Blog of Cambridge University mathematician Timothy Gowers who asks, "Why can't we just tell Elsevier that we no longer wish to publish with them?"

Academic life is characterized by the need to “publish or perish,” but some academics are calling for a boycott of a very prestigious publisher — another example of the disruptions caused by the switch from legacy to digital forms of information transmission.

Disruptions caused by the change from transmission by atoms to transmission by bits have been in the news in multiple industries in the past few months: book publishers upset over Amazon becoming a lending library; Hollywood pressuring the federal government to wage war on pirating;  Congress proposing new copyright laws,  causing a massive counter-attack by internet companies.

Now academics are up in arms over the pricing structure and insistence on exclusivity of a private publisher of scholarly journals who enjoyed a monopoly over the prestigious, peer-reviewed  research articles it used to provide on paper. With increasing pressure from government funders and scientific researchers  to share knowledge more rapidly and efficiently, and with electronic  journals becoming the standard form of publication, academic publishers are scrambling to keep control of  their revenue stream, and scholars are questioning the high price of scholarly journals.

Under the old paper-based system of information transmission, a publisher was clearly needed to pay for the paper and ink and organize and pay for the assembly and distribution of the physical volumes. The transmission chain included a physical library and a structure for purchasing physical volumes, cataloging them, placing them on shelves, lending them out and making sure they were returned.  Most of these tasks can be mechanized or eliminated by digital production. But does this mean that journal publishing is no longer necessary?

As with other mediated activities, the change from legacy to digital formats is an opportunity to ask radical questions, to identify the core human needs being served by a mediated process. In this case the question is, What do publishers do that cannot be eliminated by the change from paper to electronic documents? Where is the value added by publishers when we abstract their activities away from the medium in which they have traditionally practiced it?  We can expect the controversy over price to continue until there is wide agreement that we have a self-evident answer to that question.

HBO GO Game of Thrones Application

Active Creation of Belief is a  design term I first used in Hamlet on the Holodeck, to contrast with Coleridge’s classic term of “suspension of disbelief”  and to refute the notion that narrative pleasures are incompatible with interactivity.

To my mind, active creation of belief is a function of immersion reinforced by agency. Immersion is derived from consistency and depth and from the establishment of clear boundaries. A fantasy novel series or a detailed television storyworld encourages us to believe in it by being extremely detailed and consistent. When fans  are able to explore the world, to ask questions of it, and discover new and consistent facts about it, then their belief increases as a result of their actions and they experience the active creation of belief. 

Interactive applications are a good fit for supplying information on demand and for helping people to keep track of the increasingly detailed storyworld that episodic television is delivering. But the design of these applications is still rough, often disrupting immersion by distracting from the dramatic presentation or calling attention to the fact that the world is not real. HBO GO is one of the best examples of an application that reinforces immersion, but the single-screen presentation is a liability, introducing a secondary suspense (when will new information pop up on the right-hand side?) to compete with the narrative suspense.

Changing copyrighted content from atoms to bits makes it easier to copy things and cheaper to distribute them.  The transmission layer for entertainment such as Hollywood movies and TV shows is a profit center that depends on exclusivity and scarcity — limited copies in few hands — but also on mass consumption — many viewers who must all come to the single source for the desirable item.  The economic model rests on the material properties of broadcast and cable networks, and the social arrangements (like advertising practices and geographically negotiated cable regulations) that have determined how we pay for them.

But digital transmission is peer to peer and many to many, not just many to one. The internet runs on the model of a shared resource as Clay Shirkey has pointed out, using the analogy of a Brooklyn bakery that no longer allowed children to put mass media cartoon figures on their birthday cakes for fear of copyright infringement. The image of kids and birthday cakes is a well-chosen loaded one, as was the image invoked by the U.S. Justice Department when it raided a luxury enclave in New Zealand to arrest the millionaire entrepreneurs behind Megaupload.

