Tom Armitage and Frankie Roberto's talks at Interesting North are about rules and Lego, respectively. After an introductory dialogue, we considered some points that might unite them, in order to formulate an "In conversation with..." article. So, we brought them together, and set them off, talking about play and playfulness, systems (including Lego), and gamification.
Does digital media inherently lend itself to rules and mechanics, or are we in danger of taking too technical an approach to an artistic medium?
TA: Digital media can be artistic, but the problem exists when you want to make things that exist digitally: on the web, on my mobile, or wherever. At the bottom of it all, are a bunch of transistors. That's all we have. It's digital because of mechanical chips; they're not dull, they're amazing.
That's not a problem; you can work around it. You can make very abstract, non-mechanical, curious things on top of this. In terms of what the foundations are, there are certain things that it lends itself to, because it has big, interlinking systems all the way down. Things you might consider to be ostensibly more artistic. the first thing you do isn't necessarily to paint a grid of squares, and colour in, one at a time. So, there's something about the foundations which need to be taken into account.
FR: There's one overarching rule, which is of what can and can't be done. A lot of the digital stuff is pushing against that, and trying to do as much as possible – and find where those boundaries are. If you want to call it a game, then the overarching game is to try to break it in new ways, and to find new things that can be done: playing with the physics of it, and trying to see what there is, and what the scope of possibilities are. That scope is widening to the point in which it's pretty open.
Do you think that the “widening” lends itself to a greater potential of playfulness?
FR: Yes. Within Lego, the only rule as such is that the studs are on top, and the bricks sit on top of each other. People have played around with that rule, as well as within it. It's incredibly open-ended, and allows infinite possibilities. Even that fundamental rule can be played with, such as jamming two bricks together, and turning bricks on their side. I see that as being a metaphor for digital media.
TA: I keep coming back to a concepts that Eric Zimmerman introduced me to, and I quite like: the notion of systemic media. Lots of things are systemic: poetry is systemic, especially metrical verse; certain forms of sculpture are systemic. Games are built on systems; they live or die without them. With poetry, blank verse for example is much less systemic than Iambic pentameter. The Lego example is nice. Lego is a system, where as Frankie said, blocks line up. There are interesting ways of breaking that, which allow you to do more interesting stuff. All of these are recognised as playing fair, because people have understood the system and internalised the rules. Not playing fair is gluing blocks together. Rubber bands, glue, and nails, tend to be cheating. Jamming blocks together in unintended ways, feels about right. The understanding of systems such as banking systems, tools such as Alexa, toys such as Lego, is not based on an aesthetic layer alone. It's drilling down, until you discover the rules, but then the brilliant thing that happens. is that you internalise the system. You forget about it. The thing that makes you good at it is not that you know the rules backwards, but it's that you can't not know the rules. You wouldn't know how not to be behave.
It's not that everyone thinks of how to put the blocks together; you know that you're playing with Lego. You know what you're doing, because you are experienced at playing with Lego. The literacy around the ways of understanding systems is based on the number-one way of understanding systems, which is to break them and to see what happens. It's a great feedback loop.
Understanding Lego, the stock market, or Flickr, are things which we are pre-conditioned to do, through play. We sometimes forget. I like Zimmerman's point that when you have a steering wheel on a car, there's that point where you fiddle with the wheel and nothing happens. We call that “play” - the play in the system. It's a little bit of “give” before things start happening. That's you figuring it out. How heavy is this wheel? Ways of fiddling in order to learn, are interesting and exciting, and I think that they are important. The only way to understand the systemic media that we are creating, such as Foursquare or Facebook, is through play, experimentation, and learning what the rules are.
Does a technical process take away that concept of discovery?
FR: I don't think that it takes anything away; it's a starting point. The first thing you do is to see how the user interface defines the constraints. I like to think of constraints rather than rules. Part of me doesn't like the definition of rules as being a “bounding” of what you can do. Constraints themselves can give more playful elements.
Even though Twitter came along at the time of infinite bandwidth and storage, the constraint of a limited number of characters made it interesting. It encouraged people to play around with language. Technical ways of getting around the limit has given rise to a whole level of creativity, such as URL shortening, because of that limit. Even though those constraints can be annoying, imposed by someone else, just one single constraint such as that can be interesting, and force people to be more playful. There are scopes within user interfaces for concepts like that.
At the office, we have been talking about how to introduce more friction. One of the things that I have said recently, is how UI design is trending to a bland, generic, “Like” button-style of interaction. Everything is as easy as possible, aggregating to one place, and you just go around liking things and commenting. There's only one form of interaction. It's not open-ended enough. It's efficient, but not interesting. Whether it's something simple as being only allowed to talk to ten people... that's a simple mechanic that MySpace had when it started. You could only list your ten best friends on your homepage. That very simple constraint – I don't know where it came from and whether it was technical, but it forced people to be playful with the constraint.
It's harder to make something where you really push someone.
