Program or Be Programmed,
originally uploaded by jpob.

A talk by Douglas Rushkoff on 12th March 2010

[This isn't a word-perfect record -- if I got anything jarringly wrong, please comment!]

Online, things get extreme very fast and change a lot in a short space of time. There’s an overwhelming sense that we’re trying to operate society on obsolete social code, on the basis of legacy systems we don’t even remember that aren’t appropriate for what we want to get done. If we don’t understand these old systems, we have no chance of recognising the new programs that are layered on top. Understanding of this places people into one of two camps: the programmers, and the programmed. Grokking programming bias is really important because it helps us manage ourselves in context – the most important thing is to recognise that programming bias exists in the first place.


How much of our outdated social code is the result of bias of the media, and how much is due to the bias of the programmers? How can we tell the difference? We won’t know until we understand how our technologies work, and how they work on us. Essentially, if you’re not a programmer, then you’re one of the programmed. A metaphor for this: a kid gets a videogame and plays it til he gets stuck, and then goes to get cheat codes – beginning to play outside the original context of the game. His role shifts from player to cheater. If he really likes the game he goes online and finds out how to mod it, becoming an author. If his mod becomes popular, he gets programming job offers and creates his own stuff. This process sees him move from being passive to increasingly more active – stages our civilisation has moved through in terms of media.

In a civilization of readers, we get a nation of readers and an elite class of writers. Now we have a nation of bloggers that are largely blind to, and don’t think about, the biases they’re operating within. Facebook is biased towards reducing humans to a consumer profile. Google is biased towards the extraction of value from content creators. At each stage when we get a new medium, civilization seems to be one iteration behind. Programming is bigger than the printing press – it’s as big as text. What does it give us? Automaticism? Conclusion: the Book as a medium is over, and biases of written culture are giving way to the biases of digital culture. To underline the biases for digital media, Rushkoff assigned commands for them.

1) TIME — Thou shalt not be always on. Asynchronous conversations (e.g. those on the Well) allow lots of time to think, like chess by mail. These conversations are therefore richer for being online than they would have been in real life. Once we turn an asynchronous medium into one that’s always on, we ‘fry our nervous systems’ and start exhibiting stress factors that arise from the always on-ness of tech – like phantom thigh vibration syndrome (physical sensation of ringing phone).

2) DISTANCE – Thou shalt not do from a distance that which would be better done in person. There’s a lack of understanding about short and long distance biases, and a fetishism that has us using long-distance tech in short-distance situations: students running a UN simulation in Second Life while sitting in a classroom! This is pretty common, and recognizing the biases will help us learn to use the most appropriate methods and tech for each situation.

3) SCALE – Exalt the particular. Not everything scales, should scale or needs to scale. The popular belief that the only way to make money online is to scale up aggregation of what other people are creating exacerbates Jack Welch-style hypercapitalism (the parts of your business that work are imperfect and should be sold off; the goal is to become more like a bank), and it doesn’t have to be this way.

4) DISCRETE – You may always choose none of the above. Everything is a choice, digitally. The real world is analogue, not digital, and analogue recordings of our world are physical artefacts of real events that have occurred; a digital copy is a symbolic representation of an event through metrics. Digital is symbolic as text is symbolic. The problem with digital metrics is that any metric we haven’t thought of is gone until someone realises it’s been left out. Online life occurs in a digital environment of forced choice: you start to believe that the options are pre-existing conditions of the universe, but they aren’t — they’re the choices given in the program that you’re involved in. You don’t want to live ’snap-to-grid’, but that’s the only way to relate through the digital. “Withholding choice from the available options isn’t death, but life.”

5) COMPLEXITY – Thou shalt never be completely right. The net tends to prematurely reduce the complex; everything is one level deep. Wikipedia seems deep and complex to us now, but in the old days an encyclopedia was a joke! It’s hard to explain this without seeming anti-folksonomy, but that’s not necessarily the case – moving through pathways to get to the cherry is how we learn, and it’s not a worse approach, just different. Philip Rosedale has remarked that within 10 years Second Life will be indistiguishable from reality: if this were true, it would be because our perceptual apparatus will have devolved to the point where we can’t tell the difference! Our perceptual apparatuses are declining: kids raised on mp3 have 20% less ability to make auditory distinctions than previous generations because their brains have been trained differently. These are choices, and recognising this frees us to use digital simulations as models with chosen parameters.