But the consumers of unlicensed digital media need not be seen as helpless, disappointed children pining for birthday cake or as hedonistic adults at a non-offshore orgy. As designers we can ask ourselves what is driving this business — what is the core need being served? It seems to me it is a desire for Hollywood entertainment on demand. The people flocking to the pirated media sites  are fans of the tv shows and movies they are downloading, and unwilling to wait until they can get it legally.  Some of them may want to get it free, but most of them just want to get content that is otherwise unavailable because they live in the wrong place. In other words, they are potential customers.

The entertainment industry lost billions of dollars when record companies insisted on holding onto  the CD as the technology of transmission, when their customer base was exchanging digital files. Now the movie studios, the  TV networks, and the cable companies are making a similar mistake, reacting too slowly to the shift to internet delivery, to the customer’s expectation that whatever they want to watch will be available on demand anywhere and anytime.  The only thing that will stop unlicensed sharing is greater legal availability of the digital content that is obviously in worldwide demand. As with the Napster problem that preceded  iTunes, the legal battle is a sign of a tremendous design opportunity: Who will come up with the right combination of encyclopedic archives, immediate availability, reliable delivery, and reasonable pricing that will turn a global media piracy crisis into a global digital market?

Inventing the Medium.

This Hellenistic period terracotta of two women playing the ancient game of knucklebones – a form of dice –  (from an image on the British Museum website) is iconic for me of one way to think about what a medium is.

According to Merlin Donald, human culture passed through a mimetic stage that preceded the invention of language. Although he does not talk about games in this context, it seems to me that game-playing is an expression of our pleasure in synchronizing our behavior with one another, by imitating common actions and sequencing them in predictable ways.  Michael Tomasello points out that a baby goes through a similar stage of mimetic communication starting at nine months when it figures out that other people have consciousness similar to their own.  We see babies delight at that stage in teasing a parent with repeated behaviors that create a strong response or in pointing at something to draw attention to it.  Tomasello identified the “Joint Attentional Scene” as the locus of this kind of infant/parent communication, and a necessary predecessor to the acquisition of language. Early humans must have gone through a similar sequence, and we can think of human culture as repeating a similar pattern in every era. We become aware of other people’s minds acting like our own, and we build on that by elaborating common rituals that focus our common attention, creating new meanings.

The Roman women are a good reference point because the game is so simple and the circle of attention is so circumscribed. Imagine two much earlier creatures, our pre-verbal ancestors playing with sheep’s knucklebones, or with pebbles, taking turns throwing them down and picking them up. This is similar to one of the earliest games that adults are charmed into playing  with babies:  baby throws something out of a crib, adult  retrieves it, baby throws it down again. As in knucklebones, the moment when the  object lands is the dramatic focus of the game, but knucklebones (like dice) adds another symbolic elaboration: how it lands becomes meaningful. It is not hard to imagine shared imitative play like throwing and retrieving games supporting the development of symbolic communication (if it lands this way it means something different than if it lands that way).

I see media development as beginning with the baby’s pointing and throwing things out of the crib, and with our pre-verbal ancestors sitting in a circle and clapping together or throwing down stones. We establish rituals for focusing attention on the same thing and then we develop conventions that associate meaning with whatever is in focus, from an articulated sound signifying  ”Mama,” to a ceramic token representing a bushel of wheat, to an ATM transaction turning into  purchasing power. A medium is always a way of creating meaning by using culturally established conventions to focus our shared attention.

As I explain in the Introduction and especially in Chapter 2, Inventing the Medium is not meant to substitute for the body of knowledge mapped above but to complement and recontextualize it, by drawing on disciplinary methods and craft practices that are absent  from the HCI/Interaction Design map of the design process.
Here is how I would express it, using the same diagram:

The humanistic perspective does not exclude or compete with the other disciplines and design practices:  it reframes them as elements in the shared enterprise of inventing a new medium of representation.

