demolish) possess bewildering depths, and have has made its Finnish developers Rovio many millions.

Angry Birds is just one example of what can safely be called the world’s fastest-growing entertainment sector: casual gaming. And if it isn’t too your taste, you can always indulge your darker side in Doodle Devil; delight virtual diners in Tiny Chef; share and collect virtual amphibian pets in the aptly-named Pocket Frog; or perhaps match coloured, numbered blocks in the fiendish logical puzzler Drop7. You may think you’re just passing the time. But you’re also participating in an increasingly significant slice of the future of technology.

Forget Tron: with powerful mobile computing devices increasingly found in every pocket, the future of technology suddenly looks less like virtual reality and more like a casually augmented version of ordinary experience. And more than almost anything else, it seems that what people of all stripes—young and old, male and female, from students to heads of government—want to inject into their days is play: the kind of fun that can be picked up, put down, and returned to at a moment’s notice.

Why is this? At its best, playing a game like Angry Birds is an Edenic experience. Across several hundred individually-crafted levels, you, the player, are incrementally mastering the dynamics of a tiny world within which everything is guaranteed to work out. The grass is always green, the sun is always shining. There is no limit, other than patience, to the number of times you are entitled to attempt each task. Here is a tiny, unfallen realm where each minor triumph is noted, measured and—if you wish—proudly displayed to the world.

Like many of the world’s best games, Angry Birds is not so much an escape from the laborious pressures of actuality as an unreality where skill and labour are amply, perpetually rewarded. As the title of the American game-theorist Jane McGonigal’s latest book puts it, “reality is broken.” It’s only in play that everything makes sense. And, she adds for good measure, “games make us better.” Because we humans, whether in Africa, America, Europe or the Antarctic, love few things more than losing ourselves in a game. Or, at least, we like losing our working, commuting selves—and rediscovering instead that person who can think of no better use for a moment’s leisure than lobbing just one more explosive avian at a cartoon pig in a helmet.

Spectator gaming

2010-11-23T11:26:00.005Z

This December's UK edition of Wired is its second annual ideas issue: 25 ideas and trends to look out for in 2011 (if you're reading this in November or December 2010, you should go out and buy it right now). I contributed one of these, on the idea of "spectator gaming." This is a slightly expanded version of my published text.

Seoul's Olympic Park, 17th January 2010: over 50,000 live spectators and millions more TV viewers are watching one of the sporting spectacles of the year. It's not football, not baseball, but videogaming: the finals of the Starcraft Ongamenet professional league, an arena in which legendary players like Lee Jae-Dong, alias The Tyrant, earn over a hundred thousand dollars a year.

This kind of fandom can seem an intractably Asian phenomenon. Increasingly, though, it's looking like a glimpse of the global future. Last year, the World Cyber Games boasted 600 participants from 65 countries, with half a million dollars in prizes. This September, Britain’s first national console gaming league was launched in a burst of glamour at Leicester Square. This November, the UK gets its first TV channel entirely devoted to video-gaming, Ginx.

Farmville alone would rank among the world's 25 largest countries by population; mainstream games increasingly rival movies for budgets, looks, sounds, performances and sheer action heft. It may largely be playing out on YouTube rather than your television screen but, as games continue their inexorable rise into the heart of popular culture, it's becoming as natural to be in awe of an elite gamer as it is a premiership footballer. After all, watching experts move electronic armies across a field is inherently no stranger than watching 22 people kick around a ball.

Taking Call of Duty: Black Ops seriously

2010-11-09T15:19:00.001Z

London's Evening Standard asked me to write a comment piece for release day about Call of Duty: Black Ops, and I was happy to oblige.

If you've always fancied re-enacting covert Cold War commando operations, you're in luck. This is what's on offer in Call of Duty: Black Ops, seventh game in the Call of Duty video game series, released today.

Expect the now standard reception for it: huge acclaim in games reviews, some disapproving newspaper articles, and hundreds of millions of pounds of sales to add to the £2 billion-plus the series has grossed to date.

No medium is more divisive than video-gaming; and no genre of games embodies this divide better than first-person shooting games, of which the Call of Duty series is a supreme example. To watch someone playing them is, for a non-gamer, potentially unsettling. A player spends hours staring at a screen — hands twitching, facial expressions churning — interacting hundreds of times per minute with what appears to be a relentlessly savage war movie.

It's a little like watching someone play bridge when you've never seen a deck of cards before. If, of course, this game of bridge were being played in trenches by grim-faced mercenaries.

Modern video games are becoming increasingly cinematic experiences, and it's this visceral realism that underpins perhaps the most understandable objections to the medium. Black Ops itself has an 18 certificate, and boasts a cast of voice actors fit for any A-list Hollywood thriller: Gary Oldman, Ed Harris and Sam Worthington, among others. It also has a production and marketing budget running to hundreds of millions.

Yet the movie analogy is deceiving — for the secret to understanding modern games lies not so much in looks or sounds as in how they are constructed.

The best analogy is not film but architecture. Video games are spaces within which things happen. These spaces may now look stunningly realistic but at their heart lies a function that has changed little since Space Invaders: the creation of miniature worlds which players experience actively, learning as they progress, mastering tasks and challenges. A successful game is one within which actions, challenges and opportunities are meaningfully balanced; and where, from simple rules, complex behaviours emerge.

In Black Ops, these behaviours revolve around spatial geometry, lightning reactions, teamwork and the management of limited resources. Visceral thrills are there but they are not enough to explain what is happening — or its appeal to millions of gamers, not all either teenage or male.

Unlike cinema, every aspect of a game's world must be crafted from scratch: not only its buildings, vehicles, landscapes, characters and sounds, but every frame of their movement and of the physics governing their behaviour. Hundreds of experts work to create this environment and its mechanics, building on the software engines that underpin previous games: programmers, artists, testers, musicians, animators, modellers, interface designers, sound designers, actors, managers, directors.

All of this matters. Games such as Black Ops offer some of the most popular cultural experiences of the 21st century. If we wish to critique games — as we should, if we hope to engage with the world's fastest-growing medium — it is no longer enough to snipe from the sidelines.

Cataclysm coming...

2010-11-05T16:05:00.006Z

I've written a feature for the marvellous Boing Boing, looking ahead to World of Warcraft's Cataclysm expansion and what it means for MMOs. The first paras are below: head on over there to get the whole piece.

A wave hundreds of feet high is breaking, poised to sweep away the statue whose open arms greet visiting ships. "Booty Bay is going down," I whisper to my wife. "I'm not sure I'm going to like this," she replies.

They're not calling the forthcoming World of Warcraft expansion "Cataclysm" for nothing. My wife and I have been playing the game ever since beta: that is, for over six years. This October, Cataclysm's full cinematic intro finally went up online ahead of its launch on 7th December, and we sat together in my study watching it. To a booming orchestral score, the earth opened, and a beast not seen since 1995's Warcraft II crawled out to rain down apocalypse.

The two of us are long-term but fairly casual World of Warcraft players. We raid occasionally. We don't tend to get sucked into the story, or spend much time reading lore. Still, watching an enraged dragon--Deathwing the Destroyer; Neltharion to his friends--levelling swathes of this virtual world in a frenzy of fire was a surprisingly emotive experience. It also helped confirm at least two expansion purchases plus continued subscriptions, bolstering the more than one billion dollars the game's parent company Blizzard Activision receives in income each year from over twelve million subscribers. Why do we care so much? And what does it mean that we do?

Click here to continue reading…

Do writers need paper?

2010-10-25T10:43:00.001+01:00

As the sales of e-books finally start to soar, what effect will this digital revolution have on publishers, readers and writers? Will the novel as we know it survive? This essay on the future of writing first appeared in the November 2010 issue of Prospect, and got a big response online.

The author Lionel Shriver is someone, she tells me, who enjoys “a conventional authorial life: I get advances sufficient to support me financially; I release my books through traditional publishing houses and write for established newspapers and magazines.” But Shriver, who won the 2005 Orange prize for her eighth novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, is also keeping an increasingly uneasy eye on the situation of 21st-century authors. For a start, there’s the worry that if “electronic publishing takes off in a destructive manner… the kind of fruitful professional life I lead could be consigned to the past.” Then there’s her own reading life, an essential part of the creative process, to consider: “I am personally dependent on the old-fashioned, hierarchical vetting of newspapers and book publishers to locate reading material that’s worth my time. I don’t want to wade through a sea of undifferentiated voices to find articles whose facts are accurate and novels that are carefully crafted and have something to say.”

The tyranny of choice is a near-universal digital lament. But for literary authors, at least, what comes with the territory is an especially barbed species of uncertainty. Take the award-winning novelist and poet Blake Morrison, perhaps best-known for his memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father? “I try to be positive about new technology,” he told me, “but I worry about what’s going to happen to poetry books and literary novels once e-readers have taken over from print. Will they survive the digital revolution? Or will the craving for interactivity drive them to extinction? I’ve not written anything for a year, and part of the reason may be a loss of confidence about the future of literary culture as I’ve known it.”

I’ve spent the last few months talking to authors, publishers and agents about the future, and it’s clear that Morrison’s feelings are far from unusual. After a number of false dawns, books are, finally, starting to go digital. In July, Amazon US reported that its e-book sales overtook sales of hardbacks on its website for the first time. E-books now account for at least 6 per cent of the total American market, a number that’s sure to rise steeply thanks to the huge success of both dedicated e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle and multipurpose hardware like Apple’s iPad, which is currently selling a million units a month. What this means for publishers, readers and writers is the transformation not only of the context within which books exist, but also of what books can and cannot say—and who will read them.

Above all, the translation of books into digital formats means the destruction of boundaries. Bound, printed texts are discrete objects: immutable, individual, lendable, cut off from the world. Once the words of a book appear onscreen, they are no longer simply themselves; they have become a part of something else. They now occupy the same space not only as every other digital text, but as every other medium too. Music, film, newspapers, blogs, videogames—it’s the nature of a digital society that all these come at us in parallel, through the same channels, consumed simultaneously or in seamless sequence.

There are new possibilities in this, many of them marvellous. As the internet has amply illustrated, words shorn of physical restrictions can instantly travel the world and be searched, shared, adapted and updated at will. Yet when it comes to words that aim to convey more than information and opinions, and to books in particular, a paradoxical process of constriction is also taking place. For alongside what Morrison calls “the craving for interactivity,” a new economic and cultural structure is arriving that has the power to dismantle many of those roles great written works have long played: as critiques, inspirations, consciences, entertainments, educations, acts of witness and awakening, and much more.

The digitisation of the reading experience itself is the least radical aspect of this process. Although a minority of titles offer sounds and images, most e-books ape their paper counterparts. Even on an advanced device like the iPad, the best reading applications emphasise clarity and clutter-free text. What’s truly new is the shift in power that the emerging order represents.

The arguments being made for the indispensability of the traditional publishing model centre on two factors: advances and expertise. The established publishing system of paying advances against royalties enables writers, it’s said, to take the time to write and research works of proper depth and quality. The expertise gathered within established publishing companies, meanwhile, is an invaluable resource both for sifting through slush piles and for improving everything from a book’s structure and style to its grammar, presentation and accuracy—and subsequently its packaging, marketing and distribution.

Leaving aside the likelihood that this expertise will simply migrate to new media companies, this account neglects digital culture’s single most transforming force: data. Buy an electronic book and the exact details of that purchase are instantly known: exactly how much was paid, and when, and how, and in combination with which other products. What are the trends, the sudden sparks of interest, the opportunities? Which chapter held people’s attention for longest; at what point did most readers give up? Answering exactly these kinds of questions lies at the heart of the businesses that players like Amazon, Google and Apple have built over the last decade. And these three companies already overwhelmingly dominate the world’s digital publishing transactions.

It has long been a truth of publishing that—much as in movies—a small number of hits generate the bulk of revenues, allowing producers to take a punt on future productions. What, though, if there were no longer any need to gamble on success? Book publishing is based on the principle that publishers control access to a scarce, precious resource—print. But digital media models, where the costs of publication and reproduction are almost nothing, tend to function the other way around: material is first published, then the selection process begins among readers themselves.

For all the weight attached to traditional models of discernment, it’s hard not to see a logic that’s already well-established in other fields gaining ground: put as much material as you can in front of an audience, and let them do the selecting for you. Then—when your best hope of a hit appears—maximise it relentlessly.

After all, digital culture is one vast forum for debate, selection, promotion and distribution. As Angus Donald—whose writing career began in 2009 with the publication of Outlaw, the first in a series of novels about Robin Hood (the second, Holy Warrior, appeared this July)—described the experience of becoming a writer to me: “I find myself as a sort of president of a club of like-minded individuals. I’m matey, elder-brotherly and in regular contact with anyone who wants to communicate with me. I write a blog on a weekly basis, I have two Facebook pages for my books and I go to pretty much any events that invite me… ”

Donald has embraced technology, but there are plenty of authors who take a dimmer view. “When it comes to the world of the internet and blogging and Facebooking and what have you, I’m profoundly sceptical,” Philip Pullman, author of the bestselling His Dark Materials trilogy, told me. “I daresay it manages to connect with a large number of people, but I strongly resent the time it takes up. In the little time that I have ‘spare,’ I don’t want to sit tapping at a keyboard and staring at a screen, I want to read and think.”

Whether authors participate or not, however, the terms on which books are bought and read are transforming. Despite his scepticism, Pullman has birthed a fantasy world that now spans a Hollywood movie, a radio adaptation, a play, a video game, and an online fan community of many hundreds of thousands. His work has a reach that stretches far beyond his own words on a page—and that can only be understood in terms of the newly dynamic interplay between modern media.

This interplay is highly significant within a book market that—even leaving aside the torrent of self-publishing that digital technology permits—has become increasingly crowded and top-heavy. In 2009, more books were published in Britain than in any previous year in history: over 133,000. And yet just 500 authors, less than half of 1 per cent, were responsible for a third of all sales. The situation is an order of magnitude more extreme than that of 30 years ago, when fewer than 50,000 books appeared. In America, one out of every 17 hardback novels bought since 2006 has been written by the crime novelist James Patterson.

This simultaneous increase in the diversity of titles and the concentration of profits among a small number of “super authors” is of a piece with cultural trends elsewhere. And Patterson’s success—in 2009 he netted a reported $70m (£44m) from writing—is both an emblem of how the book trade has changed during several decades of corporate consolidation, and of how it is likely to continue evolving.

Patterson, a former advertising creative director, has achieved a highly-evolved pitch of efficiency as an author. He assembles detailed plot and character outlines, then hands these over to one of his stable of regular co-authors, who complete the writing process under his scrutiny. Last year, nine new titles appeared under his name, and he’s bluntly unsentimental about the writing process. “I’m less interested in sentences now,” he explained to the New York Times in a 2010 interview, “and more interested in stories.”

The most successful new novelist of the last five years is in a rather different position. For a start, he’s dead. He died before he was even a published novelist. Yet neither this nor the fact that he wrote in Swedish has stopped the three novels of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy selling almost 30m copies since 2005. Sales apart, what do Larsson and Patterson have in common?

First, there’s the binding stuff of the thriller genre: bloody mysteries played out in stylised detail; a filmic emphasis on events, intrigue and broad character traits; twisting, satisfyingly resolved narratives. Equally significant, though, is what they lack—a single, defining authorial presence. Larsson is dead. Patterson is as much a brand as an author. Neither has a high public profile, nor a distinctive “voice.” And yet they sell and sell.

It has ever been thus with genre literature. What’s new, however, is the universality with which its axioms—know your audience, give them what they want—are beginning to be applied. In an increasingly unfettered digital environment, there is something paradoxically conservative about the processes dominating ideas of authorship. The business of maximising a publication’s impact is now a battle fought across all media, by all and any means possible. And the most crucial factor in all of this is not the willingness of an author to go on the road and woo readers—potent though this can be—but the suitability of a book for mass discussion and consumption.

The best-selling British author Lee Child—whose thrillers featuring Jack Reacher have sold over 20m copies—made a similar point with some glee in a 2007 interview with The Telegraph: “The thriller concept is why humans invented storytelling, thousands of years ago. The world was perilous and full of misery, so they wanted the vicarious experience of surviving danger. It’s the only real genre and all the other stuff has grown on the side of it like barnacles.” The barnacles are now dropping off at an accelerating rate. Special literary pleading, it seems, lies at an increasing distance from the cultural mainstream. Narrative is king.

The narrowing effect of technology on language itself is something I discussed with the novelist Joseph O’Connor, best known for the success of his 2003 novel Star of the Sea. “A friend recently showed me a really beautiful downloadable edition of Alice In Wonderland, full of gorgeously ticking clocks and a dormouse whose snores were audible, and it was amazingly impressive,” he explained. “And yet. Joyce filled his books with music by learning to use words. The same with Proust or Márquez or Toni Morrison. I think if the author is doing a good job, you should be hearing the dormouse snore already. Too many novels are film scripts waiting to happen.”

The novel as film script is about as far as it is possible to get from many of the ideas at the root of the literary canon. An author, etymologically, is a person who originates something—an idea that’s implicit in the word “novel” itself. Yet the notion of authors as world-makers as well as story-tellers is increasingly under threat. As the comic novelist Julian Gough told me: “One of the jobs novels used to do was to create a universe for characters, one that felt believable and complicated. But the complexity of life at the moment is such that no writer is able to keep up. The novel once had a dream of itself as this universal art form that could describe to the world to everybody in a way that everybody could understand, and that no longer rings true.”

From this perspective, genre survives—and thrives—because its point of departure is not an attempt to conjure a reflection of the world so much as an attempt to tell a story within shared conventions. But other modes are at the mercy of what Gough calls “a crisis in the individual.” The internet and new media, he argues, “make it explicit that we’re a tiny part of a huge pattern. You can now see how your thoughts are not entirely your own, but part of a flow back and forth of thoughts moulding each other and fighting for survival—which is very destabilising. There has been a loss of confidence among a huge number of people.” This includes Gough himself, who has recently, he confesses, “re-categorised myself—even though I love the novel—as a storyteller.”

As Child recognised, storytelling is among the most ancient of arts. It is also a communal experience. Today, in an age of collaborative media, most of our grandest, most popular narratives are the products of team efforts: from sprawling television dramas like The Sopranos to the latest Hollywood movies or hit videogames. Authors, too, are beginning to construct stories along these lines. The American science fiction maestros Greg Bear and Neal Stephenson recently launched an online narrative world called the Mongoliad which readers pay a subscription to access. It’s something that, Bear told me, “puts the reader directly in touch with the creators, on a continuing basis… plus giving readers unprecedented access to our day-by-day process of researching, rehearsing and writing.” In whole fields of discourse, from politics to academia, the very notion of a book—a static, authored, discrete hunk of prose—is starting to seem quaint.

Of course, for those who simply wish to write, the digital arena offers unprecedented empowerment. As the cult science fiction and fantasy novelist Neil Gaiman told me, today is “an amazing time to be a young author… if I were starting out right now, writing short stories or whatever, I would build my little off-the-peg website, no need for a publisher at that stage, maybe never.” Yet, he conceded, online authorship is also a difficult game to come into cold for those who have hopes of doing more than seeing their words appear on a screen. “People come to me and they ask, how do I get 1.5m people reading my blog? And it’s like, you need to start it in 2001 and try not to miss a day for the first eight years.” In print, you’re struggling to be heard above 132,999 other voices. Online, the figure is a thousand times greater.

Alongside this crowding comes one of the most central features of digital culture’s suffusion: time pressure. The length and the quality of time it takes to consume, let alone create, a book is considerable. The competition between media for attention has never been more intense—and, outside the elemental appeal of stories, many books are ill-equipped to fight their corners. More words than ever are being read and written; the tools for searching and managing information have never been more advanced. There has never been a better time to cultivate a special community of interest. Yet the number of significant roles played by books—and the scale of the roles that authors themselves can play—are declining. As Per Wästberg, president of the Nobel committee for literature, acknowledged to me earlier this year: “There will always be people for whom literature is a necessary bread, the lifeblood of intellect and emotion. But I think it will shrink.”

This September, the American author Don DeLillo was asked, upon receiving the PEN/Saul Bellow award, how technology is changing fiction. “Novels will become user-generated,” he speculated. “An individual will not only tap a button that gives him a novel designed to his particular tastes, needs, and moods, but he’ll also be able to design his own novel, very possibly with him as main character. The world is becoming increasingly customised, altered to individual specifications. This shrinking context will necessarily change the language that people speak, write and read.”

The “shrinking context” DeLillo describes is the paradoxical offspring of an arena in which all media float free and fight for attention, where anything goes, and yet where it’s only an ever-more-dominant few that are able to spin their stories across media and into the popular consciousness. “Here’s a stray question,” DeLillo continued. “Will language have the same depth and richness in electronic form that it can reach on the printed page? Does the beauty and variability of our language depend to an important degree on the medium that carries the words? Does poetry need paper?” He left it unanswered. But we shall find out soon enough.

Ten techy reads

2010-10-19T15:14:00.011+01:00

I gave a talk last night on "living with technology" at the lovely School of Life, and promised some follow-up reading.

There are a lot of brilliant books about technology out there, and even more equally brilliant online writings. For now, here's not so much a "top" as an "interesting" list of ten books I've been stimulated and delighted by, and think you should seek out.

1. Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (Viking)

2. Cory Doctorow, Content (Tachyon)

3. Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus (Allen Lane)

4. Julian Dibbell (ed.), The Best Technology Writing 2010 (Yale, forthcoming in November 2010 in print, but out now on Kindle)

5. Matt Mason, The Pirate's Dilemma: How Hackers, Punk Capitalists, Graffiti Millionaires and Other Youth Movements are Remixing Our Culture and Changing Our World (Penguin)

6. Steven Johnson, Everything Bad is Good for You: How Popular Culture is Making Us Smarter (Penguin)

7. Charles Leadbeater, We-Think: Mass innovation, not mass production (Profile)

8. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember (Atlantic)

9. Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It (Penguin)

10. Lawrence Lessig, Code: Version 2.0 (Basic Books)

On Mario Vargas Llosa, and how to win a Nobel

2010-10-08T14:26:00.001+01:00

Speculations on the announcement of the 2010 Nobel laureate, first published on the Prospect blog, October 2010

Much, it seems, to his own surprise, Mario Vargas Llosa has just become South America's first Nobel laureate for literature since Colombia's Gabriel García Márquez won in 1982. Llosa was born in Peru in 1936; he contested and narrowly lost the 1990 presidential election there, and became a Spanish citizen in 1993. The Nobel, according to a magnificently pithy press release on the Swedish Academy's excellent website, was awarded "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat."

This is both elegantly put and of a piece with other recent awards. Herta Müller in 2009 was praised for depicting "the landscape of the dispossessed;" Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio in 2008 for being the "explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization." By my reckoning, that makes three years in a row of geographical metaphors on the Academy's part—cartography, landscape and exploration—and an interesting emphasis on literature's ability to take readers on a journey beyond their own experience, into the passions and struggles of other lives. There's even, dare I say it, a sense of great literature as a kind of outsider art, sticking it to the complacency of the world's "reigning civilization" by, among other things, thinking outside of the English language.

This was certainly the impression I got when I interviewed the president of the Nobel committee for literature, Per Wästberg, earlier this year for Prospect—and talked, among other things, about his own fascination with journeys, and his astonishing personal history of political and literary activism. By any measure, Vargas Llosa is a dazzling internationalist and bringer of often esoteric literary preoccupations to bear on a global audience—not to mention a passionate advocate of literature as an art with a direct bearing on life, and on the question of how to live. Or, as he put it with considerably more eloquence in this 1997 piece on literary engagement:

Literature, which owes its life to freedom, helps us to understand that freedom does not come out of a clear blue sky; it is a choice, a conviction, a train of thought that needs to be constantly enriched and tested.

Ideas for modern living: digital scepticism

2010-10-03T21:53:00.001+01:00

Ahead of speaking at the School of Life in London, I wrote the Observer's "ideas for modern living" column on the topic of digital scepticism. Below is the unedited version.

“The internet is making us stupid.” This accusation has been heard on many lips recently. Yet the real problem may lie in the other direction: that people are simply too clever. For we are extraordinarily good at conjuring stories, ideas and even personalities from very little information. Show someone a few dozen pixels and they’ll see a human face. Give someone a few hundred words of text and a couple of images, and they’ll translate this into a life story.

When it comes to the increasing number of people with whom our primary contact is digital rather than physical, this process of invention and inference begins to matter. I change my Facebook status from “married” to “single” and a dozen shocked messages arrive; I tweet that I’m at a party in London and start swapping messages with friends, despite the fact that I’m actually sitting at home alone. You may not think that everything I’m saying is true—but you’re unlikely to realise just how far from the truth I’ve strayed. And my messages leave a permanent, falsified record.

We’re far from helpless, of course. A crucial facet of human cleverness is our sensitivity to social tone. We have fine ears for the bogus: the half-truths of a press release; the MP whose social media presence is fabricated by special advisors. Digital media, however, fosters a particular kind of illusion: that what we are getting is a “live,” unvarnished insight into others’ lives. The artificiality that other media wear on their sleeves is far less clear. And yet it is there. Reading all of the texts in our lives with a sceptical eye has rarely been more important.

Popshot: the new face of British poetry?

2010-10-01T16:21:00.004+01:00

An interview with Jacob Denno, editor of the poetry magazine Popshot; first published on Prospect online, October 2010.

The future of poetry is a quietly boring question that's been hanging around British letters for the last few decades. Very few poets sell more than a few hundred books; more poetry is written and taught in universities, on courses and for competitions than exists outside of them; and the burgeoning performance scene is usually seen as more an offshoot of the music scene than a new phase in the literary canon. Both poetry's written and its spoken words tend to be, in their respective ways, introverted and distant from the mainstream of literary culture.

And yet—founded in October 2008 and edited by 23-year-old Jacob Denno—Popshot Magazine has almost by accident begun to challenge this orthodoxy. Started on a shoestring budget from the kitchen of an Oxford flat, within four issues Popshot has become the first UK poetry magazine ever to gain worldwide distribution, combining poetry and illustration, and putting some of the best voices of the performance generation on paper—where, it seems, there's a vigorous demand for their wares on paper as well as in person.

A few months before the fourth issue of Popshot appeared, I met with Denno to talk about his perspective on poetry, why and how Popshot came into being, and what written poetry might mean in a digital age. Almost by accident, I also ended up agreeing to contribute an interview with the poet Paul Farley to the current issue…

Tom Chatfield: Tell me a little about yourself.

Jacob Demo: I'm 23 years old, currently residing between Oxford and London and the editor and founder of the infamous Popshot magazine. The infamous bit might be a lie.

TC: And how did you come to be the editor and founder of an (infamous) poetry magazine?

JD: From a standpoint of naivety, primarily. As I saw it, poetry was busy burying itself in a cloud of mystery and exclusivity whilst every other art form was effortlessly making itself more and more accessible.

TC: Why poetry in particular?

JD: I think it came from a deep-rooted love of children's books. We learn how to appreciate rhythm and meter as children with the plethora of nonsense poetry and hand-me-down children's rhymes. I've always been a massive fan of rhyme but there's very few people that can pull it off eloquently.

TC: There seems to be a huge divide between the poetry people read for pleasure and a lot of "great" poetry: do you think the canon can still be read by most people for pleasure?

JD: A lot of the poetry that they push in schools and the great poems that are handed down to us as classics are miles away from the poetry being written today. Unfortunately, most people's perceptions of poetry are still stuck in the times of Milton and Wordsworth. There's so much comment on the poetry of the past that many people are completely unaware that poetry is still being written.

TC: Your theme for the next issue is "This Is Modern Living." Is this admitting a problem with the canon: that it's very hard to write poetry with a long historical perspective, because people feel that modern living is distant from even the recent past?

JD: There's this definite divide between those people who like to constantly reference previous greats and those people trying to push the great poets of today. The general perception is that contemporary poetry is much worse, much more volatile and shallow than it used to be, which I think is a gross injustice. Contemporary poetry in my eyes is far more concentrated on detail, on minute matters, than what it used to be when poets tended more to contemplate subjects as vast as love, death, life and so on.

TC: So what does good contemporary poetry mean to you?

JD: It's painfully clichéd, but primarily I look for an original idea in poems. There are so many poems that we receive at the magazine that feel as if the poet wrote them because that's what they thought they should write, rather than because they wanted to. I also look for poems that grip you from the beginning: not just from the first line but from the title itself. If by the third line I'm struggling to keep my heart in it, that's a bad poem.

TC: One thing I feel with poetry today is that it is often about people wanting to write rather than read—and paying to go on courses, to enter competitions and to study, rather than practising their art for a critical audience. Is this a fair assessment?

JD: A fair assessment, yes, and I believe it's a result of financial matters more than anything else. A lot of the more well known poets hold residencies, run workshops or tutor in creative writing at universities. There is more money in teaching poetry than there is in poetry itself which is, frankly, hilarious. The major downside of all this is that people are being taught a method, a system, a way of writing poetry which ends up churning out poems that are formulaic calculations from the head rather than the heart. The focus is on everyone becoming poets rather than everyone enjoying poetry.

TC: Performance has been transforming poetry recently. Why do you think it's becoming so big; and what kind of effect do you think it has on writing?

JD: I think performance poetry appeals to our sense of rhythm and timing, and that is one major reason. Spoken word/performance poetry is also doing a fine job of making a connection between music and poetry. Last issue we started including spoken word artists in Popshot and I feel it has given the magazine a deeper aesthetic.

TC: I'm interested in magazines like yours partly because they seem to be a coming of age for the kind of contemporary poetry that performance has helped nurture. Can you tell me a bit about the reception your magazine has had so far: the level of interest, how many people are buying it and sending stuff in, and what you feel about your future?

JD: The reception has been bizarrely positive. And we're now far further down the line than I ever thought we would be at this point. Being a poetry magazine, there are naturally deep rooted stereotypes that you have to battle against. Trying to get the magazine stocked in more respected outlets has been the hardest thing. I had to pester the book buyer at the Design Museum relentlessly before he finally gave in and started stocking the magazine! Many other places don't even consider you because the word "poetry" sits on the front cover. Submissions wise, last issue I read 600-800 poems before settling on the final 24. Hopefully, this issue we'll get even more.

TC: What are your feelings about the established landscape of poetry magazines?

JD: I think in most areas of interest, magazines play a major part in controlling how that field is perceived. For example, when I think fashion, I think Vogue. When I think graphic design, I think Grafik. So I see it as a bit of a failing that when I think poetry, of the kind I enjoy, no magazines come to mind. Ultimately, the long-established magazines out there are responsible for not sustaining interest in poetry. If in ten years time young people are still thinking of poetry and no magazine comes to mind, I'll feel wholly responsible. I don't think the long-established magazines are dead in the water. But I do feel that most of them are incapable of bringing poetry to a brand new audience and getting bright young things interested. They're simply too established and stubborn to adapt, which is where I think the new breed of poetry magazines coming through will blossom.

In terms of magazines that I admire, I think Pen Pusher and Poetry Is Dead are doing great things in helping bring poetry back to a respectable state. As to where Popshot fits in, I have no idea…

TC: Do you think the government should be subsidizing poetry and poetry publishers?

JD: Contrary to popular opinion, I think there should be no government subsidies for poetry publishers. I've always felt that by Popshot being self-funding and ultimately more vulnerable, we have to try harder to keep it running and improving. I can't afford to not adapt otherwise the magazine ceases to exist. Our circulation is 2,000 and growing. That figure is made up of subscriptions, online orders, bookstore sales in Australia, Europe and in the UK, library subscriptions and so on.

TC: That's a pretty impressive number for a young poetry magazine. How do you think you've managed to reach so many people?

JD: From relentlessly hounding bookstores, distributors, blogs, magazines, newspapers—and hopefully by actually having something that people think is a good idea and worth paying for. Also, we got involved with a magazine subscription service called Stack which helped get Popshot into the hands of a lot more people.

TC: And is this a model you think others can, or already are following, given that you're a one-man editorial team and have no advertising?

JD: Without a doubt. The internet has made it so much easier to do everything that is involved with running a magazine. If I had to read through postal submissions, I think I would find a way to leave this world. Despite all the discussion about print versus web, I think the birth of the internet has helped improve the standard of print magazines no end.

TC: Poetry is competing with a huge amount of other media today. Do you think people read poetry differently than they might have done before digital media—and that it has to do different things to interest them? I'm interested, too, in your decision to use illustrations in the magazine, and make them as much of a feature of the poems. Among other things, it seems to have the effect of slowing down the eye, of making people take more time.

JD: I think for those people who go out of their way to read poetry online, the way they read has definitely changed. One downside to the internet is the fact that there is a saturation of content and no real editing process. Anyone can post up their poems and get people reading them within minutes. That lack of editing means that our perception of poetry and the amount of time we dedicate to it changes dramatically.

This makes it all the more important for poetry magazines to present poetry in such a way that people will give their full attention to it. I wanted the poems to sit side by side with the illustrations as a way of allowing breathing space and increasing attention. Beyond that, I also hope it allows the illustrator the opportunity to create a further dimension to the poem—one which you may not have come up as the reader.

The fourth issue of Popshot is out now.

Book review: Jonathan Franzen's Freedom

2010-09-22T13:51:00.000+01:00

An essay on Jonathan Franzen and his 2010 novel, "Freedom." First published in Prospect, September 2010.

Two-thirds of the way through the 562-page bulk of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Joey Berglund and his girlfriend, Connie, meet in New York city—“its pedestrians half naked in the August heat, its bricks and bridges paled by haze”—to celebrate his 20th birthday, and conclude ten days of frantic sexual congress by getting married, obedient to one of the many “urgent irrational imperatives” that drive Franzen’s plot: lust, envy, rage, fear, familial loathing. Seven pages of action and heat cover Joey and Connie’s time in the city, yet just two sentences are spent on the wedding, and these glancingly: “when he did marry her, three days later, nothing changed at all. In the back of a cab, as they rode away from the courthouse, she wove her ringed left hand into his ringed right hand and rested her head on his shoulder with something that couldn’t quite be described as contentedness.”

There’s an extraordinary deftness on display here. Franzen—whose last novel, 2001’s The Corrections, propelled him into the most stratospheric of both literary and commercial orbits—refuses to waste words on anything that doesn’t serve his purpose. It’s a gift that’s on show again towards the end of the novel, in the sudden tragedy of a fatal accident. “The police report would not even offer the faintly consoling assurance of an instant killing,” we’re told in one of three sentences devoted to the incident. Beyond a few deadpan medical details, there’s nothing more to say: what is interesting is not the cruelty of fate but its human aftermath. To linger over this death would be, like lingering over Joey’s wedding, to succumb to the fallacy against which Freedom aims to inoculate its readers: of mistaking mere events for what really matters.

For a compendious and avowedly realist author, Franzen has impressively little interest in detail for its own sake: in set-pieces and historical reconstructions. “Only connect,” EM Forster once beseeched his characters; for Franzen, it seems everything is already connected, and the novelist’s job is to unpick the chains of consequence underlying modernity’s “trillion little bits of distracting noise.” It’s a scrutiny that gives his title, Freedom, a frequently bitter irony, as its cast struggle to assert themselves against the forces of history, biology and fate.

Set largely during 2003 and 2004, the book follows the lives of the Berglund family: an apparent mirror image of the self-consuming Lamberts whose “unfreedom” The Corrections anatomised. Walter and Patty Berglund—Joey’s parents—are the kind of preternaturally “good neighbours” to be found at the vanguard of American gentrification. We first meet them in the late 1980s in St Paul, the capital of Minnesota, busily turning a crumbling Victorian house into contemporary liberalism’s interpretation of the American dream: mom baking cookies and pondering the merits of cloth diapers, pop migrating from legal work in “outreach and philanthropy” to still worthier labours as a development officer for the Nature Conservancy, son and daughter lavished with a modestly principled supply of material goods.

Franzen’s subject is, as one might expect, the ugly collapse of these appearances: the damage that comes creeping round the edges of Walter and Patty’s noble assumptions in the form, initially, of the crass neighbours with whose daughter, Connie, Joey embarks on his first “teen fuckfestival.” Joey—bright, handsome, doted upon—reacts to his mother’s hysterical disapproval by switching his allegiances and moving to live next door, a zone of untrammelled Republican consumption: beer keg, baseball, vast television and pickup. Patty, a former All-American basketball player whose career was ended by injury, pours her competitive drive first into passive-aggressive and then into outright aggressive (slashed pickup tyres) rage. Walter, who has spent his life working every hour of every day in order to escape the alcoholic poverty of his dismal Midwestern childhood, retreats into work and an increasingly messianic environmental zeal. Their earnest daughter, Jessica, sits and watches things fall apart.

Within the first 26 pages, Joey has gone to college, Walter to work in Washington, Patty into herself, and the house been sold. The remainder is causes and aftermath. Franzen sifts the weight of Walter and Patty’s family histories, while Joey begins to realise what having such a history means.

