It is said that when Singapore was building the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) in the mid-eighties, the then-Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew consulted the highly respectable Venerable Hong Chuan about the plan. The latter warned that the tunnelings would severely damage the excellent fengshui of the island, and the only solution was to ensure all Singaporeans carry a bagua (octagon diagram) with them.
But this was impossible among the different races and religions, so PM Lee thought of an excellent idea: to design the new $1 coin with the shape of a bagua, so that it would be carried by all Singaporeans.
This urban legend was made believable due to the coincidence of the timings: The new $1 coin was launched in September 1987, just two months before MRT began its first operation.
A further addition to the rumour was the road tax label, also in the shape of an octagon, which means every car on the roads of Singapore would be carrying a bagua too.

I’d heard that the shape of the dollar coin was intended to give everyone a bagua to carry, but it never occurred to me to wonder what sort of geomantic effect building an MRT system would have. Fascinating.

Related: Geoffrey West on using complexity theory to consider cities as organisms, and Grant Morrison’s city-virus:

No one’s really sure where it came from or who brought it to us, but like all viral organisms, its one directive is to use up all available resources in producing copies of itself. More and more copies until there’s no raw material left and the host-body, overwhelmed, can only die. The cities want us to become good builders. Eventually, we’ll build rockets and carry the virus to other worlds.

Not being able to tell the difference between reality and manipulated experiences isn’t just about being able to spot photoshop tricks or video manipulation, it’s when people start to ape the facial tics and artificial physical gestures of people – models, actors, people who need to fake enthusiasm and engagement – in the same media that are edited so inhumanly. Not just realistic light and hair textures from graphics packages, but convincing mimes of limbs moving in a non-human way, with the arrested momentum and weightless control of a Pixar film. I’d always thought that there were two classes of behaviour to think about, when thinking about real or virtual behaviour: people behaving like humans and computers behaving like things, But now I think there are two more classes: people behaving like things and computers behaving like people. The digital and the human standing either side of the uncanny valley – they’re not looking for a bridge, they’re making their way down the side to meet halfway.

Perhaps in popular culture we’re already negotiating the sort of collision between human and machine intelligences that’s struck me before: in the linked pieces I (and in the second, me and Keri Facer) mention the possible need for a curriculum that helps us learn about and develop collaboration and cooperation between human and machine intelligences. But maybe putting it like this betrays my limited perspective: maybe by the time that kind of curriculum comes around the gap it’s bridging won’t be apparent to anyone.

This will have to affect the way we work. Offices are organised around sitting, finding places for workers to sit, finding places for guests to sit: whole industries revolve around making things that can be accessed from a sitting height. Some people use lecterns or more modern desks designed for use while standing. To be honest, I can’t see how giving yourself varicose veins is a good alternative. Surely the message from this research is that your body needs variety and activity? Lots of small movements that keep your muscles alive and awake.

I saw a Kinect in use for the first time yesterday. The Singapore Simulation and Gaming Association held a ‘family-friendly’ event, which involved an Xbox running Kinect Adventures to occupy the children who had come along. I didn’t manage to get a go, unfortunately, though lots of people have already written about the uncanny nature of interacting using a body rather than a peripheral, and I’d love to try one. But watching it in use was fascinating, and I wondered how it would be used in a workplace, to move around a desktop, rather than a game.

It would certainly be one way to reconcile the need to do work with the need to avoid sitting. It might be expected that it would also reveal certain patterns in our work, through making certain sets of muscles ache more than others. This would be interesting and revealing in itself, of course. But perhaps this new source of fatigue could be used to add a layer to our digital work that isn’t always present?

The metaphor of the desktop, with its files and folders, might be extended through modelling the degree of resistance involved in moving a certain file or performing a particular operation – that is, files would not only have content but weight. Some files could be harder to move than others, or involve more work to manipulate. They would have an extra dimension, becoming more than just equivalent white rectangles with a pixellated drop-shadow. Some files could be sent careening around the desktop with a flick of the wrist, while others might need a solid shove from the core. Maybe this isn’t exactly “weight”, but it’s something quite a lot like it.

How could this be used to communicate more information about them? One immediate choice might be to link filesize to resistance: the larger the file, the heavier it is. There’s something appealing about this, turning a digital property into a physical one. Deleting an old todo-list would be an easier job than pulling photographs off a camera. But it seems unfair, in some ways, to give these files this extra depth without seeing it as a cost to the person moving them around. If file-weight is going to make it harder to do certain jobs, wouldn’t it be more interesting to make this meaningful in the context of the person who’s doing them?

