Friday morning. Turned up late for a Kevin Warwick lecture, as tradition demands.

Icky demo video, very sensationalist stuff. Kevin talks about broadcasting electrical impulses from himself across the internet.

"Tonight when you're bored, get some very thin wires and try to push them into your nervous system"

25-30 minutes before an epileptic fit, signals in the brain occur which indicate the onset of epilepsy - so fitting sensors to the brain can have a definite medical benefit here.

Talks about cultured neural networks - biological tissue hooked up to simple robots.

Next, Holm Friebe and Philip X from Zentral Intelligenz Agentur on the topic work, its quality and its changing nature.

"Rules of working together professionally and still remaining friends": working in a laid-back manner using digital technology. They've been road-testing these concepts in their own company; this is an interim report. They've distilled them into 7 rules:

How do you integrate individuals with a strong sense of individualisation, who wouldn't fit into a normal business?

(I'm starting to have my "we're special, not like other people" buttons pressed. A bit like people who capitalise the word "creative" and talk about "working spaces for creative people" - imagination fascism)

Their business turns over 200k euros per year - so not exactly a commercial heavyweight, but living costs are low in Berlin.

Their name serves as an entrance filter - people who don't get it won't make good customers for them.

1. Start with no offices; if you hang around at the same place all the time, you won't be able to stand each other;
2. No employees, so no-one depends on the company materially;
3. No fixed costs - they only spend 15 euros on servers a month; this keeps you independent of clients and incorruptible - you can always say no;
4. No pitches;
5. No exclusivity;
6. No working hours;
7. No bullshit;

All you need is "a good name, a web site and some business cards"

(I would be pleasantly surprised if anyone made a commercially successful business out of this. For instance, I find colocation to be one of the best parts of working with someone - the random sparking of ideas you get by being around someone for the working day is where interesting stuff happens.)

They've broken these rules already - they have offices. "But they're not meant to impress clients".

They've set up a co-working space based on the commercial model of a gym.

Rule 2: engage in client work and self-induced projects with equal committment. Sounds lovely and I would agree this is worthwhile: R&D seems important for technology or design-based businesses (and probably lots of others).

Rule 3: instant gratification, distribute profits immediately after a job is completed. People need to pay their rent (of course) but I'm not sure how that implies this. They keep 10% of profit for the company to accrue some play money for their own projects. They pay bills immediately.

Rule 4: Pluralism of methods: find technical solutions for social problems, use online tools wherever possible. I know some people really grok this, I love physical colocation myself. They wrote their own collaborative editing tools and voting mechanisms.

Rule 5: Fixed ideas. e.g. turning everything bad and annoying about Powerpoint into an on-stage format. They pulled 20 presentations off the net and got folks to get up and improvise presentations. Another project: direct feedback for poetry slam, letting callers leave feedback. The poets were wired up to a current and administered electric shocks when they received negative feedback.

Rule 6: Responsibilities without hierarchies. Each project has 1 person in charge, but it can be anybody. People play different roles within different projects. At the beginning of the year they have a retreat in the countryside, plan out upcoming projects and the year.

Rule 7: The Power of Procrastination. Don't try to be too efficient. Good ideas will adapt and catch on, even if you neglect them for a while.

Rule 7.5: No PR, if you do interesting stuff the press will come to you.

Next, Mieke Gerritzen on different views on natural and visual culture:

Mobile network masts are being disguised as trees, despite the additional cost of doing so. In Dubai they've just built islands in the shape of a world map. The Netherlands keeps a country that's below sea level dry.

Nature becomes culture: every square metre of ground in the Netherlands is man-made ("God created the world, except for the Netherlands: the Dutch did that").

We have designer hypoallergenic cats on the market. Next year we can expect transgenic cats which will remain kitten-sized for their whole life.

Shows logo drawn on the wing of a butterfly.

We have a shortage of human organ donors. Shows artists impression of an organ printer.

The featherless chicken has been created in Tel Aviv. It's a more convenient and energy-efficient chicken to live in warm countries where feathered chickens have trouble and air conditioning is expensive.

