Those 29,000 attendees called over 35,000 voters in the space of ten minutes – enough for the Guinness Book of Records to certify the event as the ‘largest phone bank‘ in history – and all for very little cost to the Obama campaign.

The record only stood for a few months, because on August 27th 2008, a line of people six miles long – over 80,000, all told – waited for seats at Invesco Field in Denver. They were there for Obama’s acceptance speech as the Democratic nominee for the election, but once again, they were going to be called upon to help out the campaign with more phone calls.

These events were replicated hundreds of times across the country, and some were focused more directly on making calls. I recall hearing about one in which the speaker walked the attendees through how to make their very first phone call to a voter. Yes, you might be nervous, he said, but I’ll show you how to do it – and he then proceeded to make a live call through the loudspeakers. Suitably encouraged, the thousands of attendees made their own phone calls – and why not, since everyone sitting next to them was making a call.

Of course, the majority of phone calls were not made in stadiums or live events, but at home or in campaign offices. Ever tech-savvy, the Obama campaign aimed to track and analyse all calls made. Even in September 2007, during the earlier days of Obama’s primary fight, the campaign had developed online tools and leaderboards:

Naturally, there was an Obama ‘08 iPhone app, which provided news updates to half a million users and (of course) encouraged users to make phone calls to votes. Over 50,000 calls were made, a figure that doesn’t include calls made by people who used an iPod Touch, and whose calls couldn’t be tracked.

The campaign had a single, clear goal: get Obama elected as President of the United States. Accomplishing this goal would require gaining a majority of the delegate votes in the Democratic Presidential Primaries in over fifty states and regions; each of those states had different rules for selecting their delegates, some of them quite unusual and rather game-like. With the Primaries won, the campaign had to win the general election.

Not only did this require a massive ground operation, going door to door in every state – not only did it demand massive phonebanking operations, some of which are describe above – but it also needed hundreds of millions in donations to adverts. In the end, Obama raised over $600 million dollars, most of which came over the internet:

3 million donors made a total of 6.5 million donations online adding up to more than $500 million. Of those 6.5 million donations, 6 million were in increments of $100 or less. The average online donation was $80, and the average Obama donor gave more than once.

70,000 campaign supporters used their MyBO fundraising pages to raised $30 million from friends and family; donation meters, leaderboards, targets, goals, rewards, and achievements – all of these most powerful reward and tracking mechanism, ripped straight from game design, were applied to the business of winning the most important and most serious game of 2008: winning the US election.

And they won.

We Can Do Everything You Can Do, Only Better

It’s becoming commonplace to read that games can cure cancer, eliminate poverty, repair the climate, fix our government – and in short, save the world. By layering game mechanics like experience points, levels, achievements, and missions onto the real world, we can motivate, train, and reward everyone in the world to make the world a better place.

These games – known as persuasive games, serious games, and alternate reality games – have been around for several years now, but have recently come to prominence with the increasing popularity of online games, as well as notable speeches by game designers such as Jane McGonigal and Jesse Schell. The claimed power and reach of these games have been used to make some very big statements about using these games to tackle some even bigger problems.

I want briefly to look at the performance and nature of some of these games and see whether those statements are justified:

• World Without Oil (2007) asked players to imagine what would happen if an oil crisis happened – what would they do, how would they cope and respond, how would the world change? The game received massive worldwide coverage and is commonly cited as a good example about how to get people to think and imagine about serious issues. The game had 2176 registered players over 32 weeks. Of those, only 276 were active (i.e. submitted at least one piece of content); 170 players submitted more than one piece.
• Superstruct (2008) was “the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game.” Players would help “chronicle the world of 2019, imagine how we might solve the problems we’ll face,” and invent “new ways to organize the human race and augment our collective human potential.” The game had 8901 registered players; it’s hard to tell how many of them were active, but 554 ’superstructures’ were created.
• Signtific (2009) “is a public laboratory for developing and sharing cutting edge ideas about the future of science and technology. We invite scientists, engineers, designers, developers, researchers, technologists, and creative thinkers of all kinds to join the lab and help us uncover, together, what is impossible to uncover alone.” The game had 1764 registered players, and as far as I can tell from the leaderboard, only 250 were active.

Many online games and ARGs measure their success, at least in part, by the number of unique users and pageviews, but with only a few hundred active players, I don’t think these games did a great job in convincing people to participate. Games such as World Without Oil may have made an impact on the behaviour of the hundreds of thousands of people who visited their sites (e.g. becoming more energy-efficient), but it’s hard to tell.

• Urgent Evoke (2010) “is a ten-week crash course in changing the world,” with a goal to ”help empower young people all over the world, and especially young people in Africa, to come up with creative solutions to our most urgent social problems.” The game currently has over 8000 players registered and 3000 pieces of content submitted in only one week. What’s more, the game is truly international, succeeding in its goal to attract players in Africa.

Urgent Evoke is shaping up to be the most popular game of its type by far, which is a testament to its message and marketing power. At the rate it’s growing, it could have up to tens of thousands of players by the time it’s finished. A big reason why Evoke is popular is because of its simple and attractive Obama-like promise: “You can become a superhero. You can change the world.” The first mission asks you to write about yourself – what will you be doing in 10 years time?

There’s evidence that visualising your hopes and ambitions can you achieve them, in a sub-’The Secret’ kind of way, so I actually think this first mission is a good idea. I also think that by creating a social network amongst its players, Urgent Evoke can create connections between strangers and help spread new ideas, which is very admirable and could pay dividends in the future (which you would hope, for a game that costs half a million dollars).

On the whole, though, Urgent Evoke – and the rest of these projects – appear to be more like networked creative writing exercises than games that improve the world in a direct, measurable way. Perhaps they’ve some people have changed their behaviour as a result of playing, but it doesn’t seem like a whole lot.

Inspiration and Perspiration

I find games like World Without Oil and Urgent Evoke very interesting, because I like the idea of people writing about the future; you don’t know what you think until you’ve said it out loud, or better yet, written it down. In a way, these games help people think things through, which can only be a good thing. I also give a lot of credit to them for inspiring people, particularly younger people who spend a lot of time online (even if the player numbers need a lot of improvement).

Unfortunately, while inspiration is necessary, it’s not enough to ’save the world’, and it’s not correct to claim that it can.

As a former research scientist, I remember how fun it was to come up with new questions and experiments – and how hard and tedious it was to spend weeks and months repeating experiments late at night in the lab, running gels, centrifuging samples, becoming frustrating at balky equipment, and being disheartened when my results were inconclusive. At the end of the day, you need to do a lot of work to make even the smallest discovery.

Methods of Inspiration

There was an interesting survey on the Cosmic Variance blog recently, asking What got you interested in science? Books about science (both fiction and non-fiction) were the top two choices – more than parents/friends/relatives or teachers. Why? I think it’s because there’s such a variety of books out there.

I have no doubt that in the future, we’ll see plenty of new games and activities that motivate and inspire people in new ways, but the fact is that different things will motivate different people. Given that there is no single good way of inspiring people, it’s useful to have a variety of ways, and the beauty of books is that there’s a real variety of them, much more than games or movies which require so much time and resources to develop. Over time, there’ll be more games, and perhaps we can programme games to match that variety, but that will require a different set of tools and understanding of what games are.

Games can inspire people, but that means they can change the world no more – and no less – than stories or books or movies or TV shows.

Bruce Sterling on problem solving

Last month in Berlin, Bruce Sterling gave a talk called Atemporality for the Creative Artist, which was not about games. All the same, it began with an observation that can easily be applied the sort of general-problem-solving games I’ve been discussing:

Well, let me take a guy who I am very fond of, a very immediate, hard-headed scientific thinker – Richard Feynman, American physicist. Richard Feynman once wrote about intellectual labor, and he said the following: ‘Step one – write down the problem. Step two – think really hard. Step three – write down the solution’.

And I really admire this statement of Feynman’s. It’s no-nonsense, it’s no fakery, it’s about hard work for the intellectual laborer… Of course it’s a joke. But it’s not merely a joke. He is trying to make it as simple as possible. I mean: really just confront the intellectual problem!

But there is an unexamined assumption in Feynman’s method, and it’s in step one – write down the problem.

Now let me tell you how the atemporal Richard Feynman approaches this. The atemporal Richard Feynman is not very paper-friendly, because he lives in a network culture. So it occurs to the atemporal Feynman that he may, or may not, have a problem.

‘Step one – write problem in a search engine, see if somebody else has solved it already.

Step two – write problem in my blog; study the commentory cross-linked to other guys.

Step three – write my problem in Twitter in a hundred and forty characters. See if I can get it that small. See if it gets retweeted.

Step four – open source the problem; supply some instructables to get me as far as I’ve been able to get, see if the community takes it any further.

Step five – start a Ning social network about my problem, name the network after my problem, see if anybody accumulates around my problem.

Step six – make a video of my problem. Youtube my video, see if it spreads virally, see if any media convergence accumulates around my problem.

Step seven – create a design fiction that pretends that my problem has already been solved. Create some gadget or application or product that has some relevance to my problem and see if anybody builds it.

Step eight – exacerbate or intensify my problem with a work of interventionist tactical media.

And step nine – find some kind of pretty illustrations from the Flickr ‘Looking into the Past’ photo pool.’

(If you don’t get what atemporality is by the end of these few images, I probably can’t help you.)

So, old Feynman, who was not the atemporal Feynman, would naturally object: ‘You have not solved the problem! You have not advanced scientific knowledge. There is no progress in this. You didn’t get to Step three – solving the problem.’ Whereas, the atemporal Feynman would respond: ‘It’s worse than that. I haven’t even done step one of defining the problem and writing it down. But I have done a lot of work about its meaning, and its value and its social framing, combined with some database mining, and some collaborative filtering, which is far beyond you and your pencil.’

You could say this is unfair, since the atemporal Feynman has inspired other people to work on the problem. The question is, are those other people solving the problem? How would we even know if they’re solving the problem? How do you verify their work in a reliable manner? What if they start gaming the system?

Achievement Unlocked: President of the United States

The Democratic Party and the Obama campaign won the game – they got Obama elected, one of the biggest achievements there is.

Was there a big change in politics, in the way things are done in Washington? Some people say yes, other people say no. Did Obama’s election save the world? Clearly not; it hasn’t even saved the US. While major financial disaster may have been averted, the new healthcare bill hasn’t yet been passed (although I’m optimistic). Millions of people are unhappy with the massive bailout given to the banks, doing anything about climate change is still incredibly difficult, corporations can now buy ads to influence elections, and there’s the small matter of two wars going on.

All of these problems are incredibly important – probably more important than the election. So where did all the Obama campaign volunteers go? Why aren’t they still making calls and knocking on doors in their millions? It’s because they’re tired, they’re uninspired, and they don’t feel they can make a difference any more.

During the election, there was a clear message: Elect me, and together, we will change the world. There was also a clear method: if you show up and vote, and you donate money, and you drive people to the polls, and you persuade other people to vote for me, etc., and finally you add up all the votes, we will win. Simple as that.

Today, not only is the message unclear, because Democrats disagree on policy details (public option, bipartisanship, Guantanamo, tax, bailouts, protectionism, Afganistan, etc.), but the execution is also much muddier and less direct. Want to get the healthcare bill passed? Call your congressman – never mind the fact that he probably won’t listen!

The beauty of Obama’s “Change” slogan was that it was something that everyone other than Republicans could agree on. But “save the world” is even better; everyone, even Republicans, can agree that saving the world would be a good thing. The problem is that when you start getting more specific – as Obama has done – two things happen: people start arguing, and they also get bored.

Let’s get bored, first. There are many instances of massive numbers of volunteers coming together online to do large quantities of hard and tedious work. The open source community is one example; the 150,000 volunteers of Galaxy Zoo are another. I don’t think either of those communities believe that they are ’saving the world’, but they are doing lasting and valuable work that benefits all of humanity. Unfortunately, writing Linux and classifying tens of millions of galaxies both happen to be quite boring, so they don’t get much attention. On a simpler scale, donating money to buy mosquito nets or to loaning money to microcredit foundations are both good activities that also don’t get the heart racing.

Galaxy Zoo is interesting, because its creators have made an experience (I hesitate to call it a game, even though it could easily be converted into one) that has an isomorphic structure to the problem of classifying galaxies; the experience is also designed to work better than machine vision. Suffice to say that it is not easy to do this; often you end up wasting your volunteers’ time by getting them to do something that could be done by machines faster and better, or you don’t understand the problem sufficiently to create an isomorphic experience than non-experts can participate in (e.g. curing cancer). Bored yet?

Let’s have an argument, then. Here’s one: do you think climate change is a serious problem? In the UK, 30% of people think that it’s exaggerated. Imagine you think it’s serious: should we reduce energy consumption, increase energy efficiency, or develop cleaner sources of power? How much money should we give to each venture? Will you join my game to save the world by donating money to create more nuclear power plants?

Many of those who are against abortion or homosexual marriage feels that by protesting against them, sometimes violently, they are saving the world. I’m pretty certain that many Israelis and Palestinians both feel that their armed struggle is also fighting against each other both feel that they’re ultimately trying to save the world.

