Oh Internet, I am so saturated by you. Tuesday started with a group of blogging success stories, including a blog about celebrities and their babies and the wonderful Ars Technica (Google it, I can't post links in the first paragraph on this blog).
WINNING BLOGS
The panel talked about the slowly dawning realizing that you're a business, you have money coming in and you can support yourself on the ad revenue. Not only that, but you can hire people to help you. In the case of Danielle Friedland of the Celebrity Baby Blog, she could encourage her husband to quit his job and help with the kid. (Co-workers, understand if you see me less around the office after spending a week learning how to monetize web properties.)
Letters home
An even more successful blog (to these sentimental eyes) was T*R*A*P*P*E*R 'L*O*S, M.D. That's the blog of Carlos Brown, a trauma surgeon from Austin. His brother works at YouTube and Google and helped him set up a video blog before he shipped out for Iraq in August of 2006. Brown hit the sweet spot of maturity and the newness of the web - the army never tried to restrict his blog because that form of communication wasn't high on their radar, nor was he posting anything to cause concern to the folks in charge.
It was a pretty tough presentation. Brown showed graphic pictures of the injuries caused by mortars and Improvised Explosive Devices, wounds being washed out, clothes being cut off injured marines. Brown's rule of thumb was that anything he was comfortable with his kids seeing, he would post. I'm certain his kids have strong stomachs. (By the way, I just glanced over my shoulder and there's a guy standing behind me dressed as Judge Dredd - this place is a trip.)
It was emotional for Brown. He was cutting the same uniform he wore off soldiers who were outside the walls taking fire to keep him safe. The words caught in his throat when he described the photos his wife sent him of his kids rushing downstairs on Christmas morning while he was deployed.
It was a fascinating talk.
We're all going to be in the happiness business, and happiness will save the world
Today's keynote talk was the best of the bunch. Jane McGonigal works with something called the Institute of the Future. Her predictions for 2013:
1. Impact on quality of life will become the prime metric for evaluating brands and products (so long productivity and profitability!).
2. Positive psychology, a study of psychology that focuses on what makes us happy rather than on trauma, will be an explicit influence on design.
3. Communities will form around various definitions of quality of life.
4. Quality of life will be defined as a measurable increase in real happiness or wellbeing.
It's very long to go into, but she thinks online multi-player video games are great at making people happy. "Multi-player games are the ultimate happiness engine," she says. They give people a satisfying task to perform, allow you to be good at something, allow you to spend time with people we like, and let you feel you are part of something bigger.
She has taken this into an interesting new field called Alternate Reality Games. In these kinds of games, you are given clues online and take them out into the world. Tony Walsh, a Toronto game designer, described one that was organized around the upcoming Batman movie. One of the clues you found online would send you to a bakery. There, if you bought a cake you would be prompted to make a phonecall. The cake would ring - a phone was hidden inside with a text message on it providing the next clue. Remember, this is not the video of a bakery. This is an actual bakery with an actual cake. Sound fun yet?
She says being able to bring games like this into the real world would make it fun. Apply it to work, work is more fun. She thinks we are at a similar point of development as was reached in the 1930s when the fact that soap killed germs was radical enough to merit headlines. She thinks games should be installed everywhere, just like soap is.
Follow that? Take a look at Chore Wars - it's a game where people are rewarded points and powerups to their characters for performing chores in the real world. Parents take note, they may have succeeding in making kids enjoy housework.
McGonigal's own latest project ties in to the Beijing Olympics. It's called the Lost Ring, and it involves an olympic event that has been forgotten for 2000 years and a mystery that is unleashed when it is discovered. Over 100 screen captures from the trailer have been posted to Flickr, showing hidden clues. Check it out.
She makes a compelling case that this kind of fun can be injected into everyday life. Not that life should become a game, but the fun of a game can be grafted onto it. If you saw her, you'd believe it. She wrapped up her talk by doing the Soldier Boy dance. I'll post video of it when I'm back in Toronto.
I'll be posting more about the idea of Alternate Reality Games in the future (you're going to be hearing a lot about them). The key is the word alternate, as opposed to alternative. This is not a different world being created, it is an alternate way to look at reality. If that sounds a little new age, give it a chance. It's actually pretty grounded and practical.