Colouring plate for children showing the sheer volume of animals on a contemporary farm.

Edible packaging for apples. To help people get their 2 portions of fruit a day, they're growing bizarre double-apples. As buildings become more inspired by nature, nature is becoming more controlled by man.

Nature becomes culture, culture becomes nature.

Shows video about implants and the increasing use of them in medecine. Fictional story about metal implants growing after insertion - didn't we get this stuff out of our system with Tetsuo The Iron Man? Reasonably disturbing images of people and animals with metal growing out of them - wooooo.

Lots of assertions I don't get, like "science fiction is becoming fact".

"Second life is not sustainable".

"Reality and virtuality are becoming equal".

Photo of unborn child using mobile phone.

I'm reminded of Adam and Joe's "Goiter"...

Shows off skeletons of Disney characters.

First up, Robin Hunicke of Electronic Arts on new trends in gaming practices:

Started doing AI research, then moved into gaming, then commercial gaming, then.... who knows?

Early theories: people are fun, so if people make computers, computers are fun. But they're not always. Games *are* fun. AI is also fun (for AI researchers).

The Sims: fundamentally about people, simulation and AI. If you take something that's fun on the PC that's about people, it'll be fun on the Wii.

She then worked on BoomBox: all about smashing down blocks. Also involves sharing levels and sending them between friends. Sharing makes games better.

Helpful vocabulary for thinking about games in commercial or academic contexts:

1. Mechanics. Game designers love these.
2. Dynamics: when a player interacts with rules
3. Aesthetics: the resulting experience. Game creators "design" these.

A problem: the dynamics are unpredictable, and as a designer it's very difficult to control these. So you have to give a little up.

"Why kill games to make digital games" by taking away the things that make games fun when we turn them digital. Games like dolls, charades, tag, spin the bottle, soccer... some are exploratory, some rule-based - all involve groups and socialising. Games involve competition, mock violence, lies, love, family. Werewolf is a game with simple rules and lots of lies.

Game: start somewhere, do an activity for a while, get a reward and move on. Repeat.

Some forms of gaming aren't progressive, they're nonlinear.

Gameplay sits between "where I'm going" and "who I'm being".

Aesthetics from recently popular games:

• I am a surgeon in a soap opera emergency room
• I am a girl discovering her past, which is strangely haunted
• I am an attorney solving odd crimes and protecting the innocent
• I am a warrior in a war-torn land: particularly common!

Game mechanics are hard. Nintendo DS says "these games are small, but you'll have a different experience playing them". Simplifying complex situations into a smaller more accessible form makes them fun and magical.

Facebook is an extremely compelling game: chatty, slocial, automatic, selective, quick, repetitive, rewarding. Addition of friends leads to a reward.

The aesthetic of Facebook: "I am a person living a fun life, and I am loved".

Game design is an art form. Games feel good because they make you feel like your actions matter, and all apps can do this.

And now, Guy Vardi from Oberon Media talking about casual gaming:

Focusing on PC and online casual games with this talk. "If a hardcore video game is a full meal, a casual game is a snack". "Snacks are not dinner".

67% play casual games 4_ times per week, 47% play every day, 66% play for 1 hour or more.

(All biased by the fact it's PC, I'd wager - I'd be surprised if mobile users were giving games this much attention)

Given the cost of a working hour in the US, this makes casual gaming the second largest drain on the US economy after the sub prime crisis :)

People spend more time on online video games than watching video clips or social networking - though is this explicitly about *casual* video games? Lots of media are moving to casual content: movies to youtube clips, music from albums to tracks, games from video to casual.

References Kart Rider and Desktop Tower Defense.

Evolution of models: retail -> shareware -> online -> social networks

Quickly shows slide of game segmentation, which looked massively similar to some of the Nokia customer segmentation I've seen...

Next, Paul Barnett, creative director for EA Mythic:

Acts as a go-between between studio vision and production staff.

They deal with "lots of people online doing stuff". What can you do with this? Social networking. User-generated content.

Paul deals with "entertainment games that make real money", as opposed to some internet businesses. It makes so much money that they don't really understand it.