For the liberal-minded and progressives among us who use technology, it’s pleasant to think that we’d be the only ones smart enough to use a game to save the world, but saving the world is like the Golden Rule – it sounds like a good idea, but it doesn’t actually work in practice because we don’t actually agree on what’s best for each other. Just imagine what will happen when everyone uses games for their own causes.

It hardly needs saying, but games are a tool that can be used for the most pure and most evil of purposes.

Not all games are the same

In a CNN interview, Jane McGonigal talked about the potential of games to do good:

McGonigal makes the controversial argument that if people played more online games like Urgent Evoke or World of Warcraft, our society would be better equipped to battle big problems.

People spend a collective 3 billion hours per week playing online games today, she said. That number must be 21 billion — seven times the current amount — for our society to realize its innovative and creative potential, she said.

That’s because gamers are trained to believe they can win, and because they’re matched with tasks that are fit to their skill levels, based on what level they’ve achieved in the game, she said.

McGonigal wants to see people exhibit the same level of enthusiasm and optimism they display in games in their real lives.

I don’t understand the reasoning behind the 3 billion and 21 billion hours remark; surely playing Farmville or grinding away in World of Warcraft is not the same as doing hard work? Yes, there are some tasks that demand real skill and concentration, such as running a major corporation in Eve Online or a guild in World of Warcraft, and I totally believe that these people could spend their time doing something ‘useful’ instead, but these people are a real minority – perhaps under 1% of all active MMO players and under 0.1% of all online gamers.

People play games for different reasons, and a common one is relaxation and down-time. It’s just not credible to me that the 80 million people who play Farmville, two minutes here and five minutes there, would happily spend their time outside picking vegetables instead – at the very least, you would need a type of technology that simply does not exist yet, and when it does exist, Farmville will be even more fun and diverting.

As for the enthusiasm and optimism that people display in games, I’m afraid that a swift session of Modern Warfare 2 on Xbox Live, or perhaps 10 minutes of clicking squares in Farmville, would rapidly provide some counterexamples. Not to say that games can’t make people happy, but let’s just not pretend that it’s all sweetness and light online.

Some words on Jesse Schell

Jesse Schell recently gave a talk at DICE 2010 imagining a future in which game mechanics are infused in every part of our world. You’ll get points for brushing your teeth, reading books, watching TV adverts, mowing the lawn – you get the idea. There have already been plenty of criticisms made of the talk, but what really depressed me was Schell’s suggestion that because all of your activities and achievements would be recorded permanently, you might stop worrying about points and change your behaviour to avoid your grandkids seeing that your 500th book was some trashy chick-lit novel.

That’s his insight? That instead of becoming a better person because you want to get lots of points, you’ll become a better person because other people might be judging everything you do? I’m not sure what’s worse, myself; the former seems empty, and the latter seems pathetic.

I feel that Schell’s talk suggested a horrific lack of self-examination on the part of pretty much everyone in this supposed future. What is it that people want? Why do you want to mow your lawn? Why do you want to read a book? How many people even ask these questions of themselves any more? Rewarding points isn’t going to make the answers come any faster.

The Limits and Potential of Games

In all of this talk of serious games and persuasive games, it’s worth pointing out that many of the things I’ve discussed here aren’t games in any formal sense, but tracking and reward mechanisms that encourage certain types of behaviour. These behaviours can be general or specific, but from the examples that I’ve seen, the more specific they are, the more likely they are to deliver concrete results.

As far as games like World Without Oil and Urgent Evoke go, I think that the best we can expect is for them to help and inspire people to achieve great things, just as a good book or teacher might; the problem is, it is very difficult to track their effectiveness because we can’t know what those great things might end up being, and we can’t agree on what to measure. Is it by ideas generated? Points earned, connections made, dollars donated, papers published?

A good comparison is the scientific enterprise. The interesting thing about scientists is that they aren’t particularly motivated by money – instead, they’re motivated by recognition. But not any type of recognition, such as millions of TV viewers (scientists and academics are often looked upon dubiously if they get too popular) – no, they want the recognition of their peers, both those alive today and those in the future.

And so the structure of science begins to look like it could be isomorphic with a game structure that awards points based on the number of papers you publish, the amount they get cited, and the impact factors of the journals they go in. Unfortunately, this already sort-of happens in academia and no-one particularly likes it, since it’s not always apparent after a year or even a decade which papers are important, which results have been faked, and whether it’s right that journals like Nature should matter more than others. Then there are the scientists who believe that teaching is just as important as research – and those that disagree with them.

What is clear is despite the fact that the scientific process is slow and hard and tedious, and that many scientists aren’t paid a lot or given any recognition or reward, they still insist on working for years. It might help that they get a pay rise and some recognition and reward, but that’s not the point – there is obviously some internal motivation that drives them on (and of course this applies to more people than scientists, I just mention them because I know them).

If we develop games that make people rely more and more on external recognition – on achievements and rewards and points – they will not be prepared for when things go badly. Every leaderboard has the worst player as well as a top player. As Anthony Storr writes in Solitude:

Children who feel that they have to be compliant to the extent of partially denying or repressing their true natures are bound to remain dependent on external sources for the maintenance of self-esteem. Such a child will develop into an adult who will continue to feel that he has to be successful, or good, or approved of by everyone, if he is to retain any sense of his own value. This necessarily makes him especially vulnerable to the reverses in life which we all have to endure: to failure in an examination or in competition for a job; to rejection by an actual or potential lover; to bereavement or to any other form of loss. Such unpleasant events make all of us temporarily resentful or low-spirited or both; but, in the case of those who possess little or no built-in self-esteem, may precipate a devastating plunge into the hell of severe depression.

The way to cope with reverses in life is by developing resilience against the caprices of the world; to determine and internally maintain a steady direction and sense of worth, and to remember past successes and recognition. Yet I fear that the games we are designing, focused on real-time things that other people have decided to measure and reward – will undermine rather than build that resilience.

You can design a game that encourages resilience, although it wouldn’t work for everyone, and books and movies might work better for some people. You can design a game to encourage people to save energy, which we know can work – if people care about saving energy or climate change.

You can even try designing a game that will cure cancer – assuming you know enough about molecular biology to create an experience that is isomorphic to the problem, otherwise you’re actually inspiring people to cure cancer, which isn’t the same thing.

But can you design a game that will save the world? No. The question is meaningless. It is people who save the world, each in their own way, through perspiration as well as inspiration. It is not always fun.

Amid all the anguish and strife surrounding the BBC’s Strategic Review and the news that 6 Music, BBC Switch, and BBC Blast are going to be axed, I couldn’t help think of an alternate version of Back to the Future:

Biff Tannen: …Where’s my money?

George McFly: Uh, well, I haven’t finished cutting those websites yet, but you know I… I figured since people liked them and they didn’t cost so much…

Biff: Hello? Hello? Anybody home? Huh? Think, McFly. Think! I gotta have those paywalls. Do you realize what would happen if you keep on putting that public service content out for free? I’ll get fired. You wouldn’t want that to happen, would ya? Would ya?

George: Of course not, Biff. Nah, I wouldn’t want that to happen. Now, look. I’ll, uh, cut the online budget by 25% and I’ll only make sites that are about TV and radio programmes. All right?

Biff: Eh, that’s okay for a start, we’ll see how it works. Oh, McFly, your shoe’s untied.

[jabs his finger up to George's face]

Biff: Don’t be so gullible, McFly.

No prizes for guessing who the BBC is in this exchange (or Rupert Murdoch).

Most of the coverage of the Strategic Review has been about the audience efforts to save 6 Music; clearly it’s a station that many people are very attached to. However, the money saved by killing 6 Music is only £9 million, or 1.5% of BBC Radio’s £587 million budget. It’s baffling that the BBC would choose to kill 6 Music given its steadily growing audience and listener hours; surely, if money was the issue, they could have found that 1.5% among the other stations? But one might imagine that 6 Music was chosen on purpose, precisely to generate this kind of audience backlash and prove that the BBC actually does make valuable and popular content; but that’s just speculation.

Still, even if 6 Music were to be killed – which would be a shame – it would hardly spell the end for BBC Radio. But imagine if BBC Radio’s budget were cut, not by 1.5%, but by 25% – that’s £147 million. Here’s what they’d have to chop:

• Radio 1
• Radio 2
• Radio 3

and they’d still need to find £2 million to make up the shortfall. A 25% cut would cripple BBC Radio.

Or let’s look at TV, which the BBC spends £2.335 billion on. A 25% cut would require savings of £584 million, and for that, you’d need to axe:

• BBC 2 (including Horizon, The Thick of It, Mastermind, University Challenge, Songs of Praise, Newsnight…)

Alternatively, you could kill everything other than BBC 1 and BBC 2, which would mean saying goodbye to:

• BBC 3
• BBC 4
• CBBC
• CBeebies
• BBC Alba (BBC Scotland)
• BBC News 24
• BBC Parliament
• BBC Red Button
• BBC HD

Either way, the BBC’s TV operation would be devastated.

The BBC's Budget (click to zoom in)

Thankfully, no-one is proposing 25% cuts in TV or Radio. No, they’re just proposing it for BBC Online.

According to the Strategic Review (PDF), “the number of sections on the site (its ‘top-level directories’, in the form bbc.co.uk/sitename) will be halved by 2012, with many sites closed and others consolidated,” and “the BBC will spend 25% less on BBC Online by 2013, with a corresponding reduction in staffing levels.”

Some of these sections have been named, such as /celebdaq and /sportdaq (stock exchange games). I was amused to see /jamiekane among one of the games listed – it was the BBC’s first ARG, and it hasn’t been playable for at least a year, so I can’t imagine that shutting it down would save any money. Other sections include /bbcpartners and /openweekend – why not visit them and judge for yourself the millions that have undoubtedly been saved by axing them?

Oh, and “some sites will be consolidated under larger audience-facing propositions, such as /history or /drama e.g., /spooks, /robinhood.” So, does this mean that the Spooks and Robin Hood online content will be cut, or is this just some bizarre trick to reduce the number of top-level directories?

The fact is, the BBC have been remarkably vague about how they’re going to save at least £30 million from Online. I see two possible reasons for this:

1. The BBC does not have the guts to tell us what’s really going to be cut (and believe me, it’s going to be more painful than closing sites that are already closed)
2. The BBC have no freaking clue what they’re going to cut

Either way, it suits them not to be specific, so that their audience won’t have a chance to protest much. You might think I’m getting overwrought about this, but imagine if the BBC had announced a 25% cut in TV or Radio, but didn’t specify where those cuts were going to land – well, it’d be absurd and insulting.

The simple fact is that a 25% cut in BBC Online spending will effectively kill much of its services and content, and there are bound to be incredibly popular and valuable things among those. It’s common for people, even within the BBC, to say, “Oh, there’s a lot of shit on the BBC’s website, there’s no problem in cutting it,” and no doubt there is. But you could say the same about any radio station or TV channel – there’s plenty of shit programmes in those, and we’re not talking about cutting them by anything close to 25%.

One response is that cuts to BBC Online don’t matter as much, because fewer people use the BBC’s website. Nonsense. This would make sense if Online’s budget were in the hundreds of millions or billions, but it’s £177 million (or, confusingly, £122 million by some accounts). The lower number is on par with BBC 3’s £115 million, and Radio 4’s £109 million; I don’t know which of the three has the biggest audience, because they’re all pretty damn big.

But what really bothers me about the Strategic Review are its reasons for slashing BBC Online:

The internet then is not an optional extra: it is the future for the BBC, just as it is for so many other organisations. But precisely because the BBC’s online services have become so vital to delivering its purposes, they must be held to new and higher standards of distinctiveness, efficiency and openness. Under this strategy, BBC Online will create new content for the web only where it fits the five content priorities, delivers audience impact and is of demonstrably high quality and distinctiveness. The site’s quality and consistency will be improved with the closure or consolidation of half of its main sections; its efficiency stepped up; and its links to the rest of the web increased radically.

Two words: Bull. Shit.

How can the BBC say, with a straight face, that the internet is “the future for the BBC” while cutting its budget by 25%? Exactly how do you improve the site’s quality and consistency by closing half the sections? If it were that simple, why not cut everything the BBC does by 25%? I would be more satisfied if Mark Thompson was honest and said, “You know what, we just don’t give a damn about Online,” instead of these totally insulting weasel-words.

And I’ll tell you which “other organisations” see the internet as their future – News International. And if they don’t have to compete with free public service content, all the better. But hey, the commercial sector can do the BBC’s job just as well, right? Right?

Two months ago, when the BBC Trust announced the beginning of the Strategic Review, I wrote a post called The Death of the BBC, arguing the case for the importance of creating public service content online, and predicting the slow, agonising descent of the BBC into irrelevance if it didn’t invest in the internet and give its commissioners the freedom to do their jobs. I hoped that it might make a small difference. Obviously it didn’t.

And then Epstein says this:

Digitization makes possible a world in which anyone can claim to be a publisher and anyone can call him- or herself an author. In this world the traditional filters will have melted into air and only the ultimate filter—the human inability to read what is unreadable—will remain to winnow what is worth keeping in a virtual marketplace where Keats’s nightingale shares electronic space with Aunt Mary’s haikus. That the contents of the world’s libraries will eventually be accessed practically anywhere at the click of a mouse is not an unmixed blessing. Another click might obliterate these same contents and bring civilization to an end: an overwhelming argument, if one is needed, for physical books in the digital age.