A get-things-done fan or efficiency hacker might see value in making the unappealing jobs light and the potential distractions heavy, so a timesheet could be handled with the same aplomb and dexterity as a sheet of origami paper, while Solitaire or timesink URLs might be dauntingly immobile. I’m sure this sort of self-management would be useful, at least until muscles developed sufficiently. But, to me, it’s more interesting to think about how the meaning of documents could be made tangible through their weight. It should be harder to fling around a will or a contract than a do-list or an IM chat. I have a hunch that I’d treat a heavy text with more respect when contributing to it than I would something flimsy and weightless. There’s a cultural history to access in support of this: we’re used to thinking about lightweight articles or weighty tomes. And there’s something appealing about making an insubstantial property more real, acknowledging that this invisible object has a proper presence and meaning in the world.

There are different ways of determining an object’s worth or meaning, of course, and the way this should relate to its perceived weight. People could decide for themselves, setting it to the degree they felt appropriate. This sounds like extra housework, though, and not the sort of extra work that could be made more than a chore. Perhaps some set of algorithms could look at the file, compare it to the files it came in with, relate this to what it knows about the relationship between senders, check it for keywords, decide where it stands in comparison to documents that have been weighted already, and so on, before assigning it a preliminary weight for people to tweak later. That would be more useful, though it risks setting expectations wrongly, I suppose, with people anticipating a document of little importance paying less attention to something that’s worth more of their time. Whichever way is chosen, it would need to look outside the operating system somehow, examining accompanying messages from the real world, to make sure that the object’s real, social worth was being addressed.

Once people start sending each other documents that can be weighted, of course, we could expect a rapid escalation in heavy files, in the same way that flags and “important!” checkboxes are abused and meaningless right now. Heaving a massive file out of an inbox only to discover an injuction on certain foods being stored in the office fridge would become tedious very quickly, and once the connection between weight and meaning is broken the whole exercise would become worthless. Letting other people influence the weight of a document might culminate in simple but effective denial-of-service attacks, in which users are left frustratedly pawing at gigantic files that block access to the desktop as effectively as a mine collapse. Perhaps weight should be accreted to documents gradually and automatically, reflecting the way they become meaningful. Early versions would seem insubstantial, while later revisions seem overloaded and too troublesome to engage with fully: there would be a brief period when a document is weighty enough to seem worth taking seriously but not yet unmanageable and weighed down by an accumulation of commentary.

All this would slowly change the way office work is conducted and perhaps even what we understand a digital document to be. Bold hopes, perhaps. But perhaps the boldest hope would be that this Sisyphyean struggle to shift a never-ending stream of digital boulders from one virtual place to another might be enough to persuade people to choose to move outside, away from the computer, and leave their humanoid robot to plough the digital fields on their behalf.

Recently I keep coming across things (articles, posts) like this, in which people suggest that we could use points and progress bars to help children (never adults, strangely) learn better. People who enjoy games, and have done so for a long time, are the last people who should offer opinions on how games could be used for education, because we’re the sort of people who genuinely like collecting points and achieving targets, and that’s what games have historically tended to be about. We’re an unrepresentative minority: everyone else has known about games for ages but as long they’ve been about points chosen not to join in. If games are going to be used meaningfully in education we’ve got to work out how else they might motivate people, beyond simplistic behaviourist approaches.

“…I had often seen one placed at the end of a road on a hillock, and in the light of the sun its black arms, bending in every direction, always reminded me of the claws of an immense beetle, and I assure you it was never without emotion that I gazed on it, for I could not help thinking how wonderful it was that these various signs should be made to cleave the air with such precision as to convey to the distance of three hundred leagues the ideas and wishes of a man sitting at a table at one end of the line to another man similarly placed at the opposite extremity, and all this effected by a simple act of volition on the part of the sender of the message. I began to think of genii, sylphs, gnomes, in short, of all the ministers of the occult sciences, until I laughed aloud at the freaks of my own imagination. Now, it never occurred to me to wish for a nearer inspection of these large insects, with their long black claws, for I always feared to find under their stone wings some little human genius fagged to death with cabals, factions, and government intrigues. But one fine day I learned that the mover of this telegraph was only a poor wretch, hired for twelve hundred francs a year, and employed all day, not in studying the heavens like an astronomer, or in gazing on the water like an angler, or even in enjoying the privilege of observing the country around him, but all his monotonous life was passed in watching his white-bellied, black-clawed fellow insect, four or five leagues distant from him. At length I felt a desire to study this living chrysalis more closely, and to endeavor to understand the secret part played by these insect-actors when they occupy themselves simply with pulling different pieces of string.”

“And are you going there?”

“I am.”

“What telegraph do you intend visiting? that of the home department, or of the observatory?”

“Oh, no; I should find there people who would force me to understand things of which I would prefer to remain ignorant, and who would try to explain to me, in spite of myself, a mystery which even they do not understand. Ma foi, I should wish to keep my illusions concerning insects unimpaired; it is quite enough to have those dissipated which I had formed of my fellow-creatures. I shall, therefore, not visit either of these telegraphs, but one in the open country where I shall find a good-natured simpleton, who knows no more than the machine he is employed to work.”

“You are a singular man,” said Villefort.