As in The Corrections, part of Franzen’s gift is the ability to spin literary metaphor out of the most inertly contemporary reaches of language: the financial, the medical, the scientific, and now the digital. Joey, like his country, must face the “ballooning of the interest charges on his high-school pleasures”; entering a friend’s house, he finds “himself floating through the beautiful rooms like a helium molecule” and is given “a milfy smile” by his friend’s mother. A milf—an acronym popularised by the 1999 film American Pie—means a “mother I’d like to fuck,” and Franzen’s annexation of the word is a masterclass in how literature can happily span every corner of language.

Elsewhere, characters deliver miniature dissertations on digital foibles—“I think the iPod is the true face of Republican politics… We’re about giving ourselves a mindless feel-good treat every five minutes”—that are sufficiently sharp, specific and intensely characterised to rise above the quasi-crankery underpinning them. There’s even a spot-on dissection of email addresses, comparing the “piquant flavors” of the @gmails and @cruzios of this world to the liberalkid@expensivecollege.edus from whom Walter is used to receiving internship applications.

Here, then, is an author able to take on the fragmented public arenas of the 21st century and come away victorious—even bearing hope, of a kind. If anything, Freedom’s younger generation are stronger and wiser than their elders. Children of a digital age, their scope is vaster than that of any previous generation: their planet older and more crowded, the burden of their freedom correspondingly greater. Arriving for the first time in South America, Joey’s greatest surprise is his own lack of innocence and amazement: “except that everything was in Spanish and more people were smoking, civilization here seemed like civilization anywhere.” The struggle for Joey and his contemporaries is not to learn or to cope: it is to slow down, to stop mistaking knowledge for understanding.

“It’s doubtful,” Franzen once claimed in an interview, “that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.” Clearly something large is changing in our culture and, while Freedom is an avowedly old-fashioned kind of art, it repeatedly achieves what its cast so often cannot: yoking past and present together, finding human continuities beneath the static hum of events.

At times, though, the weight of Franzen’s gifts can be crushing. Walter’s best friend from college—a long-struggling rock musician, Richard—spends the first decades of his career producing “wryly titled records that a certain kind of critic and about five thousand other people in the world liked to listen to, and doing small-venue gigs attended by scruffy, well-educated white guys who were no longer as young as they used to be.” This is excellent satire, and good journalism, but a limiting kind of fiction—wittily shallow, and tinged with contempt.

Franzen is sometimes compared to the late Nobel laureate Saul Bellow (1915-2005), another native Chicagoan, born 44 years before Franzen and one of the presiding geniuses of 20th-century American realism. Both are masters of massed casts, of familial feeling, and of gifting their characters passionate speech—long-repressed but ultimately explosive outpourings of deep feeling. Yet it is inconceivable that any of Franzen’s characters might say, as Bellow’s Charles Citrine does in Humboldt’s Gift (1975), that “on aesthetic grounds, if on no others, I cannot accept the view of death taken by most of us, and taken by me during most of my life… that so extraordinary a thing as a human soul can be wiped out forever.”

Transcendence is not among the freedoms on offer in Freedom. There is, rather, an exacting pragmatism about even its most agonised declarations. When Walter’s betrayal and rage eventually boil over, it comes as a diatribe against an existential threat of the most literal kind: population growth. “WE ARE ADDING THIRTEEN MILLION HUMAN BEINGS TO THE POPULATION EVERY MONTH! THIRTEEN MILLION MORE PEOPLE TO KILL EACH OTHER IN COMPETITION OVER FINITE RESOURCES!” All of which allows Franzen a neatly subversive coda: the rant becomes a viral hit via YouTube and wins Walter a national following of disaffected youth, an anarchic collective with whose sentiments he duly becomes disaffected himself.

Stylistically and intellectually, one novelist Franzen closely resembles is Britain’s most famous Bellovian disciple, Martin Amis. Here is Franzen describing Joey’s feelings towards Connie shortly before their marriage: “Connie of late was hitting him higher and higher up: in his stomach, his breathing muscles, his heart.” This could come straight from late Amis—in its cadences, but also in its impulse towards an almost medical precision: mapping emotion across the internal organs.

There’s little room for a soul in the cavities of this human chest. The heart of human behaviour seems, for Franzen, to be not so much an inscrutable mystery as a more-or-less scrutable animal—governed by powerfully irrational impulses but knowable nonetheless. In this sense, our longing for freedom is a brutal paradox: the instincts urging us onwards are themselves a prison we can never escape. And all the self-knowledge and beautiful words in the world cannot change this.

Fortunately, in the form of the Berglunds at least, the sometimes spurious tendencies of Franzen’s scientism are consistently surpassed. Freedom is a captivating read; an expertly-managed narrative that is also excellent art. Most satisfyingly of all, it’s as finely attuned to the cultural tone of the last ten years as The Corrections was to the 1990s. If the meaning of its title can at times feel paralysingly bleak—“My problem is I don’t like people enough… I don’t really believe they can change” declares Walter towards the end, a sentiment it is easy to believe his creator echoes—it is nevertheless a remarkable tonic for bleak times to find them so completely and confidently treated.

The meaning of Mario

2010-09-13T19:18:00.002+01:00

First published on First Drafts, a piece looking at the reasons behind Mario's triumph as a cultural icon, character and far more.

Twenty-five years ago to the day, the videogame Super Mario Bros appeared. This epochal fact has been celebrated in some style already—the Guardian offers one fact for every year—happily ignoring the emergence of Mario himself as a character back in 1981. Why exactly is it, though, that the most influential and renowned fictional character of the last quarter century—arguably in any medium—is a plump Italian plumber known not for his wrench skills but for his inexhaustible, effort-free athleticism, and his unquenchable fondness for consuming fungi?

For a start, Mario isn't really a character, not in the sense that Becky Sharpe or even Mickey Mouse are characters. He is a cypher: a Platonic little man in an Eden of a world whose gift to you is the journey you're able to take in his shoes. Your motives are discovery, mastery and—almost incidentally—rescuing a woman who's duly whisked away again at the end of every level, not to mention at the beginning of each new game.

This "plot" sounds trivial beyond banality, but it's important. When games designer Shigeru Miyamoto first created Mario—then known simply as "jump man"—for the game Donkey Kong in 1981, one of its most radical structural features was a narrative element beyond "the aliens are coming, kill them!" Early graphical games had never done this before. Your job was to take a recognisably human character on a journey—and you did this without departing from activities rooted in the universal capabilities of every human body: jumping, running, walking, climbing. The result was a kind of nursery version of the infamous "hero's journey"—a mythic archetype that's influenced everyone from George Lucas to the writers of The Lion King.

To this day, Mario's world and actions have remained scrupulously rooted in a child's frame of reference. Even in the most sophisticated Mario games, the new powers our hero gains tend to be the result of dressing-up games or friendly animal helpers: he puts on a cape or a suit, he hops onto a nursery-wall dinosaur. Miyamoto has remained uncannily attuned to conjuring wonder and striving in their most unworldly form—not at all the same thing as saying he has created easy games, as the millions of players who've invested enough time to master one of his worlds will testify. Behind the cute pixels, Mario is a precision tool, his moves and control finely honed, his environments compiled with an architectural emphasis on coherence and many-layered complexity.

It's this combination of the atavistically infantile and the mechanically hyper-sophisticated that makes Mario quite so beguiling. These games are a kind of childhood to which we can all keep returning—both unfallen and utterly absorbing. And the "character" this celebrates above all is not an unreal Italian plumber, much as we may claim to love him. It's ourselves, as we would like to be: young, inquisitive, adventurous, untainted; children running through caves and woods, endlessly at play; getting better and better at the game in hand—and never a minute older.

The power of personalisation

2010-08-31T15:55:00.004+01:00

A piece looking at the strange radicalism of personal appearances and meetings in a digital age, first published on First Drafts, August 2010

I've written a science and technology piece for Prospect's September issue about attending the TED Global and SciFoo conferences. They're very different events, but have what I felt were a few key factors in common: intellectual passion, interpersonal contact, interdisciplinary mingling, and—most intriguingly of all—an emphasis on quelling the social media tumult for a few hours. While events at each are in progress, the expectation is that there will be little or no blogging, tweeting, browsing or multitasking. You're there to give other people your full and undivided attention.

At both events, the other people were well worth this. Each experience was fantastic, thanks to the quality of those in attendance and of the conversations that were had. It was interesting, though, to note just how radical this kind of interpersonal mingling and engagement felt. I'm so used, online, to encountering words and ideas in free-flowing disembodiment that finding them attached to living, breathing, idiosyncratic others verged on feeling shocking.

I was thinking along these lines again this weekend. I was in Edinburgh, speaking at a couple of events relating to my book about videogaming culture, Fun Inc (my Prospect colleague, Mary, reported from a rather different Fringe experience earlier this month). People came to hear me speak—which was nice, of course. But, given how much of "me" can be found online with a few clicks and keystrokes, what exactly was it that they gained from coming along in person?

The chance to attach a face and a body to a set of ideas is, above all, an opportunity to arrive at a completely different kind of judgement to any you can form at a distance. Not that this means a better judgement: my ideas are much more clearly and fully explained in my book and articles than when I précis them on a stage. But because it offers a chance to weigh knottier matters than mere ideas. Like—do I trust this person; do they really mean what they're saying; are their written and spoken words of a piece; should I take the plunge and buy their book, or offer to buy them a beer?

All of this might sound crushingly, horribly obvious. And yet, every day, digital culture asks us to treat the glimpses of other people we are given by words and images as a complete, functioning version of "them." We fill in the gaps and don't even notice we're doing it: thanks to Twitter and Facebook, we feel closely and continually connected to people we may not have seen in the flesh for months, or even have never met. It's powerful, and great, and very useful. But it's also misleading in ways we may not even notice. We're constantly making assumptions; we're conjuring versions of others' lives and ideas that may be quite remote from the realities they're living.

All of which may just be another way of restating another ancient truth. I really do need to get out more…

Nice to meet your big idea

2010-08-26T10:13:00.002+01:00

A piece looking at digital gatherings in the light of my trips to TED Global and SciFoo; first published in Prospect, August 2010

In Oxford, it was shaking hands with legendary videogame designer Peter Molyneux. In Mountain View, California, it was when Larry Page, one of Google's two founders, sat down beside me and blandly introduced himself. A very particular conference skill-set kicked in: blinking in fame's reflected glare while trying to appear entirely blasé.

The occasions were, respectively, the TED Global conference at Oxford in June—where I had been invited to speak about videogames (there's a online summary of some of my key points here)—and the SciFoo "camp" at Google's California headquarters in July, where I was representing Prospect. Each was, in its own way, glamorous. Each also embodied an emerging trend in digital culture, in which the confluence between science, technology and public life is explored at an increasingly high-profile series of events, aimed at sharing and sparking fresh ideas. Attending was a pleasure and a privilege. Yet both events also posed a question: was this a glimpse of the intellectual future, or simply a kind of club—delightful, stimulating, but more about ego than achievement?

TED—which stands for Technology Entertainment and Design—easily attracts this kind of cynicism. It began in the US in 1984 as a one-off event, becoming an annual fixture in 1990, but it was its acquisition in 2001 by the British computer magazine publisher Chris Anderson that began its current incarnation (of which TED Global is a European offshoot). Anderson, who runs TED through a non-profit foundation, upped the impact, pulling in some of the world's biggest names: Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Al Gore, Richard Dawkins, Bono, Tim Berners-Lee. Speakers get no more than 18 minutes each, while attendees pay over $5,000 to hear them in person.

Given all this, accusations of elitism are easy to understand—although these were partly answered in 2006, when Anderson began posting videos of every talk free online. They have had over 300m views to date, with the most successful talks—such as Swedish doctor Hans Rosling's dynamic visualisations of global health statistics—enjoying audiences of over a million. Perhaps inevitably, this has now brought accusations of a different kind of snobbery: that by turning scientists and thinkers into "rock stars," TED favours style over content.

On the surface, SciFoo is the opposite: an invitation-only gathering held behind closed doors that is, thanks mainly to Google's largesse, free to attend. "Foo" stands for "friends of O'Reilly" and refers to Tim O'Reilly, the founder of O'Reilly Media, a publishing company devoted to computer technology. The first Foo event was held in 2004 when O'Reilly convened a cross-disciplinary spectrum of people for a meeting of minds. It has since grown into one of the defining modern "unconferences"—events that reject the formality of traditional formats in favour of spontaneity. Attendees are expected to play an active part and, although people come well-prepared, the schedule itself is created on the spot.

Arriving at Google HQ for this year's SciFoo (one of several Foo events now held annually: this one, devoted to science, was initiated by the journal Nature), attendees were confronted by a blank timetable and a stack of Post-it notes. A dignified scramble ensued, as people scrawled and stuck up ideas. Sessions ran in parallel, and topics were modified on the fly. One highlight was a three-way exposition of an ancient Greek computing mechanism by an archaeologist, an author and a programmer.

Despite their differences, TED and the Foo camps share crucial similarities. Anderson's publishing roots lie in the kind of fan-driven magazines that were vital fuel for bedroom technology enthusiasts in the 1980s and 1990s. O'Reilly Media produces serious technical works, but its Silicon Valley ethos is of a piece with TED's, while the unconference movement is rooted in a tradition of science-fiction fan conventions dating back to the 1930s. In both cases, the emphasis is on energy and optimism as well as excellence. This year's TED Global slogan was "and now the good news," while SciFoo kicked off with a utopian soundbite from Larry Page: "Ask: is what I'm doing going to change the world? If the answer is no, then maybe you should do something else."

Gatherings of like-minded enthusiasts are, of course, just about the oldest new idea digital culture could have happened upon. Yet, with governments speaking increasingly loudly about the need to revitalise everything from manufacturing to education, they also suggest some timely lessons about innovation.

Modern science tends to be super-specialised, as do most conferences, and the benefit of more communication between fields is obvious. The melting pot of the internet is itself a peerless counterpoint to this—and yet its great advantage is also a hazard. Online, words and concepts float free of their originators. We forget that an idea arose from a particular person, or people, at the end of a particular history. At an event like SciFoo, the thrill of meeting Larry Page or a Nobel laureate is not just about seeing someone famous. It's about a potentially frank encounter with the person and the history behind the achievements.

Even the greatest minds are experts only in a sliver of human knowledge, and watching them step outside their expertise is exciting fuel for debate. At one Foo session, the idea of using open-source technologies to revolutionise the processes of drug research was discussed late into the night. At TED, world-changing technologies have been premiered over the years—from the CD in 1984 (although not the Apple Mac, as is sometimes reported) to one of this year's highlights, inventor Tan Le's demonstration of a computer interface able to respond to users' brainwaves. Other transformative devices have won newly global attention, like inventor Michael Pritchard's 2009 demonstration of a low-cost bottle that can make dirty water drinkable.

The result is a double shift in awareness. At SciFoo, experts in different fields learn not only about each other's work, but about each other. At TED the world gets to watch individuals at the forefront of their fields standing up and sharing their passion. There's a pleasing irony here: that digital culture is rediscovering the importance of personalisation and embodiment. Both conferences actively discourage delegates from blogging, tweeting or browsing during sessions. Full, undistracted human attention is demanded—and given.

The formula can be exported: unconferences are spreading while, under a programme known as TEDx, hundreds of independent TED-style events are being held across the world. But governments and private organisations, in Britain and elsewhere, could do far more to tap into this movement. Digital resources alone cannot generate innovation. As ever, the best of the new will only arise when older truths—the exchange of ideas across generic boundaries, the importance of personal relationships, the drive to change the world—are given fresh scope.

An introduction to my gaming life

2010-08-25T18:59:00.009+01:00

The Preface to the UK edition of my book on games, Fun Inc, is available to read online as part of the official Random House preview. So, I decided, why not preview a lightly edited version of it here? It's a piece that—although aimed squarely at non-gamers—sums up a number of the things that first drew me to video games.

Even today, I shiver a little with excitement when I remember my very first encounters with games, and think of what it means that we're able to build other, interactive worlds out of nothing more than code and wild ideas. It's a feeling, I like to think, not entirely unlike what a 17th-century reader might have felt when they began to flick through the pages of their first novel; or when a 15th-century Italian first glimpsed the use of true perspective in art…

I was born in 1980, in England, just outside London. And this meant that my childhood was full of something that simply didn’t exist for anyone born even two decades before me: video games.

My first gaming experience came when I was seven, in the form of a BBC Micro Model B (a gift from a teenage friend of the family, who had moved on to newer and greater things in the form of an Atari ST). Affectionately known as a ‘Beeb’, and manufactured by Acorn Computers between 1981 and 1986, it looked like the lovechild of a toaster and an obese typewriter: a weightily off-white chunk of plastic that beeped alarmingly and shouted ‘Mistake’ at you in bald bright type if you dared approach it unprepared. It could display just eight colours on its minuscule monitor, while its 32-kilobyte memory would be put to shame by most modern watches. Yet this machine – in combination with the 400 closely typed pages of its ring-bound manual – was my one-way ticket to the information age.

There were plenty of primitive graphical games to be played on the Beeb but, as I soon discovered, it was quite a different kind of play that was first to captivate me: games which consisted entirely of words. Sometimes called ‘adventure’ games, you had to make your way around a host of fictional universes by typing compass directions and basic instructions (‘pick up the torch’, ‘look at the elvish sword’) and by reading a series of second-person descriptions (‘you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike’). Today, it all sounds impossibly crude. Yet once I began to play my way through a text adventure, I found within minutes that the machine’s technological limitations had melted away, and in their place came the dizzy excitement of walking into a story. As the pioneering text games company Infocom puts it, its products had ‘the best graphics in the world’. Why draw a travesty of a castle in blocky pixels when it was possible to describe the most glorious building imaginable in a couple of sentences? Video games, I began to realise, were much more than mere toys: they were a way of exploring, and attempting to create, whole other worlds.

Video games also represented my first taste of a modernity that definitively excluded adults: a realm of private codes, toy universes and bleeping music that seemed several thousand miles away from books, television and school but that contained some of the most valuable lessons of my childhood. To play the best games was to be transported dizzyingly away from the mundane to become the hero of a favourite adventure or an explorer on another planet. But it was also to engage with technology, logic, narrative, design and creative collaboration at a level well beyond anything I had experienced elsewhere. My friends and I spent many hours designing and critiquing games, anxious to achieve the perfect balance, the most thrilling narrative, the most cunning puzzle; and we were anxious, of course, to complete the latest and greatest titles coming out in the growing world of computers and consoles.

In many ways, the miraculously intense and sustained kind of fun that games offered relied on the absence of actual consequences or responsibilities. They were, as our parents would occasionally note, childish, not just in their subject-matter, but in their ecstatic unreality. Yet there was also something about even these early games that felt far more significant and more serious than anything else we had ever called a ‘game’: a sense similar to the vertigo that the best books and stories could inspire, of finding the world spun around in new and unexpected ways. The machines and the concepts were crude, but the best games themselves seemed to hint at a potential for the medium that could barely be imagined.

Looking back, it’s clear that video games were not just a portal to other worlds: they were also a window through which we were glimpsing a part of the world’s future. Today, three decades on, the upper limits of virtual worlds continue to retreat before our eyes. Companies can now create online games that can be accessed by many millions of players and that require hundreds of artists and technicians to collaborate in their creation, and still we have only begun to scratch the surface of what can be achieved. My generation has grown into adulthood, yet we have not set aside our computers and our consoles; instead, we have brought them with us.

It was words that first drew me to video games, and words that first gave me a taste of their power. While it might seem incongruous to have written a book about an electronic medium, the kind of sustained analysis that the written word offers is still the most important tool we have for making sense of our own experience. Media can compete for our time and attention while remaining mutually enriching; far from being at opposite poles, I believe books and games are both compatible and complementary, being the two great ‘active’ media of our time. It’s not for nothing that the internet is, among other things, a supreme arena of exchange for the written word in all its forms.

From the first time I sat up all night with a group of friends, chewing over the best strategies for victory in the fiendishly complex game version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, to my current weekly raids at the top end of World of Warcraft, it has always been my experience that the best games are a trigger for discussion, reading and writing – not an end to it. Today, I believe that the debate surrounding video games is fast becoming one of the most urgent and exciting intellectual discourses around.

My book is about the astonishing leaps that the last few decades have seen in the automation, incorporation, refinement and extension of the deep human sense that – for want of a better word – we call fun. It is also about the cultural, creative, scientific and economic melting pot that is the video game, whose story embodies one of the most important transformations to occur in work and play in the last half-century. Games have a history as old as civilisation itself; computers and the internet have existed for barely the blink of an eye. And yet the latter has been colonised and shaped so thoroughly by the former that it’s becoming increasingly hard to tell where the serious business of play ends and the playful business of work begins.

This disintegration of boundaries is the most important phenomenon of all. For video games lie at the heart of a movement within society that is gradually slipping the bounds of any particular medium, and that is repackaging in some startlingly potent forms a very ancient truth: just about the most serious thing it’s possible for one person to do with another is to play a game.

The death of the web, the rise of the app, and the future of digital culture

2010-08-23T11:20:00.000+01:00

A feature exploring Wired's controversial cover story "The Web is dead," first published in the Observer, August 2010. This is a slightly different edit to the published version.

According to the latest cover story in tech bible Wired, “The Web is dead, long live the internet.” The headline is attached to a feature by the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, outlining what he calls the abandonment of “the open, unfettered Web... for simpler, sleeker services.” And it’s created quite a stir.

The web, of course, is not the same thing as the internet. While the internet describes the underlying network of the many millions of computers around the world that share a common set of communications protocols, the world wide web – to give it its full title – is the service invented by Sir Tim Berners Lee in 1989 that sits on top of this network, allowing users to use web browsers (Internet Explorer and Firefox are the most popular) to view interlinked hypertext pages.

Anderson’s thesis is that web browsers are precipitously declining as the dominant way of using the internet. Statistically, his analysis has its dubious points – as John Naughton explores elsewhere in the Observer, this glosses over the fact that internet usage itself is increasing at an exponential rate. But Anderson has hit one cultural nail on the head: there’s now far, far more to the internet than web pages. And this implies a serious shift, not only in what the internet itself is used for, but also in what digital culture – which over the last two decades has been almost synonymous with the open, unfettered architecture of Berners Lee’s web – can be said to mean.

The most important issues, here, are as much social as technological. Earlier this year, asked what he felt Google’s biggest mistake had been, the company’s director of research Peter Norvig picked “the social aspects” of the web. “Facebook came along and has been very successful and I may have dismissed that,” he explained. “I think I missed the fact that there is real importance to having a social network and getting these recommendations from friends. I might have been too focused on getting the facts and figures.”

It was an honest response, and also something of an understatement. This year has seen Facebook’s active users swell from around 350 million to over half a billion. The website has now overtaken Google itself as the most-visited page among American internet users. With services like Twitter also on the rise – and Google’s own attempt at a real-time social networking service, Google Wave, quietly crashing and burning – a sea change is taking place in what the internet is used for, with the interpersonal pushing past mere information as technology’s greatest driving force. And while Google itself remains a potent force, both its business model – which relies on serving targeted advertising next to search results – and its stated mission, to make information online “accessible and useful,” are threatened by the growing importance of closed systems like Facebook (to which Google has no access).

This isn’t even the biggest issue for the old-fashioned web, though. For, as Anderson notes, perhaps the most transforming technological force of recent years has been the growth of next generation mobile devices. Suddenly, the world is full of smart handhelds that can go online in a way once possible only with a computer. It’s estimated that within five years there will be more mobile internet users than computer-based ones; and these devices are ill-suited to the conventional world of web browsers. Small screens plus limited time and concentration mean that users are in urgent need of well-crafted, convenient programs: self-contained internet applications known as “apps” that entirely bypass conventional browsing, and that offer everything from local restaurant recommendations to instructions on making the perfect cappuccino. Each is a complete, miniature internet experience; each is good for no purpose other than its single, intended use.

According to the latest figures from Ofcom, the average Briton’s daily media usage now stands at seven hours and five minutes. Television usage, especially amongst the young, is down, while social networking takes up almost half of all internet time – much of it conducted while out and about, or engaged in other tasks. As a modern digital consumer, you tend to know what you want, and want to do it with a minimum of fuss. You’re busy, you’re interested in what your friends are saying and doing – and you’re prepared to pay for elegance and convenience. The first thing you touch when you wake up is your smartphone; it’s also the last thing you touch at night, when you set your alarm for the morning. For everything in-between there’s Facebook, Twitter, RSS, streamed radio and television, and your games console. No need to roam the wilds of the open web at all.

This is a caricature, but a useful one, for it offers one of the most convincing visions yet to emerge of what Web 3.0 might look like: an arena not just of ever-more-powerful desktop screens, but of smart, ubiquitous devices, and the constant augmentation of daily reality with digital experience.

Perhaps inevitably, the company currently closest to embodying this is California’s other global giant, Apple, within whose exquisite walled gardens more and more consumers are gathering to play. Buy an iPhone, an iPod touch or an iPad – as over a hundred million people now have – and you’ve entered into a bargain that, to some advocates of the open web, is nothing less than Faustian. Everything you buy for your device must be obtained through Apple, who will take their cut of any monies charged, and must approve every item sold their marketplaces. Your device will be beautiful, intuitive, secure and – as far as the critics are concerned – sterile. And a small number of people will be getting very rich indeed out of all this.

As conventional media companies have found to their cost, the web doesn’t favour old-fashioned advertising models. Profits wither online: there’s nowhere to hide from the numbers that have told newspapers, magazines, broadcasters and bloggers alike that their millions of visitors are worth only a pittance, and that “free” most often means “bankrupt” for the creators of traditional content. Enter what Anderson terms “artificial scarcity”: the deliberate decision to lock users into to a particular framework or resource, relying on the fact that they’ll be willing to pay, one way or another, for something sufficiently indispensable.

One digital medium that learned this lesson long ago is video games, which excel at creating electronic environments hermetically sealed off from the outside world. World of Warcraft’s 12 million players are worth well over a billion dollars a year in income to the company that runs their virtual world, Activision Blizzard; a value that rests on the game’s impervious isolation. Only in-game effort by players can generate rewards and status. Its rules are universal and absolute; the company’s word is final, and any cheating or exploitation is ruthlessly dealt with. Users wouldn’t have it any other way.

In one sense, the web has always been a matter more of surfaces than fundamentals. Google is not synonymous with its own website any more than Facebook or Amazon are with theirs. In each case, the companies’ value lies in the vast data engines they operate, for which the web is simply one point of access. There’s a Google app for the iPhone, just as there are apps for Facebook and Amazon. In terms of ethos, though, there’s a world of difference between them; and perhaps the most crucial factor to examine is not so much the divide between the web and the internet as the new, potent alignment between personalisation and gated communities.

Personal relationships are, inherently, not an open business. Our online presences are increasingly substantial, important and valuable to us – and this means there’s an increasing demand that they exist within services that offer both security and a variety of levels of visibility, rather than an information free-for-all. The major controversies of Facebook’s brief corporate history have all centred on the issue of privacy – both the security of users’ personal details and the question of who is able to view these – and its ability to prosper relies in large part on providing adequate tools and guarantees around users’ identities and relationships. This month, the most recent version of the Facebook app for iPhones rolled out a “places” functionality, offering users the chance to “discover moments when you and your friends are at the same place at the same time.” Like it or not, the idea of gating and restrictions is central to the success of such services.

Does all this, as Chris Anderson suggests, constitute a new digital paradigm? For some observers, what we’re seeing is the ugly resurgence of a trend we were lucky to escape in the early 1990s: a world of tethered appliances, sterile software and infantilised consumers that, had it become a reality, would have prevented innovative companies like Google or Facebook arising in the first place. As the author and digital activist Cory Doctorow put it earlier this year, in an impassioned piece entitled “Why I won't buy an iPad (and think you shouldn't, either),” “As an adult, I want to be able to choose whose stuff I buy and whom I trust to evaluate that stuff. I don't want my universe of apps constrained to the stuff that the Cupertino Politburo decides to allow for its platform. And as a copyright holder and creator, I don't want a single, Wal-Mart-like channel that controls access to my audience and dictates what is and is not acceptable material for me to create.” For others, though – including Wired’s own Michael Wolff, whose piece on the future of the web ran alongside Anderson’s – a necessary balance is being restored: between the staggering power of open resources to generate innovation, and the capacity of closed ones to serve particular human demands while generating revenues.

Culturally, the internet does appear to be on the cusp of a new phase, for which the current generation of apps and social networks are simply the vanguard. The open web is very far from dead; yet mere “facts and figures” – searched for, shared and shared alike – no longer define our online lives. We are becoming a society of networked individuals, accessible to each other and the net at all times. And so the net is in turn becoming more like our society, complete with its special interests, levels of access, factional divisions, and obligations to pay for certain guarantees and conveniences. As more of who we are and what we do migrates online, we are bringing other worlds with us.

Against The Shallows: media and linear minds

2010-08-16T15:18:00.002+01:00

A piece exploring my objections to Nicholas Carr's (rather good) book The Shallows, first published on First Drafts, August 2010.

Nicholas Carr's book on "how the internet is changing us," The Shallows, has recently begun making waves in the UK ahead of its publication here in September. Back in June, when it first came out in America, Evgeny Morosov wrote about it at some length in Prospect—and Carr's original essay in The Atlantic is well worth a read. Having finally got around to reading the book myself, what really interests me is something Carr sums up in his prologue with reference to Marshall McLuhan's 1964 book Understanding Media. The book was, he writes, "at heart a prophecy, and what it prophesied was the dissolution of the linear mind." I share his concerns over the "dissolution" of certain ways of thinking and reading. Yet there seems to me to be something wrong with the words Carr himself is using here.

Carr's argument is that the "linear minds" we used to have—thanks to an intellectual diet primarily composed of text—are being replaced by "a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts—the faster the better." There's a provocative dose of truth in this description. Consuming old media certainly looks like a linear experience, and one that new technology is irrevocably interrupting: beginning, middle and end are turning into link, point and click. I'd argue, though, that the actual reasons behind this consumption—the human needs served by all media, old and new—point towards something rather different.

Life itself is linearity: the implacable rate at which time and the universe unwind, ourselves included. All media have always represented some kind of escape from this: a human refuge from the fact that everything can happen only once, Kundera's "lightness of being." In visual art and sculpture, a scene is frozen, fit for inspection at the speed of the mind rather than time. In music, dance and drama, long before recording technologies of any kind existed, compositions and styles of improvisation were geared towards repetition and tradition: continuity and concentration create meaning where otherwise there would only be ephemerality.

Most of all, in words—spoken or written—the stuff of thought supplants the stuff of life. Words can effortlessly transport an audience in time and place, multiply perspectives, convey information and argument, defy earthly limits at will. What goes on in our minds when we read is far removed from the linear business of living. Life is linear; the mental lives of animals are inexorably linear. To be human is to fight against this. In this sense, the internet is not so much a reversal of the last few millennia of civilisation's good work as the latest battlefront.

Carr doesn't exactly interpret linearity in this sense, of course. His beef is with distraction, diffusion, multiplication and speed. To me, this means that what's really being talked about is agency and scale: an audience's capacity to chose, and the range of choices they face. And although new media represents an incredible intensification of both the quantities and opportunities here it does not, fundamentally, change either why or how people use media. To be human is to resist linearity at all costs: to speak and share and consume and create. Now we all get to start doing this, all the time, through media that throughout human history have been the province of the few. It's no wonder we're having trouble concentrating.

The 10 best video game characters

2010-08-09T10:42:00.010+01:00

The Observer asked me to contribute a piece on video games characters for their "ten best" series, and with some trepidation I embraced the challenge (the resulting debate in the comments thread was pretty lively).

I tried to strike a balance between old and new, mainstream and niche, and to interpret "best characters" as slightly different to simply "iconic." Mario aside, there's no Master Chief, Sonic, Lara Croft, Ryu, Ken, Gordon Freeman, Duke Nukem, or most other towering franchise heroes. I remain delighted not to have gone for any of these, whom I think of as brilliant cyphers rather than characters as such. But—of the better suggestions that I've seen among the comments and in response—I do miss a bunch of Miyamoto's offspring (Kirby! Link!), the Final Fantasy cast, Jon Irenicus, plenty of Steve Purcell & Tim Schafer creations, Garrett from Thief, and Tim Curry's Gabriel Knight, among others.

Anyway, here's that list again, in a pre-edited form with slightly more detail in some places…

Floyd the Robot, from Planetfall

In the early days of computing, when it was still possible for a game to be built from nothing but words, games designer Steve Meretzky’s first title for Infocom set a new standard of emotional involvement for players. Planetfall cast you as a lowly ensign in a space fleet whose escape pod crash lands on a mysteriously deserted planet. The sole survivor of whatever disaster occurred is a simple-minded robot called Floyd, who strolls around of his own accord, banters about save games and—in an apotheosis that has some of today’s most hardened coders swearing they sobbed into their Commodore 64s—ultimately sacrifices his life for your sake.

Guybrush Threepwood, first appearance in The Secret of Monkey Island

“I once owned a dog that was smarter then you.” “He must have taught you everything you know.” Boasting the gaming world’s first insults-based combat system, 1990’s The Secret of Monkey Island cast you as wannabe pirate Guybrush Threepwood. Thanks to the dazzling Lucasfilm Games team of Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman, outwitting evildoers with your ready wit and solving increasingly fiendish object-based problems was a constant delight—and the geeky Guybrush an unforgettable presence in countless nascent gaming lives, from his knobbly knees to his less-than-silky sword skills.

Mario, first appearance in Donkey Kong

One of the world’s most beloved cultural icons, Mario is as much a series of attributes as a character: moustache, dungarees, hat, springy jump. Created by debut designer Shigeru Miyamoto for the 1981 arcade classic Donkey Kong—and managed lovingly by his creator ever since—the leaping hero, initially known only as “jumpman,” soon won a following and a name. Almost 30 years on, he’s now featured in more than 100 titles, including some of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed games in history. That a chubby Italian plumber should have become perhaps the globe’s most universal emblem of fun is one of technology’s stranger facts; but it would be a hardened gamer who doesn’t quiver faintly with anticipation at the thought of what Mario might do next.

The King of All Cosmos, first appearance in Katamari Damacy

Nobody does bonkers game concepts quite as gleefully as the Japanese, but even aficionados concede that Keita Takahashi’s series of Katamari games—where you play a miniature prince rolling around a magic ball that expands by picking up larger and larger objects—deserve a special award. Topping off the odd scale is the prince’s father, the King of All Cosmos, a planet-sized binge-drinker who seems to be made from lego and old toys, and whose uniquely deformed syntax has earned him a dedicated, if bewildered, global following. ”This sky is not pretty at all. It's rough and masculine. Possibly sweaty.” A very particular kind of genius.

GLaDOS, from Portal

In a field not historically noted for feminism, perhaps gaming’s funniest, freakiest female also happens to be a psychopathic artificial intelligence, thanks to this exquisite 2007 first-person action-cum-puzzle game from Valve. Portal takes place in a scientific testing facility, where a female voice appears initially to be guiding you on your way and—slightly more strangely—attempting to bribe you with promises of cake. As the game progresses, the pronouncements, threats and snack-related enticements become progressively more bizarre, until the denouement sees you breaking out and executing your deranged interlocutor, GLaDos (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System). She then sings you a song over the end credits. Expert scripting from Valve and voice acting from Ellen McLain make every moment a discomforting joy. Be warned, though: the cake is a lie.

Arthas Menethil, first appearance in Warcraft III

If you’re going to do fantasy, you may as well embrace the histrionics that come with the genre: something Blizzard entertainment showed they understood perfectly with the introduction of the character of prince Arthas in the third of their Warcrarft strategy games in 2002. Initially the valiant model of a medieval knight, everything changes when Arthas picks up a cursed sword and begins to perpetrate a steadily more sinister series of atrocities (think dead peasants), culminating in killing his own father. The character really came into his own in the mighty World of Warcraft, over which his twisted spirit presided for five years—culminating this year in the chance for players to end his evil reign at last. Top class schlock.

Niko Bellic, from Grand Theft Auto IV

That the gaming world’s most notorious series featured a Serbian immigrant as the hero of its latest episode is a tribute to the freshness of the thinking behind the sales and headlines. Arriving in a parallel New York dreaming of the good life painted by his cousin, Niko finds awaiting him not cocktails and swimming pools, but a failing taxi business and money owed to the mob. A military veteran, Niko has been tempted over to act as a protector: a role you guide him through, alongside whatever you wish to make of his love life, leisure and stunt driving opportunities. A truly adult character in a gleefully adult game, Niko also boasts a surprisingly subversive line in anti-materialist disillusion.

The Lemmings, first appearance in Lemmings

In the greatest games, less is more—and characterisation can be every bit as impressive as character. Witness the miniature protagonists of this early hit, their green hair bobbing in profile as they walked towards a doom that only the speed of your mouse could avert. Interchangeable, expendable and numberless, turning these midget chunks of 8x8 pixels into characters was a major achievement for 1991. DMA Design pulled it off thanks to charmingly characterised animations for each special ability (digging, climbing, floating on giant umbrellas) and the judicious use of chipmonk-squeaky sound effects: the death scream “oh no!” being the most commonly-heard, thanks to the fiendish difficulty. It was almost enough to make you want actually to save the moronic rodents.