You read that right: by Epstein’s logic, because you can access any book with one click, another click could obliterate the contents of the world’s libraries and consequently bring civilization to an end. I suppose I’d better be careful where I click, then – I might delete the internet!

The belief that storing words digitally is more dangerous than storing it on paper is a popular one among NYRB writers; a couple of years ago, Robert Darnton, Director of the University Library at Harvard, argued (a bit more sensibly, it’s fair to say) that digital storage, unlike paper, has to contend with the obsolescence of hardware and software at a rapid pace*.

*I wrote about Darnton’s article in a post here called Defending the Library of Google

True enough, but what many commentators who are not familiar with technology fail to realise is that digital content’s most powerful advantage is that it can be perfectly and rapidly copied, not merely to backups but to local and offline copies in hundreds or thousands or millions of locations around the world.

There are good arguments for keeping physical books in the digital age, and I hope that they continue to be produced and archived indefinitely, but the possibility that some Google employee (perhaps formerly from the Buzz division) might click ‘Delete’ instead of ‘Publish’ and thus wipe out every single digital record in existence is, well, just not one of them. Even the most durable book or stone tablet will degrade over centuries and millenia, and if there are only a few hundred or thousand copies made, they can be easily lost of destroyed; indeed, the main reason why we have the records we have from ancient Rome and Egypt are because they were popular stories or publication, so that many copies of them were made.

Equally, what we write and create today will survive, not simply due to the durability of the software or hardware (and there’s certainly room for improvement there) but because of the volume of copies – and we have the power to create not just hundreds of copies, but millions.

Thankfully, Epstein quickly recovers from his tragic misunderstanding and gives a quick rundown of what publishing might look like in the future; diversity will increase, texts will be available to and appear from new corners of the globe, authors will earn more, readers will pay less, and even better, publishers probably won’t die. It’s not a bad prediction, except for this nasty hiccup:

Some musicians make up for lost royalties by giving concerts, selling T-shirts, or accompanying commercials. For authors there is no equivalent solution. Refinements of today’s digital rights management software, designed to block file sharing, will be an ongoing contest with file sharers who evade payment for themselves and their friends, often in the perverse belief that “content wants to be free”—much as antiviral software is engaged in a continuing contest with hackers. Unauthorized file sharing will be a problem but not in my opinion a serious one, perhaps at the level that libraries and individual readers have always shared books with others.

In almost every article about eBooks and the future of publishing, you are guaranteed to see the ‘touring musician’ argument made, and Epstein doesn’t disappoint. It’s a seductive argument, one designed to make people think that books are indeed different from music, and that authors ought to be treated differently because they can’t go out and perform live concerts for money. Unfortunately, this self-pitying call for sympathy has been repeated so many times that it has blinded authors and publishers a revenue stream that’s right in front of their noses: physical books.

It’s long been clear that readers are willing to pay comparatively huge amounts of cash for a book, providing that it looks nice; just look at the availability of signed leather-bound volumes or limited edition cloth-wrapped books for novels that are not only available cheaper in paperback, but often completely free from Project Gutenberg. Even I, someone who’s ready to buy the iPad on the day of its release, will continue to buy physical books because I like the look of them. Physical books are the author’s equivalent of musician’s concerts.

It’s a good job they are, because I don’t agree with Epstein’s opinion that book piracy is not a serious problem. If publishers don’t settle on a pricing model that readers view as fair, then there is no stopping massive book piracy. In 10MB, I could email you fifty books; in 350MB (the size of an episode of 24), I could email you enough books to read for your entire life. But if there is a fair pricing model, which if you go by similar reductions in the price of digital music and games should come out to £1 or £2 ($2-$3) per book, then I think authors might be pleasantly surprised at their revenues.

Epstein is now on the home straight; he has a worrying stumble when he claims that “Amazon’s recent arbitrary deletion of Orwell’s 1984 at its publisher’s request from Kindle users who had downloaded it suggests the ease with which files can be deleted without warning or permission, an inescapable hazard of electronic distribution,” (no it isn’t; I have plenty of legally-bought books sitting on my hard drive, safely out of reach of any distributor) but he make some strong points about the near-term woes that publishers now face, such as the erosion of their backlist and the flightiness of bestselling authors.

Yes, it’s all looking good, until, a mere two paragraphs before the end:

Newborn revolutions often encourage utopian fantasies until the exigencies of human nature reassert themselves. Though bloggers anticipate a diversity of communal projects and new kinds of expression, literary form has been remarkably conservative throughout its long history while the act of reading abhors distraction, such as the Web-based enhancements—musical accompaniment, animation, critical commentary, and other metadata—that some prophets of the digital age foresee as profitable sidelines for content providers.

The most radical of these fantasies posits that the contents of the digital cloud will merge or be merged—will “mash up”—to form a single, communal, autonomous intelligence, an all-encompassing, single book or collective brain that reproduces electronically on a universal scale the synergies that occur spontaneously within individual minds. To scorn a bold new hypothesis—the roundness of the earth, its rotation around the sun—is always a risk but here the risk is minimal. The nihilism—the casual contempt for texts—implicit in this ugly fantasy is nevertheless disturbing as evidence of cultural impoverishment, more offensive than but not unrelated to the assumption of e-book maximalists that authors who spend months and years at their desks will not demand physical copies as evidence of their labors and hope for posterity.

I’ve got to hand it to Mr. Epstein – that’s one impressive piece of strawman-bashing. Why, every time I meet a fellow blogger, we’re always mystified that our dearest hopes of forming a “single, communal, autonomous intelligence” that will create an “all-encompassing, single book” have yet to materialise!

I’m not sure who Epstein thinks he’s arguing against here, but the last time I looked, most people of any age or technological persuasion were more concerned about whether a story was good than whether it was written by a monk in a cell or by a thousand people on a wiki (and, yes, the formerly is much more likely). To somehow translate the crazy dreams of – well, I don’t know, transhumanists? singularitarians? – to a contempt for texts on the part of all bloggers (and presumably anyone who creates or distributes content online) is not just insulting, it’s laughable.

Of course authors who spend months and years at their desks would like a physical copy of their book, and no-one is denying them that. But plenty of readers will find a digital copy more convenient, that’s all – more easy to search, more easy to carry around, to read, to quote, to learn from, to enjoy. That’s the horrific future that Epstein, and so many others, finds so frightening. That’s the contempt they have for readers.

The BBC is a world-class broadcaster that produces some of the very best TV, radio and news. It’s also an organisation that is desperately holding on to its past glories, while ignoring the potential and importance of the internet.

What is the BBC for? According to its Royal Charter, the BBC’s purpose is to create and distribute content that will “inform, educate, and entertain,’ – content that would not exist without a broadcaster that is publicly funded by a compulsory TV licence fee. As the Director General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, said recently:

The BBC exists to deliver [...] programmes and content of real quality and value. Content that deepens understanding, changes attitudes, makes people encounter the world with new eyes and new ears. Content – news, music, drama, documentary – which would not be made and which they would never enjoy if the BBC did not exist.

Look around you. Look at commercial media both here and around the world. Is it possible in 2009 to believe that – with all its undoubted shortcomings – if you took the BBC away you would end up with anything other than a big black cultural hole?

The BBC’s mission is truly noble. It spends millions spent on science and nature documentaries that are the envy of the world, thoughtful examinations on history and politics, daring and challenging dramas, news that strives to be fair and impartial, and unabashedly intelligent radio and music. If you took the BBC away, there really would be a cultural gap because I really doubt that the commercial sector would take up the mantle.

But, of course, that’s not all what the BBC does. It also spends hundreds of millions on game shows, soap operas, dramas, chat shows, pop music, and light entertainment – genres that are served reasonably well by the commercial sector. In theory, there’s nothing wrong with this, providing that the BBC’s programmes were somehow better or different than those on ITV, Channel 4, or Sky; but they’re not. Eastenders, Spooks, and Strictly Come Dancing may be great shows, but they’re not unique or distinctive when compared to Coronation Street, Primeval, and the X-Factor on ITV.

As it happens, most people seem perfectly fine with the current state of affairs, and they don’t care if the commercial sector is harmed by the BBC. To most, the BBC provides good value for money – it gives them a decent selection of shows that they watch regularly – some of which really are unique and ‘public service’, others which are simply entertaining – and they neither think nor care that this is unfair.

Nevertheless, the fact that the BBC openly competes with the commercial sector when it isn’t supposed to is a contradiction that has severe consequences. This contradiction is a legacy from when it was very expensive and difficult to make TV, and there were technical limits to the number of channels that could be broadcast; under those circumstances, it made sense to have the BBC create a wide range of programmes. But now that it’s easier to make TV and we have more or less unlimited channels via digital TV and the internet, the BBC’s production of decidedly ‘competitive’ TV and radio programmes seems less justifiable but somehow excusable given that it’s been doing so for the past several decades.

And so, we love the BBC for its documentaries and its worthy cultural content, and we ignore the fact that many show we enjoy, like The Weakest Link and Eastenders, are in fact perfectly possible outside of the BBC. Given popular sentiment, the BBC is not likely to stop making game shows and soap operas, so there’s nothing to worry about there.*

(*Except for the problem of the high salaries being paid to top performers like Jonathan Ross, which continues to draw negative attention from the media and the government. We’re outraged that a publicly-funded organisation is paying such a high salary to anyone, but it’s mainly because the BBC is competing with the commercial sector, and in the commercial sector, salaries can reach into the millions).

Putting aside the BBC’s anti-competitiveness for a moment, there are two other big problems.

The first is the issue of the TV licence fee and its murky future in a digital world. The second is the fear and lack of understanding the BBC’s upper echelons have of the rapid shift in audience attention to interactive forms of media and entertainment; that is, games.

The TV Licence Fee

Today, I could listen to the radio, read BBC News Online, and watch hundreds of hours of drama, comedy, documentaries and movies on iPlayer on my TV (via my PS3 or Wii), and I wouldn’t need to pay the licence fee. This is because you only need to pay the licence fee if you’re watching live TV.

If this sounds bizarre and unfair, it is, but this is the BBC’s take on it (by Ashley Highfield, while he was still working there):

…The number of homes that currently have no television licence, but that do have broadband subscription is currently estimated to be infinitesimally small. The chances are if you want to watch BBC TV programmes via catch-up over the web, you are also watching some BBC programmes at other times, live or time-shifted, via a TV set, and will already have a TV licence.

If we saw, over time, that some people stopped receiving live broadcasts at all, stopped paying their licence fee, but continued to consume televison programmes, solely on-demand through the iPlayer (or other players), then we might have to consider talking to the Government about Part 4 of the Communications Act 2003 and the Communications (Television Licensing) Regulations 2004, so that they can then consider whether on-demand tv viewing might be brought within its aegis.

For several days running, one of the most popular New York Times stories has been about a writer cancelling his cable subscription and streaming shows via the internet, saving him hundreds of dollars a year. Clearly it’s struck a chord among the Times’ cash-strapped readers, and where the US goes, the UK will follow. There is a real chance that increasing numbers of people will give up the not inconsiderable £142.50 annual licence fee and simply watch through iPlayer for free, and if this happened, you would probably see a ‘broadband licence fee’ to replace the TV licence fee. Sounds simple, but it isn’t.

Up until a few years ago, it was an fair assumption that anyone with a TV would of course watch the BBC, mainly because there wasn’t much choice; and since pretty much everyone in the UK had a TV, everyone paid the licence fee, so it wasn’t necessary to start encrypting transmissions or similar since there were very few people outside of the system. This also meant that the BBC could provide a whole range of other content via the radio, and recently the web, again with no encryption or authentication required, because it could simply assume that pretty much everyone was paying anyway.

But the internet is not like TV or radio. The internet is all about choice, and it’s perfectly conceivable (if still unlikely) that you could have a broadband connection and not consume any BBC content. This means that the collectors of a broadband licence fee would need to prove that you had, in fact, consumed BBC content in order to make you pay up. In practice, this would involve either ISPs monitoring customer traffic to see if they’d visited a BBC site (a privacy nightmare), or more realistically, users needing to log in – thus proving they’ve paid the licence fee – before accessing BBC content.

The problem with making people log in is that it makes the BBC feel uncomfortably like HBO – in other words, an optional subscription service. It would also link the BBC and the licence fee much closer in people’s minds. You might think that they’re already very linked, but on my TV licence, the BBC is mentioned precisely two times, in small writing, on the back of the letter. They’re certainly weren’t mentioned in the scary and threatening adverts the TV Licencing used to run. If the BBC begin requiring people to prove they’ve paid, there’ll be no avoiding this link, and just imagine the customer service and billing nightmares the BBC would now have to handle.

But I think the most powerful argument against any kind of licence fee is that we’re used to the BBC being ‘free at the point of use’. We want everyone to have access to the BBC’s content that ‘informs, educates, and entertains’, even if they can’t afford it, even if they think they don’t need it.

The alternative to a licence fee is a ‘BBC tax’.