His job combines "History of cinema" and "vegas casinos". Computer games are not like the film industry, it's a lie perpetuated by the games industry wanting to be cool (I've seen a similar thing with internet and TV). Like films, games often go over-budget and mess up.

Cinema went through major changes - e.g. the addition of sound, or colour. At one point they thought colour might be a fad! TV was supposed to kill film. Movies flourish, despite all the threats technology has brought. Why: they had generational thinking (rich people who'd seen it all before); guaranteed model (customers pay to watch films).

Equate this to the games industry: they get 50 changes every 5 years, not 5 every 50. They have no generational thinking (most staff are newbies - the ones who are successful BUILD ROCKETS TO THE MOON AND NEVER COME BACK). For all the money they have and data they've collected, they don't know: what platform will be dominant; what game will be dominant; how to monitise games.

Online games are fantastic because they are fun. Single player games are pretty mapped out - we know then pretty well and the boundaries are set. There's much more opportunity in online.

Two game designer types: "experiencers" who can value and explain anything they've seen, but are lousy at making intuitive leaps; and "designers who design for designers", who are very clever and speak gibberish and make ununderstandable stuff. You just have to believe these people, occasionally they make astounding things but they're bonkers.

Casinos are heavily themed - they draw you in, welcome you, teach you how to behave, manage the casino and keep unwanted people out, and lead you through the experience. Casinos copy each other and change slightly, relentlessly.

Casino thinking doesn't work online because many of the ideas. How do you expand online gaming? Make the games industry less insular and inward-looking. If you want to be brilliant, stop acting like casinos and start doing new stuff - not copying and changing slightly.

Next, Bruno Bonnell of Infogrames about robotics and the leisure industry:

Spent 25 years in videogames. What is the next tech wave to expect? "The robolution": smart objects, a room in the house which can interact and deliver experiences. We're going beyond console+screen interface, but it's a long way away.

You want to interact with an object simply. The largest personal robot today is a smart vacuum cleaner - but people play with it. They give it a name, talk to it, ask it politely to clean.

"The computing industry is just the brain of the robotics industry"

Gaming designers had to reinvent themselves for new interfaces like the Wii.

Scott Smith, Changeist

Reference models for technology adoption (e.g. The Chasm) are stale.

Need more human and social stuff to understand adoption. Wants/needs/fears/goals vs trends/driving forces/events/black swans.

Every 20-30 years generations go through major shifts.

New trend: modal fluency: users go through seamless movement between different modes of interaction. (Is this really a trend... I don't see DS owners taking their DS play to the Wii, or online. And it's one of those things that's been mooted for yonks now.)

Apologies for poor notes, I'm flagging not blogging...

One piece of happy news which came through whilst I was at LIFT... New Media Age did a nice little piece on mobile social networking, and I was chuffed to see that two of the top 10 to watch are clients of Future Platforms.

Flirtomatic are now the largest off-portal WAP destination in the UK; way back in 2004/05 we worked on the first version of their product. Trutap are a more recent client; we've worked with them since the end of 2006 to design and build their front-end application, and we're still working with them on some stuff I can't talk about just yet... but is looking really nice. If you're going to Mobile World Congress next week and bump into Carl or Dave, hassle them nicely and they might show you :)

OK, consider my trumpet blown, that's enough :)

Drawing out some interesting chunks of today:

• I think most presentations have referenced or been heavily based upon mobile, much more so than last year;
• The idea of community-supported teaching that Ewan McIntosh alluded to (there being only a single reviewer of classwork currently, the teacher), harked back to Sugatra Mitra's work having Indian children self-teach computer literacy;
• I'm wondering how social software should enable lies (or at least plausible deniability) and how sharing secrets might be used online as a starting point to build relationships;
• Rafi of Violet's comment that "Fun and interpersonal communication are as powerful propositions as usefulness". I sooo need to get my RFID on;
• The developing world as an audience for mobile, strangely enough tying into a presentation we had from a client regaring a product we'd built recently;
• Paul Dourish on ethnography was fascinating, I'm desperately trying to relate it to something I could practically *do*...