Captain Olimar, first appearance in Pikmin

Japanese genius Shigeru Miyamoto’s second entry on the list is both a less familiar figure than many of his beloved brainchildren—Link, Toad, Samus Aran—and a more intriguing one. His name a near-anagram of Mario himself in English (and a perfect anagram in Japanese), Olimar is a diminutive astronaut who has crash-landed on a strange planet and must enlist the help of its inhabitants, the plant-like Pikmin, to fix his ship. So far, so standard. But Olimar is a very particular kind of hero: a salaried employee of an interstellar delivery company, married with a wife and children, tasked in a later game with rescuing his company from bankruptcy. A little man, solving big problems—it’s hard not to glimpse a veiled autobiography in this
whimsical portrait of private enterprise going right.

Garrus Vakarian, first appearance in Mass Effect

Proof that space opera need no longer mean sub-Star Wars cheese when it comes to gaming, BioWare’s Mass Effect series has set new standards of plot, characterisation and player interaction: the second outing even allows the import of saved characters from the first so that old animosities, allegiances and romance can be continued. Among the dozens of non-player characters, the alien investigative agent Garrus Vakarian stands out: having fought alongside him in the first game, the second sees him operating as a vigilante under the mysterious moniker Archangel. Your job is to re-recruit him to your cause, a process that can—if you choose—involve entering into his own story of betrayal and vengeance. A new way of thinking about what interactive fiction might mean.

Visiting Google: the digital city-state

2010-08-03T17:52:00.002+01:00

Reflections on attending the SciFoo Camp at Google, first published on First Drafts, August 2010

Even though I've visited its offices in London before, I never really thought of Google as something that takes up physical space in the way that a bank or a retail chain does. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA—the Googleplex—has changed all that, thanks to the weekend I've just spent there for the SciFoo Camp, an extravaganza for a glittering array of scientific writers and thinkers organized by Tim O'Reilly, and graciously hosted by the world's most famous technology company. Looking at my browser window now, the Google search bar lodged at the top right, I have a new kind of double vision: a place, faces and voices overlaid on the bare text.

I spoke to Larry Page only briefly at Google, but his public words at the start of the Camp neatly summed up the tone of the proceedings: "Ask: is what I'm doing going to change the world? If the answer is no, then maybe you should do something else." In the context of his own $150bn company, this managed to sound more like practical advice than hubris, and the gathered wattage of intellectuals applauded loudly. Then we were on to the serious business of discussion: free-form sessions, proposed on the spot and plastered onto a vast post-it timetable, spanning topics brain-achingly diverse and dazzling—from super-symmetry to earthquake prediction, from the archaeology of Greek clockwork to the origins of the universe, from human flight without aircraft to the practicalities of building a working brain within a super-computer.

What will live with me as much as any individual session, though, is the place itself. Google's home is a campus, and being there is a "total" experience: if you work there, you can enjoy a gymnasium, sunny courtyards, beach volleyball, endless tech toys, laundry facilities and three excellent meals a day on site. As one employee explained it, workers are treated "like adults"—trusted to work and play hard, pursuing their projects in their own time. In another sense, of course, this also means they are treated like schoolchildren, or at least like members of a politely paternal institution—liberated from mundane concerns the better to learn and perform.

In the endless bright space of the outer San Francisco bay, between distant mountains and gridded freeways, it makes a Platonic kind of sense. The Nasa Ames research centre is next door to Google, its vast runways and hangers straight out of a science fiction movie; some of my happiest conversations were with its newest generation of thinkers. These are spaces in which people are free to live their ideas.

As I found myself discussing with the philosopher, podcaster and Prospect columnist Nigel Warburton, there's more than hint of the Renaissance city state to both Google and its great Californian colleague, Apple. Each is a place of extraordinary cultural fertility, complete with its own aesthetic and attitude: the relentlessly minimal modernism of Apple, where users' needs and whims are pre-empted with a commitment to elegance that borders on the pathological; the technicolor postmodernism of Google, whose software tools are ceaselessly calibrated to make anything that anyone might ever wish to know discoverable, and anything they might wish to do with data conceivable.

Digital culture may feel ubiquitous and instantaneous, but its greatest tools come from somewhere particular. The most brilliant minds of a generation flock to enter these citadels—to work, to visit, to build new futures for export. Whatever changes the world next, don't bet against it coming from a place that looks a lot like these.

The significance of Starcraft

2010-07-28T18:21:00.005+01:00

What might Starcraft mean for the global emergence of gaming as a spectator sport? First published on First Drafts, July 2010

The most-watched sport in South Korea, as in much of the rest of the world, is football. The second most-watched sport in South Korea, followed by almost a third of the population, is video-gaming. And above all this means the 1998 game Starcraft, which today boasts two dedicated cable television channels, a professional league of 500-odd players earning six-figure sums, and live events that can see up to 120,000 fans packing out stadiums.

Even beyond the fact that gaming isn't considered a spectator sport in most of the world, this is remarkable. Starcraft isn't a native Korean game: it's an American creation, developed and published by US giants Blizzard Entertainment. It's also twelve years old—almost prehistoric in the rapidly evolving world of gaming, not to mention laughably primitive-looking by modern standards—and extremely difficult to play well, let alone master. Yet it has both global sales of over 11 million and, within South Korea, a following that dwarfs any other modern title. Or that did until now. For the 27th July saw the release of perhaps the most hugely-anticipated game of the last 24 months, Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty.

If all goes well, perhaps ten percent of the population of South Korea—around five million people—will buy a copy of Starcraft II during its first year of release, alongside several million others worldwide. Why exactly is the appeal of the game so intense; and what's it actually like watching a pro-Starcraft match? This video, taken from a Korean cable television channel, gives a fair sense of the proceedings. To outsiders, it's largely incomprehensible. To those who play, it's a masterclass—and in this case a chance to see in action the man who, until a recent match-fixing scandal forced him into requirement, was one of the world's most-revered gamers: sAviOr, the "maestro."

Both Starcraft and its sequel are Real-Time Strategy games, or RTSs. Each player takes control of a small combat force, choosing from one of three factions, and must gather resources, build a base, train troops and ultimately wipe their opponent out. You view the map from a God's-eye perspective, and games are perhaps best thought of as a three-dimensional, technicolor kind of chess, with armies surging, reforming, and desperately trying to outflank, outmanoeuvre or simply overwhelm one another.

Learn the rules and the unique troops comprising each faction, and you're no longer watching a meaningless mess of figures and landscape: you're seeing an entire military campaign compressed into ten minutes, with two grandmasters creating and manipulating dozens of troops simultaneously. The nature of the game is the key to its success: unlike the first-person-perspective of many of the most popular action games, the strategic command of an entire army creates both complexity and scope, while the distant perspective allows an expert commentary team to guide viewers through every nuance of the combat.

The chess analogy isn't mere wishful thinking either. Despite the science fiction theme, this is as abstract a game as it's possible to imagine: an arena where precise rule-sets, capabilities and strategies interplay. There's more than a touch of dexterous prowess too: professionals must work at staggering speeds to stay on top, performing in excess of 500 actions per minute during games. Beginners languish below 50, while even decent amateurs find it hard to top a couple of hundred.

Expectations are beyond high for Starcraft II, and on the basis of early play and reviews it seems unlikely to disappoint: endless testing and calibration have gone into optimising its balance and its mechanics, which will continue to be fine-tuned as data from millions upon millions of games around the world comes in. Hundreds of millions of dollars will be earned. What Blizzard Entertainment will really be hoping, though, is that this new game will export to the rest of the world something of the fever that for a decade has held Korea enthralled.

Conditions in Korea in 1998 were ripe for the first game's success: a small nation with the world's highest levels of internet connectivity, a pre-existing pro-gaming culture centred around the ancient board game Go, cable television networks hungry for novelty, and a government and a populace dedicated to technological prowess. There's nothing quite like that elsewhere. Yet, while we're unlikely to see major television channels broadcasting live gaming any time soon in either the US or Europe, the emergence of gaming as a spectator "sport" driven by both live events and online viewing is an idea whose time may have come round at last.

For an increasingly mature and broad base of consumers, electronic games are now an integral part of social and cultural life—and it's becoming as natural to be in awe of an elite gamer as it is a premiership footballer (just as, a hundred years ago, it would have seemed bizarre that one might earn a small fortune from playing football). At root, watching experts moving electronic armies across a fictional field is no stranger than watching 22 people kick around a ball. It's the scope of the game and the commitment of its audience that matter. And here, Starcraft II holds some potentially transforming cards. Blizzard Entertainment already runs a formidably effective online service that allows all gamers, from rank amateurs to seasoned pros, to find suitable opponents and either lock horns or watch others play. The game itself has looks, depth, millions of dollars of publicity—and history on its side. The stage is set. Even if Starcraft II doesn't change the world, the age of electronic sports is coming.

Friendship, travel and World of Warcraft

2010-07-20T21:42:00.016+01:00

Most critics simply don't understand the social side of massively multiplayer online games. Here's an exploration of something rather personal: the friendships my wife and I have made in Warcraft, and how games can function as a unique kind of social space.

In April 2008, my friend Jon flew from North Carolina to visit me in England. Jon manages a store in a small town in Gaston County, just outside Charlotte, and this was the first time he’d travelled outside America; he’d had to get his first ever passport for the trip. It was also the first time we’d met face to face, although we’d known each other for almost two years.

Jon and I met in World of Warcraft, a game that my wife, Cat, and I have played ever since it launched in 2004. We met because he and Cat had the same dress. Jon plays a (male) character of the same in-game race as her - they're both Tauren Druids - and when he saw her walking past sporting a “white wedding dress” he quickly equipped an identical item. This was so, he later explained, he could use the “looks like we both shop at the same store” line to break the ice.

It worked. They exchanged a few lines of banter via in-game chat. I joined in, and it went from there. We started to help each other out with in-game tasks, and became members of the same Guild: an in-game collective that links like-minded players together in a loosely feudal structure. As we got to know each other better, we moved on to talking through microphones and headsets while playing. We swapped emails, linked up on Facebook, discussed books and films, and pieced together the details of our very different lives. Jon was smart, in his early twenties and had dropped out of college due to funding difficulties; Cat and I were working long hours in medicine and publishing, and Warcraft offered the option of a sociable, absorbing evening “out,” away from the pressures of daily life.

Like most massively multiplayer online game worlds, Warcraft’s objectives are multiple and there is no ultimate measure of victory. Although the action can be frantic at times, the game offers a playing experience that is expansive, even meditative. You are “role playing,” not because you’re sitting at a desk pretending to be an orc, but because a spectrum of clear, well-rewarded roles are on offer for your character: exploring, defeating monsters, crafting items, trading, mining resources, building relationships with other players. As Jon put it, “it’s like coming into your first day of school and finding that these set roles are already known: you’re meeting new people, but you already have goals, purposes. It lubricates that first meeting.”

Jon was the first gaming friend of mine to visit us in London, but not the last: since his stay, several others have made the journey across the Atlantic, while my wife and I have travelled up and down America’s east coast visiting and staying with people we first got to know through video games. There’s a husband and wife, Jason and Kim Long, who live with their three children in the outskirts of colonial Williamsburg. There’s Patrick, now serving in the navy; there’s Frank, from Virginia Beach, who came to a group gathering at Jason and Kim’s place. Also in our Guild there’s Chris, who’s heading out this summer to do the catering for his game-mate Brad’s wedding in Florida. They’re never met in person, but they’ve probably spent more hours in far franker conversations over the last few years than many of the guests who’ll be attending. Gradually, many of the blank spaces on my map of America have been populated by these individuals’ voices.

We often think of video games – and of digital culture in general – as a substitute for worldly encounters, and a troubling one at that. Yet our appetite for the digital has grown hand in hand with an increasing recognition of the value of the live and the interpersonal; and, above all, of the importance of the social aspects of technology. More than anything else, it is these forces that are driving forward the next stages of the digital revolution: smartphones, social networks, information streamed from trusted people and sources.

Within this frantically interconnected arena, games offer something that remains unique: a live, long-term interaction with other people. Unlike a Facebook profile or a blog entry, you cannot craft your gaming self at leisure. At play, within a virtual world, you are constantly reacting to the people and challenges around you. You’re free from most of the conventional constraints of “live” situations, but under all kinds of other pressure – something that can mean either streams of insults, or spontaneous acts of kindness. Either way, it’s startlingly fertile ground for finding like-minded others. Jon and I bonded over our love of Mark Twain; Cat and Kim over a mutual relish at being confident women in a world packed with nervous males.

For all its apparent isolation, one very real activity that has much in common with playing games like Warcraft is travel. Game worlds are places you visit; arenas that you enter in order to have experiences and encounters. In the words of Richard Bartle, the British programmer and game designer who co-created the first multiplayer virtual world in 1980, they are places that “allow you to be yourself in ways you can’t in the real world.” Even a player’s relationship with game worlds has, Bartle told me, the trajectory of an archetypical journey. “The virtual world you go to is this strange new place you must discover,” he argues. “And the first thing you have is this road of trials where you try to find your feet. Then you gain knowledge; you are tempted and tested; and so on, until at the end players gradually stop because the realm has lost its mystical significance. And this corresponds to the end of the plot.” At which point, as I have increasingly found with Warcraft, what you are left with is the people you have met.

It’s easy to be utopian about game worlds, just as it’s easy to paint them as abysses of violence and depredation. Both perspectives are equally useless when it comes to engaging with games as they actually are: new places in our lives; tools waiting to be used or abused. One sign that the debate may finally be shifting beyond the old polarities is a recent book by American sociologist William Sims Bainbridge, The Warcraft Civilization, which takes as its starting point the statement that “World of Warcraft is more than a game.” Unfortunately, alongside its sociological insights the book also provides an unintentional showcase for the less impressive aspects of gaming, with laboured re-tellings of in-game scenarios that make them sound exactly like what they are: genre fictions of little artistic or intellectual merit. Such paraphrase is doomed to failure because it takes us far away from where the real interest lies: in the fact that these are a new kind of both communal space and community. My wife and I use games in a way that’s far from unique: as not only a social tool, but a destination, a delight, a distraction, a refuge.

Together with the looser and more diffuse phenomenon of social networks, this space is only going to grow over the course of the present century. Reality is not being overtaken our outmoded, but it is being augmented. I feel no need to reach for inverted commas when I write that I met someone within a game. For an increasing number of people, the ranks of their most “real” friends include people they have yet to meet in the flesh.

Last year, I interviewed a husband and wife, Ville and Liz, who met each other through an online game: EverQuest, an ancestor of World of Warcraft, which launched in 1999. He lived in Finland, she lived on the west coast of America: they spoke for many hours online, emailed, finally met in Paris, and ended up living together. It’s the kind of story that is usually told today for its novelty value – much as, twenty years ago, it would have seemed slightly outrageous for one person to have found a partner via a website.

For Ville and Liz, though, travelling across the world to meet someone from a game was at root no stranger than travelling into a game and finding someone worth meeting there. “I find that I have a tendency to be more open with people that I meet online,” Liz argued. “It’s easier to be more negative, too, but I think you’re quite a bit closer to the people who you do really like.” Ville agreed: “For me, real relationships had often tended to be more superficial. In real life it takes a lot more for people to express their true feelings.” When it comes to real feelings, a little unreality can sometimes be just what we need.

My TED talk: seven lessons from games for transforming engagement

2010-07-16T15:51:00.006+01:00

I've had the huge pleasure of giving a talk at TED Global in Oxford, about the lessons games can teach us about engagement and about learning itself. The full video is now online on the TED website; below is a brief summary of a few central points.

We evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to be satisfied by the world in particular ways; and to be intensely satisfied as a species by learning and problem-solving. Perhaps the most amazing thing about the virtual arenas that games create is that we are now able to reverse-engineer that, and to produce environments that exist expressly to tick our evolutionary boxes and to engage us.

When it comes to games themselves, the "fun first" principle is an absolute: before anything and everything else, a game must be fun. Not everything can be made into a game, though; and it's simply misleading to think of games as potential solutions to all our ills.

So I've come up with seven larger ideas for motivating and engaging people on the basis of observing many games' stunning power as engines of human engagement:

1. Using an experience system. This is something that Jesse Schell has talked about brilliantly in this last year, and that is actually being done in places like Indiana University. Don’t have grades, for example: give students an avatar or a profile that levels up steadily based on things like attendance and performance. Everything should count in some way towards this precisely-measured, steady individual progression: a far more intimate, involving and nuanced way of measuring progress over time than most conventional means.

2. Multiple long and short-term aims. You break something down into many parallel tasks. You don’t just to say to someone, do 5,000 sums, or 100, or even 50: you create a whole spectrum of larger and smaller objectives that help people take take ownership of their progress, and keep them feeling they are progressing and succeeding - as well as targeting particular sets of skills.

3. You reward for effort. People should be credited for everything they try and do. Don’t punish failure. Instead, reward and reinforce, and make everything count towards a clear measure of progress. As I've said elsewhere, one of the most profound transformations we can learn from games is how to turn the sense that someone has "failed" into the sense that they "haven't succeeded yet."

4. Rapid, clear, frequent feedback. This is absolutely central to all forms of learning and engagement. With many of the most intractable problems in the world today, like global warming and pollution, it can be almost impossible to learn or understand something when consequences and feedback are distant from causes. Showing a clear link between things, and allowing people to experience this experimentally, allows learning to take place: you need to be shown and to experience exactly how an action plays out, what it caused, whether your attempt worked or not.

5. Uncertainty. This is the real neurological gold mine so far as gaming is concerned. Dopamine elevates when you get a little prize for doing something, but what really lights up the brain is the unexpected reward: the one that couldn’t be predicted. And so the right amount of well-calibrated uncertainty can create intense engagement in all manner of tasks.

6. Windows of enhanced attention. This is about using the emerging field of neurological modelling to identify those moments when attention and memory are enhanced in the brain by an elevated dopamine level, and putting learning into them - literally dropping the nugget of fact into those few seconds when attention is elevated. It's early days here, but the potential of the field is vast.

7. Other people. If games should remind us of one crucial aspect of our evolutionary natures more than any other, it’s that reward is not just money or personal achievement points; and it’s not just solitary individuals slumped in front of screens: it’s the intense validation of doing something in comparison and in collaboration with others.

Collective engagement can be transformed by the unprecedented laboratory that virtual worlds offer for observing group psychology and motivation; from analyzing Guild structures in games to exploring how the public visibility of participants' levels of achievement can encourage both competition and collaboration. This is, for me, perhaps the most thrilling area of all.

The importance of being naked

2010-06-27T22:11:00.000+01:00

A short column for Prospect, looking at censorship in digital publishing; first published June 2010

James Joyce and Oscar Wilde are in trouble over obscenity. It reads like a headline from the 1920s, yet this was a topic making headlines in June 2010, when it emerged that a graphic novel adaptation of Joyce’s Ulysses and a second graphic novel inspired by Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest had both fallen foul of Apple’s squeaky clean regulatory policy. Their releases on the iPad required last-minute amendments thanks to the existence of nude (cartoon) images in the Joyce and a homosexual (cartoon) fantasy scene in the Wilde.

Thanks in part to online protest, both apps have now been allowed to resubmit their original content. But, coming off the back of the incident in December 2009, when Apple (temporarily) banned an app by cartoonist Mark Fiore because it “ridiculed public figures,” it’s clear that censorship—an issue many readers considered as dead as Joyce and Wilde—is raising its head once again.

Digital censorship is an interesting conundrum, not least because it invokes another debate that many people haven’t paid serious attention to for some time: when is something artistically or intellectually valid, and when is it merely pornographic or gratuitous?

Most people accept that Apple has the moral and legal right to filter the content available via its digital store. As well as a certain level of quality, consumers expect that apps will perform as advertised, won’t be packed with hate speech or hardcore porn, and won’t rip off or deceive their users. But what about naked bodies, or politically controversial arguments, or, say, cartoons lampooning certain religions?

Courts, customers and philosophers can mull these queries all they like; but the only opinions that really matter are those of the companies controlling increasingly large parts of the world’s digital infrastructure. Apple is picky, Google famously less so. Yet there is nothing inevitable about either the one’s restrictions nor the other’s openness. And it may be no bad thing to be reminded that, when it comes to next-generation media, it’s important to keep fighting some very old new battles.

Book review: Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky

2010-06-27T11:28:00.002+01:00

A review of Clay Shirky's second book on the power of social networking and collaboration, Cognitive Surplus, first published in the Observer, June 2010

Every single year for the second half of the 20th century, the amount of television watched by humanity increased. Collectively, we now watch more than one trillion hours of television every year – something not entirely unlike, as Clay Shirky sees it, tipping the free time of the world's educated citizenry (their "cognitive surplus") down an intellectual plughole. It's not that television is evil, or even bad. It's just that, as a medium, it's incredibly good at soaking up leisure and producing very few tangible results. It tells stories, it makes people feel less alone, it passes the time. It is, Shirky ventures, a little like gin in 1720s London, helping people cope with modernity by gently blurring the edges of their reality.

The point of departure for this, Shirky's second book, is an unprecedented fact. For the first time in history, the amount of television being watched by a younger generation is decreasing rather than increasing annually. Why? Because time is being poured instead into interactive media, and above all into online activities. The key word here is "activities", for the defining feature of new media is action. As readers of Shirky's previous book, the 2008 hit Here Comes Everybody, will know, his is one of the most influential voices in the social networking movement, arguing that the sudden lowering of the cost of collaboration brought by the internet represents revolutionary new kinds of creativity and problem‑solving.

Cognitive Surplus expands on this theme in as lucid and assured a style as its predecessor, carefully displaying the collective projects that even a fraction of the world's television time might be turned into instead. Americans alone watch about 200bn hours of television a year: that represents, Shirky notes, about 2,000 times the total human hours that have gone so far into creating Wikipedia.

Not that every collaborative project could be a Wikipedia, of course. But what even the most spurious uses of socially networked media can offer (think cute cats with comically misspelled captions) is equal opportunities for all simultaneously to consume, produce and share. This is the holy triathlon of new media, and Shirky points out that these three activities are fundamental impulses that broadcast media have until recently served in a deeply unbalanced manner.

The key to the radical nature of the social change all this implies is scale. If you think 200bn hours of television is a lot, consider the fact that there are now 2 billion people online across the world, and more than 3 billion with mobile phones. Given that there are around 4.5 billion adults worldwide, Shirky points out that "we live, for the first time in history, in a world where being part of a globally interconnected group is the normal case for most citizens".

With this many people involved, the collective leverage that can be brought to bear on any particular project or problem is colossal. Whether it's "couch surfers" pooling resources to create an international network of sofas for each other to sleep on, or the open-source community of programmers that maintains Apache, a free program that now drives more than 60% of the servers constituting the internet itself, the world's collective cognitive surplus is already being put to transforming uses. And the fun, Shirky says, is only just beginning.

There are those who have proved either allergic or immune to Shirky's particular brand of optimism, arguing that the power of social media is extremely limited in the face of many intractable real-world problems, and can even exacerbate them, both by making it easier to track activists and by displacing energies that might have been better expended elsewhere. To accuse Shirky of preaching a panacea, though, is to misunderstand the simplest fact about the emerging technological and social landscape he describes: that it represents not so much a replacement of existing systems as a restoration of many far older and more intimate kinds of human relations.

As a route towards action, rather than an escape from it, technology and media have never looked more potent than they do today. And perhaps the most amazing fact about Shirky's incisive manual for building a better world is this: it's just possible that everything he promises may be true.

Interview: Per Wästberg

2010-06-23T11:46:00.000+01:00

An interview with the author and chairman of the Nobel literature committee Per Wästberg, discussing his book The Journey of Anders Sparrman, the Nobel prize, and the future of literature. First published in Prospect, July 2010

On 17th January 1773, the two ships of Captain James Cook’s second expedition crossed the Antarctic Circle—the first time in history that Europeans had done so. Among the passengers on Cook’s own ship, HMS Resolution, was the Swedish naturalist Anders Sparrman: ten days later, Sparrman recorded seeing in the sky the “blazing and radiance” of the aurora australis, the southern lights. “Probably never since the day of Creation until now,” recorded Sparrman in awe, had these “appeared before the eyes of a European.”

It was, however, more than the desire to witness new sights that drew men like Cook and Sparrman to the extremities of the known world. Children of the Enlightenment, they were also measurers and recorders. Cook’s three voyages would debunk the long-held myth of a fertile “southern continent,” Terra Australis, as well as mapping (and laying claim to) many Pacific islands for the first time. In addition to Sparrman, a distinguished handful of scientists and artists travelled with Cook: astronomer, William Wales, the naturalists Johann Reinhold Forster and his son, George, and the expedition’s official draughtsman, William Hodges, each seeking to expand the frontiers of European knowledge. The world was a book of wonders which they would, for the first time, translate and classify.

Translation is a central concern for the Swedish author Per Wästberg—trim and softly-spoken at 76—with whom I am sitting on a mild afternoon above a Soho street. We are discussing the English translation of his latest book, a fictionalised biography of Anders Sparrman that appeared in England in April, and this means beginning with Wästberg himself. Chairman of the Nobel committee for literature, author of over 50 books, a prolific polemicist and former editor of Sweden’s largest daily newspaper, Wästberg has been waiting most of his life to tell Sparrman’s story. “At a very early age, I came across Sparrman’s account of his journey around the Cape of Good Hope and around the world with Cook—and I found him humorous and outspoken and readable in a way that surprised me. Then I came to Africa myself on a Rotary Foundation scholarship for a year, when I was 25, in 1959—just the same age as Anders Sparrman was when he arrived in South Africa.” Much as Sparrman’s travels would transform his life, Wästberg’s encounter with Africa came to define his.

A “neutral, innocent Swede” (although hardly unworldly: he had written his first national newspaper column at the age of 12 and published his first novel at the age of 15), Wästberg had come to Rhodesia—now Zimbabwe—to study African literature. Soon, though, he found himself writing for the Scandinavian press about the endemic racism he saw. This was “translated to the government in Rhodesia, and I was asked to leave.” Rather than returning home, he headed to South Africa, where his only literary contact—Nadine Gordimer, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1991—granted him an interview. Through Gordimer, Wästberg met most of the then-non-prohibited ANC. He travelled around South Africa, writing about townships, factories and farms until “the South African police caught up with me, I was denounced by the foreign minister in parliament, and I was put on a plane to Congo.” There, he promptly met Patrice Lumumba, the man who would become the first prime minister of the Republic of the Congo when it gained independence in 1960.

Thus began decades of political activism: Wästberg founded the Swedish arm of Amnesty in 1963, became president of Swedish Pen in 1967 and Pen’s international president in 1979, worked at the international defence and aid fund for South Africa, and was one of the world’s most influential campaigners against apartheid. Literature never vanished from view, however. Despite his travels and extradition, the young Wästberg went on both to complete his doctorate on African writing (“when I presented my thesis, my professor at the University of Uppsala said: ‘I have never heard of any of these people, you could have made them up’”) and, in 1961, to compile the first anthology of African literature ever to appear outside of Africa, Afrika berättar (“Africa tells”).

It’s difficult, today, to understand just how great the challenges of putting together a book like Afrika berättar were. In 1961, barely a generation of African literature existed, and it was entirely unknown abroad. A silence hung over the continent: two centuries after Cook and Sparrman, Europeans were still speaking on behalf of those places they had colonised. Yet, as Wästberg realised, literature was a part of the colonial legacy that could be turned back upon the countries of its birth. “Only with the Christian, white missionaries did Africans realise they were individuals, not part of a tribe, a family—only then, when they were taught that you are a unique individual in the face of God, did they realise that you had your own individual life and experience.” Despite its inevitably political content, moreover, this young literature was doing something beyond politics—reconfiguring notions of identity, and entering Africa for the first time into dialogue with those civilisations for which it had for so long simply been a mute, other place.

The man we encounter in The Journey of Anders Sparrman is, in his own way, both an author and an activist—and a spirit out of temper with his times. Born in 1748, in 1772 Sparrman travelled to South Africa, joining Cook’s expedition from there. He returned to Sweden in 1776 and, after making one further expedition in 1787, worked in medicine for the rest of his life, dying in poverty in 1820. These are the bare bones onto which Wästberg fleshes his tale, and the result is a remarkable blend of quotation, historical record, interpretation and invention. It’s also an opportunity to rediscover an 18th-century eyewitness account of colonialism whose outrage can feel shockingly contemporary. “I think it is my duty to show how much the world has been misled,” wrote Sparrman in South Africa in 1775, determined to dismantle the European myths that surrounded the “savages.” A year later, his conclusion about the nature of the colonial experience was unambiguous: “there can be no true amity until the country is ruled by its own inhabitants.”

Wästberg weaves Sparrman’s own words into fine descriptions of landscape and character: the bitter, homesick Dutch governor of Cape Town; the rational genius of Captain Cook, diverting his men’s fears into careful routines; the unearthly wasteland of the frozen Southern Ocean. Back in Sweden, with Sparrman’s travels ended, the anchoring facts become fewer and the tone shifts towards internal monologue, exploring the unexpected joy of Sparrman’s late marriage to a younger woman.

The defining characteristic that drew Wästberg to Sparrman was, he explains, his willingness to treat everyone he met, black and white, as fully human: “his colleagues noticed and scribbled down everything, all the Latin names, but never saw the human beings around them.” Sparrman did. Unlike his biographer, however, Sparrman enjoyed little success in translating his convictions into action: his attempts to evangelise against slavery were unsuccessful, his compassionate treatment of the poor largely futile thanks to the ineffectiveness of 18th-century medicine. Indeed, he had almost vanished from historical consciousness until Wästberg’s book appeared.

“I think what compelled Sparrman to write,” Wästberg argues, “was this holy feeling of being first on the spot: of having unique access to something that might have cost his life, and scribbling it down—for the future.” This “holy feeling” also comes close to Wästberg’s sense of what is most valuable in literature: its uniqueness, its extension of what it is possible to think and say. It’s a process that has its analogies with exploration—and a keen awareness of the barriers between cultures and languages informs Wästberg’s perspective on the Nobel prize, which serves not only as the world’s most prestigious literary award, but also one of its great engines of translation. To win a Nobel is automatically to gain a truly global readership. Yet Wästberg is also quick to confess the Nobel’s own brand of insularity. “We have our great limitations as a committee. We are a few people subjected to our own tradition, reading and tastes, who try to pinpoint among many valuable writers somebody who is a favourite, writing perhaps in a new tone of language. But I think there are writers who are untranslateable. There are Arab, Indian, Pakistani writers who may be great in their own language, but it seems impossible to get their kind of originality across.”

And so we come to Wästberg’s ambivalence over the dominance of English as a global language. On the one hand, the world has never been more interconnected linguistically. On the other hand, “you can never abandon a language you have grown up in with all its nuances. I see this in Brussels, with the Swedish parliamentarians in the European Union. They think they speak English so wonderfully, but they are rather awkward, and miss nuances: they are allowed to speak their own language, but they do not.” Translation means more than carrying meaning across languages, just as literature means more than just writing.

What, then, of literature’s future in a world suffused with both words and rival media? “Literature is certainly undervalued, and it has less attention today. There will always be people for whom literature is a necessary bread, the lifeblood of intellect and emotion. But I think it will shrink.”

There remains, though, that “holy feeling”—the translation of experience into a common fund of language so that, 190 years after his death, the half-forgotten writings of a Swedish naturalist can become part of man’s continuing wrestle with words and meanings. “When I write,” Wästberg says, “I am aiming to be strong in language. Everything must be rewritten tens of times to have this effect. One is free to write about anything. It all depends how well it is written.”

Interview: Neil Gaiman

2010-06-15T14:41:00.000+01:00

To mark the publication on 15th June of the anthology Stories (Headline Review, £18.99), a collection of stories selected jointly by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio, I met with Neil in London in May, and among other things discussed the art of the short story, the future of the author, what went wrong in the 1980s—and why there's never been a better time than today to be a writer. I was also inspired to give this site its present name. First published on Prospect online in June 2010

Tom Chatfield: In your introduction to Stories, you argue that above and beyond "good writing," a short story has an obligation to make people care—to ask the question "what comes next?" Why did you feel this was so important?

Neil Gaiman: For me, that was the starting point of the whole idea of the anthology. I had written stories for anthologies that Al Sarrantonio had edited: he had done a pretty much definitive horror anthology, a fantasy anthology, and so on. We had breakfast in New York just to catch up, and I was talking about what interested me most, which was in the idea of what happens if you take away all the genre rules for stories—what constitutes "mainstream writing," "best-sellers," etc—and just tell people to go and write. We were saying, well, that would be an amazing anthology but no publisher is ever going to buy a collection of stories called just "stories." Then we went out and discovered that actually they would, if we said it with enough confidence.

TC: And why was this such a strong impulse for you?

NG: I had started to feel that somewhere in the second half of the 20th century, the idea of page-turning as a good thing had been lost. You were getting books that were the equivalent of absolutely beautifully prepared dishes of food that didn't taste like anything much. Back when I was a reviewer, in the 1980s, I'd get books where, sentence by sentence, everything was beautiful. I just never cared.

TC: Where did this idea that "well-made" fiction was synonymous with "proper" fiction come from?

NG: If I wanted to be cynical—which I do not, because I'm not actually very cynical and I don't do cynical very well—I would say, first, it's because at the point where you are teaching books, page-turning is actually no longer a survival trait for a book. Particularly in universities. You want a book that easily submits to dissection, that gives you lots of different ways it can be interpreted, that has beautiful sentences and so on. But the actual narrative drive can count against it.

In children's literature, which is a very easy place to point to because in some ways it became a microcosm of the world outside, the idea that something had a good story became less and less important. The people who were buying the books, and choosing the books that would get bought, were librarians and teachers for whom the question of whether you wanted to turn the page was significantly less important than the question of—well, if I said whether a book conformed to a certain ideological bias, I would be being unfair to well-meaning people. But it would also be true to say that I remember the wasteland of children's literature in the 1980s. If I was sent one book about a young man in a tower block who wasn't doing very well at school and whose brother was on heroin, and to whom nothing very much happened, I was probably sent a hundred of them. And you could tell people were just going down a list and ticking things off. Is it not middle class? Tick. Is it not in any way ideologically strained? Tick. Is it properly grim and gritty? Tick. And yet does it somehow lack anything that anybody could actually object to in any way? Tick. They'd go down the ticks.

TC: I remember being a child in the 1980s, and the books that have lived with me from then are probably Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett's. Because their worlds came from completely elsewhere, they required no prior knowledge.

NG: Yes. And they were not prescriptive, they were discovered, they were anarchic. The discovery of what Douglas Adams could do to a sentence, what Terry Pratchett could do to a plot…

TC: It struck me, in this new anthology, that although you say there were no criteria for inclusion, there is almost nothing in it that's straight realism.

NG: What I loved in the stories I chose was the sense of people just being let loose with themselves, and playing God. You take the rules of genre away, and people feel they can play with a story. And one of the things people start doing when they play with stories is that they make things up.

TC: Yet people are always saying that life is stranger than fiction, with the implication being that you don't need to make anything up any more. And that in a digital age, today, all you need to do as a "creative" is search and filter.

NG: Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing and life doesn't. And life can be heavy-handed in a way that you wouldn't allow in fiction. I sat there with a friend dying of lung cancer two nights ago, and she pulled out a cigarette from a pack which had "smoking kills" written in huge letter facing me. And I thought, I couldn't actually do that in a story, because in fiction or in a film it would be so heavy-handed and such amazingly bad art. But life owes no obligation to be good art.

TC: You as a young person were a real fan: you cared a lot about particular books and authors. Today, your relationship with your readers is very close, very interactive. And I wonder how different it might have been if you had been growing up today, as a reader and someone who loved authors. Because the Neil Gaimans of tomorrow are able almost to follow you around, on Twitter, on your blog…

NG: I remember, aged 13 or 14, ringing directory enquiries, whenever I had a down moment, and trying to persuade them to give me a writer's phone number. Had they given me a number, which they never did, I would have phoned someone up and said, "so, what are you working on then?" And they would have said whatever they were working on, and I would have said "thank you very much" and put the phone down. And that would have been my interaction with the person writing the book: there was nothing else I wanted to know or say other than to know that they were there, and for them to know that I was there.

TC: It seems to be a very profound change in the writer's relationship with not just audiences but books: books are less definitive, more like one part of an ongoing conversation with readers.

NG: I'm never, I hope, stupid enough to believe that Twitter or blogging or any of this stuff is a substitute for actually doing the work or writing a book. On the other hand, for me a lot of the time it is a way of going, "oh my God, this is fun." And it is fun. When I was a kid, if somebody had told me that when I was grown up I would get to write an episode of Doctor Who, I would have thought, "wow, I wonder if it could ever be as much fun as I think it's going to be, maybe it will feel like a job." Yet the fact of the matter today is that the moment I sat down and wrote "Interior: Tardis" and "the glass thing is going up and down inside the hexagonal column," I thought, this is good, this is as much fun as I thought it would possibly be. And it is a real joy to be able to say that to people, via Twitter and so on.

TC: Are there dangers that come with this territory?

