There’s much wrong with Color’s pool party ad. It’s creepy, unrealistic and brings back all kinds of memories of the first season of the OC (I was forced to watch it, ok?). Nothing good can come of a steamy make out session with an odd number of people. Maybe Color is targeting jilted third wheels with nothing to do but broadcast their awkward presence at someone else’s party.
But most of all, I spent the whole spot worried about the phone doing the filming. Kid, don’t you know what happens when an iPhone gets even slightly damp?! You’re in a pool, you moron!
Color only makes sense if you think of it as an attempt to do for video what Twitter did for blogging, and Instagram did for photos. Those guys crafted a package around the smallest possible unit of interestingness. That packaging made sharing frictionless, because it created a fluid tool, yes, but even more because you knew it wouldn’t take long, so you actually decided to do it.
For Twitter, that package is of course the 140 character limit, but also plumbing like URL shorteners, hashtags, and other language conventions (thnk u SMS) that make that limit usable. Instagram already had the concise unit of the photo, but the filters and Polaroid square added a sheen that made individual photos shareable . Flickr always felt to me like it was as much about albums, which is also how I grew up thinking about photos. Instagram broke out the individual photo.
Those restrictions don’t just allow sharing. Like any good artistic constraint, they stimulate creation, too.
So how’s Color’s packaging of video? First, sound (Color has none). Having no sound forces a certain passivity, which in theory should help keep you in the moment. I like that spirit, but the disruption’s already happened as soon as you get your phone out. Maybe the 30 second limit by telegraphing that the intrusion is temporary, but how would people know you’re filming through Color and not a regular video app?
Second, live. Compared to photos, the real barrier for video is editing, encoding, uploading and watching your hard drive fill up. Making it live cuts all out, but I think may also reflect something more fundamental. While writing this, I realized that I naturally think in terms of sharing files – so naturally sharing a piece of text or self contained photo is the same as sharing a self contained video (whether five seconds, or five minutes). Each shared item is just another event in my activity stream. But isn’t video itself already a series of events?
I think what Color has recognized is that sharing a video in your stream isn’t the same as sharing a streaming video. The unit isn’t the video, it’s the frame, or, ultimately, the moment. Sometimes, you should share a series of photos or tweets. Other times, maybe it’s a series of moments within a single video. Sometimes it should be asynchronous, a conversation held over days and weeks, sometimes it needs to be synchronous. Perhaps Color will fill a niche – either way it’ll be a (costly) experiment to learn from.
John Gruber quotes Mike Davidson’s image of the perfect news site:
As a closing thought, I’ve had this idea in my head for the last few years of what a perfect news site looks like, and it’s quite simple: a white screen with a list of 5 or 10 links that changes once a day. That’s it. Here’s the tricky part though: the 5 or 10 links need to be THE 5 or 10 links that are most useful to me on any given day. (link to original article)
Mike & John’s posts were triggered by Twitter’s acquisition of Summify, which buckets up the firehose of links from our social media feeds, but I think there’s a lesson closer to home. Their posts are from the perspective of the reader. As readers, we can absolutely (and should, and probably will have to) use services that give us algorithmic recommendations, but that’s not the only way: we already opt-in to the authors whose editorial hand we trust and enjoy.
Daring Fireball is exactly that short list of links for me, at least for a certain portion of my information diet. That and a few others (and yeah, I suppose some of them have do white backgrounds).
When I see tools like Summify, it makes me feel like I need to up my game as a writer, specifically how to be helpful to people interested in the same things as me. It took me a while to get this, but am now responding by trying to make this blog entirely transparent. It should be as clear a window as possible into the intersection of games, design and behavior change.
So that’s the lesson for authors. If you’re deeply involved in any area, perhaps it’s your job to create those 5 to 10 links. Why leave all the fun to the machines?
Hey folks, just wanted to let you know about very worthwhile Kickstarter, an online multiplayer storytelling game called the Written World. They’ve got just 3 days left and need your help! Here’s the link.
It’s a simple concept, delivered through the browser:
it’s a game of Narrator versus Hero. The narrator controls the story; crafting a plot and presenting the Hero with encounters, and challenges. The Hero creates a character that she believes can make it through to the end.
And when the story’s over it lives inside the Written World, for other people to read, re-use or play themselves.
What really excites me about this concept is that it’s in that messy space between straight-up fiction writing (hard, lonely), and role playing (rules!). As an obsessive improviser, I know how much practice it can take to get a freeform story going between two people, which the Written World hopefully adresses by injecting a lightweight set of game mechanics.
