candles

Turns out that I've been doing this on and off (more off than on) for 5 years.

Now if I can just get around to converting the whole thing to run on wordpress and embedding Tumblr, it might get a bit more lively...

Sanger Institute

Sanger Institute data centre, originally uploaded by matlock.

We're working on a really exciting project (an ARG) involving history, cartography and genome research, and the Wellcome Trust are working with us so that we can base it on the bleeding edge of scientific research. So today, I was lucky enough to get to look around the Sanger Institute, where much of the DNA mapping for the Human Genome Project happened.

It was a fascinating afternoon, with conversations ranging fluidly between robotics, bio-tech, history, culture and ethics. Tom, the writer on the project, was feasting hungrily on such stimulating source material, and hopefully we'll be able to send him up for a residency so that he can work closely with the Institue on the ARG's story.

The announcement that they'd mapped the human genome was hailed as the beginning of an era of genome-related cures for many illnesses. But in reality we still know next to nothing for certain about how our genes interact to make proteins. Its very much like exploring a new country - the map is still full of blank spaces. I'm hoping that our project will inspire a new generation of explorers to rise to this challenge...

Make *all* your audience into Heroes

My esteemed work colleague Alice Taylor posts some concerns she has with ARGs, namely that the typical treasure-hunt game dynamic ends up creating an incredible moment of live theatre for a very small group of players (normally tens or hundreds at most) and a more distanced, spectator experience for the masses.

In the 6 months that we've been commissioning online education projects, we've both seen a lot of proposals that use these 'winner takes all' formats. These are sometimes like TV reality shows, where the interactivity is limited to the audience voting on other participants, and sometimes treasure-hunt-style ARGs.

Whilst its inevitable that not all your users will become immersed in a game, I share with Alice a concern that we are importing broadcast ideas into online entertainment formats. Broadcast has one big problem with mass participation - it has a limited amount of bandwith in which to tell a story, so it makes sense to narrow the field of the story as time passes, until there is one winner who gets all the attention at the end. The X-Factor, for example, would be a complete mess if it tried to follow the stories of 12, 120, or 12,000 of its hopeful participants for more than a few weeks. The prize in a limited bandwidth world is to give more attention to the winners, until there is one person winning the ultimate prize of the undivided attention of millions of viewers. This is because bandwidth (and therefore attention) is the scarce commodity that broadcasting values most highly.

Online, we don't have to worry about bandwidth scarcity. The scarcity of attention is more acute, but the answer is not necessarily to try to artificially focus attention using winner-takes-all gimmicks. If I'm interested in a player/participant/thread of a story, why can't I follow it, even if most other people want to follow something else? Do we have to focus on one aspect of the story, and expect everyone to be happy with that?

Anyone who has heard me speak in the last year will have heard me rave about World Without Oil. This is not just because its an educational ARG, and we're commissioning a few of them next year. The reason I love it is because it points to a future direction for ARGs, in which the story is not a funnel that directs a few people towards a unique experience, but an open, collaborative story in which lots of different threads can exist alongside each other. I'm not sure that WWO altogether solved the problem of how to help people navigate these threads, but it has shown an very productive new direction for ARGs, in which a story arc can be used as a structure for creativity, exploration and collaboration. Of course, MMOs have known this for a long time, and manage to combine overarching narratives with lots of tiny social groups sharing quests together.

For me, ARGs need to understand this dynamic in order to become a mainstream experience. They focus far too much on creating a coup de theatre for a few privileged players, and not enough on making every player's experience remarkable. Even if this experience is something that they only share with a few friends, such as WWO's Ped Party mission, it can still be a powerful and moving thing.

We don't have to think in terms of funnels and winners in online storytelling. We can let stories fracture, multiply, escape and wither, depending on how we want to encourage our users to play with them. We should check the urge to rely on models inherited from the world of TV and experiment with new concepts of open, collaborative play. On the web, we don't have to only have one winner - we can make all our audience into heroes.

BBC Labs rises again!

I'm very pleased to say that the deeply talented Matt Cashmore and Morag Cartwright have picked up the baton of the BBC Innovation Labs, and is currently winging his way around the country with Frank "Mr Labs" Boyd on the launch days.

Matt, as usual, is making a much better job of this than I did when I was at the BBC, and has introduced a couple of innovations in the process. The briefs are a lot more focused and tangible this year, which I think is partly because this is the second year that some of the commissioners are involved in the Labs, and they're using their experience to write better briefs. There are also some really nice videos of the commissioners explaining the brief, so even if you can't attend a launch day, you get a good idea of what they're looking for. Its such an obviously valuable thing to do, I wish i'd thought of it last year. Still, nice to see Phil Gyford's elegant MT templates for the Labs site is holding up well for the 3rd year in a row...

But the most significant innovation is the promise that at the end of the 5 day Labs, any team selected for further development will know how much they're being commissioned for, will have a development meeting within a week, and contract within 2 weeks. This is great news, as the most disappointing thing for me at the Labs was that the enthusiasm and commitment to ideas that would flourish on Labs would quickly dissipate back in the sterile conditions of White City. It often took months to get post-Labs kick off meetings organised with indies and commissioners, and often much longer to actually get projects going. In the first year, some projects ended up abandoned, as commissioners moved on to other roles before they were put into development.

Its really, really good to see the Labs continuing, and I hope this means they're a permanent fixture from now on. They're a vital part of the growing network of projects that the BBC is using to have better conversations with the creative digital media community. They're an incredible amount of fun, as well, so if you've not thought of attending a launch day or proposing an idea, then do it. NOW!

As a taster of the kind of thing that happens at Labs, look at Muddy Boots, a prototype developed out of an idea from James Boardwell of Rattle Research. Its a neat hack that looks for contextual content from around the web to support BBC News articles. Here's some info from Backstage.