NG: You are navigating between the things that I have seen destroy writers. On the one hand, there are the guys who are too precious, and they take ten years to produce a book and you look at it and you go, how can you take ten years between books? Very often it's because every single word and comma assumes such enormous importance. And then there are the ones like GK Chesterton, whom you just want to go back in time and stop from writing; you want to say, "just don't write another essay, just stop, take a week off for God's sake…"

I don't think those are the biggest pitfalls, though. I think the biggest pitfalls for a writer are that we are not performers. A performer—and I know this because I am friends with many performers, and in fact at this point am affianced to one—lives or dies by what the crowd did last night. The applause. Did people like them, was it a good gig? It's an immediate gratification thing. For writers, for it to work, you write something, and normally by the time it is published you are on to the next thing.

TC: For younger and emerging writers today, though, with so many opportunities to appear and to speak and to communicate, you can get something like that applause effect. You're always wondering, how many blog readers, how many re-Tweets, what's my Amazon ranking?

NG: Right. There is a wonderful author called Sarah Pinborough, a very nice lady, who went onto Twitter about the same time as me, and we had some friends in common so I followed her and she was delightful, entertaining, very funny. And then she went off Twitter, and I met her in the flesh for the first time a couple of months ago and said, you're my Twitter buddy, what happened? And she said, I counted my page count after I joined Twitter, and it had dropped by two thirds, because I was being funny on Twitter. The energy was going there, into the immediate gratification.

So I worry a little bit. I worry about kids now who come to me and say, I am a young author, and my publisher has told me I should start my blog. And I say, do you want to start one? And they say, not really. So I say, well don't. People come to me and they ask, how do I get 1.5m people reading my blog? And it's like, you need to start it in 2001 and try not to miss a day for the first eight years…

TC: And do you ever feel it's a burden, blogging and so on, an unwelcome obligation?

NG: I guess. I mean, I'm blogging less because I started feeling like I was repeating myself. When I started, everything was new, everything was fun and exciting, and then there came a point after 7 or 8 years when I started to think, I've answered that question before, I've written that thing before, I've explained that concept before. At this point I started thinking that probably what I should do with the blog is just make it significantly easier for people searching it to find where I've told them things before, because there is no point writing it again and again and again.

TC: And what about the changing role of publishers in the book world?

NG: I feel right now as if we are at the end of something. And I am very pleased that I got in before it finished. Publishing was always predicated on the concept of the gatekeeper, and on the fact that it was expensive and difficult to get something into people's hands. That is no longer true. We are still in a world that needs gatekeepers, but only just. When I was a young book reviewer, the early 1980s, I was reading all the science fiction and fantasy and horror that was being published in the UK during the course of the year, plus other stuff. It was perfectly readable by one person. That would be impossible today: you have gone from there to a world in which it is easier than it has ever been to get your information out there, to do your thing.

TC: I find myself worrying about elements of fear and panic in the publishing industry. So while a lot of the old boundaries between genres are being broken down by authors, when I look at the catalogs, the tactic seems to be to generify things still more. I see a catalog with an entire section called something like "teen vampire fiction," these identical-looking books that I can't really criticize, because I haven't read them and probably never will…

NG: What I love about your statement "I won't ever read them" is that you have just wound up articulating my secret theory of what genre is for—which is also why the new anthology is called Stories. Because my theory on genre is that while there are people out there who believe that genre tells people what to read, actually I believe that genre exists as a marketing tool to tell you what to avoid. Somebody says that "teen vampire" is a genre, and then most of us can say, good, I know that I don't read teen vampire books. It's possible that ten percent of those books are good. But I don't have to go to that place any more than I have to go to the cowboy section or the romance section.

TC: Publishers are certainly segmenting audiences more and more, to reach more people. But is this any good for writers or for books?

NG: The problem that we are in now is that everything is about filtering. Information used to be gold: hard to find, expensive, the equivalent of going off into the desert and coming back with a perfect lump of gold. Now, it's the equivalent of going off into the jungle, in which there is information everywhere and what you are trying to find is the piece that is useful, while ignoring the noise. I don't know if this is good or bad: it just is.

TC: It's a landscape, as you say, that people inhabit. But it is a landscape that is suffused with words, and I wonder if it affects how people read and write, when words start to look disposable rather than golden.

NG: I don't know. I do know that I was reading articles in the late 1970s in my teenage years that, basically, were reflecting on a post-literature society in which people would no longer write things down or read because they had the television and telephone. The book was going to go the way of the letter—and yet now I get handed books where the whole idea is that it's someone's email, but also their Twitter stream and blog entries. An epistolary novel!

I'm fascinated by the fact that my fifteen-and-a-half-year-old daughter barely uses her phone to talk on. There's that weird point when you are driving four teenage girls around, in a car that five years ago would have been alive with conversation, and not only is it completely quiet, but those five are all talking to each other through text, with another 15 people coming into and going out of that conversation. It's as if you have five telepaths in the car but are excluded from the telepathic communion.

TC: Do you feel it is a good time to be a young writer?

NG: It's an amazing time to be a young author. Your options are almost infinite. The playing field may not be perfectly flat, but it's really so much flatter than anybody every believed. The truth is, if I were starting out right now, writing short stories or whatever, I would build my little off-the-peg website, no need for a publisher at that stage, maybe never. Although I'm fascinated by how many mainstream publishers keep an eye on the web for people who are good. But just the idea that I could get stuff done and out like that, that I wouldn't be dependent in any way on any other gatekeeper.

TC: I think a lot of older authors have sour grapes about it: it was rather cosy to be removed from that messiness. It makes me feel we're getting back to something like the early days of newspapers as scurrilous rags, and of authors hawking their wares, their stories, on the streets and by subscriptions.

NG: I love the messiness of it. I think in some ways we're back even earlier than that, at the point where you turn up at the village and you say, give me a meal for the night and I'll tell you stories. So, yes, it is a good time, a really good time to be a young writer. Any time that all of the rules are changing is a good time.

TC: It can help to sort people, too: if there aren't the conventions, you can't hide behind them, you can't just tick the established boxes. You have a duty to be interesting.

NG: Yes. I like the world we are in right now. I think it is fun, I think it is really unpredictable. And I love the fact that things that people prognosticated as being dead or dying have come back to life like weeds, including written communication, including short stories: the death of the short stories has been announced many times.

TC: What about piracy and business models and so on? You know the views of authors like Cory Doctorow about copyright, about open formats: he is very eloquent about the idea that there is no excuse for people restricting the way words are used, he is very against proprietary formats.

NG: I am sure that Cory believes that. But you know, at the point where the newly-resurgent UK Nazi party decides to issue commercially their own edition of his novel Little Brother with a large swastika on the cover and re-written bits inside making it clear that this book supports the UK Nazi party point of view, Cory might stand up at that point and say, I know I'm up for myself being remixed, but this actually does break the terms under which I am putting this out into the public domain.

Which is just really playing devil's advocate. But for me, the thing that frustrates me most about the pirate copies of stuff of mine is very often it has been run through an Optical Character Recognition reader and been scanned, and this has picked the wrong words, which is what happens if you use OCRs. Nobody is there proof reading, and I get people saying, how could you write this nonsense? And I'm saying, well I didn't. And they say, it's in this thing I downloaded from the web. I like a certain amount of quality control, and I also like the idea that I am free to give stuff out or take it away.

When I was a young man, the first book of mine that I wrote that was published was a biography of Duran Duran. It wasn't very good. It was written from press-clippings by a 23-year-old journalist who planned to use the revenues from it to buy a new electric typewriter and pay the rent. And the publisher went bankrupt a couple of weeks after it came out so I never got paid. My point is, the book went out of print, and about three years later when the assets of that publisher were bought, the new publisher who had bought them came to me and said, can we reprint your Duran Duran book? And I took enormous pleasure in saying to them no, I'm very happy for this book to stay out of print. The idea that now my Duran Duran book goes up on the web and out into the world, because information needs to be free. Well, no, I don't really want that to be out there…

TC: Otherwise your definitive biography will include a section on "Gaiman and Duran Duran"

NG: Exactly. I'm happy for it to have gone.

Why the iPad won’t save newspapers (and neither will paywalls)

2010-06-03T12:14:00.001+01:00

A piece exploring the black hole in digital funding models for newspapers, first published on First Drafts, June 2010

I wrote a piece about the importance of the culture of apps in Prospect this month, concluding that people are still willing to spend money on a host of media products, so long as they perceive these as sufficiently valuable—for which read unique, in the sense of not being able to get the same kind of experience for less or for free elsewhere. In the case of apps, Apple has been very good at creating this perceived value, fostering a sense of fun, intimacy, convenience, exclusivity, status, and all sorts of other positive nouns in its users.

This doesn't, however, mean that I think consumers are a bunch of idiots. And it certainly doesn't mean that making an app version of something is a ticket to the wonderful world of Apple-like profits and glamour. Most apps don't make money, for the simple reason that consumers are pretty selective about what they spend their time and money on. And even fewer apps make serious money, of the kind that might—for instance—substitute for the revenues a traditional newspaper needs to survive.

Hence my depression at an advert in the Times today for the (by all accounts very nice) iPad edition of the paper. This edition will appear "automatically on your iPad every morning," the blurb boasts, and will allow you to "see each page in turn" on the screen. You can "navigate quickly through our sections, via the illustrated pop-up menu," meaning that "no story is more than a couple of taps or flicks away." Best of all, "articles are embedded with beautiful picture galleries or stunning interactive graphics or dynamic video." Yours for a mere £9.99 per 28 days.

Now, some people are going to buy this app. It is both convenient and rather lovely to browse, if you own an iPad. There is, however, a central flaw. Everything it does is already available online, for free. Beyond the pleasures of the hardware and of good design, nothing is unique or new about the experience on offer.

So, while some people will choose to pay for editorial expertise, for convenience, for tradition, for good writing and so on, most won't. And—here's my crucial point—not nearly enough people will choose to pay for digital newspapers, ever, for this to be seriously contemplated as a business model. Not if the costly structures of journalism as we know it are to be funded in a wholly digital future.

This problem is a chasm that no-one has remotely bridged: the yawning divide between what it costs to create and operate a newspaper, even in digital form, and what the various revenue streams open to digital papers can cumulatively bring in (paid-for apps, advertising, sponsorship, premium-access clubs, digital marketplaces, subscriptions).

The websites don't add up—neither the Times's (rather nice) new premium site, nor the Guardian's (depressingly underwhelming) online fanclub for their loyal readers. And apps don't fundamentally change this equation—because the few apps that do make serious money offer services that people either find really fun (games & entertainment), really useful (work and lifestyle tools) or simply essential as extensions of digital services they don't want to live without (Facebook, Amazon). Most newspaper content as we know it is neither fun, useful nor essential enough to justify a financial outlay when something very like it can be had at any time for free.

Some people will continue to pay for papers, both physically and digitally—and niches are likely to remain more vigorous (niches can be quite big, too: the Economist or FT count). But most paywalls and news apps are likely just to be elegant ways for publishers to keep their heads buried in the sand a little longer.

Interview: Cory Doctorow

2010-05-21T12:14:00.003+01:00

An interview with Cory Doctorow, discussing his book For The Win, cyber-activism, and why digital liberty is so vital; first published in The Independent, May 2010

Cory Doctorow's latest novel, For the Win, is about video games. Fittingly enough, we're discussing it across the internet. It's 8am in his time zone – America's Pacific coast, where the latest leg of a continent-spanning book tour has taken him - but he's alert and only too happy to explain himself. And this means explaining first of all what it means to be a genuine advocate of technology, rather than merely dazzled by it.

"Someone who just accepts every technology he comes across is not being especially technophilic, because this doesn't require any reflection or choice," he argues. "It's like saying, I'm a gourmet, I'll eat anything you put in front of me. To be a gourmet of technology is to make choices: about what you're going to use, and how you're going to use it."

If the increasingly sprawling mass of Doctorow's work - six science-fiction novels, plus innumerable essays, speeches, short stories, blog entries and articles, all available to read for free online under a creative commons licence via his website (craphound.com) - has a unifying theme, this is it: helping people to make better choices.

Doctorow, 38, may be a gourmand of digital culture, but he's no aesthete. Born in Canada to an immigrant Jewish family deeply involved in protest politics, he has lived in London for much of the last decade (his wife is British), but maintains a global following and perspective. Talking to Doctorow feels a lot like reading one of his books, and even more like reading Boing Boing, the cult blog and "directory of wonderful things" he has now been co-editing for a decade.

His crusading mix of technophile wonder and polemical pressure rarely lets up. "Writing For the Win wasn't about games so much as it was about economics," he explains. "As soon as you're talking about economics, you are talking about games: the economy is the economy game, really. It's got tokens that we pretend have value, it has rules, referees, it's a congenially entered negotiation, there are different ways of playing."

And, of course, it has winners and losers - something that For the Win (HarperVoyager, £14.99) translates into the entwined stories of gamers from both the developing and developed worlds, flipping between lives, locations and potted lectures with the instant ease that only art or technology can manage.

Extrapolating from the relatively benign present of massively multi-player online creations like World of Warcraft, the novel imagines a future of exponentially more sophisticated games where three of the world's 20 largest economies are virtual play environments controlled by the Coca-Cola corporation. Within these, vast Third-World labour forces serve the illegal but lucrative market of Western clients willing to pay hard currency for someone else to undertake the grinding labour of winning in-game gold and possessions; a shadowy profession that has come to be known as "gold-farming".

While this may sound like dystopian fantasy, the passages on gold farming come pretty close to reportage. As writers like American author Julian Dibbell, whom Doctorow cites, have witnessed, digital sweatshops really do exist in China and elsewhere. Labourers work long shifts for a pittance, sleeping in dormitories and returning in their spare time to play the very games that are their jobs.

Doctorow's interest is in where all this leads: what the grand lessons, consequences and, above all, actions to be taken are. "The thing that got me starting thinking about this was when American auto jobs started to move to Mexico. The United Auto Workers responded to that with basically racism: those dirty Mexicans have stolen our jobs. Now, the forbears of the auto workers movement saw industrial jobs move from town to town across America as trade unionists took hold, and also move from ethnic group to ethnic group, and their response wasn't to demonise other workers, but to unionise them, to say we all have common cause. It is undeniably hard to go and organize a trade union in Mexico if you are an American. But once you get into videogame labour contexts, everyone is playing in the same virtual world. And they are playing in a world their bosses rarely venture into and have less proficiency in. This, I thought, is a really interesting turn of events."

Where this leads, in the novel, is solidarity, won in the teeth of brutal oppression by an alliance of gamers that spans the Pacific: a disaffected American teenager, Chinese, Indian and Singaporean workers who are literally earning their way out of the slums. Solidarity, here, gains a critical mass when the tightly-knit groups of players begin to realise their collective power, and use it to force the hands of the companies running the actual games by calculatedly wrecking their massively profitable virtual economies.

It's a scenario that Doctorow makes painfully real, skimping on none of the details of slum living in Mumbai, of Chinese factory conditions, or of gang brutality and the potentially lethal consequences of protest. Not for him a digital era that dissolves human relations into a swamp of relativism and unreality. Perhaps the novel's key insight, and its great advantage over so many other tales of cyber-derring-do, is its insistence on the intransigent social and moral realities that lie behind the networks.

These characters are neither post-modern nor post-anything much else; they are not bored, disengaged, ignorant, amoral. They are young people caught up in a global struggle for justice in a manner impossible even two decades ago, thanks to the new transnational space they inhabit.

It's an arena whose unintended effect is to offer its players a crash course in the game-like nature of the political and economic battles waged around them – as well as providing a context within which friendships can grow irrespective of race, nationality, wealth, age, gender or creed. Doctorow's American teenager teaches himself Mandarin in his spare time, the better to play alongside his guild buddies, even while his parents bemoan the uselessness of his gaming habit.

While For the Win doesn't ignore the gulf between a virtual battle and real-life incarceration in the filth of a Chinese jail, it does insist that this divide can be crossed, and that the real people meeting each other and training themselves within virtual arenas can take these skills into other parts of their lives. There's an element of fantasy, of course; but Doctorow insists that there's more than wishful thinking to it. "I think that the physical action is not a rare or an extremely high hurdle to cross. Physical action happens a lot. People do stuff to change their world a lot. Perhaps partly because I grew up in protest politics, it has never seemed odd to me that someone might go out and join a march."

The core audience for Doctorow's fiction is young adults, and his didactic intentions are entirely of a piece with both the kind of book he's writing and the people he's writing it for. "I think that I'm doing explicitly what many writers have been doing implicitly for some time. I am not predicting, I am reflecting. Science fiction is a great activist literature: it has this tradition, expectation, even requirement that your fiction be a social actor."

When it comes to the activism he has to offer, Doctorow believes that today's young people are more in need of it than most. "Kids aren't stopping playing outdoors because of video games. Kids are playing video games because they are being prohibited from public spaces. We have taken most of our public spaces away from young people, turned them into malls where you no longer have civil liberties; instead, there's a user agreement over the door that says management has the right to deny entry at any time."

This is a peculiarly contemporary battle where social, economic and technological factors intermingle. Both Doctorow's writing and his direct activism – among other things, he has been European director of the civil-liberties group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and was co-founder of the UK Open Rights Group – are vehemently opposed to the reduction of digital freedoms. "One of the things that gives me the creeping horrors," he explains, is the proliferation of "walled gardens" in the digital world – from file formats that can only be played via specific software in specific countries, to corporations insisting on absolute control of anything released on their hardware.

"It's like, we have one final retreat from places in which adults and powerful individuals and corporations dictate how we interact – and that retreat is being taken from us in the name of stopping the four horsemen of the apocalypse: terrorists, pornographers, pirates, and the mafia."

Isn't he getting a bit carried away, given that nobody is actually forcing consumers to buy this stuff? He may not want an iPad – Apple's recent corporate strategy is one of Doctorow's most prominent targets – but he's free not to get one. He offers two points in response. First, "I think one of the ways that people make good choices is by there being a discourse." Second, more importantly, "the problem with privacy and digital-rights management is that the consequences of your actions as a user are distant in time and space from the decisions themselves. It's very hard to learn from experiences whose outcomes have a wide gap from the initial action."

Moreover, because these are cultural goods and communicative technologies, the significance of these battles is far more profound than for mere consumer products. For example, the kind of restrictions built into many modern digital readers are, Doctorow suggests, akin to "a bookcase where the manufacturer gets to tell you what to read – tells you what books to buy, whose books to read, what you're allowed to do once you're done with them, who you can share them with." It's enough to make you shiver – and then swing by his website, download a few volumes, and start reading one of the founding oeuvres of the digital century.

Media election redux: who won, who bombed?

2010-05-12T11:12:00.003+01:00

A piece about how the media performed during the British general election, first published on First Drafts, May 2010

The minor questions have now been answered: who gets to be Prime Minister, who runs what department, what do you call it when Cameron and Clegg combine into an unprecedented political entity? (Best answer so far: ConDemNation). In media-land, though, more-pressing post-mortems await. What went right for the fourth estate during its own tanning session in the glare of public attention, and what didn't? Without singling out any particular individuals or institutions, here are a few reflections on how various media platforms fared during the glorious course of the election. It was…

A big loss for daily print papers, which have never looked more like so much deluxe toilet paper.
A medium-sized loss for Twitter, or at least a reality check: lots of talk, hilarious memes going viral, but little influence on anything that mattered, and far fewer people taking part than most users would like to think. Ditto the echo chamber of social networks.
A victory for television set-pieces (that is, the leaders' debates), which proved that a few hours of important faces live on screen is a big enough deal largely to sate the electorate's desire for politics.
A dismal time for 24-hour news, which may as well have equipped its correspondents with t-shirts reading "nothing to say, all day in which to say it."
A good time for political bloggers, who tend to know their audiences and their own limitations, and get on with saying what they think without worrying too much.
A good time for the YouTube/camera phone contingent, which had the important/interesting/funny stuff when you wanted it, and otherwise was handily invisible.
A decent time for many magazines, which couldn't play the instant commentary game, so had to try extra-hard and offer longer views.
A surprisingly poor time for online newspapers, who ended up looking like irritating and harder-to-read versions of blogs, with dreary "live" streams trailing thousands of anxiously self-important words across their landing pages.
A fine time for radio, which at its best still does live views and debate better than anyone.
A bad time for those who like to emphasize the potency of the media and of spin-doctors: most voters staunchly failed to be whipped into a frenzy of enthusiasm for anyone (five minutes of finding out about this guy called Nick Clegg notwithstanding), and especially not the party who did least worst.
A stirring time for volcanoes, oil and Greeks, who managed to be more interesting/alarming than British politics for days at a time.

Anything to add?

Living an augmented election

2010-04-16T11:17:00.003+01:00

A piece about watching the first British election TV debate, first published on First Drafts, April 2010

I watched the electoral debate last night online, over a Subway sandwich and some late editing work in the Prospect office. My video view of the action—as I gradually deduced from others' eerily prescient tweets—was about a minute behind live television. It was also a relatively minor part of the experience. Across the computer window snaked the ITV live opinion "worm," wriggling in response to a panel's every emotional twitch. TweetDeck brought me my friends' views along one side of my screen, while the ITV website regaled me with stranger's tweets and the latest Facebook reactions. Within another few browser tabs were the Guardian's live updates, the BBC site, RSS responses on Bloglines, and my own shifting searches across the rest of the web. Also—last but not least—there was the text I was supposed to be working on for the next issue of Prospect.

The experience reminded me of a new media conference I was at a few weeks ago, when a silent cacophony began to rage through the audience during an especially boring presentation. The speaker, oblivious, made his points, while a few hundred delegates vented and swapped instant spleen via Twitter, and a handful of bold souls leapt to his defence. My phone, set to update itself automatically every five seconds, began to churn out hundreds of words for every phrase onstage. Reality, it seemed, had shifted its priorities—in that what really mattered, what defined this experience, was not the slender speech we were being given, but the quips and re-quips and responses being traded in front of it.

By the end of the television debate yesterday, more than 184,000 tagged tweets had been sent out nationwide, and God alone knows how many millions of words written. Over ten million viewers tuned in, and the polls set the news agenda. Most of Britain shrugged, blinked and got on with the business of not being terribly interested in politics. What I saw, though, was different from anything I'd found in British politics before: an experience defined not by my glancing consumption of an elaborately managed event, like a party conference, but by my glancing participation in one corner of something far larger and more nebulous.

It has always been almost impossible to talk about an electorate in any terms other than numbers and abstractions. But now, in the augmented political arena that this country belatedly finds itself entering, you begin to get a more concrete sense of quite how many of us there are—and how madly varied, self-interested, distracted, shifting, opinionated, committed, divided and difficult we all are, in a way that defies and exceeds any segmentation or statistic.

Data can have great power, but it also offers a spurious sense of ownership when it comes to phenomena you can't directly control: the number of hits on your website, the number of voters who mention your name in a survey. What really matters is what your audience are actually thinking and will actually do. This a truth we're beginning to experience in an entirely new way. As to whether this is empowering, demoralising, or merely distracting—well, I strongly suspect it's all three. And we'll just have to wait to find out which proves the most compelling force.

Reflections on the videogames Baftas

2010-03-21T11:36:00.002Z

A piece written after attending the 2010 videogames Baftas, first published on First Drafts, March 2010

I was lucky enough to be at the videogames Baftas this Friday night and, through the drying glaze of my hangover, have a few thoughts on a fascinating evening. Game of the night was very much Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, which picked up four awards. If you're not a gamer, all you really need to know about Uncharted 2 is that it's the title gamers most want to show you, just so that they can say, look: videogames these days are really pretty incredible artefacts. Try it and you may even believe them. It's not the most original game around (and it didn't win the game of the year award, which went to the superb Batman: Arkham Asylum). But Uncharted 2 is a terrific ambassador for its medium: big, beautiful, lovingly executed, and an enormous amount of fun.

Uncharted 2 will also, I think, be largely irrelevant and unplayed in ten years' time. Sitting there on Friday, chatting to my guest and watching the big display screens fill with digital action of a kind that was simply inconceivable a decade ago, we realised that it was equally impossible to imagine what would be playing on those screens in ten years' time. This is a dizzying, energising thing, with a hint of panic thrown in. Even the greatest play-mechanics constantly require new sets of clothes.

Temporal compression cuts both ways in the gaming world. I spend more time sunk in books than in any other medium, but I can't go back and meet Gutenberg for a chat about moveable type any more than I can arrange an interview with the inventor of the television set or telephone. I can, however, share a room with the people who invented gaming and its greatest works. And perhaps the biggest hero of them all was there on Friday to receive an academy fellowship: Shigeru Miyamoto, the father of Mario and godfather of about 50 per cent of the best things in the modern gaming world. There are no other creative media where pretty much all the giants are still walking, and it's a humbling thing to be among them.

In fact, "humble" is a word that applies to much of the games industry. The Baftas had plenty of glamour, but the typical acceptance speech tended more towards the inaudible than the tearful. It was all rather endearing; the Uncharted 2 guys had four goes on stage, and didn't manage to rise above charming whispers once. It's also, though, something that goes hand-in-hand with a very particular kind of passion. I've been to a number of books award ceremonies in my time, and I'd be willing to bet that most members of those audiences had read, at best, one or two of the titles under nomination; and that many had read none at all. On Friday, I found it difficult to find anyone who hadn't played at least half of the games under nomination. I'm hardly a full-time gamer, and I'd only missed out on a couple of titles. It's something that made for the kind of sincerity that only comes with deep experience: when these people talk about games, they're talking about titles they've lived. The best writing about games has more in common with reportage than reviewing, and the best conversations are the same.

So: a wonderful evening, and no apologies for sounding like a fan-boy. I love games. I love what, at their best, they can do and be. It's because of this that I accept and embrace the fact that 95 per cent of them aren't great, and that even the best can become better. That's why we need award ceremonies: to feed excellence, and to declare ourselves permanently frustrated by second best. And, of course, to drink a certain number of complimentary beverages.

Portal: game of the decade

2010-03-18T13:48:00.001Z

A piece explaining why Valve's "Portal" is my choice for one of the finest games of the last decade, first published in HTLit, March 2010

Valve Corporation's 2007 first-person action/puzzle masterpiece Portal is, for me, one of the defining games of the last decade. Released as a kind of bonus within the Half-Life 2 "Orange Box" set, it's wonderful partly because of its resolutely old-fashioned virtues, being a self-contained, single-player piece of inspiration that takes a single concept and spins it out through twenty exquisitely designed levels. But it's also wonderful because of another, rare gift: its tone, and the fact that few games have ever conjured a more distinctive, delightful or deranged miniature universe.

For those who've been living in a cave for the last few years, the game is driven by the wonders of the portal gun: a bulbous piece of kit that allows you to open a passageway between any two amenable surfaces. Shoot the blue end at a distant wall, shoot the other, orange end underneath your feet, and your character will drop through the orange hole and pop out of the blue, your momentum miraculously conserved. You can shoot as you're hurtling through the air to stack up a whole chain of these transitions - and to solve increasingly devious spatial problems, involving lava pits, killer robots and a curiously endearing companion cube. Or, of course, you can just hurtle around enjoying the stunts it's possible to pull off with a portable teleportation device. Like the low-gravity antics of the Ziggurat Vertigo level in Quake, few sensations beat the thrill of swooping across the planes of a virtual arena, and there's a joy to using the gun that taps into games' ability to be at once viscerally satisfying and absorbingly abstracted.

Portal is justly celebrated for the genius of this central mechanic. The emergent complexities that it's possible to develop from a really well-executed physics engine have long been one of the jewels in the game designer's crown, and few have achieved a finer combination of ingenuity and intuitive ease than Valve. To understand just why the game deserves its iconic status, however, it's useful to contrast Portal to its lesser-known predecessor, Narbacular Drop. This was the 2005 PC game that pioneered the notion of the "portal" itself, and whose development team were subsequently hired wholesale by Valve. Narbacular Drop is a brilliant, brief student showcase. But it's not in the same league as its sequel. And this is, really, a question of artistic as much as intellectual achievement.

The key is a machine called GLaDos who, in a series of increasingly deranged audio messages, drives forward a plot that is as finely-made as the spatial puzzles of the levels themselves. Your character is trapped in a subterranean scientific testing facility, and GLaDos is there to motivate you with a bizarre mixture of threats, promises, lies and increasingly hard-to-credit offers of cake. Until, in the end, you get to escape, wind your way through the industrial back-end of the facility, and kill your monstrous tormentor. Who then sings, over the credits, one of the catchiest songs of the gaming era. It's a combined triumph of writing, voice-acting and attention to detail that has lifted hearts and engendered adulation across the world. Although - and I hate to break this to those who have been living in hope - the cake is a lie.

Smokescreen: introducing the game that's making teens safer

2010-03-17T10:25:00.002Z

A feature profiling SixtoStart's innovative online game Smokescreen, which is designed to educate teens about safety and security online, as part of Channel 4's digital education strategy; first published in the Observer, March 2010

When 17-year-old Jo Parsons blagged her way into a local nightclub for an evening out, she was flattered when a man she'd never met came over and offered to buy her a drink. But pleasure soon turned to anxiety. He refused to stop talking and she gradually realised that he knew much too much about her: what her friends were called, where she lived, her birthday, even her favourite music. He had been stalking her online. In fact, it was still going on: one of his mates was reading her social networking pages and send him phone updates about interests he could pretend to share with her. Furious, she threw her drink in his face and stormed off.

This isn't a true story: it's fiction. But it's part of a fiction that has been experienced more than 260,000 times by online users – mostly teenagers – over the past six months. That's because this scenario is one of 13 that together comprise Smokescreen, a free-to-play "alternate reality game" commissioned by Channel 4 Education that is intended to give teenage players a personal encounter with everything from identity theft to cyber stalking.

In recent weeks, moral panic over the safety of social networks has been everywhere in the media, sparked by the Daily Mail's account of a man posing as a girl of 14 on a "well known social networking site" and being approached by sexually interested males within minutes. Smokescreen is a far cry from that kind of frenzy. Yet what it represents might just be a lot more significant; both in terms of understanding young people's behaviour online and – most importantly – changing it.

This month, Smokescreen won the best game award at the US conference South by Southwest, one of the biggest annual events in the global gaming industry. Its success – not to mention the experiences and reactions of its tens of thousands of players – paints a rather different picture of the realm of online social networking than is usually seen in the mainstream media. Smokescreen's website simulates the experience of being out in the web at large: players navigate their way through fake sites with names such as "Gaggle," "Tweetr" and (my favourite) "Fakebook," viewing the personal pages of a cast of five core characters, watching them swap information and instant messages, and even getting "phonecalls": messages playing over their computer's speakers, with the player selecting from a variety of responses to move the story forward.

"Almost every teen we've talked to feels that they know everything about issues like online privacy, identity and security," explains Adrian Hon, co-founder and chief creative officer at the British company that created Smokescreen, Six to Start, "and the fact that most adults they've heard from insist on scaremongering about paedophiles means they're no longer interested in what adults have to say." But there's a lot, he adds, that teens don't know they don't know. And this is usually where the real dangers lie: not in up-front sexual approaches, but in the mire of privacy settings, tagged photographs, mobile phone numbers and dates of birth.

In Smokescreen, you live these intricacies from the inside. In the mission where Jo Parsons faces her cyber stalker at the club, it's you who takes on the role of his mate on the phone; it's you looking through Jo's Fakebook page and Tweetr feed, choosing what information to send. Just as intended, it makes you think twice about the public information on your own page in real life. Helen Farrall, Smokescreen's creator and co-writer, talked me through her experiences writing that particular mission. "We did a lot of research, and I was incredibly surprised by how lax people are with information. I started looking on my friends' pages online and seeing what they put out there; we went into schools and spoke to our target audience about what they did, and none of them had really thought about putting their emails and phone numbers on sites. It never crossed their minds that anyone would do anything nasty to them."

Another mission, also involving the character of Jo, shows the dangers of photo-tagging online: an image of her bunking off school is tagged with her name by a friend, and suddenly starts appearing in search results before she has a chance to take it down. The lesson, and the remedy, seem simple enough – de-tag the image in question – until you realise that, with the image out in the public domain on pages that you don't control, you've suddenly lost the ability to stop people sharing and labelling a personal picture. Playing this mission was enough to make me check my own privacy settings – and to realise that I needed to change who I permit to view images with me in them.

As Hon explains, what his company's research has shown is that kids are willing and even passionately interested in learning more about the dangers of the digital world: the problem is that the way these discussions are usually delivered to them are "just not credible". Sex claims the headlines – and becomes a running joke in classrooms – while less sensational concerns go unaddressed: about bullying online, teenagers' place in the social order and "a hard-to-articulate unease about what other people might know about them online". This is partly because such issues are genuinely tricky: "Many social networks' privacy settings seem to change every few months," Hon notes. "It was hard even for our company to figure out what they all meant. So it's not going to be easy for teens. And the issue is that they feel they can't talk to their parents and teachers about this stuff."

It's a situation that Alice Taylor, commissioning editor for education at Channel 4, hopes to change. "Originally," she explains, "we were looking to commission a project about traditional privacy – CCTV, government ID plans, that sort of thing – to coincide with the 25th year since 1984, the totem year representing privacy issues. But as we looked around, stories of teen behaviour on social networks stood out as an immediately visible form of loss of privacy: some young people learning the hardest way that posting pictures of drunken behaviour or body parts is a really, permanently bad idea." So, in late 2007, she started talking to Six to Start about something that would "show, not tell" its way through these issues: getting people to "play through such behaviours, learning as they go about things like what happens when you post public details of your house party online." The result, Smokescreen shows, can be pretty chaotic. In mission seven, 9,821 people sign up for an 18th birthday that someone has decided to advertise online as a free music festival – and it becomes your job to handle the fallout. It's enough to make you think twice about getting involved in something similar yourself.

For Taylor, Smokescreen is just the beginning: her future lineup includes a game about civil liberties and citizenship (The Curfew), and a game about self-esteem and media literacy (Cover Girl). Still, for many observers, the word "game" can seem like an increasingly misleading one when it comes to such projects. Adrian Hon isn't too bothered by splitting this particular hair. "Young people," he argues, "don't make the same distinctions between different media and devices that older users do. They play games, watch videos and surf the web on every device they can get their hands on. But they are also comfortable with entertainment that doesn't fit into easy categories." He's happy for people to think of Smokescreen as a highly interactive multimedia story – or as a lightly interactive game with a great story. Either way, it represents an important shift in the ground on which educators are attempting to engage with teens and students: and a recognition that new media can best be debated from the inside, through engagement rather than demonisation. Fire can be fought with fire: if it's fun and engaging, so much the better.

David Smith, director of ICT at the private sector St Paul's school in London, is one of a number of teachers whose pupils took part in testing Smokescreen before its public release – and a man with strong feelings about the best way of dealing with these issues in schools. "I think what Smokescreen was doing was really interesting," he told me, "but I think schools should be dealing with social software anyway. It shouldn't be banned. It's just another part of what we use to communicate and live by, and it's very important that we learn how to use it well." If the experience of Smokescreen tells us anything, it's that this means meeting teens on a common ground – and listening to, as well as telling, stories about the digital world as they are living it.

Five books about games you ought to read

2010-03-15T14:00:00.006Z

In March 2010, I was interviewed by Alex Ascherson from the excellent website fivebooks.com about my five essential reads in the field of gaming

A global industry worth almost 50 billion dollars, virtual worlds with more inhabitants than some small countries… is this the age of the videogame?

The medium is coming of age alongside its audience. For the first time, you have an activity that is pretty much ubiquitous amongst under-18s, but that is also crossing generations; the average games player is now in his 30s. And, as people grow up, what they want from the medium also grows up. People are getting older but they are not setting aside their consoles, and this means that the limiting conception of games as something for teenage boys locked in bedrooms – which is where it all started – is simply ceasing to be true. What I am interested in is the wider consequences of play being for everybody, in its electronic form. Games are now starting to compete with the most sophisticated forms of other media, as well as the crudest. And they are taking up an increasingly large amount of our time. I think that this is a big deal. We need to be able to talk incisively about what the medium has to offer, and what its real dangers are, instead of falling back on a vision of games that’s ten years out of date and riddled with cliché.

Why do you think there is such a fear of games as breeding grounds for pathology and addiction, or in cases such as Grand Theft Auto, a new generation of serial killers?

You have this emerging medium which is a lightning rod, a convenient symbol, and something very easily misunderstood. Because of the history of games, there have always been insiders and outsiders. Now, we have a situation in which the experience of one generation is being very rapidly outdated by the experience of the next generation. This fracture is dangerous and it presents enormous challenges: in this sense, people are right to see large and real social concerns in games. But most critics haven't yet managed to open up a productive or realistic debate, because they tend to start from a position that is not based in the reality being lived by most users of new media, but rather in fears based on a few exceptional cases. Of course, it's a very old fear to worry that people are vulnerable and can be ‘taken over' by something that is excessively stimulating, compelling or emotional. But this kind of fear has been articulated even about the written word, and it's no good if it's not anchored in precise observation. Plato was worried that writing was going to make people soft in the head; the novel was criticised as too exciting for women to read; we have had it with television in turn. What we have found is that people do indeed behave pathologically towards a medium sometimes, but that driving causes for this behaviour can never be reduced simply to ‘X is bad for everyone'. You have to understand why, and how different people's interactions with different cases within a medium work.