I’ve known the team behind it a very long time and they’re incredibly passionate and knowledgeable about games and storytelling, and they’ve been featured in The Atlantic and Huffington Post.
Oh, and give them ten grand and you’ll be able to name their firstborn anything you like (I’m keen on Blancmange, myself).
Anyhow, why not give them your dollars?
Lakshmi Sandhana over at Co.Exist reports on an extraordinary commitment to understanding the people you’re designing for:
When Arunachalam Muruganantham hit a wall in his research on creating a sanitary napkin for poor women, he decided to do what most men typically wouldn’t dream of. He wore one himself–for a whole week. Fashioning his own menstruating uterus by filling a bladder with goat’s blood, Muruganantham went about his life while wearing women’s underwear, occasionally squeezing the contraption to test out his latest iteration. It resulted in endless derision and almost destroyed his family. But no one is laughing at him anymore, as the sanitary napkin-making machine he went on to create is transforming the lives of rural women across India.
I really think design falls short unless you find techniques to embody your user (or are your user), and you rarely have to go to this Pattie Moore style extreme. Inspiring that Arunachalam was in a situation where he did, and that he had the guts to follow through.
Fascinating that this question could appear in an interview as recent as 2000, asked by a journal affiliated with the AIGA in an interview with E-Lab (and now iota) founder Rick Robinson, no less:
“LOOP: Can design students today avoid the question of interactivity? Is there a future for those solely interested in print design or product design? Are there areas of design that will remain unaffected?”
Wow.
Gamespot’s Giancarlo Varanini speaking to Donald Mustard, creative director of Infinity Blade 2, plus a video of the game.
Really like this take on multiplayer, the time limit and epic challenge can really crystallize a community.
“The idea is to have people partner with each other from all around the world–hundreds of thousands and hopefully millions of gamers–to participate in these massively social challenges. For example, we’ll have a Clash Mob where there’s this huge beast. Let’s say it has 10 million hit points and it’s going to run away in 24 hours. So in 24 hours, you’ll have once chance, one 30-second turn to do as much damage as you can to this one enemy.”
“Let’s say you’re really good and you’re able to do 20,000 points of damage to him before he eats you or stomps on your head,” he added. “That damage is saved persistently to the cloud, and other gamers from around the world get their turn to take a shot at this guy. And if collectively–within 24 hours–everyone from around the world can defeat this guy, everyone will unlock some supercool rare sword, item, or gem.”
Reminds me the bizarre Noby Noby Boy, sequel to Katamari Damacy. The game’s only objective is to stretch your wormlike main character, BOY. On the PS3, that may mean stretching around houses and trees in a abstracted open world, but there’s also the equally bizarre iPhone game where one of the ways to get points is to pin one end of BOY to your current GPS location, and the other end to you. In my case, I got the game just before flying back home to see my family in London, so stretched my BOY about 4,000 miles. Youch.
There’s another character called GIRL, who may or may not be BOY’s true worm-love. Her length is the sum of every player’s progress, and right now she’s reached Saturn, which means players have collectively stretched their BOYs about 1.2 million kilometers.
What I love about this is how an epic goal is created in the middle of a completely abstract sandbox. Seems a good way of bridging short 1-2 minute stints of playtime with a larger mission, making it a very relevant approach for mobile applications and short attention spans.
Helen Walter’s coverage of an old 2008 SXSW talk from Michael Lopp, then Senior Engineering manager at Apple.
Paired Design Meetings
This was really interesting. Every week, the teams have two meetings. One in which to brainstorm, to forget about constraints and think freely. As Lopp put it: to “go crazy”. Then they also hold a production meeting, an entirely separate but equally regular meeting which is the other’s antithesis. Here, the designers and engineers are required to nail everything down, to work out how this crazy idea might actually work. This process and organization continues throughout the development of any app, though of course the balance shifts as the app progresses. But keeping an option for creative thought even at a late stage is really smart.
Missed this one – still enlightening.
John Polson of Rock Paper Shotgun speaking to the folks from Vlambeer about their experimental, self destructing GlitchHiker.
Well, that was the amazing thing. People were actually empathic towards the game. The moment the first person said, “I’m not playing this, I could kill it!” was the moment we realized we made something unique. There was guilt with those that failed to score the required 100 points to break even the life the game spends when you start a game and a feeling a responsibility in those that succeeded to try and sustain the game system.
Fascinating redefinition of the player’s relationship with the game, and shows how emotions can come not just from events within, but by the structure of the game itself.