The idea of a tax, instead of a licence fee, is fiercely opposed by the BBC Trust for two major reasons. The first is that the BBC wants to maintain its independence from the government, which will be much harder if it’s funded directly by the government. The second is that the Trust thinks it’s important for people to feel that they have a direct connection with the BBC.

While TV licence fees are common in Europe, the public broadcasters in Australia and Canada receive their funding through a government grant. The CBC maintains its independence from the government by being a ‘crown corporation’ (i.e. a state-owned enterprise), governed by a 12-member Board of Directors – who are, yes, appointed by the federal government. With the government picking the Board of Directors, the CBC sounds dangerously vulnerable to political intervention, no?

Well, how is the BBC run? It too has a 12-member Trust that formulates the strategy for the corporation, assesses the performance of the Executive Board, and appoints the Director General. Given the professed independence of the Trust, you might think that its members might be elected by licence fee payers, or in some equally non-governmental manner – but of course not! Here’s how the BBC tells it:

Those who apply to be Trustees are shortlisted and interviewed. The interview panel is chaired by a senior civil servant from DCMS (Department for Culture, Media and Sport). The panel also includes an independent assessor and the BBC Chairman. Their recommendation goes to the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, then to the Prime Minister, and finally to the Queen.

So, wait – the governing body of the BBC is ultimately approved by… the government? What happened to the independence?

The Trust would probably respond by referring to the BBC’s Royal Charter and Agreement, which sets out the corporation’s purpose and funding, and decrees that it should be free of any private or governmental influence. They would also say that the Charter is only renewed every 10 years, providing the corporation with some protection against the vicissitudes of politics

But let’s be clear – at the end of the day, the BBC is not free from governmental influence, unless you think that the Queen is the actual sovereign power in the UK. When the Conservatives are telling everyone who’ll listen that they’ll freeze or cut the licence fee if they come into power, and when the Trust and Director General are constantly feuding with cabinet ministers about BBC Worldwide and performers’ salaries, you know that there’s not as much independence as claimed – or at least, any more than the CBC enjoys.

And as for the second reason, if the BBC really thought it was important for people to feel connected to the BBC, we call it the ‘BBC licence fee’ and put the BBC logo on it. But we don’t, because that would look bad. Frankly, I don’t buy it, and I don’t buy the idea that a tax would make people feel any less connected.

With the licence fee looking increasingly dated and unfair as time goes by, it’s hard to see why the BBC Trust is spending so much time, energy, and political capital fighting the battle to keep it, other than through some strange notion of purity. Ultimately, the licence fee will change, and the BBC will continue to make TV shows that are generally free of governmental influence.

The reason we should care about any of this stuff is that the Trust’s battle is not without its casualties – and these casualties are what will really kill the BBC.

Online

The BBC’s Royal Charter from 2007 states:

The BBC’s main activities should be the promotion of its Public Purposes through the provision of output which consists of information, education and entertainment, supplied by means of television, radio and online services…

Sounds great; the newest, most-promising, and fastest-growing communications medium, the internet, is mentioned right along side those old stalwarts, TV and radio. Clearly the BBC understand that as audience habits change, so should their content.

Or perhaps not.

The BBC’s 2009 Annual Report reveals that £177.2m was spent on online, compared to £2,335.8m for TV and £587.9m on radio. Remarkably, the online spend dropped by £5m from the previous year; in comparison, the TV spend held steady, and the radio spend dropped by £11m. They don’t provide a spending breakdown for online, but a large chunk of it will be for the iPlayer and BBC News Online. This means that the total spend on original, non-news, online content is in the tens of millions; and much of that will be supporting TV and radio content.

Tens of millions? That sounds like a lot, but it’s not.

According to the 2009 Ofcom Communications Market Report, the average person watched 225 minutes of TV per day in 2008. That same average person spent 25 minutes online, up from only 9 minutes in 2003 (in comparison, TV watching increased by a mere 1 minute) – and this number doesn’t include time spent online at work, which certainly makes 25 minutes an underestimate. These numbers do not take into account any time spent playing games, or the relative depth of engagement between TV watching and internet use; 25 minutes spent surfing the web or playing games is clearly not equivalent in terms of attention to 25 minutes watching the TV while eating dinner or chatting with friends.*

*It gets worse. When asked which media activity they’d miss most, 51% of adults said the TV, 15% the internet, and 2% games. Among 16-35 year olds, that changes to about 39% TV, 20% internet, and 4% games. In other words, despite the supposed 9 times more minutes spent watching TV than online, everyone values the internet and games disproportionately highly.

Let’s be generous and take the numbers at face value: TV commands, at most, nine times more minutes than the internet. So why does the BBC spend13 times more on TV than online? And why is it reducing its online spend when internet usage is growing and TV viewing is stagnating? Why, in speech last month, did the Director General say:

Expect to see reductions in some kinds of programmes and content – a look for example at the current scope of our website – and a close examination of the future of our service portfolios once switchover has been achieved.

Here’s what I think. The BBC’s aversion to the internet (in matters other than children’s content, news, sport, (some) education, and delivery of video content) has its origins in two broad areas:

• The BBC’s tendency to creating content that competes with the commercial sector muddies the issue when the BBC tries to make online content that the commercial sector doesn’t
• The £150m calamity that was BBC Jam
• Massive aversion to risk and conservatism regarding major online projects outside of the core children, news, sport, etc area (and often within those areas as well)

And also:

• An apparent lack of interest, and a definite lack of experience and direction, in interactive media production and commissioning (call them games, if you like) at the very highest levels

The Conundrum of the Commercial Sector

I’ve already written enough about how the BBC competes directly against the commercial sector on TV and on the radio; just take one look at Bonekickers and ask yourself how that fulfilled the BBC’s core mission. But the situation is different online.

In 2003, the government commissioned the BBC Digital Curriculum (later called BBC Jam), an online educational service aimed at schoolkids, tied directly into the National Curriculum. It launched in 2006 and was promptly  suspended a year later owing to complaints from commercial educational software producers to the European Commission, who claimed that it was anti-competitive.

Following these complaints, the Trust and Ofcom conducted a review of BBC Jam’s public value, and decided to pull the plug, with only 10% of the content having launched. The full cost of BBC Jam was  £150m. Not all the money and content went down the toilet, but a lot of it did.

The problem with BBC Jam, as seen by the commercial sector, is that there was already plenty of perfectly good paid-for online educational services out there, and the BBC muscling in with its £150m of content would destroy their market. Conversely, the BBC would probably claim that BBC Jam content was going to be ‘distinctive’ from the commercial sector’s offerings and thus not competitive.

Given that I don’t know what most of the BBC Jam content was going to be, I’m not able to comment on this. However, I find two things very confusing. Firstly, it’s not clear why the BBC would decide to spend quite so much money on online education for schoolkids; it’s not as if the BBC is trying to convey much of the National Curriculum on TV or radio, so it’s odd that it would do so online. I agree that it’s an important area, but if the government really wanted to provide a free online educational service, it probably should have done it outside of the BBC – and really, the BBC should have resisted the impulse to take or use the cash.

Secondly, I don’t understand why BBC Jam was so harshly criticised when BBC Bitesize – an online GCSE revision guide – competes directly against a host of other online and offline revision guides. I suspect the answer is that more people complained about BBC Jam, but that doesn’t explain the difference in principle.

Whatever the truth behind BBC Jam, it’s clear that it spooked the BBC; losing £150m tends to do that to you. Unfortunately, it also made the BBC overly cautious about doing anything else online. After all, if you can’t do education online – the word that comes after ‘inform’ and before ‘entertain’ – you might as well give up and go home. Which is, to an extent, what the BBC did – it’s spending less and less online, and in order to prevent a repeat of the Jam debacle, all interactive content has to be unimpeachably ‘public service’, or even better, in the service of TV shows (many of which are anti-competitive themselves).

CBBC

I have fond memories of CBBC’s shows: there was Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, the broom cupboard, Blue Peter, strange Australian fantasy dramas, and plenty of weird cartoons. When I got back home from school, I’d often watch whatever was on until Neighbours. This habit continued until we got the internet at home and I basically stopped watching TV; alas, CBBC couldn’t compete with the attractions of the web.

And so today, if you visit the Children’s BBC website, it says “Free games, cool clips, and more CBBC fun,” and if you google CBBC, the top result is its games portal. Clearly CBBC – a brand that serves 6-12 year olds – really cares about games.

On the surface, CBBC turning into a major game developer and portal (and if you don’t believe it is, just ask some parents) ought to be cause for considerable alarm from the commercial sector; after all, it owns some of UK’s best known brands and it can cross-promote them between the TV, the web, books, DVDs and other platforms. But bizarrely, CBBC hasn’t met the same fate as BBC Jam. Everyone knows that its target audience wants to play games, and so unless CBBC is going to abandon that audience to Disney and Nickelodeon, who are busy spending hundreds of millions on kids games, it must make games.

OK, but why do we care about CBBC at all? If Disney and Nickelodeon are doing so well at entertaining our kids, why not let them get on with it and save some money by axeing CBBC? It’s because CBBC informs, educates, and entertains in a way that Disney and Nickelodeon do not. Not all of its games are good, and not all of them are informative or educational or ‘distinctly entertaining’, but many of them are, and so I entirely approve of CBBC’s focus on games. Not that they need my approval – it’s just the obvious thing to do.

Oddly enough, as soon as you turn 13 and leave the comforting embrace of CBBC, the BBC is no longer interested in making games for you. “You’re on your own, buddy – don’t let the door hit you on the way out. We hear there are some fun games at Miniclip and Kongregate, if you’re into that sort of thing!”

I’m being a little unfair here, but not that much. A couple of years ago, the BBC belatedly realised their utter poverty of teen-centric content and created BBC Switch, which is also a brand, not a channel. Switch has a few TV and radio shows on BBC 2 and Radio 1, plus a smattering of online video, and 13 mostly cheap Flash games, with a couple of Myst-like exceptions (once again, tied into TV shows).

I’ll put it this way: if you go to BBC Switch, you aren’t going to think it has anything to do with games, and you aren’t going to find many decent games, despite the fact that most teenagers remain avid gamers. And anecdotally, when I did some game testing in schools for Smokescreen, I found the teens were playing games on Miniclip and CBBC, not Switch. It’s not that the BBC can’t do games – CBBC shows that it can – it’s that not enough money is being spent.

And that’s just children and teens – what about adults? We play games as well!

The Case for Public Service Games

You may now be thinking, “Games?! Why is he banging on about games? Why should the BBC make Grand Theft Auto or Championship Manager? Isn’t the BBC all about TV and radio?”

The answer is that games are the most promising route for informing and educating not just young people, but all people. No-one thinks that the best way to educate kids or adults is solely through books and lectures; we know that it’s important for them to interact with teachers, experts, hands-on experiments, and with one another. Interaction is a vital part of learning.

It happens that when you make interactive content that informs or educates, you tend to make things that look suspiciously like games. This isn’t because you’re pandering to your audience, but because games formalise a lot of the learning, assessment, and reward structures that already exist in education – things like marks (scores), exams (bosses), textbooks (levels) and gold stars and awards (achievements). So when I talk about games here, I don’t exclusively mean entertainment (although, of course, many of the best teachers and lessons are entertaining); I mean any interactive tool that contains an objective and a goal and learning process. Those are games.

Unfortunately, the words ‘game’ and ‘play’ are associated with frivolity or worse in many people’s minds. What’s more, many people in power have no experience or conception of the idea that games could be used to inform and educate people; add in the incessant demonisation of games from politicians and tabloids, and you have a very negative atmosphere for public service games.

What many people fail to realise is that TV was also labelled as a cultural wasteland not too long ago, and radio, and even novels. When the very first English novels were being written (Pamela, Clarissa, etc) over 250 years ago, MPs could be found decrying the terrible effects these novels had on youths, who were wasting their lives away sitting on ’sofas’, with their head buried in these frivolous ‘fabrications’. Today, we make our kids study novels in school.

Like TV or radio or novels, there are games purely for entertainment; like Modern Warfare 2 and World of Warcraft; there are games that are both entertaining and educational, like Civilization, SimCity and World of Goo; and there are games that open your eyes to the world and edify your soul; like Passage, or The Longest Journey, or The Path.

Recently, I’ve been playing Assassin’s Creed 2 on the PS3, a role-playing game set in Renaissance Italy. In the game, you become Ezio Auditore de Firenze, the son of a nobleman in Florence who gets caught up in all sorts of politicking, intrigue, and general Da Vinci Code-style conspiracies. What’s important is that the game has astoundingly beautiful and accurate reconstructions of Venice, Florence, and Rome, each containing hundreds of real towers, churches, buildings, and palaces, complete with impeccably digitised artwork. Everyone I’ve shown the game to, gamers and non-gamers alike, has been genuinely taken aback by the simulated world.

And while Assassin’s Creed 2’s story takes plenty of liberties with the truth, it tries to stay as close to the historical record as it can while remaining fun. As a result, you’ll be rubbing elbows with the Medicis, the Borgias, the Pazzis, Leonardo Da Vinci, and dozens of other historical characters. I bet you don’t even know who the Pazzis are, either, but rest assured that their actions in the game are surprisingly interesting and close to the truth.