6) OUT OF BODY – Thou shalt not be A/anonymous. The non-corporeal nature of the internet is great for some types of users (political dissenters, torrenters [ha ha]), but it’s bad for community and the social contract. We have to work against the tendency of the net to equalize us through anonymity, otherwise we become parts of polarised mobs with no sense of the consequences of our actions. Conditions of anonymity nerf us in important ways: they allow us to sidestep the prejudices that pervade our real lives, and they negate our ability to communicate non-verbally. Reportedly 80% of communication is non-verbal, so online we use 20% of the communication capability that we have – we focus on language, which is desocialising and solipsistic. We can see from blogs that allowing anonymous comments leads to worse remarks/content because of lack of accountability. Radical but powerful view: it’s liberating to adopt a strict sense of identity online, for everything.

7) CONTACT – Remember the humans. Content is not king in a communication environment –, contact is. ‘Social marketing’ is an oxymoron; it reduces multiplicity of connections down to one. There are humans responsible for the value you receive – it’s important to remember that we don’t have to give everything to the hive for free. There’s a difference between offering stuff we do for free to others and delivering it to Google, a corporation that’s happy to extract value from us. You’re allowed to do what you want, and it’s okay to not deliver everything for free (so that corporations can profit).

8) ABSTRACTION – As above, not so below. Everything doesn’t happen at different levels in the same way. Media abstracts: abstraction is what symbol systems do, but in this case it leads to a chaos systems assumption about the real world that can be modelled in computers but doesn’t exist in the real world. Spending time in abstracted space makes the games seem real when they’re not – don’t make equivalencies between abstractions and the real world – abstractions don’t work with real people.

9) OPENNESS – Thou shalt not steal. When there’s no social contract, openness can continue until there’s nobody left to give anything away. If Google succeeds in bringing the free tv model to everything there’ll be nothing left to advertise, and Google will eventually eat its tail! Getting something for free is not open source – having the world being open to Google is the same sort of thing as wanting the third world to be open to the world bank. Nothing is free.

10) END USERS – Program or be programmed. Everything in the digital realm is programmed. You’re either creating software or you ARE the software. We think ‘what can the tech do for us’ rather than ‘what can we make it do’. If we start living in a world where everything is a product we consume rather than something we use to create value, we’re doomed. Ignorance of programming is unhelpful. Kids are being taught to be users, not programmers. We accept black-boxness of devices (e,g, MS Wizard – mysterious processes, stay away!!) . User and coder move increasingly far apart under the false premise that the farther the distance, the easier things are.

We celebrate our new-found agency in the digital age but remain one step behind the programmer. This is an amazing moment where we can program money, society – but we have to understand 1) the programs and 2) the mean sets, codes, symbols and how we relate to them. We can’t understand how to work with them if we don’t understand the technology we’re using to express and codify them; but, if we don’t create a society that’s aware of programming and that devices are being programmed in certain ways, we’ll end up being just users and the used.

Q&A

Q: How do we implement these commands? A: We need to start sharing our ideas and info about how biases apply to what we use. Europe and Korea are teaching programming to school kids, ut the US isn’t. When we create a nation of dumb users, we end up not having anyone left to realise what’s happened and why it’s important.

Other parts of the world have a different perception of programmers. We think of it as grunt work to outsource, we distance ourselves from it; but the people who do this work are the new Masons.

Q: How does this differ from the old arguments about literacy and cold war concerns about the fitness of US youths when it comes to science and technology? A: The only way it’s different is in the definition of literacy. Literacy today means to program, but the old definition is ‘to be able to make an extended linear argument through an 18th century novel’, which is not an up to date literacy for a digital world.

Audience comment: When the web was young it was decentralised, but now it’s centralised (like Facebook). Geeks, when you’re thinking about making stuff, consider decentralisation. A: People adopt client side stuff because they think they’re going to get something. The future is perceived to be in digital/private currencies, and this will do to the central bank what Craigslist did to Hearst. It has to happen in a decentralised way.