Turning to your first book, A Theory of Fun. This book deals with the fundamentals of what makes a game good and posits a biological explanation for their appeal.

The reason I like A Theory of Fun is that it’s by a professional games designer, one who was responsible for the first MMO (Ultima Online in 1997). It’s a book about games in general, not just about electronic games, and it reminds us that game-playing is a human activity that is at least as old as civilisation. Today, we are seeing a new form of it, but in order to understand it properly, we need to begin with this really deep evolutionary hold that games have on us. Koster looks at games as something that are about learning above all; they are, in his phrase, ‘chewy’ environments for our brains, where we are performing a task again and again to get better at beating the particular properties of a particular environment. He certainly gives the lie to the idea that gaming is new, at least in terms of being unprecedented. I love his eloquence in explaining that, first of all, you have to understand games in very old terms if you want to understand which aspects of our natures are being foregrounded and tapped into by this modern explosion in a particular form of game.

Your second book, Homo Ludens, also deals with the notion of play from a cultural and anthropological perspective.

It was written in 1938, and it’s a study of what the author calls the ‘play element of culture'. So really it’s another book about the way that play precedes culture, and is a distinct and very complicated human phenomenon. The author sees play as something that has many interlocking facets, and that has given rise to much that we think of as civilisation: something that encodes a crucial set of human values, ideas and ways of being in the world. As he points out, all animals play; play is a bigger thing than mere culture, and an important counterbalance to those ‘serious' elements we sometimes seek to reduce life into: the Darwinian business of work and struggle. A lot of people say play isn't ‘real' or ‘serious' and mean this as a critique. But that's the point of it – that human reality is richer and stranger than the animal business of survival.

Moving on to Play Money by Julian Dibbell. This deals with the emergence of virtual economies within Massively Multiplayer Online games?

This is where it gets really interesting in the present day. If we want to talk about the biggest problems and challenges around games, too, economics seems to me a much more fertile ground for worry and exploration than the vague fears of corruption that are doing the rounds.

Play Money was written by an American author called Julian Dibbell, who decided he was going to spend a year trying to earn enough money to live off purely by trading in virtual goods. Virtual goods are things that only exist within a game world, but which people value so much that they are prepared to pay real world money for. It sounds uncanny and paradoxical, but makes perfect sense: game worlds exist to reward people, you have to put in a lot of effort to get stuff within them, and a lot of people wish to short-cut that effort. It’s simple supply and demand. There is a demand among millions of fairly affluent players for virtual things that take hundreds or thousands of hours to earn, and so the supply exists to meet this demand, especially in places like China, where the national average wage is not very high.

At this point, virtual economics start to look astonishingly real. It’s possible to construct, out of nothing, a virtual arena that generates enormous notions of value from its players. It begins to blur the boundaries between what is playful and recreational and what is hard work, what is business. This, I think, is one of the reasons that games are a fascinating window into the world’s future, because the ways in which we are recreating and entertaining ourselves, and the activities that we think of as business and money, are blurring in some ways.

After all, it’s easier to trace the chain of value of spending 100 hours of effort earning a virtual sword that then has a monetary value put on it by the market than it is to understand why it is a derivative is worth a certain amount of money. If you want to talk about the potential of game worlds, this is hugely important. Economics has never been such a precisely measurable science before – these may be games, but they are also very real and very valuable economies, with real world economic phenomena appearing in them. Unlike real life, however, you can measure every single variable precisely down to the tiniest millimetre, and you can easily set up controls, comparisons, you can tweak variables. Down the line, this could have very wide applications.

Tell me about Playbooks and Checkbooks.

I really enjoyed this book. It’s a compelling account of the unusual economics that have grown up in the last century around the extraordinarily profitable arena of sports. It’s interesting because, in order to make sports work as an industry – in order to make the money – you have to indulge in all sorts of practices that defy conventional economics.

For instance, a sport league needs to be competitive to be enjoyable, so, unlike in a business arena, crushing your opponents by too much damages everyone’s ability to make money. So leagues are highly redistributive in terms of the money; for instance, the value of the premiership is not dependent on how good its best two clubs are. It’s dependent on how good the competition is. Theoretically, the top few clubs could claim almost all the money because they have the clout in terms of their following, players and bank balances. Instead, though, it’s realised tacitly there has to be a good level of competition, there have to be good matches.

However, the great story of making money out of sport is how staggeringly popular vicarious play is as an activity. The last football World Cup was the single most viewed activity in human history, and in terms of vicarious participation it dwarfs any religion. I am very interested in what happens when what has been a vicarious activity is made a mass participatory activity, because people, who have an intense curiosity about watching play, can now participate in it on a vast scale. If we look at the special economics, rules and circumstances that have grown up around sports, this is a very useful index of the play economics of the future.

Your final book, Flow, discusses the notion of flow and what it has to do with videogames. Talk us through it.

The notion of flow is the idea that there is a state that is characterised by complete immersion in an activity, by a constant response to stimuli, and a perfect match between your ability and the challenge in front of you. This combination puts people into a state that has often been described as feeling like ‘flow', where you are learning and acting and responding at a super-efficient rate.

This physiological phenomenon has been likened to many things – to what happens when a sportsman is hitting the perfect drive in golf, or a musician is performing a piece at the peak of their powers. It’s a notion that has really been taken up by the gaming community because games are an interactive medium in a way that nothing else is – you’re getting many of thousands of tiny responses a second. And they’re a dynamic medium, in the sense that they can offer you an environment that adapts to your performance. Recently, an influential game called Fl0w was designed by a man called Jenova Chen, the idea behind it being that if you can come up with an adaptive environment that responds to what people are doing, they are learning at a much faster rate and their ability to respond to this environment is exponentially increased, as is their pleasure and immersion in it.

‘Flow' is a term that can be over-used and isn't always too precisely defined, but as an idea it's one of the most exciting things around in games theory. Because we can actually start to measure this kind of state neurologically, and start to break down this resonant but imprecise word into a number of human phenomena relating to learning, to action and to memory. This gives you powerful insights into how we can make a whole spectrum of activities more intuitive, more appealing, and more open to a wider range of abilities – how we can draw in people from higher and lower ends of abilities, and give them both a satisfying environment. It's as relevant to schools and businesses as it is to entertainment companies, and it's only just beginning.

Finally, I have to ask, your FiveGames?

Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii is a beautifully designed game world – loving attention to detail, the quality of design, it’s just immaculate. I have also been really enjoying a clever cheap game on the PS3 called PixelJunk Monsters, which is a tower defence game, because I think it’s a very simple, beautifully executed example of a game you just want to play again and again and again to get better at particular tasks: in this case, building towers to defend cute furry things against cute monsters.

I have a very soft spot for the original SimCity game, too. I still play it. It’s a great example of how simple rules can give rise to amazing, emergent complexity and how satisfying it is to play with a city as a virtual toy and complex system. People often miss the fact that the most popular type of games are not violent, but rather systems management games. The idea of a city, where you play god, try to make it grow, is very satisfying.

I also always loved Super Metroid on the SNES. You could play it in different ways – either just complete it, or complete it and try to find every secret in the game, and it was so well designed it was an absolute pleasure to try and discover all the bits that the designers hid around the place.

I think I can guess your next one.

Oh, go on then, World of Warcraft. I have been playing since Beta – so for its total existence – and what’s interesting about it is what it allows people to do. You can go in and be a twat, you can go in and help people. I’ve made friendships within it, I play it with my wife, I play it with good friends, with a guild on the east coast of the States, who we occasionally fly over and stay with. We’ve had people who’ve never left the States before come over and stay with us. It’s a delight. It’s a game that gives people a large selection of different things to do. It doesn’t set out to suck out your life, rather just present players with a broad choice of activities. Only a few people play it obsessively at the top end; most people just enjoy it because it’s witty, post-modern, and well-designed. It is the daddy.

I know you only asked for five, but I can't finish without mentioning perhaps the cleverest single game of the last decade, Portal, which just has a brilliant concept – you fire a gun that allows you to create wormholes, instantly transporting you between any two surfaces in a maze-like 3D landscape. Brilliant gameplay, but also a wonderful script and amazing voice acting. The script is hilarious; it’s a comic masterpiece. It shows that games can be well-designed, fun to play and funny.

1. A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster

2. Homo Ludens by J. Huizinga

3. Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot by Julian Dibbell

4. Playbooks and Checkbooks: An Introduction to the Economics of Modern Sports by Stefan Szymanski

5. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (P.S.) by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

How Shigeru Miyamoto taught the world to play

2010-02-28T12:21:00.002Z

A profile of Mario's creator and all-round hero of the digital world Shigeru Miyamoto, first published in the Sunday Times, February 2010

Look at the lists of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed video games of all time and you will notice something surprising: almost half the games are on both lists. Look closer, and you will see something still more surprising: almost every one of those games credits one man as either its director, designer, producer, or all three.

His name is Shigeru Miyamoto, and in the three decades he has worked in and around video games, this 57-year-old has revolutionised gaming with an uneasy regularity. It’s a little like rolling the careers of Orson Welles, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and George Lucas into one ball: sales of more than 500m units, more awards than you can shake several sticks at, and, of course, the creation of that most recognisable icon, Mario.

Born in 1952 in Sonebe, just outside Kyoto, Miyamoto has had a refreshingly antithetical career to the serial entrepreneurship of so many modern innovators. In 1977, fresh from the Kanazawa Municipal College of Industrial Arts and Crafts, he joined a local toy company. It was called Nintendo, and he has worked there ever since. Founded in 1889 as a manufacturer of playing cards, it had recently begun branching out into the emerging realm of electronic toys. Three years after joining, Miyamoto, an apprentice in the planning department, stumbled upon his great professional opportunity when a new game was needed for the arcade machines Nintendo had begun to sell in America.

Bored by the crude shooting and ball-bouncing games that dominated the early arcades, Miyamoto decided something entirely different was needed: a game anybody could relate to, telling the archetypal story of a man saving a woman from a wild beast. Or, this being 1980, a bunch of blue and red pixels saving a bunch of pink pixels from a giant monkey. The game and its four levels of increasingly excruciating jumping and dodging were a huge hit. Entitled Donkey Kong, it was released in 1981; within a year, it had sold more than 50,000 units. Nintendo made millions, and the gaming world had had its first glimpse of the unique sensibility that was to transform it.

Asked today what he does in his spare time, Miyamoto tends to talk about playing the banjo, spending time with his family or going for walks — much the same activities he enjoyed when growing up without a car or television in a small town. It’s an ordinariness that is reflected in the kind of fun his games aspire to, something universal rather than merely thrilling, and rooted in the components of childhood play: exploration, experimentation, learning and sheer delight. After Donkey Kong’s triumph, Miyamoto’s hero was named Mario (after the landlord of Nintendo’s American warehouse) and given his own series.

On its own, this would constitute one of the most remarkable CVs in any creative industry, but Miyamoto kept pushing the boundaries, not only of what games machines could do, but of the kinds of emotional experience games could provide: the thrill of futuristic hover-car racing (F-Zero), the peace of a gliding simulator (Pilotwings), the chance to play a hero exploring a vast fantasy kingdom (The Legend of Zelda) or a fox flying a spaceship (Star Fox).

By the late 1990s, however, cracks had begun to appear in Nintendo’s triumph. In 1994, Sony released its PlayStation console, using cutting-edge graphics and sounds to sell to a whole new demographic of older gamers. The Miyamoto approach — rooted in childhood wonder and universal appeal — looked, to some observers, like increasingly old news. By the time Sony released its successor to the PlayStation in 2000, Nintendo had lost its console crown.

Miyamoto was at the heart of the company’s response, and it came, typically, not from discarding his beliefs, but from persuading the firm to push them still further. In 2006, Nintendo released the Wii. Unlike any console before it, this was a machine that rejected the idea of progress as synonymous with building everything bigger, brighter and faster. Instead, the Wii put the idea of play first. The system was inexpensive, had a motion-sensitive controller and appealed to anyone yet to be seduced by electronic games: older people, women, parents and children playing together, those who are turned off by ultra-realistic visuals. The result has been sales of almost 70m units and the emergence of Nintendo, in 2008, as the world’s most profitable company per employee.

Miyamoto’s role in the Wii revolution has been driven not only by the updating of his existing ideas, but by his creation of something entirely new: games based around physical activities such as yoga, jogging, sports and balance. Wii Sports and Wii Fit have shifted more than 80m copies between them. Even the harshest critics of gaming have found it hard not to be won over, perhaps because, as ever with a Miyamoto game, the machine running it seems almost incidental to what is being created: play of an exquisitely crafted kind.

On March 19, Miyamoto will receive a Bafta fellowship at the academy’s video-games awards, where Mario’s latest incarnations have also been nominated in three categories.

He has already been made a Chevalier of the French order of arts and letters, and in 2008 topped Time’s list of “the most influential people in the world”, a title that, at first glance, seems like wild hyperbole. Consider the millions upon millions of human hours that his creations have commanded, however, and it begins to sound more like an empirical observation — that the man who most delights the world may just matter more than anyone else.

The secret of online success: don't keep secrets

2010-02-16T11:40:00.002Z

A piece looking at the success of social media groups involving secrets, first published on First Drafts, February 2010

Yesterday, a friend told me the story of last year's summer internship competition at Saatchi & Saatchi. Eager young beavers had to start a Facebook group, and the one whose group got the most members won the coveted internship. Only problem: within two weeks, Bristol university graduate Tiffany Philippou's brainchild, Secret London—devoted to sharing members' inside knowledge of London's more elusive delights—had won 182,010 members and promptly morphed into a startup.

Marvellous, the power of the web. What interests me, though, is why Secret London worked so well. For starters, it's a self-evidently good idea. People love sharing inside information about bars, gigs, bands and locations on social networking platforms. That's why yoof spends so much time online, up to its armpits in Tweets and tinyurls. But why do they love it quite so much—and what larger social purposes is it serving?

Think of yourself for a moment as a node: your web presence a pinprick connected to millions of others via everything you've said and done online. What is it that gives your particular online presence value—and status? It's not your unerring ability to regurgitate received opinions, or type "lol" a dozen times. It's the content you generate that's unique to you: what you actually think, where you've actually been, the things that only you know. Largely, in fact, it's real stuff that gives your virtual presence value: your take on real places, real actions, real people.

This sounds like an incredibly basic point—but it's why anyone who obsessively talks about the "virtualisation" of life (and the life of yoof in particular) is missing half the point. Yes, many people may appear to live their entire social lives online. But, just as it's other, real people that are the overwhelming focus of their interest, so the greatest conversational cachet lies in knowing the particulars of something real: the band, the gig, the bar, the hidden gem. The best phrase for describing this is "augmented reality," and that's where the future lies. The camera-phone is never far from the hand, the Twitter decks are on constant spin, but the person wielding them is very much out and about.

In a world where secrets and opinions are the most valuable of currencies, the pressure to divulge them—and dig them out—has never been greater. It's a social minefield, a privacy nightmare, and much else besides. But it also makes me feel slightly sorry for Saatchi & Saatchi. You spend decades building a reputation as the agency that knows people's deepest fears, desires and whims, and make a pretty penny for your trouble. Now, it turns out, these people are spending 90 per cent of their online time telling each other exactly what they want, like and know, for free. Forget advertising. Get yourself an intern, and start a Facebook group.

Interview: Martin Amis

2010-02-01T15:38:00.000Z

An interview with author Martin Amis, marking the publication of The Pregnant Widow; first published on the Prospect magazine website, February 2010

Tom Chatfield: I wanted to start off by asking you about the new book, which I've been very struck by. It has had an unusually long gestation, and yet it read very easily to me, in a way that I hadn't felt for a while: it felt very much of a piece.

Martin Amis: Well, that's an accurate apprehension on your part. I'll tell you exactly what happened. I struggled for years with a turgid autobiographical novel, with a fictional structure. It seemed endless and inert. And it's a funny thing about life that, when you put it in a novel, it's dead. None of the usual forces that are in a novel—to do with unities and metaphor and imagination—were there. There was this horrible Easter, the Easter before last, in Uruguay, where it seemed huge and endless, no end in sight. I just thought to myself, "my god, this is dead."

I had a bad couple of weeks, and there was a bit in it that I liked, which was the Italy bit. It was a big bit, but it was a tenth of what I had written. I took it out and it was about maybe 100 pages—and I thought, can I get this up to a novel size and expand it? It was a bit I liked because it was the most fictional: although it all seems very transparent now. And then I wrote for a year, 15 months, and when the proofs came in the book was 470 pages long, so 370 were new and recent. The bulk of it was the latest stuff. So it doesn't I hope have that feeling. In Mao II, Don DeLillo describes this block in writing a novel: "it was the colour of a monkey, it had alligator's feet, it was a monstrosity…" which is what that was. And I realised that it was two novels. The other half will be pressed into a literary novel about Philip Larkin, Saul Bellow and Ian Hamilton [the British literary critic]—he's the Neil Darlington figure [in The Pregnant Widow]. And there will be one novel in-between.

TC: State of England.

MA: Yes.

TC: It felt to me that there was a lot of autobiography very close to the surface in The Pregnant Widow, in the character Keith Nearing especially: he shares your birthday, doesn't he?

MA: We have various bonds, like height, and birthday.

TC: And having a sister and a best friend who have been lost.

MA: A sister and a best friend, yes. The only people who are from life in the book are now dead—including Ian Hamilton. And the Kenrick character [Keith's best friend in The Pregnant Widow], and the Violet character [Keith's younger sister]. I felt I could, you know—that their lives were complete. And also slightly manipulable, for fictional reasons.

TC: It seemed to me to work very well with those characters: they felt fictional in the context of the novel, but the life was there.

MA: Yes. Because I had been living with these characters for so long that I did feel they were there. And when it switches to the coda, I felt I had sort of lived all that, even the bits that weren't true—like Keith going to work for an ad agency, which is diametrically not my life.

TC: It's a kind of shadow-life…

MA: Except that I did work for an advertising agency for three months before I got the job at the TLS, like Keith. But there was never the slightest question in my mind that I would ever be an ad man. Keith is different, he is in a different situation. What I find I had to do to him to really divest him of any resemblance to me was to completely remove his sense of entitlement. He has no sense of entitlement: he is an illegitimate orphan, a sort of tabula rasa in a way that I never was. My father was Kingsley Amis, and my mother was a very remarkable woman. So that was what I had to do. And I also had to make him sexually much more tentative, blundering…

TC: And this means that Keith was in a position to be profoundly deceived.

MA: Deceived, and also profoundly gratified in a way that he wasn't ready for, that ruined him for a long time.

TC: All the way through the novel I found myself sensing, as often in your books, lines and half-lines of poetry, from Larkin in particular. And then suddenly the Larkin erupts into this explicit vision of "Larkinland" at the end, this place that Keith is sent to by his own weakness.

MA: Well, that experience with Gloria [the character who violently seduces Keith] was too much for him really.

TC: This decision to make what had been a very dense subtext explicit, almost to show your hand…

MA: It's the most invidious of subjects. And that word, "invidious," is tailor-made for what we mean—that which is unfair, and wounding, and likely to cause resentment. And I think the sexually unhappy, which Larkin definitely was… It was weird, I spent an evening with Larkin and Monica [Monica Jones, Larkin's long-term companion], and it's described in my book Experience quite neutrally, as if they were both slightly eccentric. Years later, ten, 15 years later when the letters and the Life [the biography of Larkin by Andrew Motion] came out, I completely re-experienced that evening with horror. I didn't realise that he was sexually so miserable, and I have to say she looked like an urka [a Russian criminal from the bottom of society]: like a male urka. Really butch. And she dominated the evening in a weird way. She was awful. A beast. And I thought, that is the love of his life.

TC: The big one.

MA: The big one, yes. You know she was the model for the character of Margaret…

TC: …in your father's Lucky Jim, yes.

MA: The terrible clothes. But it's more than that. A great sense of frustrated self-importance. And all Larkin's girls seemed to have that.

TC: It answered to something in him.

MA: His mum, I guess.

TC: "Dear old mop," he called her in the letters. It seems remarkable, that correspondence with his mother—something entirely outside of the literary.

MA: Yeah. Some of the quotes from her letters. "I think you were most mistaken to sleep in those damp pants. I said so at the time."

TC: Bathos by the ladle-full.

MA: He was an old woman. He was an old bag. A sexual sloth. The bit from the letters where Kingsley writes to him—"I fucking give you up. I give up when it comes to you." "We don't meet different women, we meet them differently."

TC: Is that a line in Larkin's poem "Letter to a friend about girls"?

MA: It's not in the poem, but that's what he means in it.

TC: Sex, in both senses of the word, keeps coming through in this new book. You say Larkin was an old woman, but the sexual revolution as you describe it—is it about women becoming men, becoming able to behave like men?

MA: Well, that didn't last very long, that phase: the gaudy, equalitarian phase. And it's very understandable: what model did women have for being adventurous? Only the male model. And they took it up for a bit, and then they realised very soon that it wasn't in their interests. I remember during the equalitarian phase, you would meet serious people, serious women, serious men, who would say "there is no difference between men and women." But that phase ended. And during it, and thereafter, it was the women who had to do all the hard work, the adapting, the changing, the throwing off of what they had been taught with such consistency for hundreds of years. As is demonstrated by all the books in Keith's English literature reading course, from Clarissa onwards.

TC: All these women in English novels, where alcohol or drugs or hysteria have to be invoked in order to escape this structure.

MA: Or madness.

TC: Yes, the lunar influence, lunacy.

MA: It's sort of touching and desperate, really.

TC: In your discussions of your earlier books, it's often seemed to me that you treated the characters as though they are skewered on pins, wriggling: they were there to have things done to them, and if the audience chose to empathise with them that was a forgiveable mistake on their part. But in this book there seems to be a lot of tenderness for these characters, especially when you open it up at the end. They are given a lot of space to live their mistakes, and some make it and some don't.

MA: Yeah, well. We are all quite sentimental, a word that Nabokov defended. He wrote of Dickens and the death of Little Joe in Bleak House, I will not allow you to describe this as sentimental: people who use that word have no idea what sentiment is. Also, the entirely pleasant feeling that I got after writing Experience was that we have all protected our emotion, it was the orthodoxy then that writing was tough. But writing Experience made me think that the emotion which I had always thought was present and detectable to a good reader should be given more room. It's partly getting older and you just think, it's all too plangent for words. As Kurt Vonnegut said, everyone thinks I'm tough and slick, but in fact I'm as soft as a sneaker full of shit. And you are, as a writer.

TC: You're not afraid to quote yourself, in the book, or to quote yourself quoting people: from the book of Job through Ovid and Shakespeare to Larkin. But another aspect of the confidence seems to be that you are unafraid to acknowledge explicitly the place of these things: they matter to you, they are important, so there they are in the book.

MA: It's rather like Experience in that way, in that there are lots of quotes: Herbert, Keats, Wordsworth, Blake, Auden. And actually, in the prose, Lawrence.

TC: Did Lawrence stay in that castle in Italy, where your novel is set, with Frieda?

MA: In a similar castle. They may well have stayed there. There was such a summer, for me. And it was with half as many characters, and nothing happened. It was pathetic.

TC: And nothing would really have happened in this book if it wasn't for Gloria, for this kind of dea ex machina, who parachutes in from another frame of reference and turns it, I suppose, into a Martin Amis novel, rather than a Kinglsey Amis novel.

MA: Well, I mean, something might have happened there, it was very much in the air. Scheherazade might well have . . .

TC: . . . got it on with Keith.

MA: Yes. But through various sorts of blunders it doesn't happen until Gloria manipulates it into being.

TC: Manipulation is another recurring theme in your writing: this idea that you create characters who - and I suppose Iago is a prototype of this - like Fielding in Money, or Quentin in Dead Babies, can just take the others and open up their weaknesses, who know their secret selves better than they do.

MA: That is what you are sort of doing, is putting your characters through it. EM Forster said that when he started a novel, he lined up his characters and said, no larks, behave. Nabokov was horrified by that: "my characters cringe when I come near them," he said, "they are galley slaves. I have seen whole avenues of imagined trees lose their leaves with terror as I approach." I think you do insert these characters into novels, and they are wised up, in the novelist's way, they know how people work. And Gloria comes from a fairly long line of girls in my stuff who know exactly what men are like; and that is a scary thing, and a funny thing, to have a girl who really understands all that.

TC: Who is a cock, as you put it in the novel.

MA: Yes, well, there haven't been any of them before. Right. But, in my own summer, there was no Gloria. She was made up: jerry-built to do this very strange job in the novel, being ten years ahead of the others.

TC: She's a sort of messenger from the future.

MA: Yeah. And there were none of the other incidental characters out there either, in my own summer: no Una, no Prentiss, that summer, no Rita, no Kenrick.

TC: There were the three leads.

MA: There were those characters. But it was such a relief to get back to fiction, because something else takes over: that's the marvellous thing, the exhilaration.

TC: It was a relief to read it, in that it felt like you were joining up a lot of dots: Islam was in there, war, appearances, morality, death, but with an elegant flourish rather than the sense of very hard work that can come with being non-fictional.

MA: It's certainly a real history, a real history of the golden age, this very specific period, and of this social convulsion. You get more and more interested as you get older in what actually you have lived through, historically. My grandfather lived through an enormous historical change, which was people giving up the land and going to live in the city. That was the big change for his generation, the really significant demographic change. In my generation it was the sexual revolution, that enormous convulsion.

TC: And what would you say it is for my and your sons' generation?

MA: Well I get the impression, when I teach and we have a lot of general discussions - three years now, and they impress me with being non-ideological - but they have been saying, actually, our ideology is Green. And there is a lot of social pressure about how often you fly and things like that. Maybe the Greening of people's imagination is the next thing.

TC: Yet again, it smuggles something rather apocalyptic and inhuman in scale into the psyche.

MA: Absolutely.

TC: A lot of the great themes of the 20th century have proved to be anti-human, ripping down those protections we had built around ourselves historically.

MA: And this sense of the exhaustability of the earth is a completely new idea, one that would have made no sense to anyone not born in or after the 20th century.

TC: In a sense we are fighting against a pre-20th-century attitude. And you might say that there are parts of the world where people feel they are entitled not yet to be forced to enter the 21st century.

MA: I thought George Monbiot made an interesting point that connects to my book, in that he cites the same book by Ernest Becker as I do, The Denial of Death. Monbiot wrote in a piece for the Guardian that what people are doing is denying something that's too horrible to contemplate. Becker is quoted, specifically and non-specifically, several times in that piece.

We had a ten-year holiday from this feeling in the 1990s. The nuclear cold war, then a ten-year holiday, then Islam. Islam only up to a point, one mustn't exaggerate: the number of people killed by terrorism in the west is the same as the number of Americans who drown in the bath. It's not apocalyptic. I remember Kingsley saying, of nuclear weapons, "there's always something, it's the end, judgement day, something else."

But then again, the weather, climate change; I've talked to Clive James about this and to Nigel Lawson. I asked, why are 180 countries gathered in Copenhagen to do something they don't want to do? Politicians, Nigel said, love anything that makes them look busy. I say to Clive, don't you sense the incredible potential for violence in the weather, already—the storms, the snow? You can see the nature of what the future will be, and it's all terror and boredom all over again. You will be massively inconvenienced and appalled by the power of the weather. It's intuitively inescapable to me.

TC: You've been there before with apocalyptic weather, in fiction, in London Fields.

MA: Yes. And in Yellow Dog.

TC: Do you see yourself as a political writer, or feel that writers are inescapably political creatures?

MA: They are under no obligation to do politics. Some writers don't want to do it. If it doesn't coincide with their writerly urge, absolutely fine; they are enriching the perceptions of their readers, that's pro bono enough. It has to coincide with your writerly flow, you can't decide to write a political novel, it has to come on just like any other fictional situation.

TC: The big political situations do seem to have come on you over the years.

MA: Yeah. So far, the fiction has been nuclear weapons, the Holocaust, and the gulag. But the impulse each time was literary. I've just written a piece about writing Time's Arrow, and begin by quoting the often-asked question that I heard, "why did you decide to write a novel about the Holocaust?" I never did. I never decide to write any novel of mine. They emerge. "Decide" is completely the wrong word, and "about" is completely the wrong preposition. You find yourself writing around a topic, but not after thinking "someone ought to do something like this," nothing like that.

TC: You suggest in your criticism that the route to bad or dishonest writing begins when you start off from a set position, then write to fit.

MA: Then it emanates out from that, yes.

TC: You've also written about seeing your father's work going through a period where it was deformed by biographical or political circumstances. Stanley and the Women, a couple of other books where false assumptions came in.

MA: Well, yes. Russian Hide and Seek, that was a real wild goose chase politically. Predictive power isn't everything by any means, but you look at novels like Anthony Burgess's 1985, which is about a trade union takeover, and it just looks sillier by the week and is of course dead as a doornail in the long term. Orwell's 1984 doesn't describe 1984, of course; barely even in the Soviet Union. But that is such a dynamic fiction, in its non-genius way. It's important to realise that Orwell is not a genius but he does do some things very, very well.

TC: I've enjoyed reading his diaries as a way of understanding the particular nature of his non-genius, that he had this enormous gift for the quotidian, of stacking it up...

MA: Jealously stacking it up, exactly.

TC: And then seeing the salience, picking out the detail: these ploughs in North Africa, wells. It's the highest pitch of journalism rather than literature.

MA: Yes. 1984 I've been looking at again. It is journalistic, but it's quite swift and direct, and has few false quantities.

TC: It may be an impossible question, but do you have any personal hierarchy of preference among your own books: ones that you feel more completely say what you wanted to say, or that feel like unfinished business you might want to revisit?

MA: Yeah. Burgess used to say, when asked which his favourite book was, "the next one." Which is sophistical in a way, but I feel it. And I would grade my novels completely chronologically right up to the present one.

TC: A steady increase.

MA: I tried to read The Rachel Papers [Amis's first novel] recently, to reacquaint myself with what it is like to be 20 or 19, and I couldn't read it. I knew it quite well so I knew all the good bits, the not bad bits, but as a structure and as a . . . the craft is pitiful.

TC: It reads to me like a companion book to your father's Lucky Jim, or a riposte. Nice things aren't interesting, nasty things are interesting.

MA: Nice things are boring, nasty things are funny.

TC: Yes, sorry, I'm misquoting you.

MA: I just taught Lucky Jim, which went down incredibly well with my students. Kingsley says, in Lucky Jim, it all goes to shore up this view that nice things are nicer than nasty things. And actually that's contra Larkin, who took on the suffering inside himself.

TC: I suppose happiness is a talent, and Larkin lacked that.

MA: I attribute a sort of heroic strain to Larkin. He realised. Don't tell me that he died and left half a million quid. Poets were very popular with women in London. Women were very moved by poets. "What do you do?" "I'm a poet." That gets you a big start, or got you a big start; it probably wouldn't do you any good today. But women were very drawn to him. Some of them were terrible trogs and tyrants, but he had lots of women around him. Larkin, as the leading English poet, could have moved to London, in a Keith-like move, and become . . . women loved his poems, some of the poems. But he didn't. He's heroic in that he embraced that.

TC: And if he had done otherwise he would have had a different poetry.

MA: Yeah, and I wrote 20 years ago that he decided to cling, to wrap it round him, this peculiar misery, and to write the poems that belonged to it. And I salute him for it. Combined with sloth, it was actually a way of saying, this is my voice, the voice of failure.

TC: Do you have a characterisation of your own voice, a way you would describe your best literary self?

MA: I do think that Kingsley's value, the supreme value in his fictional world - not in his poetry, good little minor poet that he was - but the thing his fictional valued above all was decency. And the value my fiction values above all is innocence. Even the most unlikely innocence. I would claim that Violet in The Pregnant Widow is innocent.

TC: She's almost a holy innocent, isn't she?

MA: I have got a horror of that type from reading Graham Greene recently, and Brideshead Revisited. I loathe the idea of the degenerate who is awarded saintly status because religious novelists are trapped in this terrible tendentiousness where they have got to do that for religious reasons. It's so anti-artistic. Greene's The End of the Affair is a wild, hilariously incompetent and charmless book. And Brideshead, where even Sebastian in his "monk's cell" at the end and Julia has this great religious effusion, quoting the Bible, this sort of trance...

TC: It's a quintessential artist's cop-out, that you smuggle in a saving absolute. Suddenly, it stops you having to do the balancing act.

MA: I think religious novelists have the balancing act forced upon them. You see ponderous intrusions, they wheel it round: it's so anti-artistic. Religion is the enemy of art in fiction. Not in other forms, not in poetry.

TC: Is that because the novel post-dates the dissociation of sensibility? That idea of that dissociation crops up in your latest novel.

MA: It does crop up. But I don't think it's that. We did an event in Manchester on religion and literature with James Wood, and I said that the two things are co-eternal and come from the same place. As Flaubert said: all the artistic stuff comes, in post-Romantic cases, from frustrated religious feeling. It's fine for poetry and, obviously, for music and painting. But the minute you get into the discursive world of fiction, it's a disaster, because it runs the show, and it is the opposite of art: it is tendentious, schematic, predictable.

TC: Your father once said, it's not so much that I don't believe in God, it's that I hate him.

MA: It's more that I hate him. He said it to that poet. . .

TC: To the Soviet poet, Yevtushenko. Is that your position?

MA: No. In fact, I'm an agnostic, which is the only rational position. It's not because I feel a God or think that anything resembling the banal God of religion will turn up. But I think that atheism sounds like a proof of something, and it's incredibly evident that we are nowhere near intelligent enough to understand the universe. We are a dozen Einsteins away. It's pathetic. I feel very sorry for cosmologists. Only a couple of years ago I was told by one, Lee Smolin, he said they had just discovered that the universe is not only expanding but that this process is accelerating. For us, he said, that's like throwing your car keys in the air and them not coming down. And then, they've just been struggling to understand what dark matter is, which occupies 80 per cent of mass in the universe and until the last year all they knew about it was that it was this "dark material." The guy at Playboy magazine said that "Hugh is a great admirer of your material." I mean, "material" is really telling you nothing at all. Paul Davies in the Guardian says that we now know it exists in massive particles that haven't really gelled. But that's 80 per cent of mass in the universe, and we have no idea...

TC: Of course, your fiction contains one of the few examples I can think of of death by cosmology: Night Train.

MA: Yeah, in a way.

TC: A woman who has everything to live for, but can't face the insignificance of everything she knows in the context of the universe.

MA: A falling short. And there was one thing I mentioned in London Fields, where I got a very nice letter from a cosmologist. In this description of an eclipse I was saying, it's amazing that you have this 93 million mile pool shot, and it's absolutely straight, the balls fill each other, and maybe that's a prerequisite of life on this planet. And I got this letter saying they were thinking about that, apparently.

TC: And then you have the anthropic principle saying that if things were any different, we simply wouldn't be around to watch them. We can have no null hypothesis, there is just us.

MA: One observer per universe. But now we have the idea of the multiverse.

TC: Although a prerequisite for that seems to be that it's an untestable idea.

MA: No contact possible, yes. Like super-string theory - they wasted a generation on that.

TC: And what does all this do to fiction, the state of what we know and what we think of as truth? Because literature is interested in containing rational forms....

MA: It has no effect on fiction. It has an effect on some writers. Writers are above all individuals, and above all writing is freedom, so they will go off in all sorts of directions. I think it does apply to the debate about religion, in that it's a crabbed novelist who pulls the shutters down and says, there is no other thing. Don't use the word God: but something more intelligent than us... If we can't understand it, then it's formidable. And we understand very little. We don't understand the weak nuclear force, galaxy formation . . . so one should be humble.

TC: That does make me think of Larkin, looking at the stars: "Much less is known than not, More far than near."

MA: And then there is "Solar."

TC: I presume you've read it, the forthcoming novel from Ian McEwan?

MA: No, I haven't, no. It's very heavily embargoed. But I was also talking about the Larkin poem "Solar," which is what McEwan is referring to. "Heat is the echo of your gold." I mean, that's really cosmically aware, it's a lovely line. But I'm dying to read Ian's book. And he's done it the clever way, which is not to have the first sentence being "Splork tied his camel to the rail outside the Igloo and looked south." No, it's some guy who goes to all of these conferences. I am looking forward to that.

TC: As your career has gone on, I was also wondering how your attitude to your father's work has changed. Do you feel differently now about it?

MA: I re-read Lucky Jim recently for the tenth time, in order to teach it. A first novel that was perfect would be a creepy thing: it's not what you go to first novels for. You go for energy and freshness of voice, and Christ have you got that. But it's 20 per cent too long, it's got too much editorialising. He doesn't yet know what you can leave out. My favourite novel of his is The Old Devils, which I think is fantastic. And Ending Up is great.

TC: It's sad and delicate too. I found the dementia aspect very sad.

MA: But it's antic, and it's scurrilous, in a good way. A funny read.

TC: A very serious kind of fun.

MA: I guess. Yes, it's awful. As Kingsley said as he began the address at Larkin's funeral, all this is evidence for the terrible effect of time on everything we have.

TC: More generally, you and your father are often bracketed together as comic writers. Is that something you feel is getting harder to do?

MA: The comic novel is dying, because comedy is anti-democratic. Comedy is a smear.