Someone who doesn’t know anything about Renaissance Italy (i.e. 95% of the playerbase) would have to try extremely hard not to learn something about the relationship between the Church and State, the independence of Venice, the Doge, the power of the Pope, the various festivals in Italy – and so on. Assassin’s Creed 2 manages to convey this education despite the fact that it wasn’t made for any public service purpose – it was made to make money. It just so happens that you can make money and be educational at the same time, and people appear to enjoy that; personally, I was so intrigued that I booked a holiday to Italy.

I spent somewhere between 15 and 20 hours completing the game. Try getting me, or the average teen or young adult, to watch 15 to 20 hours of a documentary about Renaissance Italy. In fact, try getting us to watch just three hours of a documentary. Good luck.

It could be argued that if Assassin’s Creed 2 is so wonderful, the market is providing great content already and the BBC can rest easy. Nonsense. The reason I mention Assassin’s Creed 2 here is because it’s exceptional: exceptionally good, and exceptionally rare. There is a gaping hole in the market for ‘public service games’ that inform and educate people of all ages; where is the Britain from Above of games? Or the Power of Nightmares, or Life, or the Reith Lectures, or the Newsnight, of games? We are seeing an entire generation go by without content that is suited to their habits and preferences.

If we think it’s important that people learn about WW2, or impressionist art, or the slave trade, or climate change, and the commercial sector isn’t providing that content at a good price and a good quality, then it’s the BBC’s responsibility to step in. By all means, the BBC should make a documentary or a radio show where appropriate for the content and the audience, but we may find that these subjects must be addressed through games in order to get certain audience, or simply because games are the most appropriate way (imagine a game that lets you run climate change simulations, or explore the Black Death).

And if we are happy with the inconsistency of the BBC producing TV drama and entertainment that competes with the commercial sector, then maybe we should be happy with the inconsistency of games that don’t seek to mainly inform or educate. I don’t mean that the BBC should produce the gaming equivalent of Bonekickers; rather, the equivalent of Life on Mars, or The Thick of It, or The Office – all distinctive and original pieces of entertainment.

There are many good people at the BBC who are fully capable of commissioning original, high quality, public service games. They’re smart, they’re skilled, and they’re motivated by a real desire to help people, but they’re hamstrung by the lack of a coherent and consistent games strategy. I have yet to see any BBC games strategy be articulated, and believe me, I have asked many times over the past few years.

Instead, all we have is fear, and a lack of understanding at the very highest levels about the value of games, and how to go about commissioning them, which I find tragic. I think the Trust just do not believe games are important. Either way, the BBC needs to decide whether it’s going to make public service games at all, and if so, it should spend proper money on it befitting its significant and growing attention among the public. It should also understand that entering any new medium entails risks that are ultimately justified by the rewards. We didn’t stop trying to reach the Moon because it was expensive, or the rockets blew up, or we didn’t know how to, or even because astronauts died. We kept on going because we thought it was important – because we thought it was worth doing. Not every game the BBC makes will be amazing, but those that are will make up for the necessary failures.

The BBC also needs to think about the distribution and marketing of games. Its TV content benefits from a captive audience, cross promotion, and prime placement on electronic programme guides, not to mention significant PR and advertising. Games currently do not enjoy such benefits, and as a result, the BBC focuses almost all of its biggest games on its biggest brands, which is a frankly uninspired and cheap strategy. The BBC needs to spend real resources on reaching the tens of millions of gamers out there; that means going out to gaming portals and social networks.

Or, indeed, making its own gaming portal. The BBC actually has hundreds of games online, the legacy of a decade of unco-ordinated games commissioning and throwaway Flash games. Most of them are bad, a few are very good. Unfortunately, there is no way to see a list of all of the BBC’s games; you’d have to visit each separate department instead. The reason is that a games portal might be seen as anticompetitive, which is laughable because:

1. No-one in the games industry seriously views the BBC as a competitor
2. CBBC, which actually does spend a lot of money on games, already has its own games portal

It is wilfully foolish of the BBC not to have a games portal.* Surely the BBC wants people to play its games? Isn’t it a waste of money to not have these games played? Or is it only worthwhile for people to games if they also watch the associated TV shows?

*(I should note that the BBC is doing some technical work in aiding the discovery of games and integrating them into social networks, but it’s no replacement for a true games portal, or a proper budget for games content)

Last year, gaming overtook music, and TV and film, to reach the number one spot in terms of money spent on entertainment. It is, without a doubt, the dominant form of entertainment for the 21st century, and it will become the dominant medium for informing and educating people as well. The BBC can either step up, or slowly and painfully die.

The BBC’s Choice

Last month, Sir Michael Lyons, the Chair of the BBC Trust, talked about ’streamlining’ the BBC’s online offerings:

…We want to question honestly what licence fee payers really expect to get from their licence fee and what they might be surprised to see the BBC doing in the online world.

Specifically, the Trust is asking the BBC to investigate:

Beyond the core offer of news, sport, education, children’s and the iPlayer, which parts of the online service are essential to the BBC’s mission and which could be stopped?

In particular, where should the boundary be drawn between the online expression or extension of BBC programming and the creation of new online content with a less direct relationship to BBC programming?

These seem like reasonable enough questions in a time when we’re all facing lighter wallets, but frankly, the Trust is begging the question. If online is to be considered for ’streamlining’, why not also TV and radio? Why is drama or entertainment not among the ‘core offer’ of BBC online, when they are firmly part of TV’s core? Why aren’t they asking if there is online content that licence fee payers want from the BBC, but they’re not currently getting?

And, in particular, what lies behind the assumption that BBC programming must exclusively originate from TV or radio? The implication that ‘new online content with a less direct relationship to BBC [TV or radio] programming’ is less deserving of funding speaks volumes of a Trust that cannot conceive of original online content that is capable of fulfilling the BBC’s public purpose. Or let me put it another way way; if it’s not TV or radio, and it’s not news, sport, education or children’s, then it’s not worth doing.

The BBC Trust is fighting a battle on many fronts. It’s trying to protect the licence fee and prevent BBC Worldwide from being sold off, in order to retain its budget. It’s also trying to justify the high salaries being paid to top performers, because it feels the BBC needs to continue making popular, and often anticompetitive, content, in order to keep the British public happy with it. Finally, there’s the fight to justify the BBC’s online presence. Unfortunately, the Trust has decided to largely abandon the fight for the internet, and leave it to the commercial sector, so that they can defend the areas they think are more important.

It’s brilliant news for the commercial sector; they understand the internet is the future, and while the BBC is cutting its online budget, they’re rapidly increasing theirs. It’s great for the BBC Trust as well; they get to save the BBC’s remit and its licence fee for another decade, and by the time that the internet and games have overtaken TV -well, they’ll be retired.

The BBC exists to make “of real quality and value. Content that deepens understanding, changes attitudes, makes people encounter the world with new eyes and new ears. Content – news, music, drama, documentary – which would not be made and which they would never enjoy if the BBC did not exist”. It’s here to make content that other people won’t. Shows like Eastenders, The Weakest Link, and Strictly Come Dancing are popular, but they’re not public service, unlike BBC News, documentaries, debates, and education.

If the BBC doesn’t continue its proud tradition of creating great public service content and games onto the web, and give that content the resources it deserves, it’s the walking dead.

It shouldn’t be hard for the BBC to make public service games. First, define a clear and consistent games strategy that defines what can and cannot be made. Second, significantly increase the budget to reflect the growing amount of time people spend online. Third, streamline the process of commissioning games, and give commissioners the same freedom that TV and radio commissioners have.

Fourth, the Trust should accept the risk inherent in this new medium, and commissioners should be more free to experiment – you could have the BBC1, the BBC2 and the BBC3, and BBC4 of games. We have some of the best game developers in the world, from Lionhead and Rockstar to brilliant bedroom programmers – the BBC’s games could come in all prices, from cheap to expensive, so any experimentation need not break the bank. Where sensible, some games might be related to shows (e.g. Doctor Who), while others might be wholly original. Who knows, you might even make a TV show out of a successful game!

Fifth, create a games portal and make it easier for people to discover the BBC’s games. Finally, take the successful games and sell them worldwide, just as shows like Top Gear are sold. These games could make money!

Every time I ask people at the BBC about games, I’m told that “things are going to change soon.” I’ve heard that so many times now that I just don’t believe it. Five years ago, the BBC commissioned the State of Play report on gaming, which revealed that – surprise, surprise – people of all ages and sexes play games. Unfortunately, nothing happened, and two of the top BBC execs involved in online and gaming – Matt Locke and Alice Taylor – left to join Channel 4, where they’re busy making a whole host of award-winning public service games that attract millions of players, on a budget a fraction of the size of the BBC’s.

What’s the future of BBC? Making TV and radio, as the audiences stagnate and slowly decline? Mark Thompson, the Director General, said there’d be a ‘big black cultural hole’ if you took away the BBC.

Do we really believe that the internet is full of culture, free to British citizens, that “deepens understanding, changes attitudes, makes people encounter the world with new eyes and new ears”? Do we really think that the internet has websites and games as good as Planet Earth, or Life, or Radio 4, or The Power of Nightmares?

If that content exists, brilliant: there’s no need for the BBC to do anything.

But if that content isn’t there, then it’s time for the BBC to get started.

You may have heard of DARPA before – they’re the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. In 1969, they created ARPANET, the predecessor to the Internet, and more recently, they run the DARPA Grand Challenge, which is a competition for groups to create driverless cars.

A couple of days ago, they announced the DARPA Network Challenge to mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet. Like the Grand Challenge, it’s a simple competition: On December 5th, ten large red weather balloons will be inflated and moored at at locations across the US. The first individual to submit the latitude and longitude of all ten balloons will win $40,000.

The purpose of the competition is to ‘explore the role the Internet and social networking plays in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems.’ Without the internet, it’d be impossible for all but the very largest organisations – the government, the military, Google, etc. – to win this competition; but with the internet, it’s possible for millions of people across the world to collaborate on a single goal.

The Network Challenge is not the first to test the mass problem-solving abilities of online communities; open source projects see thousands of people work on extremely complex problems over long time scales. Some of the tasks in Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) have brought these problems into the physical world; in I Love Bees, thousands of people answered payphones across the US.

But the Network Challenge is the first to pose such a geographically-massive task in such a small timescale. Those red balloons aren’t going to stay up forever – they’re only going to be moored for six hours. And while they’ll be moored at ‘readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roadways’, the continental United States has an area of 8 million square km and 6.5 million km of roadways (4.2 million if you’re just counting the paved ones).

It’s a deceptively simple challenge that ought to be reasonably straightforward to solve, but gets extremely difficult and time-consuming when you think things through. Online discussions about the Network Challenge seem to think that you could win this just by following Twitter hashtags and Facebook. Far from it. That might do for a few balloons in cities, but not those by a desert road that no-one ever drives down; and believe it or not, but not everyone uses Twitter – and even if someone does, that’s no guarantee they might not keep the information to themselves for bargaining.

Given this, $40,000 seems like a pittance compared to the effort involved, but the small prize money is really a key point of the competition. It’s not supposed to cover any expenses – in fact, it’s probably as small a sum as they could reach without getting insultingly low.

The reason for the small prize money is because DARPA are exploring the different kinds of motivation that can be brought to bear on this type of problem. If a team treated the Network Challenge like paid work, $40,000 would buy very little time. However, if it’s treated differently – like a game, or like a citizen-science project such as GalaxyZoo – money is basically irrelevant. And it’s those non-monetary types of motivation that DARPA will be keen to evaluate – which works, and which don’t?

So, let’s get onto the fun stuff – how do you win the DARPA Network Challenge?

(Caveat: This is all assuming that DARPA is going to make this hard. If all the balloons end up in cities or by highways, it’ll be much easier).

Positive Strategies

Satellite Photography

This seems like the easiest way – just get a satellite to photograph the continental US over a six hour period. Unfortunately, there are numerous problems:

1. The satellites with sufficient resolution to resolve an 8ft weather balloon do not have a wide enough image swathe to cover such the US in six hours.
2. The very best resolution you’ll realistically get is 1.6 ft, meaning an 8ft red balloon will take up about 19 pixels. That’s not bad, but that’s only under ideal conditions, so if you’re trying to automate the process of finding those 19 pixels with computer vision, you’re going to get a lot of false positives (see below).
3. Clouds, and weather in general.
4. It’s expensive.
5. Not sure how quickly you can get the images from the satellites – it’d need to be near real-time.
6. Highly susceptible to fake balloons (see below).

Satellites are clearly the coolest and tech-heavy solution, but basically impractical for all but the most remote and inaccessible areas…

Aerial Photography

OK, so satellite photography is not the solution. What about planes though? You can get better resolution and near real-time data. But…

1. Planes don’t move fast enough, and the image swathe isn’t big enough.
2. Clouds, and weather in general.
3. It’s expensive.
4. Highly suspectible to fake balloons (see below).

Having said this, I wouldn’t be surprised if aerial photography, like satellite photography, played a role in winning the challenge.

Crowdsourced Data

Let’s forget about looking from above at the moment, and consider a ground-level solution. Why not just get lots of pepole to keep an eye out for the balloons and tell you if they find one? This strategy isn’t susceptible to fake balloons, so that’s a plus, at least.