Tom Armitage
TA: I like separating out constraints and rules. I don't think that everything is systemic media. One of the things that systems do, is enable you to internalise the ruleset so you become good at stuff. I was recently talking to a friend, and we were discussing the gap between game design, and UI design. That gap is something that people don't talk about, and they are actually polar opposites at times. Effective UI design is streamlining me doing what I want to do: sending a message and clicking Send. Effective game design makes things arbitrarily difficult. It encourages mastery; it enables you to get better. What is complicated on the surface, becomes easier as you get on. The reason that it is genuine mastery, is that there is a difficulty curve; there is challenge. A lot of UI design is about being frictionless; enabling people to achieve what they want to do, seamlessly. That's great, but everyone has the same capabilities. It's harder to make something where you really push someone.
In Frankie's Twitter example, the people that are good at it, are those that are funny, and don't resort to condensation such as text speak. The skill is a linguistic one. What makes heavily rule-based things good, is that actually they are not always immediate. Getting to learn the system enables you to get good at it. I don't have to learn Facebook in order to be able to talk to my friends. There's a big sliding scale of immediacy, going towards mastery. You can position yourself along it. When Frankie was talking about friction, it's just that tiny bit extra just to think about what you're doing, and slows you down a little. That allows you to understand what's going on.
FR: On Facebook or really any other social site, rather than the friends list, you could introduce friction in terms of giving your contacts a half-life. If you don't contact them within a certain amount of time, they dwindle. Systems that self-manage with such friction... how do you encourage that “socialness”? How do you introduce something that forces people to consider that they haven't spoken to a particular friend? Those small interventions are what's needed in digital media, otherwise we have an efficient landscape which is useful but isn't always engaging.
TA: You're describing a pacing issue. Pacing is interesting, as some interactions are slow and meaningful. If you consider these people to be your friends, maybe you should talk to them, and adding people to a friends list should be harder than an “Add” button. Maybe if you don't talk them, they are sorted down to the bottom, as clearly they are not interesting. The mechanic of the half-life exposes them to the way in which it works. You're making something much more explicit: not by putting it there in words, but giving them a little “speed bump”. That bit where you have to consider it for a minute. Then, you have a site, application or product which moves at various paces. If you look at things which people find engaging, whether it's narrative or products, they don't have identical interfaces. They have pace, and speed bumps. Good stories have pacy drama, and long, drawn-out meditative sequences that let you gather your thoughts after high speed. That idea of friction is nice, in terms of how we enjoy friction in lots of other ways.
FR: The reason that the “Like” button is designed that way, and the reason that the word “Like” is chosen, is that it's such a low-value emotion.
TA: It's really anodyne.
FR: It's easy to press. You don't have to think much about it, before pressing the button. If you're a service that wants to gather as much data as possible, then it makes sense to have the least friction possible in the interaction. It means that you end up surrounded by stuff that you have a vague likeness for, but don't actually love. You don't get exposed to stuff that you don't like. One of the ideas that I have been playing with, is the notion of “agree” and “disagree”, and not having a neutral. That forces you to make a statement. There's an implicit idea that you have to explain why you agree or disagree. It encourages people to say that you agree or disagree with it. The aggregate that you get back, is less about stuff that you might like, and more about what you agree or disagree with. My learning is from what I disagree with.
TA: I would be much more interested in seeing what an “Adore” button looks like, or a “Loathe” button. The choice with “Like” is in pressing the button, or not. Not doing it is not ignoring the UI; it's a valid choice: choosing not to push it, rather than a binary choice. Not doing it, does matter.
From the perspectives of UI design, and how we learn and play, is there more scope to address friction?
TA: Yes. Users introduce their own friction. You have to account for how people will understand things. With online dating sites, there's a friction in terms of the questions asked, but then there are people's own sensibilities. There are some questions which many people dive into, and some parts that people have to fill out, and some parts to which people have issues with the language. Some of the friction comes from the user. We can create obvious friction; we can put in the speed bump, but some people are cautious drivers.
This is why I say that a lot of things already have friction. People are cautious about how they upload private data, or adding friends. It might be a small button, but it's a big piece of friction. Systems aimed at less expert users – people less aware of the meaning of what they are doing – are more likely to meet more obvious speed bumps.
FR: The example in my mind is from our current project, where we are looking at people between 14 and 20 using Facebook. One of the interesting things is how among many of them, is who you are in a relationship with. It's used in a playful way, and it's usually only with one person. You're at the age where you're not in relationships yet, or dating. They're often not in actual relationships, but are making a joke, and to put themselves in relationships with their friends, and constantly renegotiate who their significant other is... even to the extent of who their children are. We have seen sixteen-year-olds adding friends as their children, when clearly they are not. It's expressing something – breaking the system, and easing room for negotiation. You still have to agree that between the two of you, as just being a friend is a non-agreement. You can just do that. That's an example of where people value friction.
With half-lives, a point raised by Toby and Marcus was about subtlety. They made the point about how digital photography doesn't age, and should age in some way.
Are we moving towards an approach where entities such as the “Like” button take away a sense of time?
FR: The most interesting thing that I have recently seen in terms of the progression of time, is James Bridle's talk at dConstruct this year. He talked passionately about the historiography of digital things. A lot of things are online, and disappear. They don't change over time. The example which he gave that doesn't do that, is Wikipedia. You have a continual change. In some ways it's progress toward a point, and in others, it expands towards the future. You can see that, visibly. I would like to see how that can be applied more widely.