Q: In terms of staying true to your real life identity, how do you see the future? A: Facebook is pushing for to be the verification agent of online identity, and verifiability is going to be something either we or they pay for. This verifiability will help with the adoption of digital currencies too.

END! Visit http://pbsdigitalnation.org for more fun discussions.

The schedule kicks into gear after lunch (a meal that I’m probably not going to be requiring after stuffing myself with bacon and wholegrain pancakes [in that order] at breakfast), and if my notes turn out to be coherent after a session I’ll pop them up. Tweeting now and then from @jen_bolton too. If you happen to see me around, come and say hi!

Somebody’s nicked Heroquest, we rarely have enough of us in for a decent game of Werewolf and my Rock Band expertise doesn’t extend far beyond songs by the Police (oh, the joy in their eyes as they’re forced to play ‘Can’t Stand Losing You’ *again*!), so I bought some new stuff for game hour this week. I wasn’t around for the deboxings this morning though, since I’ve taken the day off to recuperate after juggling like a trained octopus all month.

Finished Mass Effect this morning, finally. Expected it to be good and it was, although the Paragon ending left me a bit cold and the romance stuff was eye-rollingly bad. At least [spoiler alert!] Kaidan didn’t pounce on Shepard at the end. Thinking about it… if ME’s supposed to be a trilogy, I wonder if we’ll be able to import our Shepards all the way through?

The session schedule was pretty packed and I couldn’t make it to everything I fancied due to things happening concurrently, but I managed to pick many awesome brains, eat 17 brownies and sun my translucent arms for the first time this year, so I wouldn’t dream of complaining.

The first talk I went to was about brainstorming game ideas. That attracted a lot of interest. It involved hashing out timed exercises on paper, and it wasn’t the sort of group exercise I expected but it got some lazy synapses firing ahead of the rest of the day, which was good.

A small, standup discussion on MMO guilds was next, led by a lovely gal who leads a kinship in LOTRO. There were only four of us, all experienced MMO gamers, so most of it was friendly eggsucking but towards the end it took a neat turn towards how to recruit for the kind of guild you want to develop (which reminds me to try to figure out exactly what’s going on with GamerDNA).

Dan and Katy joined me for a lovely lunch by the window, and then I wandered down to the Rock Band. There seemed to be a queue so I nested on the sofa, enjoying my raised blood sugar level while perusing RSS feeds. Back upstairs to join my guild master in ruminating about whether ARGs are FISHed. They might be. :) Two other interesting people contributed to that talk, and I found out later that one of them was Justin Hall – a person I’ve been told I should meet at some point. That would have been a good point. Whoops!

The last session I went to was a discussion about how to properly wrap up Virtual Magic Kingdom, so that the kids who spent time and money building presence there can maintain social ties with one another and take away nice mementos of their experiences. Knowing how the closing of a game can affect adults, as with Asheron’s Call 2 and one a bit closer to home, the little players of VMK plucked gently at my heartstrings all the way home. I think the discussion yielded some good ideas, and I hope they’ll help.

This GameCamp was made of win. I had a really fun, thought-provoking day. Already nursing a couple of ideas for stuff to talk about next time.

Last Friday, a couple of the guys were super-organized and brought in Mario Kart for the Wii. We’ve got a Wii in our games room, but unfortunately someone had borrowed its power cable for a couple of weeks (!) so we couldn’t actually play anything on it. Having only five players, which isn’t quite enough for Werewolf, we decided to fall back on an old classic: HeroQuest.

Although a suspicious number of our brothers had apparently played HeroQuest back in the day, none of us ever had so we spent the first half hour pawing at the game pieces and trying to figure out the rules. In defiance of typecasting, I picked the Dwarf character. (You can’t go too far wrong hacking at everything with an axe.) We each entered the the dungeon from a different place on the map, and sortof individually winged it through sections of the pre-made level one dungeon, fighting goblins, finding a bit of treasure and falling into traps.