1. 4.2 million km – that’s a hell of a lot of road. OK, so you don’t have to walk or drive down all of them, particularly in cities, but to have a reasonable level of confidence of finding more than a few balloons, you’re talking about tens of thousands of hours of driving. So you might be able to drum up a few thousand people to drive down specific roads on a Saturday, but they can only cover a fraction of the area required.
2. So there’s a big publicity and marketing challenge here – say you make some iPhone app or SMS number for people to report sightings; how do you get sufficient numbers of people (e.g. tens of thousands) to use yours? Because it certainly won’t be the only one out there.
3. Very noisy data – expect thousands of false sightings

Let’s face it – you’re going to have to use crowdsourced data whether you like it or not. And you’re going to be in for a world of pain…

Negative Strategies (aka 4CHAN)

Winning the Network Challenge isn’t just about finding those ten balloons – you need to find them first. To do that, you can either do the job really quickly, or slow everyone else down. A nice way of doing this is through generating false positives:

• Identical red weather balloons: These will fool everyone and cause a lot of grief; unfortunately, they’re comparatively expensive, and you’ll have to impersonate a DARPA representative.
• Red circles: Make a 2D red circle with an 8ft diameter and put it on the ground; it’ll look pretty similar to a red balloon from above. You could even paint it with a shadow to annoy sat and aerial photography users even more.
• False reports: Want to mess up a crowdsourced strategy? Send in false data! For bonus points, get your friends to corroborate your false reports with photoshopped photos and so on.
• Destroying balloons: If you find a balloon, make a note of its location, and destroy it. Don’t let those DARPA nerds stop you – just use an airgun!

I predict a veritable firehose of false positives being entered into the Network Challenge; it’s just too easy and too fun to put up fake balloons and send in false reports.

How to Win

Realistically, if you’re serious, you’re going to use a combination of these strategies. If I lived in the US and had more spare time, here’s what I’d do:

1. Use satellite and aerial photography for remote and inaccessible regions, then use people + machines to spot the balloons.
2. For most areas, use crowdsourced sightings by creating an application that integrates sightings via every and any communications medium available; voice, SMS, MMS, email, Twitter, IM, etc. When you get a sighting, get other people to corroborate it from different angles. Have an algorithm that assigns a reliability value to each location based on the incoming information.
3. Recognise useful contributors and make stars out of hard-working reliable ones. Use points, and turn it into a game.
4. Give people a reason to be involved. Finding ten weather balloons is not cool enough, and $40,000 doesn’t go very far. Give the prize to charity, or make the challenge part of a story. Make people care.
5. Don’t mess about too much with putting up fake balloons – it’s a waste of time. You’d be better off refining your algorithms and getting more contributors.
6. Don’t try and restrict your contributor base; to win, you need scale. This means a lot of false data, but you’d get it anyway.

This all sounds very hard, but there’s one good piece of news – the required accuracy is only one arc minute, which is about 1.86 km; a pretty big area, all things considered. You don’t need people with GPS devices to report, you could do fairly well with just a street name.

Unanswered Questions and Wildcards

• It’s not clear how many times you’re allowed to submit entries on the site. If you had a list of, say, 30 sightings you were reasonably confident in, could you just send a few hundred thousand entries to cover all possible combinations of the ten real balloons?
• Will there a spam cut-off limit, so you can only submit one entry a second?
• What if someone performs a DDOS attack on the Network Challenge website to prevent other people from entering? (OK, it’s DARPA so you’d think they’d be ready for this, but still…)
• Will people unaware of the challenge report balloons anyway? If so, the challenge becomes rather easier.
• Will a rich person or organisation (e.g. Google) throw money or time at the problem, for the kudos? If this happens, it won’t be as boring as it seems, since I’d be impressed with any organisation nimble enough to shift resources to a problem like this within a mere few weeks.
• Will anyone try a social engineering attack against DARPA to steal the location data? When we ran our Perplex City treasure hunt, with a $200,000 prize, we were paranoid about being followed. While the Network Challenge is less money, it’s arguably more kudos.
• Is DARPA going to make this easy, or hard? (see below)

My Prediction

The Network Challenge will either be solved reasonably quickly, or not at all, and I think it’ll come down to the amount of false positives being entered into the system. Any balloons in or near metropolitan areas will get sighted very rapidly, but others will be very tricky to find. Teams will require scale in order to win – tens or hundreds of thousands of ‘players’, all feeding in data; unfortunately, the most visible team will be the most tempting target for griefers, and they’ll have to deal with a lot of crap, so with the balloons only being up for six hours, it’s not clear whether they’ll be able to corroborate sightings in time.

If individual teams can’t, teams will eventually end up pooling their data in an attempt to weed out false positives. That could take time, but if you’re allowed to send in unlimited entries, maybe this won’t be so bad.

Personally, I welcome the false sightings and griefing; it might be annoying, but that’s life, and if you can beat them, the victory will be much sweeter!

It’s really up to DARPA as to how difficult they make this challenge. If they put most of the balloons near cities and highways, the challenge will be solved within hours. If they’re placed randomly, it’ll be very hard. Very possibly they’ll make it easy to start with this year, and then ratchet up the difficulty, which is sensible (but personally quite disappointing).

Final Thoughts

The Network Challenge is brilliant – it’s the sort of hard-to-solve but easy-to-describe challenge requiring strategy and mass co-ordination that is catnip to someone like me. It also represents the future of work, and demonstrates type of skills that will be most valuable in the future – in that sense, it reminds me of Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End.

Also, the great thing about the Network Challenge is that it costs DARPA very little to run; you’ve got a website and ten weather balloons. If someone does win, $40k is a small price to pay for witnessing such an original type of problem-solving; and if no-one wins, then they don’t have to pay up.

What about a UK version?

While people of any nationality can enter the Network Challenge, and much of the work will be done online, it’s very much a US-centric task.

Happily, if you are interested in this sort of thing, I’ve been planning a similar sort of challenge with Philip Trippenbach. It’ll be much easier, but no less challenging and fun, and it’ll happen in London before Christmas; you’ll also be able to follow and participate online. Email me if you’re interested!

A common complaint of Transition is that it leaves too many unanswered questions. It certainly seems that way, but a closer reading of the novel suggest that answers to most – if not all – of those questions can be uncovered, and it’s quite fun to speculate on them.

Since there isn’t much speculation about the book online yet, I’m starting a resource here where I explore some of the questions raised. Obviously it contains MEGA SPOILERS so if you haven’t read the book, you really should go away, right now.

I’ve tried to root all of these speculations in the text of the book, with relevant quotes. I’d be very happy if anyone with alternative theories contributed in the comments – I’ll then add them to the blog post if appropriate. I intend to keep on updating this post as more and better theories are generated.

So, let’s start:

Who (or what) is Mrs. Mulverhill?

There are several unusual things about Mrs. Mulverhill:

1. She almost always wears a veil. Even when she isn’t, her eyes are often obscured, e.g. “hair veiling her face.” Why? “Madame d’Ortolan had always assumed this was mere affectation, but perhaps the lady wished to conceal some angle from which she looked less than racially pure, when the race concerned was human. Who knew?”
2. She never provides a first name.
3. We get to see her eyes on two occasions. Adrian Cubbish sees “catlike slits for pupils, not round ones,” and Temudjin Oh sees “slitlike pupils in amber irises.”
4. Adrian Cubbish describes her as an astonishingly good dancer: “…she moved round me, curling and uncurling and rising and falling, circling about me like she was caressing my personal space.”

Let’s face it: Mrs Mulverhill has something to do with cats. She has cat’s eyes, and she dances like a cat. Her clothes often seem catlike (all black, etc) and she occasionally speaks in a ‘purr’. Madame d’Ortolan doesn’t even think she’s fully human. And interestingly, her lack of a first name may then be related to the fact that Madame d’Ortolan’s cats do not have first names either (M. Pamplemousse, and Mme Frenolle). All of this has a bearing on the next question…

Of course, Mrs Mulverhill isn’t actually a cat – she looks like a human. But Adrian Cubbish does find it hard to place her: “The face behind the veil looked Asian, I thought. Maybe Chinese, though less flat than Chinese faces usually are. Sort of triangular. Eyes too big to be Chinese, too. Cheekbones too high as well. Actually, maybe not Asian at all.” Later, he says, “You look a bit alien yourself, Mrs M. No offence.”

Adrian’s difficulty may simply be down to the fact that Mrs Mulverhill comes from another world in which the standard racial types are different. However, there is a tantalising possibility is that she’s from Calbefraques – a world in which the Mongols had a much greater influence over world history, and could conceivably have mixed genes in interesting ways. Does this have any significance? It’s not clear yet.

Are Mrs. Mulverhill and Madame d’Ortolan the same person?

Perhaps – and if they aren’t, they’re certainly related (but not necessarily in a familial sense).

The word ‘Ortolan’ comes from ‘Ortolan Bunting‘, the name of a bird that’s eaten in a rather interesting way:

For centuries, a rite of passage for French gourmets has been the eating of the Ortolan. These tiny birds – captured alive, force-fed, then drowned in Armagnac – were roasted whole and eaten that way, bones and all, while the diner draped his head with a linen napkin to preserve the precious aromas and, some believe, to hide from God. – The Wine Spectator

Draping a linen napkin over your head to hide from God – it’s a bit like wearing a veil, no? And Mrs Mulverhill always wears a veil! Very curious, but not conclusive of any extraordinary relationship. (Thanks to Naomi Alderman for spotting the ‘Ortolan Bunting’ connection!)

But this isn’t the only time veils are referred to in the novel. When Temudjin Oh first meets Mrs Mulverhill (incognito, at the Venice ball as a pirate), he notes a particular painting of a Doge that’s covered by a black veil. Mrs Mulverhill explains:

“He was Doge for a year in the mid thirteen hundreds [...] He’s covered up because he’s in eternal disgrace. He tried to make a coup to sweep away the republic and have himself declared prince.”

“But he was already Doge,” I said.

She shrugged. “A prince or a king would have had more power. Doges were elected. For life, but with many restrictions. They were not allowed to open their own mail. It had first to be read by the censor. Too, they were not allowed to conduct discussions with foreign diplomats alone. A committee was required. They had much power but they were also figureheads.” [...]

“I thought perhaps he was only veiled for the ball,” I said.

She shook her head. “In perpetuity. He was condemned to Damnatio Memoriae. And mutilated, and beheaded, of course.”

“Of course.” I nodded gravely.

She might have stiffened a little. Was I talking to a local?

The story of the Doge almost exactly parallels that of Madame d’Ortolan, who seeks to supplant the Central Council to gain more power, and is ultimately shot in the head – a modern equivalent of beheading. This doesn’t mean Mrs Mulverhill and d’Ortolan are related; Mrs Mulverhill might simply think it’s poetic justice for d’Ortolan to have the same fate as the Doge, but it is curious – as is the use of the veil (incidentally, Banks didn’t make this up – the disgraced Doge, the veil, etc, it’s all true).

What I find most interesting is the astonishing amount of information Mrs Mulverhill knows about Madame d’Ortolan’s origins, history, intentions, and even thought processes. Madame d’Ortolan herself remarks that Mrs Mulverhill is “rapidly approaching the stage where she will know what I intend to do shortly before I do myself.” It’s possible that Mrs Mulverhill simply found out all of this through hard work, but it boggles the mind that anyone could know quite as much as she does about d’Ortolan (and still be alive, that is).

So here’s my theory of how they’re related: Mrs Mulverhill is an older version of Madame d’Ortolan. After d’Ortolan is ‘headshotted’ at the end, she somehow survives and becomes Mrs Mulverhill. In the process of getting a new head  (by flitting to the world of the humanoid cats, I don’t know), she gains her characteristic eyes. I suppose another, more believeable mechanism might relate to the fact that d’Ortolan has cats on the brain and this influenced her post-headshot flit.

Anyway, this new Mrs Mulverhill is filled with remorse at what she’s done, and wants to stop herself, but as we know, time travel isn’t possible. Instead, she finds a lagging world (or worlds) as similar as possible to the one she’s left, and she attempts to stop that world’s version of Madame d’Ortolan. Being a different world though, Mrs Mulverhill can’t be entirely sure of what will happen this time around, which makes things a little more difficult.

Of course, you may not believe any of this speculation. Instead, you’ll just have to read Banks’ own heavy-handed clue right at the start of the book, where the narrator (Temudjin Oh) says “…Mrs Mulverhill herself said that, I think. Or it might have been Madame d’Ortolan – I get the two confused sometimes.”

Why is Calbefraques unique? and ALIENS!?!11

Calbefraques was the ultimate Open world, the mirror image of the numberless perfectly Closed Earths where nobody knew about the many worlds; a place where possibly every single adult soul who walked its surface knew that it was merely one world within an infinitude of worlds, and a nexus at that, a stepping-off point for as much of that infinitude as it was possible to image.

And a world, an Earth that was close to unique. Logically there had to be other versions of this Earth that were close to the Calbefraques that we knew, but we seemed to be unable to access them. It was as though by being the place that could act as a gateway to any other version of Earth, Calbefraques had somehow outpaced all the other versions of itself that would otherwise have existed. It seemed that in the same way that the true consciousness of a transitioner could only be in one world at a time, there could only be one world that was perfectly Open, and that world, that unique Earth was this one, called Calbefraques.