TC: Inviting you to laugh at.

MA: Yes. But that may be turning around a bit. People assume that it's the gloomy buggers that are the serious ones—but in fact, anyone who has ever been anywhere in fiction is funny. Yet there are whole reputations built on not being funny. Who's that German writer doesn't even have paragraph breaks?

TC: I don't know him, I don't tend to read that kind of German writer.

MA: Coetzee, for instance—his whole style is predicated on transmitting absolutely no pleasure.

TC: Do you admire his books at all?

MA: No. I read one and I thought, he's got no talent. The denial of the pleasure principle has a lot of followers. But I am completely committed to it, to pleasure.

TC: Why have people felt the need to do this to the novel: is this puritanical?

MA: Dryden said, literature is instruction and delight, and there are people who think that if they're not getting delight then they are getting a lot of instruction, when in fact they're not getting that either. But it has a sort of of gloomy constituency. If there is no pleasure transmitted then I'm not interested. I mean, look at them all: Dickens, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Smollet, Fielding, they're all funny. All the good ones are funny. Richardson isn't, and he's no good. Dostoyevsky is funny: The Double is a scream. Tolstoy is funny by being just so wonderfully true and pure. Gogol, funny. Flaubert, funny. Dickens. All the good ones are funny.

TC: Who do you really enjoy of the younger generation of writers?

MA: I don't read them. I read my friends: Will Self and Zadie Smith. But it's a fantastically uneconomical way of reading, to read your youngers. No-one knows if they are any good. Only time knows that.

TC: You say that in your Preface to the War Against Cliché, one of the most distilled articulations of your literary philosophy. I've always had a nagging question about that, the argument that cliché can be very powerful in the short term but that in the long term it inevitably looks ridiculous…

MA: I don't think it has any say in the short term either. These are two quotes from Coetzee. How does it go. Oh, yes. A woman is watching him closely. "She watched me like a…"

TC: "…hawk."

MA: Next sentence. He had said these words in a "voice loud enough to wake…"

TC: "…the dead."

MA: Consecutive sentences.

TC: Which novel is that from?

MA: Waiting for the Barbarians. You will get these people who are felt to be educational, even though, as Clive James said, a sense of humour is common sense dancing. Those who haven't got it, a sense of humour, shouldn't be trusted with anything. You're amazed they can get across the road. But proclaimed humourlessness has a constituency, I don't know why.

TC: One of the things you've often said is that the classic humourless form is pornography: it's a recurring theme of your work, this idea that the pornographic is a state where irony, wit and self-knowledge are entirely absented, and this is a cultural force that can be extremely dangerous.

MA: Let's not pretend. This is how young people get their sex education, from pornography. I don't think a liking for pornography obliterates your sense of humour, but it probably does in the sack. This is from talking to my grown-up daughter, who was very frank with me about the mores of her peer group. It dominates the style of the whole encounter. I don't understand that. I have had the dissociations of my generation but I don't have this, which I think is much more radical than we think, with unknowable consequences socially between men and women.

TC: The epigraph to The Pregnant Widow says that the transition in the social order caused by the sexual revolution involves a long dark night, rather than an immediate transition to an heir. At the moment, are we still in that long night of the 1960s and 1970s?

MA: The rise of women will take about a century, I think, to be complete. And will have to be global, and is barely imaginable, and we sometimes fear it. It's true that we like to have a panic. But if there is time for women to rise before life becomes just a question of dealing with survival, which is what's going to happen if there is a five per cent rise in temperature, that's how long it would take. It's a marvellous delusion that people can flip effortlessly from one deep ideology to another.

TC: Finally, is there a way you would characterise your own late style. What is late Amis, if there is such a thing?

MA: Kingsley definitely had a late style. It's hard to describe: it becomes sort of flatter, but interesting in a different way. You have to adjust to this terrible thing that happens to writers - when the talent starts to die. I've talked to Ian about this a lot. Everything I hope will be fine for another ten years. But then you have to start adjusting, and maybe working on short things. Chekhov said, and Saul Bellow very much agreed with this, that everything he read seemed not short enough. A long book is a big undertaking, a short story is a relatively carefree undertaking.

So there's that but, I don't know, I feel it's not as agitated, in a good way, as it used to be. But I can tell: it's now physiological, when you're reading a paragraph of a book, it's your body that tells you, you've got to bring it up to a point where you read it. So it's a bit quieter, my style, but I think rhythmically good. When I look at this latest book, which I've had to do to go through the proofs, I think, you keep the strongest bit of the sentence for the end, you keep the strongest sentence for the end of the paragraph, and when you come to the end of the section it has to end nicely, so you are satisfied. I'm impressed by how consistently that is done.

TC: And do you have any interest in the reviews, in how the book makes its way once you've signed off?

MA: You will read enough to see what kind of review it is, and then maybe read the end. Unless it's someone you really respect, and then out of comity you will read the whole thing and weight it a bit.

TC: But you don't feel at all anxious for your books in the world?

MA: Well, yeah. I mean, I have plenty of cause to be that. Kingsley used to say, once it's had a few good reviews, once you were over the hump, let it go. Julian Barnes used to have Pat Kavanagh, his wife, read things for him in a rather nice arrangement: she'd say, look at the Independent, don't bother looking at the Times. You have these filters. The trouble is, they can say what they like, but there are some things that stick in your craw, and then you've got it with you for the next week or two and you don't want that - you know, get out! As Craig Raine said, you're murdering people in your dreams.

I think the great bonus of being Kingsley's son is that I don't take these things very hard. I knew that was what you got. He never meant to give me this, but that turns out to be the gift.

The inside story of opening up British government data

2010-01-27T17:28:00.002Z

An essay written jointly with James Crabtree, telling the story of how the British government decided to open up its data to the public; first published in Prospect, January 2010. See also my interview with Tim Berners-Lee about his role in the process.

It all began with a lunch. Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the world wide web, was invited to Chequers in spring 2009. A government taskforce had just published a report aimed at making Britain a digital world leader and technological reform was in the air. Even so, Berners-Lee was surprised at what came next. “The prime minister asked me what Britain should do in order to make the best use of the internet,” he told Prospect in early January. “I said, you should put all your government data onto the web. And he said, let’s do it.” A month later, Berners-Lee flew in from his base at MIT in Boston for a meeting, this time a cup of tea with Brown in the garden at No 10. He brought with him his friend and colleague Nigel Shadbolt, a professor of artificial intelligence at Southampton University, who works on next generation web technology and has piloted his work on public data. Sitting in wicker chairs, they hatched a plan for a new government team, led by Berners-Lee, to unlock Britain’s public data.

On 21st January this year, less than 12 months later, the government launched a website to do just that (you may have seen the television adverts). Modelled on a similar effort by President Obama, data.gov.uk brings together over 2,500 public data sets, ranging from abandoned vehicles and A&E stats to child tax credits and carbon indicators. And Brown has promised, in a few months’ time, to open up the jewel in Britain’s data crown: the maps made by Ordnance Survey.

“It can be tricky to explain why Tim’s work matters so much,” says dotcom entrepreneur turned government adviser Martha Lane Fox. “But the data he has been able to release can reorder the balance of power between the citizen and the state.” Such claims are often made for “e-government,” whose hype is traditionally exceeded only by the price tags attached to the (often disastrous) IT projects undertaken in its name. But Berners-Lee’s work has the potential to be different, relying as it does on an unprecedented combination of technology experts, amateurs and businesses like Dr Foster or Experian to take the new information and present it usefully. This helps people make better decisions, underpins information-age businesses, and—because it to some degree redraws the boundary between people and government—may also change the terms of politics. Yet perhaps the most remarkable fact is that it happened at all. Others have tried to unlock Britain’s data, only to run into walls of official obstinacy, vested interest and political indifference. So how did Berners-Lee do it?

***

If Berners-Lee is best known as the father of the web, he has a parent’s protective instincts towards his child. Born in London, he studied physics at Oxford—where he built his first computer with a soldering iron, television set and spare parts—before working in telecoms and software engineering. In 1989, while working as a fellow at the CERN research centre in Switzerland, he published the academic paper that defined the system of protocols that underpin the global network we think of today as the web. Then, in 1994, he founded the World Wide Web Consortium, a group devoted to keeping the seething mass of pages he helped to create working together. “The whole new field of web science has a lot of excitement about how humanity, connected by technology, should evolve,” he says. “And we have a duty, I think, to make sure that the web does serve humanity.” This belief was clear in March 2009, when he gave a talk at TED, the annual technology conference in California. Declaring 2009 to be the year in which the world should open up its stores of data, he whipped his audience into an unlikely football-style chant of “get raw data now!” And it was this conviction that saw him take his data-philia into a new arena: politics.

Normally, explains Nigel Shadbolt, Berners-Lee “steered well away from government.” So Shadbolt was delighted to be appointed alongside him as a government information advisor. There was, he admits, a certain logic in the move: “Tim built the first web because the scientists he worked with had so many different documents, on so many different systems, and it was just a pain to constantly have to move between them.” Shadbolt himself had begun to think that online public data could even kickstart the next stage in Berners-Lee’s web adventure.

Take one example: information about where you live. Data about local public services is currently spread across any number of websites or is often unavailable. Money flows into schools, recycling centres, hospitals and so on, but information about them is locked away in government files. Put this data online, however, and allow amateurs and businesses to build useful websites with it, and the public will be able to enter a postcode and be presented with information about such facilities at the click of a mouse. As Berners-Lee explains: “The thing people are amazed about with the web is that, when you put something online, you don’t know who is going to use it—but it does get used.” So his pitch to Gordon Brown was simple: if this data—exam results, postbox locations, weather reports, and most crucially, maps—was put online, people would find a use for it. If you build it, they will come.

***

Three months after meeting Brown, Berners-Lee’s role was made public unexpectedly. It was June 2009, the height of the scandal over MPs’ expenses. Berners-Lee’s appointment was included in Brown’s speech setting out his response to the crisis, couched as part of a push for more government “transparency.”

Meanwhile, inside government, Berners-Lee’s initial task was to convince the cabinet, and for this he needed a case study of how open data could help ordinary people. The story he found came via Nick Pearce, head of Brown’s No 10 policy unit. Before entering Downing Street, Pearce ran the think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research. During his tenure in 2007, one of the IPPR’s interns, Amelia Zollner, was killed while cycling to work. In March 2009, Pearce wondered to a colleague if they could publish raw data on bicycle accidents. If they did, might someone then build a website that would help cyclists stay safe? Phonecalls to the office of transport minister Andrew Adonis followed. The data existed, and Adonis saw no reason not to try out Pearce’s plan.

As Berners-Lee remembers, “the first data set got put up around 10th March.” Events then moved quickly. The file was promptly translated by helpful web users who came across it online, making it compatible with mapping applications. Then, a day later, a web developer emailed to say that he had “mashed-up” the data on Google maps (mashing means the mixing together of two or more sets of raw data). The resulting website allowed anyone to look up a journey and instantly see any accident spots along the way. It was just the story Berners-Lee needed: “Within 48 hours the data had been turned from a pile of figures into a valuable resource: one which can save lives, and which might help people to pressure the government to deal with blackspots. Now, imagine if the government had done a bicycle accident website in the conventional way. It would have drawn up requirements, put it out to tender, eventually gone for the lowest bidder, the company would have come in, then there would have been a review…” Instead it took two days for raw data in a drawer to become a powerful public resource. (To find it, google “London bicycle accidents map.”)

Put like this, opening up data sounds easy. Yet, historically, enthusiasts have largely failed to convince public bodies to publish more of it. The latest push, 2009’s Power of Information taskforce, was born from a series of secretive ministerial seminars in February 2007, designed to pep up the dog days of Tony Blair’s premiership. A formal review followed, then the taskforce itself in 2008. It was slow work—neither a priority for politicians nor Whitehall bosses. But evidence began to stack up. In the US, a “scores on the doors” scheme put cleanliness ratings in restaurant windows, and cases of food poisoning fell. In Britain, league tables of heart-disease survival rates in hospitals saw mortality rates fall, while data on electricity usage has helped customers cut bills.

Today, the case for open data is becoming ever less theoretical. In 2008 Channel 4 set up 4iP, an internet division led by internet expert Tom Loosemore, designed to do “public service data mashing.” Initial projects include a website to compare schools, which combines exam results, government reports, and even measures on pupil happiness and teacher ability drawn out of Ofsted reports. The site could quickly demystify the decisions, and tradeoffs, inherent in picking a good school. Also under 4iP’s banner, in partnership with the charity MySociety, is Mapumental—a site that mashes together maps with data on commuting times and house prices. Users can answer in seconds the question: “if I have this much money to spend, and want to live this far away from my office, where can I live?” As Loosemore explains, moreover, this is only the beginning: both the schools and houses sites could soon include other data, like crime levels and OS maps, taken from data.gov.uk.

A final example is the site WhereDoesMyMoneyGo.org, by the Open Knowledge Foundation. Its colourful graphics already show exactly how tax money is spent. But if there was better raw data from local government too (which data.gov.uk plans to provide), the site could become far richer: offering, for example, comparative information on how much local councils spent on gritting during this January’s snow.

Boosted by the promise of such sites, and other examples abroad, the case for open data has begun to catch on. Obama has pushed the agenda, while David Cameron is also a convert, linking online mash-ups to a wider argument about his belief in a coming “post-bureaucratic age.” As of early 2009, however, Whitehall itself remained largely unmoved: civil servants had handfuls of excuses for not publishing their data, and no one had a strong incentive to force it. Opening up Ordnance Survey was especially tricky: the organisation tenaciously defended its monopoly status, and gave the government tens of millions in revenue—money that would have to be replaced somehow if its data was to be made free. If he was to change all this, Berners-Lee had his work cut out.

***

One thing Berners-Lee did have was star power. As Shadbolt puts it: “Secretaries of state and ministers were more interested in meeting him than the other way around.” At a meeting with the cabinet this even brought a rare moment of humour, Shadbolt recalls. Berners-Lee was introduced by the prime minister; Jack Straw then said: “Meeting the man who invented the web is like meeting the man who first invented the wheel.” Ed Miliband shot back: “And what was the wheel man like, back when you met him too, Jack?” It took a little time to restore order amidst gales of laughter.

Berners-Lee and Shadbolt were given offices in a dusty corner of Admiralty Arch, owned by the cabinet office. A civil service team was assigned to help them. The duo initially saw their task as “picking off the low-hanging fruit” of government data. No weighty reports were to be written. Instead their plan was deceptively simple: they would use Berners-Lee’s reputation to get meetings with cabinet ministers, name the data sets they wanted, and publish the results. Before all that, however, Whitehall had to cope with Berners-Lee’s working style.

Most Whitehall computers run on a heavily encrypted network called the “government secure intranet.” But Berners-Lee, used to his own laptop, demanded wireless internet access. He also wanted his team to use an open source project management tool, called Basecamp. But the biggest bone of contention came over Microsoft Word. Much government work is done by civil servants emailing Word documents back and forth. Yet Berners-Lee refuses, on principle, to use Word, which is a proprietary rather than an open source format. On one occasion, one official recalled, Berners-Lee received an urgent document in Word from one of the most senior civil servants—and refused to look at it until a junior official had rushed to translate it into an acceptable format.

Once in the room, politicians were treated to a display of Berners-Lee talking animatedly and waving his hands wildly, seemingly lost in thought. Buzzwords—“metadata tagging,” “the semantic web,” “the web of data”—left the politicians puzzled. Martha Lane Fox recalls a meeting with Berners-Lee and Brown, and the mix of awe and bafflement she felt, along with most of the politicians, when he was in full flow. Yet when faced with Berners-Lee’s demands, ministers usually said yes. There were, of course, difficulties, not least a mentality Berners-Lee tactfully calls “data-hugging.” But data protection laws, at least, could be overcome: public data is usually anonymous, or can cleverly be “anonymised” by statisticians.

The team made progress over the summer but, at meeting after meeting, Berners-Lee and Shadbolt were told by web developers that raw data was not much use without geo-spatial data to go with it. Google maps were not detailed enough. The Ordnance Survey had a reputation for frightening private and public bodies with legal threats if they used data which contained some element of Ordnance Survey’s maps. Berners-Lee had himself thought Ordnance Survey was “not something to deal with in the first instance.” But the tipping point came at a meeting, organised with the Guardian, where web developers outlined their plans to build everything from big sites on public transport to niche services allowing people to see the number of cows in their area. What the pair kept hearing was that “80 per cent” of useful data relied on information owned by Ordnance Survey—whose maps include electoral and council constituencies, building locations, land-ownership boundaries and footpaths. As Berners-Lee recalls, “We were under huge pressure from a large number of people to do something.”

***

Here, Berners-Lee was being drawn into tricky territory. Looked at one way, Ordnance Survey is an obscure public body packed with geographers. But its iconic orange maps inspire fanatical loyalty, especially from millions of walkers. And people like having their buildings appear on the maps—previous attempts to privatise it had run into tabloid headlines that local churches or community centres could literally be erased.

Berners-Lee himself speaks fondly of them too: “We grew up on our holidays using OS maps to avoid traffic jams, find beaches, walk through the hills.” Even so, deciding they had to act, Shadbolt and Berners-Lee wrote a long letter to Brown, outlining why they needed the OS data. Word came back from No 10: fine, but you must convince the treasury. It was here, at this final hurdle, that previous attempts had always fallen. Where was the money to come from? At a time of fiscal crisis the treasury was in no mood for signing cheques. But Berners-Lee and Shadbolt got two lucky breaks.

The first was an obscure 2007 treasury economic report, led by Cambridge academic Rufus Pollock. Pollock’s analysis argued that there were substantial economic gains to be made from opening up map data to the public—an arrangement that has made the US a world leader in online geographical business. The second was political backing. John Denham, the local government minister who “owned” Ordnance Survey came on board, despite the body’s HQ being in his Southampton constituency. Junior ministers Stephen Timms and Michael Wills were also supportive. But most important was Liam Byrne, the new chief secretary to the treasury, and the man responsible for dishing out cash across government.

During summer 2009 Byrne made a private trip to Washington, visiting the new White House office of “social innovation,” returning impressed by the data projects underway. Byrne had been badgered on similar subjects by Tom Watson, a junior minister who became an open data convert. And at the time Byrne was hunting for big ideas to improve public services and create future economic growth. Open data fitted the bill. The £20m or so that the treasury needed to fill the black hole from Ordnance Survey, he decided, would just have to be found. With Byrne convinced, No 10 came on board. And with backing from the two most powerful voices in government, Whitehall opposition began to melt away.

***

Berners-Lee’s overall success was partly down to luck. Had the political panic over expenses not convinced Brown of the wisdom of transparency, progress was unlikely. Part of it also came down to an inheritance: obscure bits of work dotted around Whitehall provided evidence Berners-Lee and his team could marshal. As Richard Allan, who chaired the Power of Information task force, puts it: “Berners-Lee is a great man: but he is a giant standing on the shoulders of many determined midgets.” Finally, even in the dry world of public policy it seems celebrity does matter: Berners-Lee unlocked a previously intractable problem because people wanted to help him.

As Berners-Lee leaves government, the stakes remain high. He has long argued for a second wave of his web revolution—one in which information within web pages is classified by a common protocol, allowing pieces of data on the web to talk to each other. This would create much more interaction between, say, computers and mobile phones. This vision, known as the “semantic web,” has not yet taken off. Yet this dream for his precocious child could depend on the type of public data he has been working to unleash. As Nigel Shadbolt puts it, “I’m starting to believe that public sector information could be an incubator for this new data web.” Whether that happens or not Berners-Lee seems content. “It has been an exciting journey. We have had that top-to-bottom enthusiasm, which is something very special. But we are also capitalising on a resource, data, that at the moment is just sitting there. Making it available is so obviously a good thing that it is hard to argue against it.” Put like that, it’s hard to disagree.

The real test will be whether the government makes publication of data a rule, not an exception. This is still some way off. Reversals are possible, especially as Berners-Lee heads back to Boston and politicians move on to other issues. Local government is a particular worry: data sharing is rare among local authorities, although John Denham has asked Nigel Shadbolt to help ensure progress here too. The crucial decision on opening up Ordnance Survey (out to consultation until April 2010) could also still be reversed by a short-sighted treasury. But, assuming that doesn’t happen, what really matters is the applications and websites that follow. And here there is cause for optimism. So far, when raw data has been released it has usually been quickly reused, as in the London cyclist blackspots example.

If, as many assume, the Conservatives win the general election, their enthusiasm for open data—especially from George Osborne—also makes a U-turn unlikely. And it is here that perhaps the most important political and policy consequences of Berners-Lee’s work could lie. Brown deserves credit for finally understanding this issue, and will with some justification claim it as part of his legacy. But a world in which citizens and businesses muck in to create new data websites is equally amenable to Cameron’s vision of a post-bureaucratic age. Publishing raw data, and expecting accomplished amateurs and social entrepreneurs to find uses for it, creates an eye-catching new type of partnership between citizens and the state—what the wonks sometimes call the “co-production” of public goods. There is an important role for businesses too: just look at how companies like MoneySupermarket have prospered by repackaging financial data. But it is the creative citizens and amateurs who tend be most innovative and add the most value, often quickly and cheaply performing functions (like dreaming up websites) previously reserved for government bodies. It is this that has led some, like Martha Lane Fox, to think of open data as the spark for a power shift between citizens and government. If so, these citizens—the new class of über-geeks and “data mashers”—could become as important to good public policy, and to helping citizens make better decisions, as Whitehall strategists or government statisticians. As Tim Berners-Lee likes to put it, the wonder of the web is its sheer serendipity: what someone else, somewhere, has already done can “save your bacon.”

Politically, the idea is far from libertarian. There is still a vital role for the state in collecting, publishing and paying for data, and also in getting the best out of developers. But a world where mashers inherit the earth is also an oddly appropriate example of Cameron’s “big society.” For once, this is an area where those irritating buzzwords—“the wisdom of crowds,” “the long tail,” “nudge,” and the rest—actually work, and where the ideas they enshrine mean citizens taking decisions for themselves rather than relying on the state.

Interview: Tim Berners-Lee

2010-01-27T17:14:00.003Z

On 5th January, just before the public launch of data.gov.uk, I spoke to Tim Berners-Lee about how he helped the British government open up public data. This interview was published on the Prospect website in January 2010. The full inside story of the government data initiative—written by myself and James Crabtree—was published in the February issue of Prospect

Tom Chatfield: How did you come to be working with the British government?

Tim Berners-Lee: It began with a lunch at Chequers, when the prime minister asked me what I felt the UK should do in order to make the best use of the internet, and I said, you should put all your government data onto the web. And he said, okay then, let's do it. [laughs] So when one has spent a lot of one's life persuading people to put things onto the web, and persuading people to be open, it's almost disarming to have somebody say that straight away. The result of that was a team in the Cabinet office of a team under Andrew Stott. Various people in the UK government had experience of this area already, so it was a question of how to accelerate this as much as possible.

TC: I know it's sometimes felt in the world of online innovation that governments are not the best people for creating radical change. What motivated you to put this effort into working with and within the British government?

TBL: The neat thing about this is that there is such a clear win: the data we're talking about has already seen a lot of effort expended on creating it. It's a valuable resource that has been produced by parliament for a particular purpose, and it has typically been sitting there as a really valuable but under-used resource.

The thing people were amazed about with the web itself is that when you put something online, you don't know who is going to use it. You're looking for something and you think it's impossible that somebody will have done it before, but you find that they have, and the web saves your bacon. It's the serendipity—the unexpected reuse that is the value of the web. When you move to data, suddenly this is not applied because data actually is really desperately boring when you look at it by itself. When you put data together you can derive very powerful new insights; so I think that realisation that the UK had got all all this resource that was under-utilized means the arguments become very obvious for putting them out there for people to re-use.

TC: You've been working in this field for some considerable time, but is this the first time you have worked in this way with a government?

TBL: I have encouraged governments on various occasions to adopt standards and to use them for websites, but this is the first time within government. What happened is that at the beginning of 2009 I decided that this is going to be the year in which I ask people to put data on the web. I gave a talk at TED, including getting people to chant "get raw data now."

TC: Part of the interest of the story seems to be that from this first encounter with the prime minister there was a degree of serendipity involved: the time proved incredibly ripe in government for this initiative to gather a huge amount of momentum over a very short time in government terms.

TBL: People had different points of view coming from different places, but the consistency of the encouragement that we've had has been very gratifying. And I suppose this is really my first experience with getting involved with policy so I don't have very much to compare it with, which means that my impression is that if people really do want to do something, and they are excited about it, then they can. I think we have to be very careful about having a burst of apparent momentum, though, and a lot of talk; we have to realise that it is going to mean a lot of pushing of other people, staying late for a bit, putting extra effort in maybe to go to a seminar to learn how to do things with linked data. I think that within departments there is bound to be resistance from a few individuals, who are going to have to be coaxed around it.

One of the really important things of course is that we should do all this without changing the way people work. It needs a very concerted ongoing push at each level: managerial, within departments, the material level, and the grass roots. This stuff happens because people are dedicated and put a lot of time into doing it. And then it's great to celebrate the results: things like these "hackathons" which we had a couple of, where people got together and made visualisations of the existing data. Those have been good because they give you a good sense of the data being made into something really interesting.

TC: Did you feel that people really grasped what you were talking about, intellectually, the principles and ideas?

TBL: Yes. Obviously from the point of view of the timing it connected to a concern about transparency in government, which is not just the UK, the US is also very concerned at the moment; some people connected it directly to that, and that may have helped, the sense that this was holding the government accountable. One of my fears is that people would see that as the only motivator and they wouldn't see that we also have an enormously valuable resource.

For instance, somebody blogged on DirectGov, putting up some data which was just the grid references and years of bike accidents over three years. And that was on 10th March, I think, and later on that day somebody pointed out that it had been put up in Microsoft Excel, and said you shouldn't do that, it's a proprietary format, you should put it up as a comma separated file which anybody can read, and by the way here it is turned into a csv; and then someone says they've turned it into a kml file which can be used with a mapping application; and then the next day someone from the Times blog says I have done the mash-up, so here is a map you can go to and zoom all over the location and find your journey to work and see where all the bike accidents have been and maybe modify your journey to take another route. That was within 48 hours: the data had been turned from a pile of figures into a really valuable resource, which can save lives, which perhaps can help in the long term helping the public put pressure on the government to deal with black spots, and that is immediately useful to anyone getting on a bike.

Now imagine if a government department in any country had decided they were going to have a bicycle accident website. They would probably have spent a long time drawing up a requirements document, put it out to tender, and eventually gone for the lowest bidder, and after a certain amount of time the company would have come in, and then there would have been a review, and eventually the site would have been launched, and with luck it would have been useful; but in fact the message is that there are people out there who are prepared to put the effort in to turn data around before you have gone to the trouble of doing it yourself. It's about seeing whether the mash-up-sphere, if you like, will do it for you. And that sphere will always win because they have access to data from different departments and non-government sites and all kinds of things. Somebody who is out there mashing up data sources, or someone in government doing that, is always going to produce things that go far beyond one single data set.

TC: Coming in from the outside, how did you find the internal working practices of government?

TBL: The people I met were generally very switched on, and I have been very impressed with the way that people in the Cabinet Office have made things happen and explained to me how things work. Yes, people tend to send around word processor files in emails, where at W3C everything is on the web. The British library has I think one of the largest public wi-fi areas in the country, possibly in the world, but the government doesn't have open wi-fi so one has to work around that, you can't just open your laptop and be connected. But I wasn't there to complain or worry about that, and of course there are an awful lot of industries in the world that still operate by sending around copies of a document via email.

TC: One of the key things seems to be the Ordinance Survey data. As I understand it, you went in thinking that OS would not be your prime focus, but it ended up becoming a key component. Was there a eureka moment with OS data?

TBL: My initial feeling was that OS had a complex history, that the whole set-up for OS as a trading organisation was defined, so that it was not something to deal with in the first instance. But so many people we came to, who deal with data of almost any variety, said that government is to do with the government of the country, the place, and almost everything you do is to do with some physical place on a map. We met so many people who were very constrained by OS data or had a governmental right to use the data but as a result couldn't pass on the information they created to the public, so we were under a huge amount of pressure from a large number of people to do something.

TC: I know historically it has proved very difficult to open up the OS data. Did you find there was a lot of opposition to that?

TBL: There had been various attempts to review the problem, some of which had been very conservative and focussed on small changes to the model, but there was one report that focused on the economic side and said very strongly that everything should just be made public.

TC: Rufus Pollock's report?

TBL: That sounds like it. Basically, the ideas in the report are correct. But one of the problems is that the value to the individual citizen of having the data available, that return on investment, is very difficult to measure. How can you measure the value in your life of the web: how do you put a pound sticker on it? You can't. You can try in some ways, you can say you would have wasted this much time going down to the library which I don't now do, but the whole thing is wrapped up and you do things now that you didn't used to do. But this is one of the problems.

One of the things that was very important to us was to preserve the OS. A lot of us remembered at school being taught to use an OS map: we grew up on our holidays using OS maps to avoid traffic jams, find beaches, walk through the hills; and there are a huge number of people in Britain who are very attached to the Ordinance Survey and who value it, they know the OS as the people who make their maps, and are a jewel in the crown of Britain's information resources. A lot of it is sentimental attachment too, to particular maps and the particular way they are presented.

TC: What are you worried about? Are there some great obstacles remaining—and is it possible that a different government might not care for the agenda so much?

TBL: The whole openness of data thing is so non-partisan that I can't see a different government really wanting to reel back the openness. I think that once people have seen it, too, it will be easier to see that nothing horrible has happened. The fears that people tend to have when they are managing a particular bit of data sitting at a computer are to say, well, I'm worried that people will misinterpret the data, I'm worried that people will use it for the wrong thing, or I'm worried that people will think it's more accurate than it is. Those are the sorts of things that you hear, from the very large standard excuse set. But once the data is out there those sort of excuses won't be there any more, because people will say, well, the data is out there and it's not really being abused, and people do understand that it's not very clean data and that nobody is perfect, but they are very grateful to you for making it available.

The things that I am concerned about: we need to keep the momentum going, and ensure that people are following up with data sets. There is also a temptation to mail out a DVD and say, okay, here's the data, but obviously the data is changing and being made open is just part of the cycle of the development of data; we have to grow to learn how best to do this.

TC: Is this an area that Britain could lead the world in, or are there other countries we should be looking to and trying to emulate?

TBL: America is also at it, of course, with its data.gov site.

TC: They seem to have less emphasis on making it highly usable for developers and third-party APIs.

TBL: That's right. I think when it comes to the quality of data and making it usable, Britain is ahead. Of course it is early days. There is an awful lot of data out there: in both countries there has been a call for a list of the things that are out there, and I think just producing that list of what data to call for is quite difficult. We need to move to an ethos where if somebody in government creates a database then by default they will create a path to making that available and usable publicly. There are different ways in which the UK and US can learn from each other. There are also efforts go on in other countries—Australia, New Zealand, Toronto, New York, the State of Massachusetts, all have public data projects.

TC: Is this a movement that could change the way people think about politics and interact with political systems?

TBL: Yes, I think it will have a big effect: the accountability of government and transparency will have a very healthy effect on the way that government is run.

I felt initially that we clearly we needed to do this with the most developed countries, who understand about putting stuff on the web. But people are also pushing the idea of this in developing countries, because that's where government and data transparency is needed, and you really need to establish trust in the government in order to justify investment from outside for example. When I was recently in Uganda, talking to ministers and the prime minister there, I took the opportunity to mention the openness of data in Uganda, so it may be that some of the most important effects that you find early on actually come from developing countries.

TC: Do you see yourself having a long-term involvement with the government, or with governments, on this?

TBL: This has been a project of a certain length of time. I hope that the momentum that it has got will be self-driving, I hope this will take off exponentially, and that I will be able in future years be able to push other sorts of things. What should it be in 2010—should it be the year of scientific data, social networking data? There's a lot of ways in which we have to go in how we use the web, and they all connect together. But putting government data on the web has been a very exciting journey. We have to keep pushing, though. Constant vigilance.

TC: And what about your personal motivation. Obviously you're very driven: it would be quite possible for you to sit back if you wanted to.

TBL: It is very exciting, clearly, to make things that work and that allow computers to do things that help us. The whole new field of web science, learning about how the web as a very large system and how humanity connected by technology should evolve, has a lot of excitement. But there is also a certain amount of duty. The web is this big system which we did actually make, this artificial system created by the people who sit down and write protocol and machine specifications. The way computers interact over the web is defined by a system we invented and can change. We have a duty to make sure that at the same time as we are putting data on the web, that we look more broadly to make sure the web does serve humanity, and think about the 75 to 80 per cent of the world who don't use it at all at the moment. As always, too, I'm motivated by meeting people who are also very fired up: people like Andrew Stott, who are excited about doing something that is going to be good and effective.

TC: What most concerns you, and most excites you, about the future of the web?

TBL: Most of my concerns are to do with the web being controlled by one party or one group, whether government or a large company that has got excessively powerful and is able to control what one sees or know what one does; if a government decides it is going to control or limit what people do, or spy on them. Those are the main fears.

Tim Berners-Lee studied physics at Oxford, before working in telecoms and software engineering. In 1989, while working as a fellow at the CERN research centre in Switzerland, he published the academic paper that defined what would come to be known as the world wide web. In 1994, he founded the World Wide Web Consortium, a group devoted to keeping the seething mass of pages he helped to create working together. In June 2009, alongside Nigel Shadbolt, he was appointed as an information advisor to the British government.

How computer games discovered virtuous reality

2010-01-19T16:23:00.002Z

An essay on "serious" gaming, first published in The Independent, January 2010

Nobody could argue that the £30bn video gaming isn't by definition a serious business. But can games themselves ever be put to "serious" use? Could the same medium that offers us so much fun and entertainment also be a tool for raising political and social awareness?

Playing Darfur is Dying couldn't be easier, so long as you have a computer and an internet connection. Visiting the game's website, you are instantly thrown into the fray: a window in the centre of your screen asks you to "choose a Darfurian to represent your camp". A family of two parents and six children are your charges: displaced by conflict, the game asks you to perform such tasks as foraging for water, irrigating crops, and generally trying to survive the appalling rigours of life as one of the 2.5 million refugees in the Darfur region of Sudan (a context that's clearly explained in a couple of sentences underneath the game window onscreen).

I choose my family member, clicking on the image of Rahman, aged 30, the father. Now I must forage for water – except I can't. A message has flashed up on the screen: "It's very uncommon for an adult male to forage for water because he is likely to be killed by the Janjaweed militia. Choose another camp member to forage for water." Right. Slightly nervously, I select the eldest child – Elham, a girl aged 14 – for the task. I'm told to use the arrow keys to control Elham's movements, and then I'm off, dashing and dodging as the screen scrolls towards me.

My mission is to dodge wandering militia by hiding behind rocks and scrub, and to reach the well, whose distance and direction in relation to me are indicated at the bottom of the screen. It's tough. Incredibly tough, in fact. I can press the space bar to hide, but it isn't long before a jeep full of soldiers catches me out in the open. The screen freezes, and another blunt message flashes up: "You have been captured by the militia. You will likely become one of the hundreds of thousands of people lost to this humanitarian crisis. Girls in Darfur face abuse, rape and kidnapping by the Janjaweed. As someone at a far-off computer, and not a child or adult in Sudan, would you like the chance to try again?" I would.

One child down, five to go. I select the next eldest and set out once again into the scrub, dashing towards the well. This time, playing incredibly cautiously and hiding every hundred metres or so, I make it to the well. Success! I fill my canister and am promptly told I need to be extra careful as I'll now be moving much more slowly on my way back. Drawing a deep breath I set off for the camp, this time running towards rather than away from the screen – meaning I can't even identify any good hiding places in advance. A jeep appears in the distance, and I try to outrun it. Just a few hundred metres short of the camp, it catches me. I've lost another child and still not got any water.

At this point, several things occur to me. First, I'm not having much fun. I'm a pretty experienced gamer, and what I've been doing so far is both fairly crude and slightly excruciating. Second, I'm wondering whether my not having much fun is part of the point. After all, trying to get water to a real refugee camp in Darfur is neither fun nor easy, and the game may be honestly attempting to reflect this – which is both fair enough and somewhat self-defeating. It only takes a minute to absorb the lesson that getting water is a difficult task, and after this there isn't much to motivate me to continue in this task. As the game itself has already pointed out, I don't actually need this water because I'm sitting safe at home looking at a computer screen. What should keep me playing is a sense of challenge, achievement and engagement, and as yet I haven't found too much of that.

Still, there is more to the game than water-gathering. Or, to be more precise, there is more to this particular "narrative-based simulation" than water-gathering – the designers of Darfur is Dying were evidently sufficiently uneasy with the idea of referring to it as a "game" that the word appears nowhere on their website that I can see. As well as gathering water, I can visit the camp itself, where I'm given an isometric overview of huts, fields and tents and tasked with assisting the residents in growing crops and maintaining the buildings. It's an attractively drawn setting, with plenty of mouse-over information about the details of life in such a camp; what it isn't, however, is either easy to fathom or to interact with.