The game was rushed and improvisational – not quite HeroQuest as intended, but a great experience. With five minutes left it descended into all-in PvP vs. the Elf, which I’m happy to say (since my Dwarf started it), the Elf lost. Next to a particularly spirited game of Rock, Paper, Scissors with my daughter, it was the most fun I had all week.

Before normality could set back in, I very unexpectedly got a new PC yesterday after considerable drama trying to put the guts of mine into Dave’s old case (in hopes of quieting it down some, as its constant roar was like riding in an airplane). Now I’ve got more speed (+), loads of storage (++) and Vista (?). I’m up past my bedtime playing with it. Which is bad, since I’m back at work tomorrow. Oops…

But more to the point: if heavies like Stephen King and Joss Whedon loved the show, and fans are devoted enough to keep their fansites alive a year later, shell out a whopping £78.50 plus travel to see Veronica and Logan at a con in the UK (compare with £55 for the WoW Invitational) and $800+ to take a VM-themed cruise… then why has Veronica’s story skidded to a halt? A tv series demands a lot of infrastructure and investment: in crew, locations, promotional stuff – but a story just needs, well, a story, and a way to tell it, right?

Buffy evolved into a comic, but the rumor that VM will go that route too has gone cold. Fans are hopeful that a film might be greenlighted, but that’s still up in the air. Those are high-dollar options, and while either would be welcome, they’re taking ages and it’s been a year since cancellation. Why not offer some low budget out-of-the-box stuff that fans might even donate money to enjoy (as long as Rob Thomas and Kristen Bell are involved)? Heck, I’m feeling impatient so I’d pay a fiver now just to get things started.

VM is built on relationships and mystery-solving. Add in the geeky undercurrent and there are roughly 17 bazillion possibilities here. To name a few: webisodes are a no-brainer. KB plus a script and camcorder = win. Maybe Twitter could tell part of the story – follow the characters to see what they’re doing and how they interact. Give Veronica haxable email (a la Aperture Science?) and see where that goes. Short, frequent bursts of a variety of content. Make it a game to figure out what’s going on with her. Frankly I’m not so hot on the FBI angle; that was too sudden, so I’d start where season 3 left off. Logan? Piz? Sheriff? Graduation?

I’ve never written a word of fan fiction in my life and am actually teetering on the verge of it right now – not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you! – so I’ll just wrap it up by saying that I think it’d be a shame and a waste if Veronica’s potential to entertain fades away while her fans are waiting around for someone to fund a movie.

I’ve got quite a bit to catch up on from days 3 and 4. Happily, sxswi is churning out podcasts now. Video too – click through from here.

Recommended: You Are Here: Gaming and User’s Geolocation in Web 2.0
Queued up: The Suxorz: The Worst Social Media Ad Campaigns of 2007; Hi-Tech Craft: Why Sewing and Knitting Still Matter
One for the fellas at work (sorry, no swag :/): Expression Engine 2 Sneak Peak (not my spelling!)

Heaf: How can games, stories, puzzles etc. help engage users with your brand? We’ve seen in film and tv that these techniques have been put in place to great effect. Outside of those genres, can such tactics be effective?

Hon: Who here knows about Cloverfield? (many) Seen it? (many) Knew about online campaign? (fewer) Felt a bit let down? (a few) There’s a way that stories can be used to extend brands across multiple platforms. With Cloverfield, JJ Abrams has seen that there’s a way to extend a story across a wide universe, and the people who are your most passionate fans will evangelize your content.

Clarke: Honda are using straightforward puzzles across all their media atm. On their website, everything’s about problems (Rubik’s cube, mazes, puzzles) to engage people. These take you more and more into what Honda’s about and what they’re selling (hybrid car).

Reynolds: I love ARGs! Everyone knows about ilovebees. Perplex City has a nice backstory to drop into, and an amazing wiki, and community of people solving it. Doing puzzley things for kids now and I love all that stuff. in my work in virtual worlds I’m in some ways disappointed not to see the same level of depth inside VWs. There have been great examples of participation by consumers, like Second Life – CSI: narrative story there, not a puzzle as such but stories and games going on. ‘virtual worlds are the next wave of a tool for storytelling’ and I think we’re just beginning to scratch the surface.

