The Great Idea Slowdown?
We are more aware of our past, and cling to it in a world of accelerated change. We seek meaning everywhere, and disconnected tribes (niches/groups/interest/clubs) trade in signifiers (symbols/names/images/art) from older times as a way to connect. In some ways we seem to live in a world that is too self aware, where everything is a reference, and so ideas cannot avoid being analysed and discarded if they do not fit into sets of pre-defined memes. A world, also, which is increasingly aware of its limitations and sense of systems (politics/ecology/economy/biology/technology) spiralling out of control toward some ill-defined doom.
What to do?
Make stuff, invent, ignore the hubbub and contribute. It’s normal for culture to exist in some sort of reference-driven state. Even Shakespeare did it.
Majority, Plurality or Margin?
Something that drives me a little bit insane every time I hear it is the way that the British press misuses the word ‘majority’ in reference to election results.
In the rest of the world majority means “more than 50%”. If I ate 5 slices of pizza and you only ate 3, I ate the majority. However if I ate 3 slices, you ate 2 and three other people ate 1 each, did I have the majority? No.
Unless you’re talking about elections in Britain.
Under the current reporting standard, the BBC would report that I had in fact won by “a majority” of 1. What they mean is that I ate 1 more slice than the second placed contender, which in every other context of anything everywhere would be called a margin of victory, not a majority. My 3 slices are not a majority because 5 slices went to other hungry tummies. What they are is a plurality.
And yet everyone from The Guardian to the Mail would call them a majority. It seems to be one of those traditional language quirks, a holdover from elder times, but it gets my goat because I think it causes a confusion.
For example it conveys the impression that MPs are elected by most people in their constituency. This is not true. Even just counting those who actually showed up to vote (and turnout has rarely been so low), most MPs do not get more than 50% of the votes in their constituency.
Some get as low as 30%. Caroline Lucas of the Green Party was elected by 31.3% of Brighton Pavilion voters. This was reported as “a majority” of 2.4%, or 1252 votes. What that actually means is that she beat Nancy Platts of Labour by a margin of 1252.
She didn’t get a majority. She didn’t get within 18% of a majority. 68.7% of voters in that constituency voted for someone else. And there are many other similar examples.
Language matters. Perception matters. Honesty matters. At a time when the youth in particular feel shut out by the political process, the economy and society, Westminster has rarely seemed like more of an elite club. When even reporters are accidentally colluding in this by painting a false image of proceedings based on a historical language quirk, what are the uninformed to think?
Whether you believe in changing voting systems or sticking with things as they are, surely accurate reporting is always better than distortion?
On Redesign Woes #newnewtwitter
When you don’t like a design change it’s hard not to get tagged as resistant for resistance’s sake. You’ll be in good company on the one hand because a lot of people react negatively to any kind of change, as Facebook knows all too well, only to forget their rage a week later.
Sometimes this effect applies even to designs that were spectacularly in need of cleaning such as GMail. Before the recent spring cleaning in line with the new Google Plus aesthetic, GMail had become thoroughly cluttered. And yet still there are people who hate the new design, the fact that it uses icons over text labels and so on.
Because all sites are communities, they all attract cultures based on what they are at the time of their inception, and it’s not always the case that the site wants to attract outsiders into the community. Reddit is a good example of a community who’s deliberately lo-fi aesthetic is part and parcel of what its community thinks it should be because the techie feel of it keeps non-geeks away.
However there are also redesigns that make a site worse for no good reason. This is how the recent Twitter redesign (Called #NewNewTwitter) feels. Gone is the left-to-right reading arrangement which focused on the stream of tweets. Gone is the differently coloured sidebar that helped assist focus. Gone is the direct access to saved searches and lists (which is particularly annoying for me as I use Lists for news).
And instead we have the obliquely named ‘@Connect’ and ‘#Discover’ options which seem a bit too clever for their own good. We have nested conversations inside the stream which cause more clutter (it used to overlay the sidebar instead). We have all the least important content (profile, trends, who to follow) on the left, right in your reading range (which you can fix with a script).
In a snap the Twitter design has gone from the focused and powerful to something with more kid gloves. Why?
My guess is that Twitter wants to be a social network that everyone uses, but it has always had something of an aura of being quite technical. Many long-time users maintain that the service is hard to get into, but once you do it’s pure gold (which I agree with). However that is perhaps not the best place to be if you intend to sell advertising, and it means that the service likely has a high churn rate.
Maybe so, but if it is then changing the design wholesale should no longer be the answer. Twitter is over 5 years old, so a lot of its user relationships have already formed, its power user culture is very strong, and to start simplifying it risks pushing those people away. Sometimes there is no growth to be had in making things dumber than they used to be. Digg tried the same thing after all, and look what happened.