After eventually managing to make a successful water run, I manage to keep things going for only one day before it's game over. At which point a message asks me to enter my name, reminds me of the 2.5 million refugees currently living in camps, and invites me to spread awareness of the game virally to my friends. It also invites me to take further action by donating to charities working in Darfur, or contacting my elected representative.

Ethically, Darfur is Dying is hard to fault. As a game, however, its limitations are painfully obvious. It's a little confusing, and "fun" has been rather too scrupulously avoided; or, a little more generously, its idea of "engagement" is somewhat dour and limited.

Suzanne Seggerman is the New York-based founder of the organisation Games for Change, a group founded in 2004 that promotes the use of video games as tools for raising political and social awareness. As she sees it, "fun" is an inadequate description of what video games do in the first place. "I don't think the word is really right, I don't think a game has to be 'fun'. It has to be engaging, it has to be well-designed: what makes a game good is the balance of challenge and reward, and that is about learning." At every step of a well designed game, you are engaged – but not necessarily entertained. It's a process she believes is fundamentally akin to some of the most serious issues in the world today. "More and more we are recognising in the 21st century that the kind of problems we face globally are genuinely complex. They involve many interrelated variables: things relating to climate change or international trade, for example. Games are systems, and they offer a good way to explore complex systems, a way that we simply didn't have before." There is, in other words, no better way to understand a complex system than by experiencing it: by role-playing, shifting variables, and seeing how the outcomes are affected.

Darfur is Dying was funded via a competition, backed by the American television channel mtvU, a division of MTV that broadcasts across the US to college students. Playing it is rather like going back in time 15 years, back to when most games were made on similarly small budgets. There is tremendous enthusiasm for politically and ethically engaged gaming within much of the industry, but not – yet – the level of support from major developers and publishers that would be needed for the phenomenon to gain critical mass in terms of design and production values.

But there also remains the question of how far "serious gaming" is a contradiction in terms. The idea that I might have been really entertained by Darfur is Dying is a somewhat uncomfortable one. Wouldn't the fact that I really enjoyed running a virtual refugee camp be, in some ways, inherently trivialising the issues involved? Seggerman rejects this idea, pointing to rapidly expanding array of titles that her organisation is already linked to from their website, titles that model everything from Third World farming to spotting signs of addiction in others to developing sustainable energy resources for cities.

"Games have to be taken on their own terms," she argues. "They're not trying to replace the reality of Darfur or Rwanda. But people cannot just go and experience these places, and the simulated experiences games offer are amazing. I don't look on games as competing with the real world and human interactions. I see them as a medium and as a path towards actions in the real world."

If you're looking for further evidence that games are serious tools for purposes other than entertainment, it can be found in a field whose aims appear very different to those of Games for Change – the military. The US military alone now spends around $6bn a year on various kinds of virtual and simulated training programs. War games themselves are almost as ancient as warfare and many of the earliest games played in human societies were based around combat or fighting of some kind, from duelling and wrestling to javelin throwing. The earliest video games, too, found a rich resource for game designs in everything from hand-to-hand combat to virtual military campaigning. In fact, it's probably fairer to say that video games found the military, rather than the other way around.

In 1996, seeing how popular the iconic first-person shooting game Doom was among soldiers, the US Marine Combat Development Command decided to produce a specially modified version of it.

Marine Doom, as it was inevitably known, was little more than a carefully reconfigured version of the existing game's runaround-a-maze-shooting dynamic. What it introduced was "realistic" weaponry and a series of carefully structured environments. It was also, not unimportantly, great fun.

As well as strategy and teamwork, hurtling around in-game environments proved a fantastic way of training soldiers to identify and memorise locations suitable for hiding, sniping, taking cover and regrouping, skills that were soon harnessed by the decision to construct training levels based on the precise floorplans of various worldwide US embassies. This meant that, for example, hostage recovery scenarios could be rehearsed within accurate representations of actual embassy buildings. As any gamer will tell you, there are few better ways of memorising the layout of a space than running around a virtual representation of it a few hundred times under intense pressure.

Marine Doom was a hit within the corps. When a version of it was subsequently released for general consumption – a response which suggested a valuable secondary use for military video games. More than just training tools, the army realised they could also function as highly effective recruiting tools. What better way to harness the willingness of millions of gamers across the world to blow each other up in fantasy scenarios than to offer them a taste of the real thing – or, at least, to offer them a stamp of interactive military-grade authenticity? The result, released online in 2002, was the game America's Army, "the official army game", as it bills itself on its slick website. Simply download, create an account and you can start playing in a patriotic blaze of red, white and blue. Or rather, you can start training: America's Army isn't quite your standard blast-till-you-drop affair.

The first thing the game invites you to do is not – as some users might have hoped – kick some terrorist ass, but learn how to fire a gun at a training range, including full instructions on the importance of knowing how to unjam your rifle, conserve ammunition, and fire from standing, kneeling and prone positions. That done, it's on to an obstacle course – at which, during my first attempt, I manage to hurl myself to my death with an overenthusiastic rope descent from a tower. The tone throughout isn't quite that of your ordinary gung-ho game environment either: there's a strong emphasis on listening for and obeying orders, putting your safety and that of your comrades ahead of blasting or running around, and above all on maintaining what the game calls "honour". This is a kind of experience system that rewards players for "honourable" actions, like aiding a comrade or achieving an objective, and punishes them for "dishonourable" ones, like shooting civilians or allies.

America's Army has been an unprecedented success, boasting 10,063,499 registered players (including this author). There have been no fewer than 26 editions of the game since its original release, spanning consoles as well as computers, and taking players through scenarios from special forces infiltrations to all-out assaults on terrorist bunkers or reconnaissance missions.

But a basic tension between the idea of seriousness and the idea of entertainment rears its head. Is the triumph of America's Army as propaganda a tacit admission that the entire point of video games is the lack of certain kinds of real-world seriousness within them? You can certainly make the military seem a thrilling and thoroughly contemporary occupation by packaging it up in a hot new medium. Exactly how ethical an activity this is, however, remains open to debate. Indeed, as is often the way with modern video games, dissident voices have begun to be heard within the game itself, with a number of members of the public choosing to make "virtual protests" against the actions of the US military by, among other things, registering accounts under the names of soldiers killed while on active duty in Iraq.

Military games are in some respects not so dissimilar to many "games for change". What a game can do, as Suzanne Seggerman noted, is turn just about any complex and potentially overwhelming system of variables into a manageable simulation that can be played, refined and analysed as many times as you want. It's a process that, compared to the cost and hazards of "real" training exercises, offers fantastic value for money. And most intriguingly of all, it overlaps directly with one of the most potent and rapidly developing fields not just of modern warfare, but of all kinds of human exploration, excavation and interaction with the most hazardous and challenging of environments – robotics.

Unmanned aircraft have been in use for reconnaissance purposes by both the British and American military since the 1960s. Today, however, technology has advanced to the point where highly complex remote-controlled "drone" aircraft, known rather chillingly as Reapers, are being used for everything from interception and exploration missions to true "hunter-killer" roles. The operation of these machines bears more than a passing resemblance to a certain electronic leisure pursuit.

In simple terms, drone aircraft – of which the US military alone now operates more than 7,000 – are designed for complete integration with both video game simulations and video game control mechanisms. It can be literally impossible to differentiate a training scenario, taking place via a "virtual" drone within an environment generated by a modified version of the America's Army game, from an actual mission as relayed by the multiple cameras and sensors attached to a real drone. As a profile in Wired magazine revealed, America's top drone pilot is not a swaggering Top Gun type, but a high-school dropout whose great aptitude was not for action but for video games.

Similarly, the increasing use of "remote-controlled-soldiers" – caterpillar-track mounted robots able to wield machine guns, travel through snow, sand and water and relay home detailed images from their onboard cameras – blurs the line between simulation and reality in a disturbing, if highly effective, manner.

The possibility of robot armies marching across the world under the control of youths wielding video game controllers within sealed military bunkers is a frightening one (not least because this kind of thing can sound dangerously attractive to certain kinds of gaming ears); and yet, rather more hopefully, it's in areas other than shooting that the wider possibilities of the kind of games the military have invested so much money in really start to become obvious, and to get closer to what are perhaps the most essential 'serious' capacities of video games. Take, for example, a "virtual training program" video game that has been developed for US military officers. Known as Gator Six, and based on hundreds of actual combat situations, the game uses actors and location filming to put players into the kind of decision-making situations that young officers actually face in the field.

Yet even the most complex video-and- multiple-choice game looks crude in some ways in comparison to the kinds of training simulations based on games technology that are already being piloted in other professions. Medicine is one area in which the use of game and virtual techniques is especially advanced – perhaps partly because the business of caring for the human body involves understanding the real-time interactions of countless complex systems and games are especially adept at reproducing such systems.

One vital area of training is emergency triage: equipping healthcare professionals to assess the order in which casualties should be seen in a crisis situation. The principles apply equally to events like train crashes, treating sick people in remote areas, or even military operations; the underlying idea is that it's vital, when time and resources are limited and needs are devastatingly urgent, to differentiate between those patients who might be saved by intervention and those who won't be.

A prototype triage game is currently under development by the TruSim division of Blitz Games Studios, whose areas of research include serious gaming. In the triage game, everything takes place in an interactive three-dimensional world: you explore the site of, for example, an explosion in a city, and find the bodies of those who need treatment as you investigate the wreckage. With highly realistic graphics and an interface that allows users to monitor vital signs, the data presented mirrors almost everything a medic would be able to discover about these patients in a real-life situation and, crucially, forces them to take triage decisions in real time without any break in the immersion.

The game is much less mediated than the "real" scenario; and, of course, the cost of running dozens or even hundreds of such game situations is negligible. "It's interesting," one doctor who had watched the TruSim demonstration told me, "because how can you simulate a complex, open fracture of the leg in real life?

"You can't, at least not without a lot of tomato ketchup. But in a game, you can represent difficult wounds exactly. For large-scale emergency training, at the moment, they have people dressed up in latex and fake blood, pretending to be in a car crash. It's involving, but it's also very obviously unreal. A virtual world can simulate the noise, the chaos, everything. You could assess, for example, the exact percentage and degree of someone's burns from the way they looked in a game." And, of course, you could roll out such a scheme across the country and compare data and different approaches between centres at a minimal cost: game technologies excel at nothing so much as scoring, comparing and rewarding progress (medics, moreover, are a notoriously competitive bunch in the first place).

***

Perhaps the most important single demonstration of the potential of games for serious applications comes from the purest of all training environments: the education system. There will inevitably come a time when no one alive remembers a time before video games existed.

Within a modern school, that time has already arrived: every single pupil was born into a world where video games were simply a fact of life, and it's in this environment and among these pupils that the serious potential of video games suddenly starts to seem less a novel possibility than a creeping inevitability. Until 1999, Derek Robertson was a primary school teacher in Scotland. "I still am at heart," he says, when we first speak in March 2009, although his official job title has moved on considerably. Since June 2008 he has boasted the title of National Adviser for Emerging Technologies and Learning in Scotland. It's largely thanks to him that Scotland now leads the world in the emerging field of what Robertson calls "games-based learning".

Even a decade ago, Robertson was profoundly sceptical of everything to do with video games. Then, in 1997, on the last day of term before Christmas, the children got to bring in toys and games, one of which happened to be a Super Nintendo games console. "I watched these two boys play a game," he explained, "where they were manipulating and arranging D shapes forming sequences and patterns. They were doing this really quickly, but what interested me was that these boys were in my supposedly bottom maths set and, when it came to problem solving in the traditional contexts with which I was presenting them, they appeared to be pretty hopeless. But this game challenged my thinking."

So Robertson began trying out games in the classroom, according to what he felt were the principles of best practice in teaching: involvement, engagement, stimulation and rigour. He used, for instance, Nintendo's series of Zelda adventure games to get children to write stories known as "ergodic" texts – that is, stories with no single linear path, where a reader's decisions about which page to turn to next give rise to a whole range of narratives. It was an instant success, as was the learning of various mathematical principles through other games.

Yet the key point was not that video games achieved miraculous results but that, as Derek Robertson put it to me, they were a context that really meant something to the children. "I think it's very important that learning doesn't look at a child as though they come out of a vacuum: that school embraces where children come from and what there is out there that impacts on their cultural life."

Within the digital culture that all children are now born into, video games have tremendously positive connotations. It was probably only a matter of time before they began to find their way into educational structures.

Robertson decided to create a physical space where he could bring all kinds of people – education managers, pupils, teachers – to get their hands on the actual games and discover that 'it wasn't all Pac-Man, Space Invaders and blowing up zombies". He dubbed this space the "Consolarium", and began to take it on tour. His mission was, in a sense, twofold: to take on people's initial misconceptions about what video games actually were; and to change their perception of how games might be used within schools. The results have begun to speak for themselves. In 2008 he oversaw the most extensive trial to date of what games-based learning might mean for schools. Extended across 32 Scottish schools and involving over 600 pupils, the study was conducted to the most rigorously controlled scientific standards.

First, every pupil involved at every school took an initial maths test and their scores were recorded. They were then split into two groups, with 16 schools in each. The trial group used, under structured supervision, a game on the Nintendo hand-held DS console – Dr Kawashima's Brain Training, which contains a number of training games in mental arithmetic – for 20 minutes at the start of every day for nine weeks.

The control group simply continued their classes as normal. At the end of the nine weeks everyone was tested again. Both groups had improved, but those using the game had shown a 50 per cent greater improvement than those who had not. The time the games group took to complete the test had also dropped by more than twice that of the control group. Equally significantly, the increases in the game group were most significant among pupils at the lower end of the ability spectrum.

It's a suggestive and hugely impressive set of results on a number of levels. But the most important single issue is, Robertson believes, one of attitude. "We find some pupils are disengaged from learning by the traditional fear they get from school. And the games are really powerful at dealing with this, at enthusing people, not so much in themselves as via the context for learning that the teacher manages to craft around them." I asked how many schools are now using video games in learning across Scotland? "I would say at least 200. I've given local authorities the kit to get them started as well as loaning it out, and I go out taking the Consolarium on tour, giving talks, bringing it all with me. We have repositioned games-based learning from being a left-field idea to something that is very much mainstream.'

Robertson's passionate enthusiasm is infectious – and in Scotland schools, parents, local authorities and councils are now queueing up to participate in the latest wave of video games learning. South of the border, initiatives based on Robertson's work starting to spring up at a number of centres around the country.

One such centre is Oakdale Junior School in Woodford, East London. Game-based learning came to Oakdale after the borough, Redbridge, heard Derek Robertson speaking about his work in early 2008. Like many others before them, the local education authority were so impressed by Robertson's work and results that they bought 30 Nintendo DS consoles and invited all the secondary and primary schools in the area to bid for them. Oakdale have for the last year been running their own trial version of Robertson's scheme.

The main game used is Dr Kawashima. A typical class, packed with 30 pupils aged 10 and 11, was buzzing with quiet activity soon after form teacher Dawn Hallybone gave out the Nintendo hand-held consoles, with pupils striving to beat each other – and her – at 20 mental arithmetic questions. The pupils loved the competition because the machines kept score instantly and automatically, and were scrupulously fair; everyone could do a test at the same time and then compare results. They loved the presentation and interface ("You get to see one sum ahead, and it scrolls so smoothly," one girl commented), perhaps unsurprisingly, given that several billion dollars' worth of corporate research and development have gone into making the consoles as child-friendly as possible.

During this class and several others, a central point about game-based learning gradually became obvious. For teachers and parents, using games consoles as part of a lesson may still sound a little like science fiction, or at least like gimmickry. For pupils like those at Oakdale, however – a good local state school representing a whole spectrum of abilities, ethnicities and attitudes – the presence of the consoles in the classroom was a natural and familiar extension of much else in their lives. As pupil after pupil patiently noted, this was a welcome slice of their "real" lives transplanted into the sometimes-daunting world of the classroom. With this kind of technology in their hands, even the weakest member of the class felt entirely at home. So at home, in fact, that they competed to come back in break times to take more maths tests.

Oakdale's head teacher, Linda Snow, is philosophical on this point. "Gone are the days when children sat for 30 minutes copying off a board: they expect the world to be singing and dancing. Dawn uses Twitter live in her class, live links with Australia for geography, posting stuff on websites: this is a world that even five years ago wasn't there. And the DS consoles are part of that package. The pupils grew up with this technology. It's part of who they are now."

Why playing in the virtual world has an awful lot to teach children

2010-01-10T11:35:00.002Z

A piece looking at gaming as a socially positive, innovative force, first published in the Observer, January 2010

What does playing computer games do to us? A YouGov poll has stirred up familiar worries about the effects of new media on children's communication skills, saying that one in six children under the age of seven in England has difficulty talking – a problem that will have many worried parents looking at games consoles and wondering how far their children's onscreen delights are implicated in this decline.

Anyone who has played video games, or watched their children playing, will know that they are an exceptionally compelling medium. As Jean Gross, the government's new communication champion for children, noted, overbusy parents can spend dangerously little time talking to their children. Far easier to plonk them down in front of a mesmerising screen.

A lack of parental time and engagement is self-evidently a bad thing, as is the excessive use of any one medium. Yet this vision of gaming as a passive, inert activity does little to help struggling parents. For perhaps the most remarkable thing about modern video games is the degree to which they offer not a sullen and silent unreality, but a realm that's thick with difficulties, obligations, judgments and allegiances. If we are to understand the 21st century and the generation who will inherit it, it's crucial that we learn to describe the dynamics of this gaming life: a place that's not so much about escaping the commitments and interactions that make friendships "real" as about a sophisticated set of satisfactions with their own increasingly urgent reality and challenges.

Take the idea of scarcity. In the real world, there isn't enough of everything to go round and people suffer as a result. In the digital world, there is suffusion: anything can be duplicated almost endlessly at negligible cost. We are free to indulge ourselves to the utmost degree. Except, it turns out, people are rather attached to scarcity – and to difficulty, and to hard work, and to all those things that the narcissistic digital realm allegedly teaches us to avoid. We are deeply and fundamentally attracted, in fact, to games: those places where efforts and excellence are rewarded, where the challenges and demands are severe, and where success often resembles nothing so much as a distilled version of the worldly virtues of dedicated learning and rigorously co-ordinated effort.

The very first virtual worlds were indeed utopias. Places like The Palace, which opened its doors in 1995, offered users a kind of enchanted chatroom where they could interact with each other within graphical locations ("palaces") that they had themselves created. Within the limitations of the technology, you could have and do anything you liked. It was a utopia, and it was boring. Not only did people prefer virtual worlds in which there were brutally strict limits on available resources, and where vast amounts of effort had to be expended to obtain these resources; they were actually prepared to pay money to spend time in these scarce worlds.

People liked other things, too: banding together to earn greater rewards; the escalating prospect of greater and greater challenges, involving levels of achievement at the top end only attainable by hundreds of hours of effort. Take the processes involved in playing Microsoft's Xbox 360 console in its own online arena, Xbox Live – a digital destination that now boasts more than 20 million users. Thanks to the way Xbox Live works, anyone playing on Microsoft's network isn't just trying to beat individual games; they're also working, often very hard, to earn cumulative "achievement" points for meeting particular targets in each and every game on the system, in an effort to lift their individual score ever higher in the global rankings. It's this pattern of effort and reward, validated by a networked community of players, that makes modern games such an awesome engine for engagement.

When considering just how "real" anything that takes place in a virtual environment can be it is, first of all, worth remembering the degree to which most real-life activities, from work to shopping to dating, demand a degree of self-concealment precisely because of the direct consequences they entail. A virtual world is a tremendous leveller in terms of wealth, age, appearance, ethnicity and such like – a crucial fact for anyone who isn't in the optimum social category of being, say, attractive and affluent and aged between 20 and 35. It's also a place where "you" are composed entirely of your words and actions: something that breeds within and around many games an often extraordinarily complex network of conventions and debates that are integral to a community held together only by voluntary bonds.

Visit any website devoted to hosting player discussions of games like World of Warcraft, for instance, and you'll find not hundreds but tens of thousands of comments flying between players who debate every aspect of the game, from weapon-hit percentages to mathematical analyses of the most efficient sequence in which to use a character's abilities. It will range from the sublime to the ridiculous, and will be riddled with private codes, slang, trolls, flames, and everything else the internet so excels at delivering.

What you'll find above all, though, is a love of discussion almost for its own sake; and an immensely broad and well-informed range of critical analyses. It's not unknown for doctors of economics or maths to wade into the fray – and find themselves bested by other still more meticulous chains of gamer reasoning.

Perhaps the most sophisticated online game of them all, the epic science fiction universe known as EVE Online, has even seen its player community persuade the company running the game to hold democratic elections for a "council" via which players can voice their concerns directly to developers. Places on this Council of Stellar Management, as it's known, were first competed for in a full election during March 2008, with 66 candidates putting themselves forward for nine positions. Every player of the game was eligible to vote, and the results were announced in May 2008: 24,651 votes were cast out of a pool of 222,422 eligible voters, revealing a turnout of 11% – not bad at all, considering the level of engagement with the game required to follow the campaigning, and the fact that players span more than 50 countries across the world. These days, alongside the council, there is a separate internal affairs division, designed to root out misconduct on the part of both players and developers after some nasty allegations of insider dealing with valuable engineering schematics.

In an election year for Britain, this kind of grand experiment in community government and participation is given an edge by perhaps the most fundamental traits of every gaming world: fairness, equality and transparency. Even the crudest game is, with its community of players, an arena of absolute and rigorously enforced equality in both terms of opportunity and measurement. It simply wouldn't be fun otherwise.

Consider one of the most fundamental problems posed by any massively multiplayer online game: the distribution of rewards among a team of people who have collaborated in order to work their way through a vast – and rewarding – challenge. Nobody is being paid to be there. In fact, all the players involved will be paying exactly the same amount of money for the privilege of playing the game in the first place. Given that most in-game challenges tend to produce only a small amount of very valuable loot in the form of armour or weapons that almost everyone would like to own, the problem created is one that can only be solved satisfactorily by a solution that is self-evidently fair and self-contained.

In 1999 a group of players in the game EverQuest devised the first version of exactly such a system. Dubbed Dragon Kill Points, or DKP – the key task that necessitated devising the system was killing two very tough dragons – essentially it entailed introducing a private and self-regulated currency between collaborating players. Under a DKP system, every time anyone participated in a group mission they got "paid"' a set DKP allocation. These points were tracked – independently of the game, on an open website run by the players themselves – and accumulated over time until a player decided they wished to spend them on a rare or desirable item found during an in-game mission. At this point an open or closed auction system would allocate each item to the highest bidder.

Once the notion of DKP had been introduced, an increasingly sophisticated series of methods of quantifying the challenges and rewards in the game soon began to develop among players. "Price lists" were developed for in-game items, based on detailed statistical analyses of their properties. As one founder member of the EverQuest guilds that developed the DKP system put it to me, "loot handling in online games would probably be a PhD thesis in itself. It was very, very difficult. We had a good time trying to figure out what price things should be, what was the best way to distribute."

In a digital world – and a political arena – increasingly preoccupied with transparency and accountability, the spontaneous emergence of such a system points towards the gaming world's remarkable power. The DKP system is an entirely self-enforcing mechanism; yet its effectiveness among gamers who adopt it runs at close to 100%. This is because it works; because it's transparent and meticulously fair; and because it has been laboriously calibrated over time to prevent collusive bidding or other kinds of "cheating."

Neither playing Warcraft nor building a virtual polling booth in Second Life is likely to win many votes for a British political party in 2010, of course. And spending 24 hours a day in either environment is unlikely to do much for anyone's conversational abilities. But it's high time we began to understand games on their own terms, with all the potentials and dangers that entails: as arguably the most powerful models we have for connecting and motivating, and understanding those vast, disparate groups of people a digital age throws together.

A Christmas play in Wormwood Scrubs

2009-12-17T11:43:00.002Z

A piece about watching charity Only Connect's Christmas play, put on by prisoners in the Chapel of Wormwood Scrubs, first published on First Drafts, December 2009

The chapel of Wormwood Scrubs prison is a piece of unexpected beauty: Grade II listed, arched in the Romanesque style, its Portland stones white against the massive brick walls and crenellations of the rest of the Victorian site. It was drizzling steadily last night, and a hundred or so of us—visiting civilians, who had spent the last half-hour being carefully processed through the layers of security and thick-walled rooms required to enter any category B prison—stood outside it for a few minutes, waiting for the guards to count us, eyeing the metre-high rolls of barbed wire on every outside wall and fence around us.

We were there to watch the first night of a play organized by Only Connect, an arts company working with prisoners, ex-offenders and young people at risk of offending. Its founder, Danny Kruger, writes a monthly column for Prospect telling in a few hundred words the life stories of some of the people he works with: Raymond, whose mum died when he was in prison; Foster, the burning star, up on a charge of domestic violence. I thought I was prepared for what I would see.

As it turned out, I wasn't prepared at all. Not really. The 40 minute play exceeded every expectation that I didn't even know I'd had. The vast space of the chapel had been re-made into a promenade theatre, around which we followed the cast—almost entirely Afro-Carribean, and re-imagining the story of Scrooge as a minor drug lord on the streets of East Acton—as they exploded out of the naves, over heaps of boxes, across chairs and a low bed and the desk from which Scrooge ran his business empire. Not a line was missed; the energy didn't let up for a moment; the lighting and sets were of a professional standard, flicking us this way and that between scenes and asides; the sound boomed out to fill the space, from a storming reggae Christmas anthem to the gong announcing the ghost of Christmas yet to come, who gestured with a scythe from the pulpit towards a mortuary trolley, where Scrooge saw his own body under a sheet, the back of his head blown off in a gangland execution.

And then came redemption—as in all the best Christmas tales—and it was over, and the cast bowed ecstatically. We applauded, and a few words were spoken. We were reminded that these beaming flushed faces were about to be returned each to their individual cells. Then we would leave, by another exit, to be counted safely out into the real world. Their eyes drank in our applause—and they applauded us in turn. Danny Kruger spoke a few words, about the extraordinary difficulties of putting on a production like this, with men free to move outside their cells for only a few hours each day. The play had failed to start properly the first time around, he explained, because the guards had not yet released the men from the room where they were being kept locked safely away from their audience.

It's all too easy to pour righteous scorn on the idea of bringing the arts to criminals. What could be more ephemeral, or more hand-wringingly out of touch with the way the world actually is? Last night, these worries died in the face of what I saw: a play that seemed to be the most urgent, real thing in its performers' lives. What does it mean, for men in a place of shame and correction, to enter the one beautiful building within it, perform, and be applauded by a standing crowd of strangers? Yesterday, it seemed to embody an intense and miraculous combination of freedom and pride—and a taste of what it means to create something that has no relation to crime, to personal history, or any of the other brutalities of prison life. I do not know what they have done, or will do. But I know that something happened that showed what redemption might look and feel like: the faces of strangers, glad because of something good.

All the world is play

2009-12-16T15:43:00.000Z

Essay on social games, and the future possibilities of the video game industry, first published in Prospect magazine, December 2009

Kristian Segerstråle is telling me what makes his videogames company unusual. “Most of the $50bn [£30.4bn] or more spent on videogames each year goes on that emotional, solitary, caveman-like journey of you versus the monsters,” he says. “But our games are different. They’re not about what is going on between you and the screen; they’re about what goes on between you and your friends when you play. They’re much more of a medium and a catalyst, for expression, competition, co-operation.” They are also a stupendously good way of making money.

Segerstråle, a boyish 32, is founder and CEO of Playfish, one of the world’s leading “social gaming” companies: makers of a new kind of videogame that is rapidly becoming as essential to online life as sharing images or reading a blog. It’s mid-November and he is “super excited”—not surprisingly, given that Playfish has just been bought by one of the world’s largest and most revered videogames publishers, Electronic Arts (EA), in a deal worth up to $400m (£250m). Playfish didn’t exist two years ago. Today, its games have over 60m unique monthly players and it’s not even the largest in its sector (market leader Zynga boasts over 100m after just two-and-a-half years in existence). So what, exactly, has been going so right?

The easiest answer has two words: social networks. Facebook, the world’s most influential social networking platform, now has over 300m active users. The only website to command more online traffic is Google. Other leading social websites like MySpace and Bebo reach several hundred million users globally. Factor into this the swelling number of smart-phones with internet capabilities, such as Apple’s iPhone, and you have a big business opportunity. Because, next to sending messages, the single most popular activity within these new social platforms and on these new devices is playing games.

The history of games is as old as civilisation. Competitive games are recorded as far back as 2,600BC, while archaeologists have found game “boards” that were apparently scratched onto the backs of statues by bored Assyrian guards in the 8th century BC. Technology has not changed human nature but it has given unprecedented rein to some of our innate impulses and, in particular, to those parts of us that the world of work and business have not used to best advantage: our love of exploration, learning, interaction and, perhaps above all, our sense of fun.

Playfish has created ten games to date, and most of them are a long way from the traditional idea of videogames as a violent, crude form of escapism. Its first title, Who Has the Biggest Brain?, is an IQ quiz. Starting to play it takes less than 30 seconds: having logged into Facebook or MySpace (or switched on your iPhone), you look up the application and, after a few clicks and no expenditure, start playing. An excitable cartoon figure invites you to pit your wits against four classes of game: analytical ability, calculation, memory and visual processing. And then you’re off—counting the number of blocks in increasingly complicated Lego-like shapes, for instance, or answering a series of sums against the clock.

The game does all the basics well: it features a bouncy, appealing interface and is challenging without being infuriating. The key to its success, though, is its integration into the social network itself. The moment you finish a game, it tells you how you rank compared to anyone on your “friends” list who has played the game and invites you to send a “taunt to a friend” to show off your prowess. Playing takes five minutes, and your friends don’t have to be online for you to be playing with them. They’ll find a message waiting for them on Facebook when they next log in, alerting them to the fact that they’re slightly lower down the big brain pecking order.

There are many thousands of playful social applications made by a whole spectrum of companies today, ranging from Scrabble emulators to programs encouraging you to “bite” your friends and turn them into a vampire/zombie/werewolf. But behind the swelling selection of Playfish titles—which range from a geography quiz to a “virtual pet” simulator—lies a close relationship with players that sets the company apart from its rivals. One corner of the London office is devoted to feedback and, Segerstråle says, “you’d be amazed at the stuff people send in.” Stuck to the wall are fan letters, drawings and even photographs of Playfish characters, including one snap of a three-foot-high cat knitted out of blue yarn.

***

The Playfish business model is a good example of the digital/internet “free” revolution working as it should. As with other social game producers, the basic Playfish games are given away free and the company then makes money through lots of small add-on purchases called micro-transactions. And yet the more mainstream end of the videogame market appears to be almost completely unaffected by the free revolution. People may no longer buy books, newspapers or music as they once did, but vast numbers remain willing to pay top dollar for the latest games. This was made clear on 10th November 2009 with the release of the game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which instantly wrested the coveted title of most valuable entertainment release in history from 2008’s biggest videogame, Grand Theft Auto IV. Within five days of release, Modern Warfare 2 had grossed over half a billion dollars; in its first 24 hours on sale, one in 49 people in Britain bought a copy.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the game’s triumph, though, was how conventional the economics behind it were. Modern Warfare 2 is a blockbuster: a piece of premium media content that has been lavishly, lovingly crafted by a team of many hundreds of expert programmers, artists, writers, testers, directors and animators over many thousands of hours. With a recommended retail price of £54.99, and an estimated overall budget of around $200m (including huge global marketing), it was largely bought as a boxed product. It represented, in other words, a success antithetical to almost everything that new media stands for—more like an MGM behemoth from the golden days of Hollywood than a virally-marketed, word-of-mouth indie flick.

Modern Warfare 2 came as a welcome commercial triumph at the end of a relatively slow year for games as a whole. And yet, for the games industry itself, it was the fact that EA was willing to pay up to $400m for Playfish rather than Modern Warfare 2’s sales that made the biggest waves. Why? The reason is not simply that an old model is giving way to the new. It’s that companies like Playfish are starting to dissolve the longstanding divide between those who identify themselves as “gamers” and those who would never go within a thousand yards of something like Modern Warfare 2. Gaming may be about the most mainstream subculture it’s possible to imagine, but it does not yet have a presence at the heart of our culture. As this changes, its different sectors are more likely to reinforce each other than they are to compete—and a cascade of associated transformations will not be far behind.

The main divide in gaming audiences currently runs along age lines; but there are also questions of taste, aptitude and perception. Modern Warfare 2 is a dazzling piece of programming, but it also presents a formidable challenge for anyone not acquainted with the intricacies of the FPS (“first person shooting”) genre. There are plenty of consumers who have little interest in its kind of “twitch” gameplay, which demands lightning fast reactions, not to mention those who dislike its gun-toting content. Its audience is composed largely of males aged between 18 and 35. These are the kind of players who are guaranteed to pay up every time a major release comes along, and they are the ones the games industry has to thank for its current wealth. Compared to the wider world of those who use social networks, however—an audience that is more female than male, and that ranges in age from five to 100—they’re merely a niche market. And it’s the massed ranks of this far larger audience that is the key to both the success of companies like Playfish and to the larger commercial excitement accompanying their expansion. For their growth owes as much to financial as to social innovation, and at its heart lies a business model that is finally combining videogames’ intense consumer appeal with the sophistication of 21st-century online business.

“We’re operating at the heart of a big shift in the games industry, as games move from being a product to being a service,” Segerstråle says. “With a social game, you only invest a fraction of the total development cost pre-launch, because you want to get it out as soon as possible. You can create the title in chunks. The budget for our titles ranges from $200,000 to $1m, but just 30 or 40 per cent of that is up front.” Mainstream games require budgets many times bigger than this, all of which has to be paid up front, which can put off risk-averse investors. All that is now changing, with venture capital money flowing towards the social gaming sector.

Investor excitement is sustained by the attraction of the “free” online games business model, and by the aspect that I mentioned earlier—micro-transactions. Unlike mainstream titles, social games producers do not charge up front, but rather generate the bulk of their revenues through many millions of tiny purchases. Everything from extra training options to faster advancement to fancy clothes for pets can be bought for a couple of dollars or less, while a progression through levels of achievement and the accumulation of in-game currency keeps you motivated. It’s a model that was pioneered in Asia, where consumers don’t tend to own computers and will not pay big money in advance for games.

Behind this micro-transaction model is the secret of these games companies’ success: data—and data of a kind that no other online business can match. The biggest online games companies now record more than 1bn data points every day, measuring everything from whether blue or red objects generate more sales to whether a certain phrasing improves the rate at which users click on a particular purchase. They can also see, for instance, exactly when the majority of players give up, and then release several subtle variations on that precise point to different segments of their audience, recording what works best and following it up with targeted email questionnaires. And games companies have only begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible. As Nicholas Lovell, an industry analyst, consultant and founder of the blog Gamesbrief, put it to me, “I can’t think of a single media company that couldn’t learn from the world of social and online games”—whether this is about the power of community, of precisely calibrated rewards, or of simply creating a virtual location so appealing that people will make it a part of their online lives.

***

Before Playfish, Kristian Segerstråle ran Glu Mobile, a company that made games for mobile phones. He says the inspiration behind his businesses is not just other videogames, but also his “fondest memories of growing up: playing with friends in the park, board games, cards.” These have fed his desire to bring back what he calls “that human element” to videogames, rather than “to drive people into deep dark cellars to interact with their 42-inch plasma screens.” Where once the kind of gaming pleasure he describes was confined almost exclusively to childhood, it is becoming more available to people almost all of the time. “This is a wonderful thing,” Segerstråle argues, “because it gives people this sense of being able to interact with each other over the generational boundaries and over other boundaries that are hard to cross: geography and time.”

Crucially, this audience no longer thinks of their behaviour as merely “gaming.” While chasing virtual soldiers around a three-dimensional landscape will always be a minority activity, the urge to pass time in casual play with a friend is something that anyone can identify with. It’s not even about winning, as the most successful games on social platforms demonstrate—from Playfish’s Pet Society (where you look after a virtual animal) to Zynga’s Farmville (where you run a virtual farm). It’s at least as much to do with the satisfactions of nurture and sharing. Like The Sims, the most successful single-player series of games ever, these games offer their users a miniature world they can manage and control in minute detail.

What makes electronic games quite so enjoyable and compelling? What most of the best minds pondering this question over the last 50 years can agree upon is that the satisfactions they offer have deep evolutionary roots and can exert an impressively strong grip on the human psyche. Few things satisfy us more than the sense of incremental mastery that comes from negotiating an environment especially designed to challenge, stimulate and reward.

Take what’s known in the industry as a “reward schedule”: a carefully tailored timetable that governs the rate at which different kinds of rewards are given to players. At the start, when a lot of basic learning is going on and a player doesn’t have much invested in the game, the rewards will come close together: more powers and options, graphical effects, new equipment, new areas to explore and so on. Gradually, these rewards will come further apart, with a tantalising random element included to keep players guessing (and hopeful). Psychologically, it’s a similar process to the kind of satisfaction gained from becoming better at a sport—golf, for instance. And as businesspeople have known for years, there are few better ways of gaining insight into another person and getting to know them than by playing a round of golf with them.