Ettinghausen: Why might brands be interested in games and stories? Traditional marketing (tv ad, poster) engages people for about 30 secs max; games provide a much longer and more in-depth interaction between brand and potential consumer, and give many more opportunities to interact with consumers. That’s probably why more and more brands are interested in having conversations with and interacting with consumers.

Clarke: The O’Reilly Games book in swag bag is a perfect example of getting people to engage.

Heaf: The obvious question is: where would you say you find deeper immersive techniques, and why do you find them there?

Clarke: The drugs company making Aleve decided that interaction is good, so they put together a game campaign. Everything is totally controlled though, and there’s no interaction – it’s just a journey across fake websites. There have been lots of negative comments about what they’re doing.

Ettinghausen: We did a puzzle solving book, and it was easy to find answers on Google. It didn’t help to sell books but was a good learning experience. As a game and method of deepening interaction it didn’t work well.

Hon: With Cloverfield there’s an existing ARG audience that likes the interaction and discovery, but CF wasn’t a game at all. Just like easter eggs on DVD, you can’t talk back to the characters. It’s more traditional than broadcast marketing with no conversation. That’s not a disaster, but you have to remember that your audience has expectations. lonelygirl15 was interesting to the ARG community and they added content. You really need to be able to listen and react appropriately to audience, or the chances of a train wreck increase exponentially.

One subset of people who use the internet will find everything and break everything first, and you have to be ready to react. You can try to prevent these things from happening but they will happen and your reaction will determine the success of the game.

Reynolds: People will be doing a lot more of these games, and in the next couple years there are bound to be more trainwrecks.

Heaf: Do you feel that whatever the interaction, it’s the same group of people consuming these?

Reynolds: It’s certainly a challenge to involve mainstream; Dan is addressing this now.

Hon: Everyone is trying to use techniques to broaden appeal and ensure that they’re hitting a very large base of casual players as well as hardcores and evangelists. I believe there are ways to satisfy these different levels of users and interactions. What we’re building for penguin is v different from Perplex City; it’s very story based.

Clarke: As big companies get involved (Guinness) you’ll get more and more people invoved who have never participated before. You have to take this into account and not aim a game at just a core audience, so everyone gets something out of it.

Hon: Here’s an interesting parallel: a hardcore audience of gamers has been identified (male teenagers stereotypically), but nobody talks about hardcore tv audience – like people who are really into soaps or Lost. There’s no distinction between casual and hardcore tv consumers. The level of involvement that we see crosses media now; Lost fans are doing stuff online, there are Heroes blogs, etc. It’s very important to note the distinction and know what you mean when someone says hardcore, casual etc.

Ettinghausen: There will always be people following companies like Dan’s to see what they’re doing next, but there are also people who’ve never heard of ilovebees and never will, so we try to introduce games to them by bringing games into other places where they’re looking. We have audience [at Penguin] who like books and stories and we hope they’ll broaden their interaction.

Heaf: We’ve talked about what we can do – people in this room feel passionate about what they can create. The money to commission these things tends to rest in mktg and I’d guess that not all marketers are as educated as they might be in this area. Jeremy, how do you convince those within Penguin who are traditional marketers to spend in this area?

Ettinghausen: Our money for these projects doesn’t come from marketing, but from an ‘innovations fund’. The reason we’re doing this is as much proof of concept as it is marketing; we want to see if authors can tell these stories successfully and if there’s an audience for them. We want to examine the future of the story, and see where we can go with it.

Reynolds: It’s interesting that you have that innovations budget. What marketing depts are looking for might not be what the interactive experience is delivering. They’re probably using traditional metrics: eyeballs, page views – these things are stil meaningful, but not as much as measuring the depth of user interaction. If you have 100 people so deeply immersed that it’s changed their lives vs 1000 who’ve seen a logo, how can you compare those?

Hon: With ilovebees, the number of people who’ve got married as a result of his campaigns is his success rate. That’s a deep experience that people have undergone. The numbers are actually pretty high: 4 for Beast, 3 for ilovebees. Of course, agencies don’t traditionally track stuff like this.