TA: I'm weary of analogue nostalgia, but I think that there are things that become less visible in a digital medium over time. Historiography is undervalued. Wikipedia is built around historiography, just because it has a changelog. This is again about systems exposing their workings. The way it works best is when you make something relevant and “human-scale”. In one sense, Wikipedia's historiography is complete: it's every change, ever. In another sense, it's totally incomprehensible. James's book of Wikipedia's Iraq war changelog shows this. It's 14 volumes. You scale it to every article, and realise that you can no longer contain it in your head. It's about finding ways to make these changes over time visible and valuable. I talked about this recently: human-scale data.
It's putting things in places where people understand them, such as no rule as to when your friends “expire”, but just sorting them in that way, and that paying attention to them moves them back up the list. That's how communication works – people can feel forgotten. This is much more relevant than having all of the data, all of the time. Digital photographs curling up has a little bit of analogue nostalgia about it, but it is understandable. It explains that one photograph is older than another, as opposed to looking at a directory and seeing 20,000 timestamps. You forget as to whether six months was a long time ago, or not. Some things seem very vivid, some seem very far away. It's a very personal thing. Finding ways to make age understandable at a very human level, and adding a little bit of friction without adding total bewilderment, is a good way to go.
FR: PhotoJojo sends you your own photographs from a year ago. It's not an arbitrary amount of time. It's the same amount of time, every time. You look back at summer photographs in the summer, and so on. Two years seems like an interesting amount of time. There's that boundary of some things you remember, and some which are yonks away.
TA: I love that service. It makes your own history visible to you, in a way which you understand. It's yours, and you get to feel what that period of time feels like. It slots itself into your email. It's a great example.
FR: It's very powerful. One of the things that I struggle with, is how you visualise that time. Generally it's just with numbers, and numbers are very difficult to understand, meaningfully. We're just getting started [with this concept].
Competing with random people seems boring.
Frankie Roberto
In our earlier conversations, Tom mentioned an “increasingly lousy gamification” of things. Could you expand on that?
TA: The last three events that I have been to, all had gamification – using that word, specifically. It now appears to be an open joke. It's the keyword for a laugh. It's not a very good word; it's an unpleasant portmanteau word to begin with. It doesn't represent a very good thing, as it assumes that some magic turns what wasn't a game, into a game – or you add gaming qualities into something to turn it into a game. At Playful, Margaret Robertson called this “Pointification”, because it's not adding anything to do with games, such as rules and mechanics. It's just adding metrics – physical trappings, and badges. These points are very aesthetic. They are based on surface detail.
I would have less of a problem with people making things like games, if they didn't do it so badly, and so crassly. There are things that work well, but consider that we have had numbers and metrics for a long time, and never had to call it “gamification”. Weight Watchers really has been working for fifty years, and in one sense it's gamification all the way down, but it's not. It's just a helpful way of explaining what weight loss feels like, with a feedback loop, some metrics, and numbers which are understandable, and non-scientific. As Frankie has been talking about, there's friction in there too. Right now, it's easy to make cheap shots at gamification, because there are a lot of terrible examples of it. There are also some things where if we were not to use that word, that they weren't trying to be games in the first place.
Nike Plus, for example, is great, but it's not a game. It's social, it's competitive, there are numbers, but the act is based on exercise with a social component. If we don't call it gamification, then we say that Nike Plus is simply very impressive – but not everything has to be Nike Plus. Certainly, anything which is Nike Plus-ified doesn't turn it into a game, because Nike Plus isn't a game. Whilst I don't agree with it, and I'm not even sure that gamification is a real thing, I think that it's a bunch of possible similarities that someone gave a name to.
I also don't think that we should dismiss this a running gag, because there is a failure in the misunderstanding of designers, in talking about games: knowing what they are, learning from them, and knowing what the feedback loops are that people like, regardless of whether they are games or not. Some frictionless things are very satisfying and rewarding, but they are not a game. We need to back off. It's an easy target. A bit of perspective will give us ways to talk about gamification, to understand it, and get over the hype. Ideas should not be running jokes at conferences.
FR: I don't play games very much, so in my mind gamification is about applying a set of behaviours. Those behaviours work. Having points, leaderboards, and metrics can be fairly dull, and I don't like competing with people in that way. Competing with random people seems boring. From a personal perspective, the desire to collect things is often tied up with gamification, but it has been around for a lot longer. People have a desire to collect things, and it's not about gaming, and it's not about rules. The desire is to have things which are similar but different, and to have as many of those as possible. You see it done badly. At Christmas, where you see those part-work magazines, split up into 24 or even a hundred chapters, with the desire to collect them all, and have something complete at the end of it. Even though it seems silly and trivial, there's a really powerful desire there. It can be done well, and it can be done badly.
Tom is Creative Technologist at design and network consultancy BERG. Frankie is Interaction and Experience Designer at Rattle, a research and development agency for social technologies. Both Tom and Frankie are speaking at Interesting North, which takes place on 13 November. For further information and to book, visit interestingnorth.com.