Later on, Mrs Mulverhill says this:

Plus I believe that – at the behest of Madame d’Ortolan – there is something else, some already hidden agenda [The Central Council is] working to – the uniqueness of human intelligent life and the singular nature of Calbefraques itself may well point to the nature of that secret – but I never got close enough to the centre of power to find out.

I find this hard to believe; Mrs Mulverhill almost certainly does know why Calbefraques is unique, and how it’s related to the uniqueness of human (as opposed to non-human) intelligent life. The clues lie in her conversation with Temudjin Oh:

I see consciousness as a matter of focus. It’s like a magnifying glass concentrating light rays on a point on a surface until it bursts into flame – the flame being consciousness. It is the focusing of reality that creates self-awareness [...] There is no intelligence without context [...] Just as a magnifying glass effectively casts a partial shadow around the point of its focus – the debt required to produce the concentration elsewhere – so meaning is sucked out of our surroundings, concentrated in ourselves, in our minds.

This conversation is so important that it’s repeated towards the end of the book, after Temudjin’s first septus-less flit, when his powers are expanding and he apparently flits to another world where he’s having the same conversation again.

So what does it mean? On the surface, Mrs Mulverhill is talking about human consciousness and how it comes into effect. At the same time, though, she’s talking about humanity as a whole – she’s saying that humanity is focusing its collective attention, spread across the many worlds, onto itself. This focus is what results in there being only one Calbefraques – it’s why it’s totally unique, the point of the focus.

But there’s a debt involved, a shadow cast on the surroundings. For humanity, that debt is paid by the rest of the universe, which has any meaning sucked away from it – and by meaning, we’re talking about stuff that’s interesting. Like aliens. And so all the talk of solipsism in the book refers to the fact that human consciousness and attention is required to make them exist.

(this reminds me of Asimov’s The End of Eternity, which has a similar message)

All of this is confirmed by the next two lines:

“I’d have said that we give, even… Even that we radiate, emanate meaning. We ascribe context to external things. Without us they exist, I suppose -”

“Do they?” she murmured.

Clearly Mrs Mulverhill doesn’t think that ‘external things’ exist independent of our observation; that it really does matter that we always look inwardly, depriving the rest of the universe (and aliens!) from existence and meaning. Hence the importance of SETI, which Mrs Mulverhill claims d’Ortolan is trying to shut down. Finally:

“- but we give them names and we see the systems and processes that link them. We contextualise them within their setting. We make them more real by knowning what they mean and represent.”

“Hmm [...] Maybe. [...] But everything requires a leavening. Everything.”

In other words, Mrs Mulverhill believes that humanity needs to observe and attend to the external universe to effectively kickstart it into existence. Once we’ve done that, perhaps it can continue on its own, but our attention and imagination is required.

To return to the subject of Calbefraque’s uniqueness, Mrs Mulverhill says this in her lecture:

The closer you go, the deeper you look and the higher you turn your magnification, the more of the same you see. Only the scale has changed.

It might be useful to see Calbefraques as being the ultimate magnification of humanity’s focus towards itself – it’s just the same, and it’s populated purely by flitters – people who are defined by their selfishness. There can’t be more than one Calbefraques because you can’t zoom in any more (and obviously humanity’s problem is that it isn’t zooming out). Madame d’Ortolan wants to prevent any zooming out, as she says in her final confrontation with Mrs Mulverhill:

…It’s all about power, you fuckwit bitch. Not mine; humanity’s. no diminution, no subjugation, no ‘contextualisation’, no aboriginalisation. [...] [I'm] a human racist, and proud to be so.

Why do Transitionaries need to be confident and selfish?

Mrs Mulverhill says of transitionaries:

We try to choose pragmatic, selfish people for such positions [...] All our best people are highly self-centred. It’s the only thing that holds them together in the chaos.

Transitionaries need to concentrate on themselves and keep their imagination on track, otherwise they might flit to undesirable places. Perhaps this is why Temudjin is such an expert flitter – he starts out being self-centred, which allows him to get started, but then becomes less selfish and thus more able to expand his abilities. d’Ortolan is the opposite – she’s totally selfish, very skilled at what she knows how to do, and nothing else.

Why are the alternate worlds so cliched?

They’re all pretty banal, aren’t they? Post-apocalyptic wastelands, neo-Victorian worlds, dirigibles – we’ve seen it all before. But that’s the point. The reason why Banks has only uses cliched alternate worlds is because they are the only ones that the flitters and humanity can imagine – and so they’re the only ones we see. His claim is that humanity doesn’t have the imagination for anything else – we’re too solipsistic. As Mrs Mulverhill says:

We have access to an infinite number of worlds and have visited some very strange ones. We suspect there are some so strange that we are unable to access them just because of that strangeness: they are unenvisagable, and because we cannot imagine going to them, we cannot go to them. But think how relatively limited is the type of world we do visit. For one thing, it is always and only Earth, as we understand it. Never the next planet further in towards or further out from the sun: Venus or MArs or their equivalents. This Earth is usually about four and a half billion years old in a universe just under fourteen billion years old. Usually, even if it supports no intelligent life, it supports some life. Almost without variance, it exists as  part of a solar system in a galaxy composed of hundreds of millions of other solar systems, in a universe composed on hundreds of millions of other galaxies [...]

…Infinity seems to be failing somehow, wouldn’t you agree? [...] It hasn’t produced any aliens. It has produced only us. A single intelligence species in all the wide universe does not smack of infinity. [...]

…It could simply be due to what the transitioneering theorists call the problem of unenvisionability, as mentioned: we cannot imagine a world that includes aliens – or perhaps, deep down, we don’t want to.

Has Madame d’Ortolan seen or met any aliens?

Probably not. But there is a tantalising possibility in Mrs Mulverhill’s Doge-parable about d’Ortolan, where she says:

A prince or a king would have had more power. Doges were elected. For life, but with many restrictions. They were not allowed to open their own mail. It had first to be read by the censor. Too, they were not allowed to conduct discussions with foreign diplomats alone. A committee was required. They had much power but they were also figureheads.

It is perfectly natural and believeable to think that the references to ‘mail’, ‘censor’ and ‘foreign diplomats’ are perfectly innocent; after all, it’s true. Banks didn’t make up this fact, it actually happened. However, I like the idea that ‘mail’ is actually ’signals from aliens’, ‘foreign diplomats’ are ‘aliens’, etc etc. It’s interesting, at least (although I freely stipulate that it’s probably complete nonsense).

Who is Patient 8262?

Temudjin Oh, of course – we find out at the end.

How does Patient 8262 apparently talk to the other patients?

Either he is mad, or the other patients are. Perhaps there’s a better answer to this, though?

What is the hospital in which Patient 8262 hides?

Given all the strange events in the hospital, you do wonder whether this is actually real or not. Could it all be in Patient 8262’s head, a solipsistic moment? Or is he really hiding from the Concern (but why, if he – Temudjin – is so powerful?)

Why is Patient 8262 violated in the hospital?

Not sure about this one yet…

What is Septus?

It’s a drug, of course! Just like the drugs that Adrian likes to go on about. But it’s about expanding horizons, making you imagine more. It’s not necessary to take it to flit, but it helps.

A septum is “A dividing wall or partition, a general term for such a structure. The term is often used alone to refer to the septal area or to the septum pellucidum.”

Perhaps it breaks down walls – or builds them up.

Why is Mike Esteros important?

Here’s how he feels about his movie idea:

He still believes in it. It’s just a dream, but it’s a dream that could be made real and this is the place where that happens. Your dreams – not just of your idea but of your future self, your fortunes – get turned into reality here. He still loves this place, still believes in it.

In a sense, Mike is a hero; he’s a guy who continues to have a real imagination, to keep his thinking zoomed out and to consider the possibility that other things in the universe might exist and might be made real. He’s incredibly important to the world, partly because he exists across so many of them.

Why does Mrs Mulverhill pay Mike Esteros to look for aliens?

Perhaps just to look for aliens. I find this rather weird though – why not fund someone to start a proper SETI programme? Or is the point that his crazy theory of sightseeing aliens just as possible as anything else, and that if Mike looks, he’ll find something, thus conjuring aliens into existence in full?

Why is Madame d’Ortolan watching eclipses at the end of the book?

I can’t say I understand this yet. Does she expect to find aliens? Does she want to kill them? Does she want to kill Mike Esteros? It seems rather small fry compared to (say) blowing up radio telescopes, which might be more effective, but then we know The Concern is very concerned (sorry) about him because he exists across so many worlds.

What’s the significance of Adrian’s story?

Adrian Cubbish is a man who cares only about himself; he’s a solipsist, and one that readers might be able to relate to (and hate) a little better than d’Ortolan. In a way, he’s a human-sized version of what Banks is suggesting humanity has become – something that is only concerned with itself, rather than what else might surround it.

When Adrian meets Chloe, her rant about her father and his single point of view parallels exactly that of d’Ortolan; it’s not enough that he’s selfish, he is convinced that everyone else is, or at least should be, selfish. On a surface level, Adrian’s story is a criticism of unbridled capitalism; on a general level, it’s a criticism of humanity’s consistent selfishness.

What’s the deal with all this talk about solipsism?

The critical section is described by Patient 8262:

Often, in practice, one would be talking to the solipsist concerned in a sheltered institution or outright lunatic asylum. Why did they appear to be there, with all the restrictions such establishments tended to involved, rather than living some life of maximally efficient hyper-pleasure – a god, a super-heroic master-figure capable of any achievement or state of bliss through the simople act of thinking of it?

How this argument affected theh individual solipsist apparently depended entirely on their degree of self-deception and the history and development of their delusional state, our tutor informed us, but the depressing truth was that it pretty much never resulted in a eureka moment and the solipsist – now happily convinced of the existence of other people – returning to society as a rational and useful part of it. There was inevitably some underlying psychological reason why the individual had retreated to this deceptive bastion of selfish untouchability in the first place, and until that had been successfully address little real progress towards reality was likely.

So – this describes Patient 8262’s journey, and humanity’s.

Note: I am not about to reveal any secrets about Spooks: Code 9 or its production. A dedicated fan of Spooks could have written this, and while I’m not one, I did spend a lot of time thinking about, and watching, the show. These are my own opinions, and not that of Six to Start.

Last year, I worked on the online extension of a BBC 3 TV series called Spooks: Code 9. When I tell people this, they’re often excited and impressed when they hear the word ‘Spooks‘, and I have to explain that it wasn’t the long-running BBC 1 spy thriller that many know and love, but a spin-off.

Except Spooks: Code 9 (SC9) wasn’t a spin-off of Spooks. It was set in 2013, a year after a nuclear bomb had blown up London, and there was no continuity of events or characters from the original series (set during the present day). The only thing in common it had with Spooks is that it involved MI5 and it shares the same name (originally, it was just going to be called ‘Liberty’).

It’s easy to understand why SC9 was made; the BBC had a successful and popular thriller in Spooks, and the production company, Kudos, was clearly smart and reliable (they’d also made the excellent Life on Mars). Why not try and extend the formula to the younger end of the market? After all, the CSI brand had two spin-offs, so who’d begrudge the BBC just one?

But it wasn’t that simple. As the show neared launch, ‘Spooks’ was tacked on to the name, and ‘Liberty’ turned into the impenetrable ‘Code 9′, which meant absolutely nothing except for being a codeword in the show. Tying the show to the Spooks brand was a risky move – it helped raise its profile and increased the chance that fans of the original series would tune in, but it also set the expectation that it would be just like (or at least, similar to) Spooks. This was bad, for two reasons.

The first was that the show clearly wasn’t like Spooks – it was aimed at a far younger audience, and so it had younger characters and younger themes; anyone expecting the sort of characters and interactions from the original, decidedly middle-aged, series, would be disappointed. Secondly, anyone who didn’t like Spooks but might have tuned in to a younger, edgier show might now be turned off because they’d think that – yes – it’d just be like Spooks.

So what happened? Firstly, many criticisms of SC9 mentioned the fact that it wasn’t Spooks – and it got worse:

Spooks Code 9 is an utterly cynical venture and a damning indictment of the lack of imagination at work in commissioning new drama … Moreover, given its patronising awfulness, SC9 actually damages the Spooks brand. And that’s what it’s about – the brand.

The unthinkable had happened – the branding plan had backfired and SC9 was now dragging the golden goose down with it! Sadly, I think that if SC9 had a different name (i.e. not Spooks), everyone would have given the show more of a chance.

Not that that would’ve helped much, because regardless of it was called, SC9 was bad. Really bad. I couldn’t find a single positive review of the first episode, and believe me, I looked; reviewers criticised the script, the absence of anyone over 40, and the show’s consistent focus on the youth market through various club scenes, drinking, and romantic angst. What should have been the opening to an intriguing and exciting new world had emerged as a bland show that used tired tropes, like newsreel montages and all six main characters explaining why they thought they should become a secret agent.

After the first two episodes, which were shown back-to-back and were equally painful to watch, the audience numbers plummeted. Ep1 had 810k viewers, Ep 2 had 703k viewers – and Ep3 had 447k viewers. In a week, the show had lost almost half of its audience. By the sixth and final episode, SC9 had a mere 245k viewers.