Clarke: I asked the same question to Honda: how do you convince clients? Their answer was that these projects need to be relevant to the core of the brand. The approach shouldn’t be ‘ARGs are hot, we should do one’ but ‘is it relevant?’ – which brings it back to metrics. With tv ads, you still have quantitative methods – which are garbage but everyone accepts that ‘cos it’s the same garbage it’s always been.

Hon: One example is the interest broadcasters have, especially in education. You know you can reach a lot of people, but you don’t know what they’ve learned from watching, whereas if you include a cross-media campaign with playful media where people are asked to do quests or complete tasks, each of those can be mapped to a url and measured, so you can see how many players are ticking off objectives. You know that’s been satisfied.

Heaf: What do you have to do to get these projects beyond r&d? Where do you feel the real success criteria lie?

Ettinghausen: Happily there are quite a few criteria. Penguin has value just as a brand, so if people are talking about us (in blogs etc.) that’s good! We want to sell books, so we’re thinking about what happens after the project. Do we create a book (product?), use what we’ve learnt in the game in the future? That’s the most interesting bit. Can we get sponsored projects as a result? Learning stuff is an important metric of success; we learn stuff by failing as well.

Heaf: We all know games and puzzles have been used successfullly in the past. What would you say are the key characteristics that make these types of experiences better than more traditional types?

Clarke: Collaboration. If you look at Masquerade (a treasure hunt book), that took over 2 years to solve before someone found the treasure. They say it would take 2 weeks now with the web.

Hon: Definitely working together. Relationships between people; a community you can foster. Encourage people to collaborate and you’ve got something very powerful. The web provides instantaneous communication and feedback. We see with tv shows that people may or may not contact [the producers] with feedback, but in ARGs the time to production is much shorter, so we can respond faster to make changes. This makes the experience more compelling.

Clarke: The Dancing Elves [ElfYourself] are a perfect example of this phenomenon; the web spreads things much faster. From a brand perspective, when you get something that does hit home, then the benefits to the brand are huge.

Hon: Traditionally ARG campaigns run, are solved and die. This is confusing, because you’ve created a passionate audience but you’ve killed their sites. Microsoft and WB didn’t fund the Beast sites and didn’t keep the domains active. The same thing happens with other ARGs, and it’s confusing that people are willing to just write them off.

Heaf: Is there a way to effectively kill an ARG? One could argue it’s up to the audience whether they want to consume the brand or not.

Hon: Nobody’s really killed off an ARG yet. That’s a good question.

Clarke: An ARG is extreme – it’s the limit of the spectrum. The experience can’t be repeated, but you can think about multiple ways of using these tools.

Hon: Episodic content is something ARG people have been thinking about.

Reynolds: You can have a game that’s successful with a niche, and that’ll have an impact. It doesn’t have to reach mass appeal to have an effect. The idea of having lots of things out there, with each taking off differently, is interesting.

Clarke: Cheap viral effects are pervasive, but you can put good flash games out there that are branded to give people 30 seconds of fun.

Ettinghausen: Games and stories have always had a powerful culture in education, and there’s more and more research being done about game-based education. Someone’s opening a school in NY that teaches through gameplay and game design. Games and stories have always been around and will continue to be, whether ARGs are a thing of the moment, we’ll find out over the next few years. We’ll always be looking for new ways to encourage people to play and share stories. ARGs are just one way.

Heaf: You talked about Wrigley’s – I wonder how many people visited the url, and whether Wrigley’s has the right brand value?

Clarke: They bought the portal and took it over for the brand. Its popularity has declined recently but it’s still fairly large and people use it.

Heaf: Do you think there are companies where it’s a given that these experiences wouldn’t work? Tropicana? Domestos? Are some brands not suitable?

Hon: Yes. we’ve turned down quite a few people who’ve come to us simply because we couldn’t see why they wanted to work with us. I think you have to tailor the campaign to the brand.

Ettinghausen: Last year Second Life was what everyone was talking about at sxsw – everyone wanted an SL strategy. It’s the same with ARGs now perhaps, and some companies really shouldn’t get involved. You have to offer something to players and consumers. Consumers arent stupid, and with a bad campaign you’ll lose credibility.