For cinema there is mythic moment associated with the birth of film, the Lumière Brothers 1895 showing of a film about the everyday occurance of the arrival of a train.  

According to the legend, the audience for this film went screaming from the Paris screening room in terror, believing that a real train was bearing down upon them (an episode that Martin Scorsese adopted for his 2011 film  Hugo). Although film scholars are skeptical of this event, the iconic story captures the feeling that accompanies a new medium: the frightening sense of being unable to tell the difference between something that is represented and something that is really there.

Some early film artists explicitly played with the delusional quality of film, most notably George Méliès who simulated magic tricks in playful and imaginative staged scenarios like this one:

The Lumière films were documentaries, exploiting the camera’s affordance of portability  – its ability to capture outdoor events  and spectacles too large to be captured on stage or too far away to be seen in person.  Méliès exploited the new representational affordances of the physical film, such as the ability to splice together different shots leaving out intervening events or to capture multiple images in a single frame through  multiple exposures. But both the realist and the fantasist approach are driven by the same  fascination with the power of a new medium to represent the world.

We can see the same cultural patterns in the response to other media, from spoken language to computation…but that is  matter for other posts.

“Michael” is a two-minute live-action film featuring characters from more than a dozen games that have appeared on PlayStation platforms. It begins with a pair of Second World War soldiers from Call of Duty parachuting through the night into a forest. The duo make their way through the shadows to a dimly lit pub, where they find PlayStation-exclusive heroes including God of War’s Kratos, Uncharted’s Nathan Drake, and LittleBigPlanet’s Sack Boy mingling with personalities from popular multiplatform franchises including Portal, Assassin’s Creed, and Metal Gear Solid.

The film builds as each character tells how they were in danger and rescued by “Michael,” who is revealed, as they raise their beer mugs to toast him, as an ordinary teenage male gamer, playstation controller in hand.  The video ends with stirring music and the message “Long Live Play!”  For my students who recognized all the characters, as for the Globe and Mail’s columnist, the film is stirring, because:

Sony’s ad tacitly declares that we don’t play games just for their guns and explosions. It affirms that video game characters and the stories in which they appear are important. It suggests that games make players feel. I’ve spent hours with all of the characters featured in the spot and I felt a legitimate flood of emotion as it built towards its climax.

I am not the audience for this ad, or for the games that it describes, but I see the appeal. Playing videogames, like reading fiction or watching movies or television shows, offers us the chance to identify with heroic characters. More than that, unlike more passive media, but like the make-believe games of young children or our lifelong daydreams, videogames cast us in the starring role. Narratives in videogames serve the psychological functions that psychologist Keith Oatley describes as characteristic of all fiction: they allow us to empathize with the emotions of characters who are not ourselves and to simulate the behaviors depicted in the story using the mental modeling affordances of the human brain.  In later posts I will discuss further what it means that the simulation is created procedurally, and that we do not just imagine it, but enact it within the storyworld of the game.

The Facebook game Cow Clicker was meant to parody Zynga's Farmville and expose its inanity and cynical commercialism. Instead it became a hit.

Cow Clicker was  meant to parody  the wildly successful Facebook game Farmville,  exposing its unchallenging and pointless gameplay and its cynical commercialism. But  to Bogost’s dismay his intentionally boring game unexpectedly attracted 50,000 users.  Stunned out of his customary ironic detachment, Bogost found himself unable to resist the direct “pleasure” of having people play his game.  He began to pay attention to what they liked and to fulfill their requests, though he was bothered by their unironic pleasure in the gameplay. In order to reinforce his satiric intent, Bogost  tried to subvert the game by charging ridiculous amounts of money for obviously worthless virtual items. To his dismay, people paid and continued to enjoy the game.   Eventually he resorted to outright destruction, starting a counter that ended with a satisfyingly absurd “rapture” that left no cows standing, just a little clickable shadow in the pasture: a “cowpocalypse”!