What videogames offer is both the automation of everything that is burdensome in the real world (keeping score, setting up, avoiding distractions, ensuring fairness) combined with the endless fine-tuning of an environment to keep it balanced and full of new content. I began playing World of Warcraft soon after it was first released; and yet, five years and the best part of 1,000 hours of play later, there is an ever-expanding list of items, achievements and quests I have yet to master. And still I go on playing—questing for just one more item, one more steed to show off, one more duelling victory to add to my tally.

Give someone a number, and they’ll want to make it go up. It’s a mechanism which is thought to have an especially powerful effect on the release of dopamine in the brain. Behaviourally, some argue, the most compelling videogames come dangerously close to being addiction machines—although games designers tend to retort that there’s still at least as much art as science to the process, and that the relatively high failure rate of even big-budget titles speaks for itself about the difficulty of compelling people into pleasure. It’s certainly true, however, that, in a well-made game, the more fun someone is having, the harder they are prepared to work. The mechanics of a modern game function as a kind of engine for generating effort in users—with the right learning curve and incentives, the right feedback and opportunities, and the chance to measure yourself against others. The evolutionary origins of play lie in humans learning vital lessons about the world through enacting a “safe” version of life-saving skills like flight, pursuit or deduction. And it appears that complexity and effort, far from being a bar to pleasure, can in fact be the most satisfying and stimulating incentives of all.

***

People have been “gaming” life in the pursuit of fun and profit for centuries. From collecting toys in cereal packets to gathering air miles via credit card purchases, it’s possible to give an activity “hooks.” What videogames bring is an unprecedented degree of automation and feedback: an aspiration towards a mental state first described in the 1970s by the Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as “flow.” This, he argued, was the mental state experienced by a top athlete executing a perfect sequence of manoeuvres or a musician losing themselves in performance; a kind of “optimal experience” gained from reacting to constant, shifting stimuli. It’s a state of harmony to which most forms of play aspire, and a perfect metaphor for the balance of rules, actions and consequences that all videogame designers aim for.

Videogames are perfectly pitched to deliver this kind of sensation because they are interactive. And this has applications well beyond mere entertainment, as I discovered when I spoke to the man credited as the founding father of virtual economics: the American academic Edward Castronova. As far as Castronova is concerned, fun must come first whenever you want to get anyone learning, trying and expressing themselves in the context of technology. “What I say to a lot of professionals in the area is that you must surrender to the principles of a game. You have got to surrender to what the hairless monkey [that is, the human animal] wants to do; and once you do that, you can do anything. I know people are suspicious of words like ‘fun.’ But I think you’re not getting the whole person if you’re compelling them.”

From Castronova’s perspective, the fundamentally measurable and manipulable nature of electronic media means that the time for setting theories and ideals above practical observations is now largely gone. It is no longer possible to pretend that you can change what people are like or, indeed, what they like. It’s all about using what you know.

What videogames suggest is that almost anything can be made more compelling with the application of gaming principles. This causes consternation among those who fear that games bring with them addiction, violence and social irresponsibility. Fun and play have been, for the last several centuries, words kept in a box tightly sealed off from work and adult responsibility. Whether we like it or not, this is now changing. And, for all the talk of addiction and dependence, the massive growth of social gaming suggests that most of the doommongers are wrong. We shouldn’t be worrying about gamers being sucked out of real life into a realm of unreal satisfactions. We should be looking, instead, to the gradual infiltration of play into our daily lives—the ways we socialise, express ourselves and, increasingly, think about everything from work to education to warfare. Understanding this shadowy world of virtual goods and transnational allegiances is a far greater challenge than chasing bogeymen.

The crossover between real and virtual actions is already well advanced in some fields. As political scientist Peter Singer describes in his book, Wired for War, the US military now spends $6bn a year on virtual and simulated training programmes. Not all are videogames in a strict sense, but their interactive scenarios are firmly rooted in the world of gaming, where learning occurs in real time in response to scenarios that look astonishingly realistic. One game, America’s Army, has been so successful at creating immersive military experiences that it doubles as a training and recruiting tool. The civilian version has now been downloaded more than 10m times. Do such games glamorise war for those far away from actual combat, or desensitise those fighting to the messy realities taking place on the ground? Given the increasing use of remote warfare, the answer is almost certainly a qualified yes. These are problems from a different world to that of social gaming; and yet some of the troubling questions they raise, about how remote interactions can both bring us closer together or drive us apart, are common to our future.

Then there is the more mundane but equally significant matter of business, and the eternal challenge faced by managers and companies in general: how to keep people happy and motivated. Games get people to pay to perform tasks that are often hugely demanding and time-consuming, or that—in social games—involve them seeking out new customers and persuading them to play (and pay) as well. In January 2009, the IBM Institute for Business Value released a report on “lessons from online gaming,” which highlighted some of the factors behind gaming’s success: excellent communication tools, the use of collaborative spaces where ideas can be openly shared, the communication of clear rules and objectives, the use of realtime data to analyse outcomes and, above all, the linking of performance to recognition and incentives. It’s only a matter of time before the finely-honed lessons of game design begin to be implemented across many workplaces.

In the field of education, too, games are beginning to reveal their potential: not only as tools for learning (although games like Nintendo’s Brain Training series have started appearing in classrooms around the world), but also as a broader context in which learning takes place. In Scotland, Derek Robertson—a former teacher, and now national adviser for emerging technologies and learning—talked me through a typical school term that used the music game Guitar Hero to motivate pupils. The actual time spent playing the game was quite brief: what mattered was the easy weaving of the game through every aspect of classroom activity and the fact that this allowed students of all abilities to forget they were in a classroom and to start—for the first time, in some cases—giving themselves entirely to the project. “The teacher who was organising this first got the children to write a biography of an imaginary rock star,” Robertson explained. “Then they looked at each other’s writing and got the best five into a virtual band for the class. The band then made an album. Then it was decided that the album had gone double platinum, and the band had to go on a European tour. And this meant that they had to plan an itinerary, research capital cities and routes across Europe, hotel costs, flights, times, currencies. Then they had to create a video for an awards ceremony…” Did it work? “Absolutely. They even now have a national Guitar Hero challenge taking place in Scottish schools.” The boundaries between play and work, here, are already not so much permeable as nonexistent.

“Children now see everything in 15-second bursts,” one headteacher told me. “Gone are the days when they sat for 30 minutes copying off a board: they expect the world to be singing and dancing. One teacher uses Twitter live in her class, live links with Australia for geography, posting stuff on websites: this is a world that even five years ago wasn’t there. But for the pupils, it’s not like, gosh, this is something new. They grow up with this technology. It’s part of who they are.”

It’s easy enough to lament this world of “15-second bursts.” But these pupils will not be setting aside their phones and consoles as they leave school or university, and nor will they be setting aside the emerging landscape of play: a realm that is crossing increasingly seamlessly between work and pleasure, and between personal and public selves. Games may have a history as old as civilisation itself, while computers and the internet have existed for the blink of an eye. And yet the latter has been colonised and shaped so thoroughly by the former that it’s becoming increasingly hard to tell where the serious business of play ends and the playful business of living begins.

My Twitter quiz hell

2009-11-27T11:47:00.002Z

A piece about attending the first Hive Mind quiz event in London, first published on First Drafts, November 2010

When David Cameron returned to London from this year's Conservative Party Conference, what platform did his train depart from? Why did the engineers of the longest continuous-span suspension bridge in the world change the blueprints after construction started? Those were the easy questions. Now, try these for size. Agtaq gufnx mbvrp eselx vurnm xsmqc aqzxa gakro altam yrvtn tpqzy vgnbx nofqw gonov? And who on earth is the person named in the hieroglyph above?

I'm sitting with my wife and two increasingly bemused friends experiencing the future of quizzing—or at least the future of quizzing in countries with high rates of iPhone ownership and comprehensive 3G networks. We're in the Coach and Horses, Soho, and pretty much the only rule is that anything goes. Short of assaulting our two quiz-masters with a blunt weapon, there is nothing we can't do, or won't need to have done by the end of the evening if we want any chance of victory. We can call friends. We can use the internet. We can crowd-source our queries out to our thousands—well, tens—of Twitter followers. We can even, I have discovered, simultaneously phone National Rail Enquiries and send an inordinately expensive text message to the mobile phone service Any Question Answered, although neither of those options does much good.

Welcome to the Hive Mind Challenge—the first ever quiz where both cheating and Tweeting are de rigeur. Founded by tech gurus Adrian Hon and Philip Trippenbach, the event—which took place on Tuesday this week—was the trial run ("the alpha; not even the beta!") and was both a wonderful and mildly terrifying experience. For a start, there were the massed ranks of Macbooks-cum-dongles that confronted my motley band as we entered. We were wielding, between the four of us, one iPhone, one Blackberry, some kind of Palm device that none of us knew how to use, and one ordinary mobile phone that didn't like sending text messages. When the batteries ran out on the iPhone half way through, we nearly walked out in despair, so comprehensively were we out-gunned by the massed ranks of geekery surrounding us. But I'm glad we didn't.

For a start, we came fourth—about half way down the table—thanks in part to my willingness to run across central London in response to by far the most fun question of the night: "In ten minutes time exactly, two pay-phones are going to ring at these exact latitudes and longitudes; whoever answers the phone and says the name of their team gets the points." Shoving a senior member of Sony's online team out of the way, brandishing an iPhone with less than 5 per cent battery power remaining, I blundered towards the marked spot on its GPS—and made it just as the ringing began. It was a minor miracle, and a cheering compensation for our failure to know anyone fluent in ancient Egyptian to whom we could send a photo message.

The evening was a pretty hard kind of fun. To win, we realised, meant not only being glued to a screen yourself for the best part of two hours, but also persuading several hundred friends and colleagues around the world to spend two hours of their evening sitting by their computers, desperately researching names, faces, places, numbers, details. Most pub quizzes are about being rewarded for random lumps of knowledge that have somehow stuck in your heads. This was all about bandwidth: both how much of it you could bring with you in a bag, and how much human capital you could stack up online of a Tuesday evening. It was a kind of intellectual arms race—and a fine proof of what diffuse communities of contacts are good at working out (numbers, dates, events, news, words) as well as what they find rather harder (music, images, locations, physical activity). In the end, too, it was an object lesson in the first law of the internet: more means better.

It was delightful, disturbing and demoralising all at the same time: modernity in a nutshell. And a searing indictment of the battery life of an iPhone. Next time, we're told, it will be international, which begs all kinds of questions about how the tasks can be made even more mind-bending. But I hope to be there, so long as there are further opportunities for running around. And, for those of you still wondering about the questions in the first paragraph—David Cameron left from platform 7, the engineers changed their plans because of an earthquake, the coded question is a Vigniere cypher and the answer is "stationx," and the name in the hieroglyphics is that of Amenirdis. But you'd worked those out already, right?

Why World of Warcraft matters

2009-11-23T15:47:00.000Z

A feature written on the 5th anniversary of World of Warcraft, first published on the Prospect magazine website, November 2009

I believe that World of Warcraft matters. Exactly how and why it matters, though, can be hard to get at from the outside; much of what reaches the mainstream media is a muddle of scandals, statistics and pseudo-scientific scraps. So I'd like to take a few moments to recall just what it was like to play this game for the first time five years ago, in the company of an old friend who had managed to wheedle both of our ways onto the game's American servers in time for launch—and why, five years on, the character I created then is still soldiering on through the northern reaches of the world's most famous unreal destination.

What struck us, first of all, was just how much it felt like a world: huge, organic, inviting exploration. There were lakes, mountains, rivers, forests, cliffs, towns, cities, and lots of things to squash, splatter, maim and generally exterminate for the sake of various rewards. What struck us shortly after this was that, although there was a game here to be played, there was also an awful lot more to it than simply playing and trying to win. My friend had chosen to play a dwarf warrior as his first character but, unlike any other game we'd encountered before, there was no sense in which he was that character. As far as World of Warcraft was concerned, he was himself, and just happened to be strolling around a vast cartoon world in the guise of an aggressive dwarf. And that was much more interesting, because it meant that—for the first time any of us had known—you could actually be yourself while playing. In fact, you could be all sorts of things that your self didn't normally manage.

My friend, for instance, could give free rein to his love of abuse. He'd team up with other players, and they'd happily talk trash for hours while batting the odd boar on the head with an axe. Soon enough, he got invited to join a guild, where his trash talking began to assume legendary proportions. I, meanwhile, had begun to play the character of a troll rogue and had discovered that I quite enjoyed talking about books with the people I met online. That, and confusing them by quoting inappropriate lines from films at apposite moments. The game allowed it. The game positively encouraged it, with its lovingly detailed mélange of pop-cultural parodies, fantasy scenarios and media cross-references (my favourite is the gruff big game hunter Hemet Nesingwary, a none-too-subtle anagram). You could take it as seriously or as lightly as you liked. And, when the action got frantic, you and the people you'd met up with just half an hour ago would find yourselves forging a whole new kind of friendship in the fires of virtual adversity. There were even members of the opposite sex in there—and much older people, and people from places you'd never even heard of. Everyone was equally welcome, and everyone was equal on the level playing field of a virtual world. All distinction was to be earned.

Plus, it wasn't really possible to lose. No death was final, no cause ever entirely lost. To all intents and purposes, the game was endless: even after a few hundred hours of hard slog had raised your character to the maximum level allowable, you could always start another one, or explore a new region of endgame content, or wait for the makers Blizzard to patch up the world of Azeroth and generate some fresh content. Or you could just swagger around a capital city clad in eye-wateringly valuable armour and weapons, and watch the newbies follow you around and beg for help with their own quests. And, of course, you could debate the rights and wrongs of everything from what robes went best with a particular haircut to the balance of power between different classes of player in the endless online forums surrounding the game.

World of Warcraft matters for all sorts of reasons, but perhaps above all because it did all of this much better than anything else around, or than anyone had really thought possible. There were other massively multiplayer games before it, and there have been plenty since; some are wonderful, some very popular. But WoW was the bridgehead through which a sub-culture rudely inserted itself into the mainstream of cultural life. It has proved—with hard, unarguable numbers (12m players, over $1bn of annual revenues)—that playing videogames is a very serious kind of fun for many, many people. And it has proved that this kind of fun is bound up with a number of other trends that are worth taking seriously.

The study of virtual economics wasn't born around WoW, but the notion that there can be such a thing as a billion-dollar international market in buying and selling unreal goods has gained common currency through it. WoW has now become a shorthand for the observation that real and virtual worlds can compete for allegiance in people's lives—with potentially troubling consequences. But playing a game with strangers can also be one of the most eye-opening ways in which it's possible to meet someone (my wife and I now regularly visit members of our in-game guild on the east coast of the US). And then there's the whole culture that has grown up around it. I defy anyone who has played WoW not to hurt themselves laughing at this particular episode of South Park—or anyone who hasn't to understand a single thing about it. The gulf between those who do and don't know what playing a video game is like is now one of the most telling cultural fractures around; and it's thanks in large part to WoW that it's no longer clear which is the more dignified side to be standing on.

What scares Google?

2009-11-15T12:02:00.001Z

A piece exploring some of the hazards ahead for Google, first published on First Drafts, September 2009

There's an article in the latest Atlantic that asks an interesting question, but offers no answers. "What Scares Google," by Kevin Maney, notes that big companies have historically failed to adapt their highly profitable strategies to the next generation of technology—IBM's dominance was scuppered by home computing, Microsoft's by the internet—and draws the lesson that even Google is likely to struggle to transform itself come the next great shift. But what will that shift be, and who stands to gain from it if not Google? Futurology has long been a mug's game, and Maney wisely remains silent: he simply wraps up with the pronouncement that you should "Fear what you can’t see, not what you can." Fair enough. But looking out for things that you can't see isn't half as entertaining as free-wheeling speculation. So here are a few thoughts.

First, given that the mobile internet represents a large slice of global technology growth, Google ought to be scared that Apple's "closed" iPhone system has thus far trumped any rival based on Google's open "open" Android platform, and that the App store is raking in millions of dollars a day for Apple. This is looking increasingly like a new model for online access that lavishes most of its profits on application and service providers, rather than on benefiting advertising providers. And, as far as money is concerned, Google is an advertising provider.

iPhones aside, the screens of mobile devices in general aren't too friendly to Google-style ads; and nor are the "alternative" internet browsing options increasingly being offered by devices like games consoles and TV boxes. In fact, a future in which almost every domestic gadget is hooked up to the internet is not a hospitable one for a company that relies on serving ads next to search results. There are lots of opportunities for micro-payments and subscriptions in a world where every device is hooked up to its own walled garden of online resources, but far fewer profits for old-fashioned click-throughs.

Second, Google sells its ads off the back of being the world's best search engine. Anything that defeats or undermines its search philosophy undermines Google at its core—and although it expends incredible effort on ensuring this won't happen, there are pitfalls. Take Twitter, a service that offers a snapshot of what people are thinking about any particular event at any particular moment in time. Twitter has grown into a major, searchable international service that makes Google look slow and stumbling by comparison, something that has never happened on this scale before. You can't effectively search Google to find out what's happening on Twitter.

Nor, to a lesser extent, can Google usefully penetrate the constant updates and messages that constitute social networking sites and online communities. In a world of wireless internet access via telephone networks, with iPhone-like devices in every pocket keeping everyone online every minute of the day, this kind of constant data streaming will increasingly become the way that many people use the internet. And, despite the success of its news service, Google doesn't do this kind of socially-networked streaming on anything like the scale or with anything like the dominance it enjoys with search.

What else? As I discussed in the pages of Prospect a few months ago, it's noteworthy that Google has failed to dominate the Chinese internet—the world's largest online community by some margin—as it has the west. Among other things, Google's liberal style has proved less popular with the Chinese authorities than a home-grown company's willingness to cooperate on censorship and official policy. And with more and more countries ruled by censorious regimes beginning to have a real presence online, especially in Africa and the Middle East, Google's admirable corporate philosophy is unlikely to find universal favour.

Then there's malevolence. Google is both huge and popular, to its great credit. Can this continue? History suggests it may not. Governments already fear Google, or at least what it represents: Google is a huge target, and likely to be hit especially hard by any future legislation seeking to regulate the internet (and it's hard to believe that laws regulating everything from virtual property rights to ownership of data, some of them bad, will not be passed in bulk in the future). It's also in the nature of most very large companies that they wane in their users' affections over time: something Google works very hard against, but that the increasing trickle of "Is Google evil?" headlines suggests may be beginning, at least in the media.

Then, finally, there's Google itself. And this at least is certain: leaving aside the fearfulness of what you can't see, it's always possible for anyone, no matter how successful, to destroy themselves in a fraction of the time it took them to achieve success. Just ask the bankers.

Book review: Superfreakonomics and On Rumours

2009-10-21T17:57:00.002+01:00

Review of Superfreakonomics, by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner, and On Rumours, by Cass Sunstein; first published in Prospect, October 2009

Over the past two decades, economists have been rediscovering human behaviour—real, irrational, confusing human behaviour, that is, rather than the predictable actions of the “economic man” who used to be pressed into service whenever modelling was to be done. It’s a field that has conquered not only the academies but also the bestseller lists and the policy seminars—and that, given the role played by human greed and ignorance in the recent financial crisis, seems either more pertinent or more ironic than ever. Now, two new books offer an opportunity to exercise a little applied scepticism concerning the science of human waywardness itself.

The first of these, Superfreakonomics, is Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner’s sequel to their 2005 hit, Freakonomics, which told a swashbuckling scientific tale about how the right data can explain even the murkiest behaviours. Freakonomics worked because its economist, Levitt—his co-author, Dubner, is a journalist—was a brilliant investigator of this “hidden side of everything,” as the subtitle put it. And the sequel is equally diverting. Did you know, for instance, that “the total impact of TV on crime in the 1960s [as it was introduced across America for the first time] was an increase of 50 per cent in property crimes and 35 per cent in violent crimes?” The authors don’t have an explanation for this disturbing statistic, but make a robust enough case for its accuracy to give this reviewer serious pause for thought. Similarly, while much of the section on climate change feels like old news, their debunking of the experimental evidence for altruism is a provoking assault on several sacred cows.

As some reviewers pointed out in 2005, Levitt’s economic approach is actually a pretty orthodox one. “There is no such thing as freakonomics,” wrote the American legal scholar Cass Sunstein in the New Republic. “Nor is there anything remotely freaky about Levitt’s approach. In assuming that people are rationally responsive to incentives, he is a perfectly conventional man of his trade.” The most exciting developments in economics, Sunstein continued, were those that dispensed with the idea of incentives, looking instead to “pervasive human errors and illusions.” This was what Sunstein set out to explore in his own bestselling book, Nudge (2008), written with American economist Richard Thaler.

Nudge was about “choice architecture”—altering the way choices are presented in order to “nudge” people towards a beneficial action, without actually banning anything or creating incentives. Presented as a “genuine third way” for policy (as opposed, presumably, to the ersatz third ways of Blair and Clinton), Nudge also offered a masterclass in political rhetoric. Here was the perfection of 1990s liberalism’s have-it-all aspirations—a moderate means of promoting radical change, and impeccably empirical too. The future of economics had arrived.

Except that, one year and a financial crisis later, this softly-softly approach towards “pervasive human errors” is already looking shaky. And its limitations are neatly, if inadvertently, traced by Sunstein’s latest book, On Rumours. Its text weighs in at a mere 100 pages, but On Rumours is more than just a book: it’s also a manifesto. This September, Sunstein was appointed Barack Obama’s internet regulation csar. And in On Rumours we find the curious spectacle of someone who wishes to regulate without ever mentioning the word “regulation.” What he favours instead is “three modest ideas” to make the online world a little less impervious to truth or reason: a general right for libelled individuals or institutions to demand the retraction of false rumours, the principle that “those who run websites would be obliged to take down falsehoods upon notice,” and “damage caps” to prevent free speech being chilled by the above.

The problem, Sunstein explains, is that the fine notion of the “marketplace of ideas” doesn’t work online. Rather than truth vanquishing falsehood via the superior currency of being not false, it turns out that false rumours actually gain strength from the balanced presentation of evidence. Sunstein describes the internet’s tendency to create “echo chambers” of extreme ideas, and identifies these as threats to “the proper functioning of democracy itself,” no less. Not to mention—as Sunstein does not, indeed, mention—the benefits of curbing the kind of hostility he himself experienced over what some bloggers (falsely) termed his own “secret animal rights agenda.”

These proposals leave the erstwhile nudge guru in a tight spot. When is a nudge not a nudge? Takedown notices represent, at the least, a firm shove. Of course, Thaler and Sunstein were never daft enough to suggest that anyone could govern by nudging alone. But it’s interesting to contrast Sunstein’s exasperation—“is it so important to provide breathing space for damaging falsehoods about entertainers?”—with Levitt and Dubner’s gleeful swagger. Sunstein bends over backwards to be reasonable but, when it comes to the anarchic democracy of the internet, it seems that neither reason nor persuasion nor the subtlest nudge can drive people away from certain kinds of lie. And this leaves him at square one, fighting the good fight against ignorance and extremism with the oldest tools in the shed: writs, fines and re-education.

Surprisingly, then, it’s the “conventional” Superfreakonomics that ends up sounding more resilient in 2009’s credit-crunched realm of digital anarchy. Its authors are not opposed to a bit of nudging, but their message is bolder and blunter than Sunstein’s: “People aren’t ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ People are people, and they respond to incentives. They can nearly always be manipulated—for good or ill—if only you find the right levers.” It’s reductive, old-fashioned and a little arrogant. But it gets results.

Why don't you Baidu it?

2009-07-04T17:53:00.003+01:00

An article looking at why native search engine Baidu beats Google in China, and what the larger lessons of this are; first published in Prospect, July 2009

How many internets are there? Pampered by Google, most of us have got used to thinking of the online world as one seamlessly interconnected whole: 30bn pages all instantly accessible via the right search term and the click of a mouse. Yet with the number of people online (1.6bn) likely to double by 2020, we need to start thinking about internets rather than the internet: about a world in which regional idiosyncrasies are as important as global trends and where no single website, no matter how good, can be the key that unlocks every door. And, as with so many other 21st-century trends, to understand this future we must begin by looking at China.

China is already home to the world's largest online community, with 298m users to America's 227m. And the most visited website in China is not Google, but a home-grown company still relatively unknown in the west: Baidu. Founded in Beijing in 2000, Baidu today commands over 70 per cent of Chinese search requests, with Google trailing at under 25 per cent. The fact that Google isn't top is not in itself unprecedented—outside countries that use the Roman alphabet, Google is often smaller than regional rivals. Baidu is especially interesting, however, both because the Chinese-language internet is so large, and because Baidu's particular package of tools and features has proved so resilient to Google's considerable efforts to catch up. It's a resilience that suggests both the limited ability of any one company to dominate an increasingly divergent internet—and some of the ways in which other companies might carve out similar niches elsewhere.

Google's latest Chinese gambit, announced earlier this year, was to offer hundreds of thousands of free downloadable songs within China—a canny attempt to boost its status in a country where 99 per cent of music distribution occurs illegally. (The Chinese government's laissez-faire attitude towards copyright borders on the supine.) Yet Baidu has largely held its own. Its music search and social messaging features are better than Google's and have been around for longer—Baidu began its life as a search tool for mp3s. The company also enjoys a cosy relationship with China's notorious censors as well as with many of the country's biggest online businesses. Then there's the fact that it simply feels more Chinese. The brand identity is aggressively patriotic—its name is from an 800-year-old Song dynasty poem and means "hundreds of times"—while its latest viral advert features a western interloper being vanquished by a Chinese hero.

China's internet is at once a more fraught and a more intimate arena than the west's. Censorship has bred many secret codes and evasions that allow off-limits topics to be discussed. These codes in turn have formed a satirical online subculture of their own—most famously in the form of the "ten mythical beasts of Baidu": animal names that look innocent enough in written characters, but when spoken are recognisable as profanities. (These include the elusive cao ni ma, or "grass mud horse," allegedly a species of alpaca, but actually a way of smuggling into discussions a phrase that when spoken sounds exactly like the Mandarin for "fuck your mother.")

As a character-based language, web pages in Chinese need only half as much text as western equivalents to say something—and are read in a different manner on screen, with the eye leaping far more easily from location to location than it does with an alphabet-based language. Then there's the immense popularity of low-tech bulletin-board style forums. These suit the patchy internet access in many areas, but are also easy to set up in a country with the ever-present threat that sites will suddenly be shut down on a censor's whim. Limited access to websites outside China has also helped to spur the growth of homegrown forums; and there's a dearth of quality international journalism, although local discussions are often expert and heated.

How much does all this matter? Those waiting for Baidu to take over the world will have to be patient. Although the company recently launched a service in Japan, its two operations seem insignificant next to Google, which supports over 100 languages and has sites based in almost 200 different territories. Yet even in the face of Google's sheer scale, Baidu shows how local, specific services can command both loyalty and profits—and shape the future direction of the web. For, as more of the world's citizens arrive online, the internet will become not just increasingly polyglot, but increasingly poly-platform. Growth in access via mobile phones, for instance, is far outstripping that via computers in Africa and parts of Asia. Google and other giants like Yahoo! are investing heavily in mobiles and in extending their international services. But no matter how good their products, their current level of global dominance will be hard to maintain in a larger, more diverse internet.

Baidu is likely to hold the top spot in China for some time. And, more importantly, there's every indication that similar services will be able to rule regional markets elsewhere. None of which means you should start shedding Google stock yet: given its record and resources, it's likely to remain the best worldwide search service, even in the face of competition from new arrivals like Microsoft's Bing. But global search is no longer the only game in town—and, while the last decade saw Google's growth match the rapid and seemingly effortless expansion of an open internet, we are now entering an era requiring more effort; a world of blocked and unreliable pipes, multiple platforms, and a wider divide between the types and qualities of internet connection. For all the technical marvels set to bring us closer together over the 21st century, the biggest online story may be one about our growing differences.

Thanks to Anthony House of Google and Sam Geall of chinadialogue.net for their help in researching this piece

Screen Test: video games and art

2009-04-30T11:25:00.002+01:00

A feature exploring video games as art, first published in the New Statesman, April 2009

Cultural realities tend to lag behind economic ones. How else to explain that the UK’s biggest (worth £4.5bn-plus in annual sales) and fastest-growing (at close to 20 per cent annually) entertainment medium still barely registers on the nation’s more rarefied intellectual radar? I am talking, of course, about video games – as the field of interactive entertainment still rather quaintly tends to be known. And the reason for its neglect is not so much snobbery as a gaping absence in our critical vocabulary and sensibilities.

When, today, we ask a question such as “Is it art?” we are no longer looking for a yes or no answer. The 20th century decided that urinals, cans of soup, recorded silence, heaps of bricks and fake human excrement could all be art, of a certain kind. Under these circumstances, it would be more than a little perverse to deny the idea of art to objects as lovingly crafted, as considered and as creative as video games. The question that’s really at stake is something more specific. If video games are art, what kind of art are they? What are their particular attributes and potential? And, perhaps most importantly, just how good are they?

I recently posed similar questions to someone who is very definitely both an artist and a gamer: the writer Naomi Alderman. Alderman’s first novel, Disobedience, appeared in 2006 and won her the Orange Award for New Writers. In parallel to her work as a literary writer, however, she also spent three years pursuing a very different kind of career: that of lead writer on the experimental “alternate reality” game Perplex City. To many authors, such a venture might have felt like a period of time away from “real” writing. Yet, Alderman explained, for her it was more a discovery that these two modes of writing were not only compatible, but symbiotic. I asked her whether she had preferred working on her novel or on the game. “I couldn’t choose,” she said. “I feel that if I were to give up either the novel or the game, I wouldn’t be able to do the other.”

It’s a creative interconnection Alderman traces back to her childhood. “My first memory of playing a game was around 1981, when my mum took me to the Puffin Club exhibition, a kind of roadshow for kids who read books published by Puffin. I remember they had a bank of computers at this one where you could queue up to get ten minutes playing a text-based adventure game. And I thought, ‘This is absolutely brilliant.’ I was fascinated.” These games were some of the first things it was possible to play on a computer in which plot and character meant more than a handful of pixels dashing across the screen. For Alderman, as for many others, the experience was closely associated “with stories and with the idea of being able to walk into a story”. And the dizzying kind of thought experiment that the best fiction can undertake – its gleeful defiance of the rules of time and nature – lies close to the heart of what video games do best.

As a modern example, Alderman describes a game called Katamari. In it, for want of a better description, you roll stuff up. You control, she tells me, “a little ball, which is effectively sticky, and you’re rolling it around a landscape picking stuff up. As you do so, your ball gets bigger and bigger. It’s almost impossible to explain how much fun this is, the pleasure of growing your little ball, which starts off just big enough to pick up pins and sweets from a tabletop and ends up picking envelopes, then televisions, then tables, then houses, then streets; until in the end you can roll it across the whole world picking up clouds and continents.”

Katamari may sound like an oddity, but its pleasures are typical of a central kind of video-game experience, in that they are in part architectural: something one inhabits and encounters incrementally; a space designed to be occupied and experienced rather than viewed simply as a whole. Players in a well-made game will relish not just its appearance but also the feel of exploring and gradually mastering its unreal space. Yet, in what sense is any of this art, or even artistic? Just as every word within a novel has to be written, of course, every single element of any video game has to be crafted from scratch. To talk about the “art” element of games is, I would argue, to talk about the point at which this fantastically intricate undertaking achieves a particular concentration, complexity and resonance.

It’s worth remembering, too, just how young a medium video games are. Commercial games have existed for barely 30 years; the analogy with film, now almost 120 years old, is an illuminating one. In December 1895, the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, showed the first films of real-life images to a paying audience, in Paris. This, clearly, was a medium, but not yet an art form; and for its first decade, film remained largely a novelty, a technology that astounded viewers with images such as trains rushing into a station, sending early audiences running out of cinemas in terror. It took several decades for film to master its own, unique artistic language: cinematography. It took time, too, for audiences to expect more from it than raw wonder or exhilaration. Yet today you would be hard-pushed to find a single person who does not admire at least one film as a work of art.

If, however, you ask about video games, the chances are that you’ll find plenty of people who don’t play them at all, let alone consider them of any artistic interest. This is hardly surprising: at first glance it can seem that many games remain, in artistic terms, at the level of cinema’s train entering a station – occasions for technological shock and awe, rather than for the more densely refined emotions of art.

Yet the nature of games as a creative medium has changed profoundly in recent years – as I discovered when I spoke to Justin Villiers, an award-winning screenwriter and film-maker who since late 2007 has been plying his trade in the realm of video games. Even a few years ago, he explained, his career move would have been artistically unthinkable. “In the old days, the games industry fed on itself. You’d have designers who were brought up on video games writing games themselves, so they were entirely self-referential; all the characters sounded like refugees from weak Star Trek episodes or Lord of the Rings out-takes. But now there is new blood in the industry – people with backgrounds in cinema and theatre and comic books and television. In the area in which I work, writing and direction, games are just starting to offer genuine catharsis, or to bring about epiphanies; they’re becoming more than simple tools to sublimate our desires or our fight for survival.”

I suggest the film analogy, and wonder what stage of cinema games now correspond to. “It reminds me of the late 1960s and early 1970s, because there were no rules, or, as soon as there were some, someone would come along and break them. Kubrick needed a lens for 2001: a Space Odyssey that didn’t exist, so, together with the director of photography, he invented one.” How does this translate to the world of games? “It’s like that in the industry right now. Around a table you have the creative director, lead animator, game designer, sound designer and me, and we’re all trying to work out how to create a moment in a game or a sequence that has never been done before, ever.”

Villiers is, he admits, an unlikely evangelist: someone who was initially deeply sceptical of games’ claims as art. But it would be wrong, he concedes, simply to assume that the current explosion of talent within the gaming industry will allow it to overtake film or television as a storytelling medium. Today’s best games may be as good as some films in their scripts, performances, art direction and suchlike. But most are still much worse; and in any case, the most cinematic games are already splitting off into a hybrid subgenre that lies outside the mainstream of gaming. If we are to understand the future of games, as both a medium and an art form, we must look to what is unique about them. And that is their interactivity.

To explore this further, I spoke to a game designer who is responsible for some of the most visionary titles to appear in recent years – Jenova Chen. Chen is co-founder of the California-based games studio thatgamecompany, a young firm whose mission, as he explains it, is breathtakingly simple: to produce games that are “beneficial and relevant to adult life; that can touch you as books, films and music can”.

Chen’s latest game, Flower, is the partial fulfilment of these ambitions, a work whose genesis in many ways seems closer to that of a poem or painting than an interactive entertainment. “I grew up in Shanghai,” he explains. “A huge city, one of the world’s biggest and most polluted. Then I came to America and one day I was driving from Los Angeles to San Francisco and I saw endless fields of green grass, and rows and rows of windmill farms. And I was shocked, because up until then I had never seen a scene like this. So I started to think: wouldn’t it be nice for people living in a city to turn a games console into a portal, leading into these endless green fields?”

From this grew a game that is both incredibly simple and utterly compelling. You control a petal from a single flower, and must move it around a shimmering landscape of fields and a gradually approaching city by directing a wind to blow it along, gathering other petals from other flowers as you go. Touch a button on the control pad to make the wind blow harder; let go to soften it; gently shift the controller in the air to change directions. You can, as I did on my first play, simply trace eddies in the air, or gust between tens of thousands of blades of grass. Or you can press further into the world of the game and begin to learn how the landscape of both city and fields is altered by your touch, springing into light and life as you pass.

“We want the player to feel like they are healing,” Chen tells me, “that they are creating life and energy and spreading light and love.” If this sounds hopelessly naive, it is important to remember that the sophistication of a game experience depends not so much on its conceptual complexity as on the intricacy of its execution. In Flower, immense effort has gone into making something that appears simple and beautiful, but that is minutely reactive and adaptable. Here, the sensation of “flow” – of immersion in the task of illumination and exploration – connects to some of those fundamental emotions that are the basis of all enduring art: its ability to enthral and transport its audience, to stir in them a heightened sense of time and place.

Still, an important question remains. What can’t games do? On the one hand, work such as Chen’s points to a huge potential audience for whole new genres of game. On the other hand, there are certain limitations inherent in the very fabric of an interactive medium, perhaps the most important of which is also the most basic: its lack of inevitability. As the tech-savvy critic and author Steven Poole has argued, “great stories depend for their effect on irreversibility – and this is because life, too, is irreversible. The pity and terror that Aristotle says we feel as spectators to a tragedy are clearly dependent on our apprehension of circumstances that cannot be undone.” Games have only a limited, and often incidental, ability to convey such feelings.

Thus, the greatest pleasure of games is immersion: you move, explore and learn, sometimes in the company of thousands of other players. There is nothing inherently mindless about such an interaction; but nor should there be any question of games replacing books or films. Instead – just as the printed word, recorded music and moving images have already done – this interactive art will continue to develop along with its audience. It will, I believe, become one of the central ways in which we seek to understand (and distract, and delight) ourselves in the 21st century. And, for the coming generations – for which the world before video games will seem as remote a past as one without cinema does to us – the best gift we can bequeath is a muscular and discerning critical engagement.