Reynolds: You won’t do yourself any favors if you do something like this to be trendy. The valuable campaigns give something to the community. Sometimes good candidates aren’t obvious; a brand may have a deeper identity than the thing it makes. For instance Volvo isn’t about cars, it’s about families and safety etc.

Q: Based on your expertise, would you prioritise good storytellers or good puzzle-makers?

Hon: I wouldn’t pick one or the other; it depends on the kind of audience you want to get. Different people are there for different things. It was the mix of content available that led to such a wide demographic in Perplex City.

Q: I’m very interested in the intersection of VWs and casual games on the web. With a lot of adults in the US, “game” is a bad word. How do you deal with this?

Reynolds: There’s danger, when you’re trying to do something serious, in making it appear trivial; fun but not educational. There’s a number of different approaches, like using the term ’serious games’ to underscore the educational value of a project. I don’t know the answer, but i think there’s scope for using games and learning from them without scaring people off (investors, IT dept etc).

Clarke: The brand objective is to get those people to engage.

Hon: There’s a perception in UK that games are what teen boys play before they go and kill everyone in the classroom; there are bad connotations with Hitman, GTA, hot coffee mod etc. But what we’re able to do now is point to specific examples of what games can teach, which is becoming harder and harder for broadcasters and brands to ignore. It’s an uphill struggle, but the evidence is there and it’s just a matter of time.

Clarke: Marketers like online games. Middle-aged women in casual games hits home.

Q: I’m currently working on a game with a couple of hi-traffic partners. What happens when they figure it all out? How can we scale up fast? Server backups/security? Do you have concrete examples of this?

Reynolds: None of that is really different from the web. There will be panels about scaling this week.

Hon: I’d suggest going to the Velocity conference, which is all about back-end stuff. That’s outside the panel’s scope, sorry.

Q: In my spare time I’m a novelist. I’ve released a podcast and got a book contract out of it. There’s some dead time between now and publishing to bring new listeners in and keep current ones interested. Do you have any advice on creating a game when resources are limited and you only have good will?

Hon: Totally solicit help from your current audience. It’s a very young genre and very hard to explain, but once people have experienced it they want more. I can guarantee people will want to help. Some will be crap but you can deal with that. The wonderful thing about the web now is it’s easy to publish and produce content; the hard part is creativity. Tools are out there and free; people don’t judge the experience by how many servers you’ve got, or tech implementations. They’ll judge it by its narrative, gameplay etc.

Q: I’m an 8th grade math teacher and a big gamer, so I see learning potential in games. I’ve found that gaming and learning don’t work well together though; how do you solve those issues?

Reynolds: You’re in an interesting position, straddling two worlds. Get help. [laughter] There are people out there who can help you, walking the same line. In IBM we’re doing lots of work with educators, making edugames and stuff. Those things have a point, outcomes, measurable objectives and so on. If youve got those things in mind and you’ve got measurable outputs, you’re talking about a different delivery method. Dan’s working with a broadcast media company now; you can know that someone’s learned something cos they reach a certain point. if you can measurably demonstrate that you’ll be OK.

Q: Do you think that male casual gamers are as needy for an overarcing brand story as females?

Hon: I think it’s a question like ‘do boys like watching 24 (or tv) more than girls’. Having a long story arc and social relationships in storylines meant we attracted more women, but that’s a broad brush generalization. Try putting the story arc in.

Heaf: One minute left, no more questions – that’s a wrap!

Kathy Sierra was next up in A with Tools for Enchantment: 20 Ways to Woo Users. Packed house. Predictably fun talk – my notes don’t capture it well so it’s worth waiting for the video.

Finally, The Supercollider: A Hero of the Social Network, Matt’s panel. [Edit: there's a summary at dessalles.] His slides were superb. Two people tripped over my charger, but thankfully no-one was hurt (although some hard-disk protector feature on my laptop kicked in, which was worrying until it didn’t actually do anything and went away).

Et voila! Now I head off to some drive-thru to pick up dinner, like a very sad person. For the best really I think, since I’m flying back tomorrow and need to pack, be properly hydrated etc. Have fun, moo party people! ;)