Yet even the  ”cowpocalypse”   was not enough to erase the enthusiasm of the fans and Bogost , who is an extraordinary productive designer and scholar, now  finds himself best known for his most despised creation.   Worst of all, according to his pal the astute game critic  Leigh Alexander, the runaway success of Cow Clicker makes a sad contrast to the modest sales of  the serious art  game Bogost created around the same time,  called  A Slow Year in which the gameplay involves virtually drinking a cup of coffee as slowly as possible to make it last through a meditatively slow seasonal change captured in the retro minimalism of the Atari game console.

In fact,  looking at the mechanics of the gameplay, the design of Cow Clicker and A Slow Year are almost identical —  each is based on the player taking one click-enabled game action  at very long intervals with very little visible effect.  Yet one game is played obsessively by thousands of people and the other is appreciated and collected by connoisseurs but probably little played even by the relatively few who have bought it. Setting aside the author’s intentions (as literary critics are taught to do) , we can see that both games are successful, but they succeed in different terms.

A Slow Year is a Writerly game (it even comes with a book of poetry) in the sense that Roland Barthes used the term for literary works that require the reader to work to understand what is going on. Writerly texts do not respect the reader’s need for clarity.  In fact, they privilege confusion, complexity, and the active effort of decoding.  The writerly aesthetic does not lend itself to the simple agency of click and moo.   Bogost’s art games often work as refusals of agency — but they are still successful as art because  the refusal is meaningful and meant to communicate the need to slow down and to become aware of the mechanics of game interaction.

Cow Clicker is meant to be equally opaque, but it carries the form of the very Readerly text it intends to parody. Even more than in Farmville,  the interactor knows what  to do, and gets clear feedback for doing it:  you click a cow every six hours, hear it moo, and get a tally of your clicks. Cow Clicker also includes the very readable social aspects of the Zynga games it is parodying, allowing you to pasture and view other people’s cows, affording the pleasure of an ambient social atmosphere. Most importantly, it has very readable, pleasing, and witty graphics which make the pointless clicking and mooing into a friendly, shared joke. Perhaps that is the key design flaw — Bogost’s strong graphic design skills and comic timing defeated his philosophical purpose, unintentionally creating an experience of dramatic agency around the ironic anti-commodification message.

The SyFy TV show Defiance will have an associated MMO set in a different city within the same storyworld.

What would this new participatory story genre look like? Some of its conventions are clear, based on the way people have wanted to connect with existing story worlds and multiplayer games: It will involve an internally consistent but puzzling fictional world, an authored but participatory plot, and an encyclopedically large cast built around a small number of iconic figures.

The shape of future inventions can be glimpsed by consulting our own frustrations with existing media patchworks. For example, on the web, viewers can pose theories and argue about the interpretation of episodes and scenes, but they can’t point to them or excerpt them yet. In a format that was custom made for participatory story telling, viewers would be able to create precise pointers to parts of an episode, and assemble them for replay or post commentaries linked to the exactly the moment that proves their point.  They would be able to create and share their own playlists to emphasize a particular point of view or follow an important story thread.

The elements that currently take place in separate game worlds could also be more closely integrated with the unfolding action so that they could inflect (but not disruptively alter) the course of the actor-played, scripted main characters. There would still be a division between the scripted actor-focused story and the interactive one, but some large events  – an alien invasion, a blinding snow storm, an epidemic of the hiccups — could be shared, reinforcing the sense of immersion in a single narrative world.

Just as daytime soap operas used to bring all the characters together for a party or a funeral every season, participatory dramas could arrange large events like battles, contests, telethons, sales of virtual merchandise, or the release of puzzle clues that would synchronize the work or the partisan actions of teams of viewers within an unfolding dramatic situation. The Defiance series planned for the SyFy network and for an associated MMO is one opportunity to start defining some of these conventions, and they’ve taken a good first step in setting up the game world as taking place in another city, but within the same fictional universe or storyworld.