The previous Twitter design was not perfect but it was artful. It was an interface for people who knew what Twitter was already and wanted to figure out how to use it better. Clever, well-proportioned and sophisticated, it was interface that perhaps needed some polish in key areas rather than to be thrown out. In a side by side comparison, as someone who uses Twitter frequently, it was simply much better than the new new one.
I for one feel as though Twitter has just made a significant misstep. It needs to be careful not to Digg its own grave, to reject its existing users in the hope of finding a larger group that doesn’t care. It is reasonable to suggest that any service is done with its explosive growth phase after half a decade and that its challenge is to grow the depth of what it provides rather than its breadth.
Twitter, it seems, has failed to understand that and still thinks that it’s the new kid on the block.
100,000 Players for 60 Days [Traction]
‘I don’t really care about being right’, Steve Jobs said in an interview for Triumph of the Nerds, ‘I just care about success.’
There are infinite ways to kid yourself that a game is successful, but there are also many ways to misinterpret success as failure. Here’s what I think: If your game can attract 100,000 players who each play for 60 days then it’s a success. It might take time to realise its value, but you’re definitely onto something.
It has traction.
Continue reading “100,000 Players for 60 Days [Traction]” »
This vision, from an interaction perspective, is not visionary.
I had the opportunity to design with real working prototypes, not green screens and After Effects, so there certainly are some interactions in the video which I’m a little skeptical of, given that I’ve actually tried them and the animators presumably haven’t. But that’s not my problem with the video.
My problem is the opposite, really — this vision, from an interaction perspective, is not visionary. It’s a timid increment from the status quo, and the status quo, from an interaction perspective, is actually rather terrible….
The Storysense of Call of Duty MW3
I often say that videogames are not a storytelling medium. They can’t tell tightly structured tales because the player gets in the way, and this is why there are no great game stories.
However I also often say that videogames are a great medium for storysense. An excellent example is the new Call of Duty game, Modern Warfare 3. This article looks at how Modern Warfare 3 conveys its sense of story, and how it sometimes gets it wrong, as a lesson for what you might do in your game.
(PS: Watch out, there are spoilers.)
Testing 1..2…
Just thought I’d restart my old Tumblr blog to see if it’s any better than it used to be.
What Games Are
Do you know that I’ve moved?
I have a new project, called What Games Are. Come join me!
Reply to O2’s Ronan Dunne About Their Proposed Limited iPhone Tariffs
(Posted here because O2 took to censoring comments from Ronan’s blog post)
(Which can be found here: http://j.mp/DataBlog )
Ronan, your position on data makes no sense at all. Here’s what’s actually going on:
O2 (and other cell carriers in the US and other places) are simply terrified of what happens when the larger bulk of their users starts to realise that they can use their smartphones for video, music and gaming. Right now that 0.1% you’re talking about is simply the early adopters, but they follow a wave.
It could be called “The Youtube effect” or somesuch, and you know that it’s coming. When you could be spending some of that million-a-day working on the next level of compression for your technology (like the ADSL people did), instead you seem to be throwing your hands up in the air and, like King Canute, thinking you can simply command the ocean to stop advancing.
Limited usage has one effect and one effect only: It stops people using data because they become afraid of accidental costs. I used to use broadband on Orange years ago before I got an iPhone, and that’s what it was like. Metered access is simply cutting your nose off to spite your face.
Does nobody remember Compuserve? Or AOL? Or how it was in the pay-per-cycle days of dialup internet? That is essentially what you are proposing here. You’re saying “let’s turn back the clock”.
As for me, this now makes me think to move to another network that has a clue about what my needs both are and *are likely to be* into the future. My guess is that none of the major networks will provide that (because, like any oligopoly, you all tend to move in lock-step with each other) which means instead that I’ll start looking for alternatives, such as WiMax (or equivalent) services that simply cut you out of the loop.
And what happens when I do that? I drop my O2 tariff to the most bare bones cellphone usage instead and take my data (and the bulk of the monthly bill I would have paid you) to someone else.
Congratulations, you’re now losing money.
The smarter thing to do, as the broadband industry discovered, is to tier charges by speed rather than usage. Nobody has a problem with that and nobody is afraid of hidden costs, and THAT encourages usage while at the same time keeping traffic manageable. That’s the business model that you should be chasing.
But to revert to charging for usage is to essentially throw your hands in the air and cry that it’s all just too hard and boo hoo for O2. Please. You’re supposed to be embracing the future, not running in terror of it.
