Gimlé

What you make, what you make it of, how you do it are all comparatively unimportant when compared with why you make it, your reason for action. The final cause is the first cause, and the end is the beginning.
Eric Gill—A Holy Tradition of Working.

It was excellent. My mind is still overloaded with ideas, new thoughts and discussions.

Me and Tom Abba arrived a bit late on Thursday. Missed the first presentations and were about as attentive as roadkill as Satinder Gill presented her research on something related to bodies and how we bodily interact with computers (I apologize, I was rather knackered).

The lunch was in the Hall at Wadham College, which looked like something right out of a Harry Potter novel (haven’t seen the movies).

The official theme for the first day was “What Computers are Good For” and, sadly enough, judging by some of the presentations on the first day, the answer would be one word:

Toys.

We saw a mass of interesting projects presented. Colin Holgate from Funny Garbage demonstrated some of the amazing things he could make the stumbling beast called Director do.

Brendan Dawes, author of “Drag, Slide, Fade” told us how he first, at the beginning of the internet boom, inflicted utter rubbish on the net (and being paid to do so, the clearest evidence yet for the theory that capitalism hates the internet) but also described to us how his work and his company grew up and began doing interesting work.

A quibble about Brendan’s presentation: His dismissal of the usability issues Jacob Nielsen raised is a bit hasty, though understandable seeing as how much of an inflexible robot personality that mechanical Danish guy seems to have.

The attitude difference between the usability guys and flash designers seems to be that the usability group wants people to say things as clearly and simply as possible even though things might not look as good that way while the latter group seems to want to look as good as possible while saying the stuff they have to say.

I do think that Brendan Dawes’ assessment of usability issues in flash and his refutal of the points made by “Uncle Filbert” are a kneejerk reaction to the writings of a very boring Danish guy. Although the problem might have more to do with Nielsen’s insulting writings than anything else.

It is time to consider whether Jacob’s condescending Useit’s are doing more harm than good.

This is a minor quibble, to be honest. Brendan Dawes’ presentation was a long one and a good overview of the history of commercial usage of Flash as well as its possibilities.

If only the Flash 6 format didn’t suffer from patent issues (the movie codec is a proprietary one). Macromedia only has to add even the slightest of Digital Rights Management support to the player to make the reverse engineering of that codec immediately illegal. Throw the patent issue into the mix and you have a file format that is closed tighter than a grannie’s arse.

Issues like these prevent comprehensive Open Source flash support which in turn prevents computers like mine (a PPC running Gentoo Linux) from having flash support (yes, I am annoyed by this and yes I am severely biased against flash as a result, adjust your readings accordingly).

Toys.

The feeling of the latter half of the day was that of watching master craftsmen demonstrating their skills, which is a good thing. The let-down came when I saw what they were working on.

The dissapointment was akin to realising that the master craftsmen eked out a living by making He-Man action figures for eccentric collectors who wanted historically accurate plasticine twinks to be used as sex toys at the dog pound.

And the craftsmen saying: “It pays the bills so it must be good.”

Eating and having a roof over your heads has to be your first priority, I know. But it is a bit depressing, nonetheless.

Maybe the reason why the multimedia industry (or what remains of it) seems to churn out doodahs with wiggly bits that go blong when you bling is that interactivity seems to be fundamentally about play. Click, something happens “Oooooooh!”

If you’re not careful, the play takes over the work’s structure and your project turns into a toy. The nonfunctional equivalent of a game without gameplay.

I’ve seen dozens of projects here at the University like that, and it seems to plague the commercial world as well.

Ask yourself this: If your project is not a representation of some sort of narrative structure but provides some sort of functionality, shouldn’t it be written as a normal application and integrated into the user’s desktop environment?

And if it isn’t a narrative or a game, and doesn’t provide some sort of functionality, doesn’t that mean you’ve just made a toy, a non-functional game?

Maybe it was the toy aspect of multimedia that made the last presentation by Scot Osterweil of TERCworks so good. After all, if it really is a toy then why not try and make it the best damn toy ever?

A functional toy being a game.

Scot presented some of the Zoombini series of games he created, talked about some of the issues inherent in gameplay design and the values he and his cocreators tried to imbue the game with.

The conference programme says: “Scot’s computer work is a part of a wider vision of human dignity and empowerment.”

And it’s right.

Scot was also remarkably valuable when it came to the debates at the conference as he frequently brought the two sides of an issue together by pointing out the similar values that lay behind the opposing views.

It does make you hope that the games industry won’t follow the same ‘hell in a handbasket’ route that the comic book industry (led by Marvel Comics) has been following in recent years.

The last productive thing of the day was Christian Wach’s presentation of the project Football’s Leaving Home. Have a look through the website. The idea is remarkably simple and human and well executed.

The evening ended with copious amounts of booze being drunk, incoherent (mostly me) but entertaining (mostly not me) discussions being thrown about and good food eaten.

I probably managed to frighten a lot of people off the very idea of coming within a hundred miles of Iceland with my incessant yapping and my surreal and indecipherable sense of humour. Most of the conference goers are probably under the impression that Icelanders are a nation of drunken loudmouths.

That probably wouldn’t be too far off the mark.

Baldur Bjarnason,
Clifton, Bristol.