The thirst of fans for access to secret communications could also be accommodated in a more integrated manner. For example, a character could be shown writing an email or text message, and some viewers could gain access to the contents of the message on a synchronized display, like a tablet remote, by situating themselves within the fictional world as allied to one point of view or another.

Not all shows in this future integrated medium  would have the same kind of interactivity. Some would be more like current television shows, but they would have affordances we now go to the web or the DVR to find, such as access to backstory, character profiles, actor’s filmography (where do I know that guy from?), or the kind of on-screen informational captions that Lost was forced to resort to in its last season just to keep people informed of the over-elaborated and highly confusing story – but that would also have been useful on The Wire.

It is always easier for me to see the direction of change than it is to identify the time frame in which a particular moment of invention will occur. The emergence of integrated interactive stories is getting closer as TV, console games, and the internet converge on the same living room screen. But it is not technology that will drive it. The arrival of the new genre will come with an act of the imagination, similar to the first Star Wars films, when someone conceives of a coherent multi-episode, multi-season story, in an elaborately detailed and mysterious world with room for large participatory groups in well-defined but open-ended roles,  It may be a science fiction universe or an historical adventure or a romantic soap opera or a western or gangster story. But it will be a world that people will want to inhabit as well as view, one where the viewing reinforces the delight of participating and the participation reinforces the richness of viewing. It will be a story with multiple conflicting points of view or compellingly ambiguous moral choices or a multi-layered symbolic mystery, or some other special complexity. In other words, it will be a great story that could only be captured in a new interactive medium, and the demands of that story will lead to a new synthesis of media conventions,  that will seem graceful, inevitable, and not “trans” anything.

Entertainment is a risky business, so anything that makes money or attracts attention becomes the basis of the next pitch and the next big investment. After the success of Lost in spreading fan involvement from the TV screen to the web in the form of intense plot speculation, map-making, webisodes, and games, “transmedia storytelling” — whose properties have been brilliantly observed by my old friend and colleague Henry Jenkins of USC — became the goal of many producers. I agree with Henry that the creation of a consistent story world with participatory elements that takes viewers deeper into the fictional universe is a phenomenon that is very much worth taking note of.  But I am also impatient with the concept, because I don’t expect “transmedia” anything to be around very long.

Why am I so sure? Because “transmedia” like “photoplay” is an additive term for a temporary,  additive practice. Just as we no longer think of movies as merely photographed plays, we will someday cease to think of television and the web as separate media platforms for authors to work across.

As Nicholas Negroponte used to say, “Bits are bits.” Anything translated into binary integers is part of the same medium – the digital medium. And once an entertainment property is in the digital medium, all of  the expressive possibilities of that medium become available to it. Digital representation is not limited to sending legacy media packages down a new kind of wire: it is not merely a transmission technology.  The digital medium is a new form of representation, opening up new possibilities of interaction and immersion, and the possibility of wholly new genres of entertainment that transcend their patchwork origin, just as movies transcended the patchwork of photography plus live theater to find their own expressive language.

Most of my students do not own a TV – they watch on their computers. Millions of older consumers are watching TV and movies on demand on their iPads or game control systems. Some smaller number are calling up the internet on their living room Google TV sets. Right now the mating between these separate media forms is clumsy and incomplete. Additive design is not stable because it takes too high a cognitive load: if you don’t believe me, try to figure out which game events belong to the canonical Lost universe,or what to make of the characters in the Lost videogame that look enough like the characters in the TV series to make it annoying that they are not played by the original actors.

How will we transcend this awkward additive “transmedia” stage ? Not by making everything on television interactive or everything on the web serialized and non-participatory. But by looking at the points of intersection of existing media genres — what  we might currently think of as the  “transmedia” design space – as marking off the turf of an emerging new genre which will eventually define its own space within the vast expressive affordances of the digital medium.