I thought this was very sad, and not just because we were making the online extension. Episode 4 wasn’t bad, Episode 5 was pretty decent, and Episode 6 was really quite entertaining. In fact, the first minutes of the finale are captivating.

We open with a man (of apparent Arabic descent) pacing around a room in agitation. He’s throwing things into a bag while dialling the same number again and again on his mobile, and it’s always engaged. The man jumps into a car and drives out of the city, still dialling without success. Finally, on the motorway, instead of getting an engaged tone, he gets nothing at all; and then the radio turns to static. The traffic all around slows, then stops, and everyone gets out, because there’s a mushroom cloud behind them.

That’s how SC9 should’ve started – with a bang.

January

The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World by Lewis Hyde. A beautifully-written book about why people make creative works, how they should be compensated (with reference to gift-based economies in the past), and the sources of inspiration. There was a TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert doing the rounds a few months ago about nurturing creativity; it’s pretty good, but if you want to know more about the subject, Lewis Hyde’s book is absolutely the place to go. I finished this book in a couple of weeks, I think.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. An incredible novel that I’ve written about previously and took five weeks of sustained effort to get through. I probably finished this in March.

April

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. When I bought this in June 2008, I got a dozen pages in and developed a headache from the second-person narration and shamefully abandoned the book. My second attempt was much more successful and I came to appreciate the literally mysterious structure. I’ll admit that a few of the chapters dragged for me, but the rest of the book more than made up for it.

May

Many of these books were read on a four day cruise to Cork, Ireland.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Much has been written about Taleb’s assertion that people fool themselves into thinking they can accurately predict and/or quantify the chances of extremely rare events occurring (e.g. stock market crashes). Several people have told me they liked the book but can’t stand it because Taleb is so full of himself; I think this is besides the point. He is full of himself, but that doesn’t stop the book from being interesting and entertaining.

I found it irritating that the Guardian condemned David Cameron for talking to Taleb, because of Taleb’s ‘wacky’ views (which were subsequently clarified by Taleb). I’m no die-hard Taleb fan myself – and I’m not a David Cameron fan either – but I think Taleb has things that politicians would be well-advised to hear, and scare-stories from the Guardian do no-one any good.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace. Much as I enjoyed Infinite Jest, like many others, I absolutely adore DFW’s essays and articles. His essay on television is incredibly foresighted for something written in 1993, although I would have been interested in his opinion of the HBO-style dramas of recent years; his coverage of the Illinois State Fair is wonderfully funny and characteristically introspective. Probably the best essay, which the book was named after, is about his trip on a cruise ship. I’d already read the essay online, but I was happy to re-read it, and I’m sure that I’ll never see the words ‘lapis lazuli’ in the same way ever again… (it also became obvious, from this book, that Neal Stephenson is a massive fan of DFW).

Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner. What are the minds (or ‘mindsets’) that are required to succeed and flourish in the information-rich, hyper-competitive, fast-moving, etc, etc, world of the 21st century? Gardner attempts to explain here. This was an interesting book, but not much stuck with me apart from the later sections on the ‘respectful’ mind.

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood. If you’ve ever heard me talking about Margaret Atwood, it is normally about one of two subjects. Firstly, the fact that British people think she’s either British or American. Secondly, the fact that she strenously denies that Oryx and Crake (and the new The Year of the Flood) are not science fiction – which they plainly are – while simultaneously decrying science fiction. Having said that, I have actually read and enjoyed The Handmaid’s Tale, and since I have a real interest in economics and history these days, no amount of science-fiction denial was going to get in my way here. Payback was a good look at the history of debt and the way in which it’s been treated and contorted over the centuries, although it ends on a bizarrely hard-line note (which is probably not surprising given the eco-apocalyptic nature of her novels, but there you go).

June

Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships by Eric Berne. Margaret Atwood mentioned this book in Payback, referring to a game called ‘Debtor’ that people (or an entire nation of people…) can fall into; the debtor is able to play the role of the persecuted as they receive ever-more threatening letters and calls, while the creditor also has a similar satisfaction. The rest of the book covers depressing games such as  ‘See What You Made Me Do’, ‘Why Don’t You – Yes, But’ and the occasionally happy game like ‘Busman’s Holiday’ and ‘Homely Sage’. Many of the book’s lessons are still valuable, although it’s clearly a product of its time (1964) through its diagrams, notation and widespread sexism.

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace. Clearly on a DFW binge by this point, Consider the Lobster edges out A Supposedly… as my favourite book of his collections (unfairly so, because I’d already read the cruise story). The essay about the porn industry is probably one of the most well-known ones, but I much preferred his essays about John McCain’s 2000 campaign and Dostoevesky. I’d already read the essay about rightwing talk radio online (with its breathtakingly interlaced footnotes) and the quiet story about the 9/11 bombings – both of which are excellent.

My favourite, however, was Authority and American Usage. The subject of the essay, Garner’s Modern American Usage (a 1000-page guide on the use of American English) refers to the DFW’s essay as “purportedly a review essay of the first edition of this book”, which puts it rather well – it’s more a essay about the use, teaching, and style of (American) English language usage. DFW grew up in a family of what he self-mockingly calls SNOOTs (either ’syntax nudnik of our time’ or alternatively ‘Sprachegefuhl necessitates our ongoing tendance’) – i.e. a well-informed language-lover and word connoiseur, someone who “can be definied as someone who knows what dysphemism means and doesn’t mind letting you know it… a fellow SNOOT I know likes to say that listening to most people’s English feels like watching somebody use a Stradivarius to pound nails.”

Maus by Art Spiegelman. This is a rather famous graphic novel about Spielman’s father’s experiences during the Holocaust, with the Jews drawn as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, etc. It’s a really very good way of appealing to younger audiences and doesn’t at all get in the way of the story. What I found interesting was Spiegelman’s difficulty in writing the book (mentioned in the book itself), which took him 13 years.

July

Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd Edition) by Bryan Garner. I bought this book based solely on DFW’s ‘purported review’. I was somewhat dubious about the claim that you can actually read this book for fun, but when it arrived, I spent half an hour at work just flipping between the different word-use definitions. If any dictionary is witty, it’s this one – but it’s also probably the premiere authority in the usage of American English in the world (and has plenty of applications for British English). The 3rd Edition has updated entries, new essays at the beginning, and the ‘Language-Change Index’, where each disputed usage falls on a five-stage continuum from nonacceptability to acceptability (to the world as a whole). An entire page is give over to 11 different ways of describing these five stages, from Literal Shorthand References (Rejected, Widely Shunned, Widespread but…, Ubiquitous but…, Fully Accepted), Olfaction Analogy (Foul, Malodorous, Smelly, Vaguely odorous, Neutral) and Moral Analogy (Mortal sin, Capital sin, Venial sin, Peccadillo, Virtue). Yes, it’s weird.

A Tranquil Star: Unpublished Stories by Primo Levi. Primo Levi is most famous for his writings on his time in a concentration camp during the war, but I first encountered him in The New Yorker, who published his short story, A Tranquil Star. I have a guilty confession to make – for all my advocacy of short stories, of the hundreds of issues of The New Yorker that I’ve read (one of the most important publishers of short stories in the world), I’ve read only two, and A Tranquil Star was one of them, mainly because the first line caught my eye:

Once upon a time, somewhere in the universe very far away from here, lived a tranquil star, which moved tranquilly in the immensity of the sky, surrounded by a crowd of tranquil planets about which we have not a thing to report. This star was very big and very hot, and its weight was enormous: and here a reporter’s difficulties begin. We have written “very far,” “big,” “hot,” “enormous”: Australia is very far, an elephant is big and a house is bigger, this morning I had a hot bath, Everest is enormous. It’s clear that something in our lexicon isn’t working.

I had to read this story, and it became one of those stories where, upon finishing, you sit back and just muse happily about the nature of the universe, our place within it, and your own relationships with your friends and family.

For whatever reason, I didn’t read any more of Primo Levi’s stories until I was browsing the Strand bookstore in New York and spotted this collection. Every time I visit the strand I have to buy something, and this (along with the next book) came home with me to England. For me, Levi’s stories stand out because of his perspective – not as a Holocaust survivor, but because he was trained as a chemist. You don’t often get that kind of mind writing these sorts of stories, and it really shows in the way he uses language, in a sort of scientific-fantastic-realist way. This is a short collection, but worth picking up.

Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. I have long intended to read more Borges’ short stories after reading his ‘The Library of Babel’, and many other authors whose work or style is similar to Borges’ (e.g. Ted Chiang, Stanislaw Lem). At the Strand, I found a single volume that contained all of Borge’s stories. I have only made it through the first third, which comprises A Universal History of Iniquity and Fictions. The former is interesting although rather formulaic, whereas the latter contains many of his most well-known stories including Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, The Garden of Forking Paths, and The Library of Babel. It’s a massive collection of great fiction, and after the first third I had to put it down since I was just getting overloaded.

August

If This Is a Man/The Truce by Primo Levi. Having enjoyed A Tranquil Star and with the Holocaust on my mind, I decided to read Primo Levi’s first books (which most people think you should read together, since they cover his time in a concentration camp, and then his long trip home). Levi describes his fierce desire, at the time, to remember and recount his experiences so the rest of the world could know what happened, and I think that’s what makes this book compelling – it’s detail and accuracy. But it’s not simply a scientific retelling of the facts – each of the chapters is more like a mini-essay about the people there, and the struggles of humanity. One particular chapter, ‘The Drowned and the Saved’, about the way in which people either struggled to survive, was truly insightful and affecting.

Galileo’s Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson. Ever since I read KSR’s Mars Trilogy, which quite literally changed my life, I have unfailingly bought every single one of new books. Unsurprisingly, none of them have exceeded the impossibly-high bar of my ‘Red Mars’ experience (which is as much a result of my age at the time as anything else), but they’ve all been solid.

Many of KSR’s books have dealt with history and philosophy; the Mars Trilogy notoriously spent hundreds of pages on political philosophy, and The Years of Rice and Salt is an alternate-history novel about a world without Europe, and how it might develop science and something that resembles the Renaissance. Galileo’s Dream is a fictionalised look at Galileo’s development of the telescope, his discovery of the moons of Jupiter, the heliocentric universe, the Copernican heresy, etc – and also sees Galileo being transported to the future to deal with a crisis on the moons he discovered. Pretty weird, yes.

The fact that I preferred the parts of the book set in the 1600s says something about my changing literary tastes, but mostly the quality of the science-fiction sections. I can see why KSR wouldn’t want to spend too much time on the details of the futuristic sections, for fear of detracting from the ‘real’ parts, but I couldn’t make myself care about what happened in the future – those sections were altogether too abstract and dry. By contrast, I thought his treatment of Galileo’s life, work, opinions and circumstances to be excellent – the story of his life is more nuanced than many people (including myself) would have thought, and really very touching. To his credit, KSR seamlessly weaves in translations of actual correspondence and documents from the characters involved, which gives the proceedings a rock-solid foundation. Galileo’s Dream is a great way to learn about the maestro himself.

The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company by David A. Price. I love Pixar’s films – there is something truly special about how they’ve been able to consistently create such popular, successful and meaningful movies, and I really admire what they’ve done. From the outside (and to an extent, the inside – I’ve visited Pixar’s studios twice), the company seems like a well-oiled story machine that has always been perfect and never has any problems. A lot of people put this success down to the fact that Steve Jobs effectively bankrolled the company for ten loss-making years in which, we’re led to believe, they perfect their art. There’s a nugget of truth to this, but David Price reveals that the origins of Pixar are rather more interesting than that, and that Steve Jobs did a lot more than simply open his wallet (for good and bad!).

What really struck me from this book is the way in which Pixar never seemed to give up, despite many, many setbacks (e.g. consistent losses, firing of half the company, shutdown of production on Toy Story, etc.); and how they managed to keep alive their vision of making computer-animated movies even while everyone else just wanted them to sell fast computers. Of course, their success is not just down to persistance – they were possibly the most talented collection of computer graphic programmers in the world, and they had snagged John Lasseter, already an Oscar-winning animator even before he joined Pixar.

This is not an ‘authorised biography’ and so it contains some pretty useful insights, most of which are still very complimentary to the company. The only problem with the book is that it lingers rather too long on technical details that either you don’t care about, or you already know.

Coming up in September

Transition by Iain Banks; Solitude by Anthony Storr, The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman, and The Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynne Jones.

Over the next few weeks, I’m hoping to write several more posts going into more detail about the different aspects of the game (e.g. mission design, audio, story, interaction, etc), and we’ll also have posts by other people involved in the game as well! So this will be a good opportunity to see how we design games, and where our thinking is currently at.

• Shots Magazine – Evolving Alternate Reality – Shots chats to Six To Start co-founder Adrian Hon about their latest projects for Channel 4 and Muse
  "Every time I go to talk to the guys at Channel 4 we have the same argument. What is it? Is it a game? Is it an adventure? Is it a drama? Is it a thriller?" Adrian Hon is having a tough time describing his new project, Smokescreen, an online educational project for Channel 4. "In truth it's all these things." …