Later, in a moment of pre-postmodern clarity, the Count strikes at something fundamental in the relationship between technology and meaning: “The moment I understand it there will no longer exist a telegraph for me; it will be nothing more than a sign from M. Duchatel, or from M. Montalivet, transmitted to the prefect of Bayonne, mystified by two Greek words, tele, graphein.”

It turns out he has a sufficient grasp of the mechanisms in operation to exploit a security weakness in the network through social engineering, using money and charisma to misdirect a vital packet of information upon which a financial empire rests – a “third-rate fortune”, unusually susceptible to such accidents:

“I make three assortments in fortune—first-rate, second-rate, and third-rate fortunes. I call those first-rate which are composed of treasures one possesses under one’s hand, such as mines, lands, and funded property, in such states as France, Austria, and England, provided these treasures and property form a total of about a hundred millions; I call those second-rate fortunes, that are gained by manufacturing enterprises, joint-stock companies, viceroyalties, and principalities, not drawing more than 1,500,000 francs, the whole forming a capital of about fifty millions; finally, I call those third-rate fortunes, which are composed of a fluctuating capital, dependent upon the will of others, or upon chances which a bankruptcy involves or a false telegram shakes, such as banks, speculations of the day—in fact, all operations under the influence of greater or less mischances, the whole bringing in a real or fictitious capital of about fifteen millions. I think this is about your position, is it not?”

“Confound it, yes!” replied Danglars.

I had the impression that these fortunes earned the scorn of the Count not for their vulnerability to the sort of events that get called “black swans” today, but for their fictitious nature, for being “like the locomotive on a railway, the size of which is magnified by the smoke and steam surrounding it”. There are lots of concerns I’m used to imagining as being particularly of our time by virtue of their technological or complex nature, but the little thrill I get when I see them reflected in a book written 150 years ago reminds me that “of our time” covers a longer period than I expect.

Morris Minor dancing

Wearing fake Morris minors (Bernie Clifton ostrich style) players reverse park, move off and negotiate a mini-roundabout (playing the part of a maypole, representing the sacred circles of a more pastoral England), to the sound of the pipe and tabor/picnic hamper, while a fool dressed as John Betjeman recites directions to the nearest out-of-town Tescos in rhyming couplets.

Tam Lin

Following the script of the ballad Tam Lin, players have to hold on to something they love as the opposed faery team change it into a roaring lion, a black biting dog, a black hissing snake and a bar of iron (or other modern variants).

Knights asleep under the hill

Players have to creep through the circle of sleeping knights, to reach the chalice without sounding the bell that wakes the sleepers.

Mayhem!

Players run through neighbourhood in spontaneous fashion, carrying flaming torches and hurling stones at foreigners. Winner is the last person hung at the county Assizes.

Smugglers Moon

Two teams, smugglers and customs, each have to infiltrate the other team by dressing in their costume and passing themselves off as something they’re not. Only problem is there’s a limited number of costumes, and they all start the game on someone else: your task is to persuade one of the opposing team to swap costumes with you, or leave them no alternative (bribery, threats of harm, etc.) Winning team is the first team to be swapped, at which point the customs agents (previously smugglers) arrest them all and ship them off to Exeter for the hangings.

Knights of the Conference Room Table

Players are seated around a circular table and each try to add an agenda point (recent decrease in chivalrous acts, increase in littering e.g. swords left in stones all over, lack of virgins for unicorn hunts). Winner is the first to persuade the anonymous Green Facilitator to call a comfort break.

Exscallybur

Find the lady hiding a sword down her tracksuit.

All yours! Looking forward to seeing the Igfest pictures, sure it’ll be another fantastic time.

Singapore recently celebrated its National Day: every residents’ association spent July providing decorations and bunting and exhorting residents to deck their parapets with ordered rows of red-and-white flags. There was a parade, rehearsed for weeks beforehand, and by the time it took place the novelty of the aircraft and the fireworks must have worn off, though you wouldn’t have known it from the applause. I really enjoyed it. Here’s a video:

(A week later they hosted the Youth Olympic Games opening ceremony. Watch the last three minutes or so: amazing set, Speer-like, shades of Metropolis, drifting in the half-shadow of Marina Bay, a place that’s no less artificial or considered than a stage)

This sort of thing is a reminder that in lots of ways Singapore is a made-up country, one created suddenly and with a sense of urgency only a generation or so ago. The patriotism that is encouraged here is genuine, of course, and there are very real threats to the island’s security which demand a sense of loyalty, but there’s an untested quality to it that draws your attention to the way it’s been made up, in schools and workplaces and televised events.

They make up other countries as well. These pictures were taken in the IKEA cafeteria, after eating meatballs and boiled potatoes.

“Dalarna. It is mythical. It is summer. Midsummer. An enchanting hilly landscape. A picture painted by famous artists. The sound of a happy violin. Folklore. Culture. Traditions. Bright nights. Breath-taking light. It is the most Swedish in Sweden. It is Dalarna.”

Sweden, mystical home of sensible interior planning and refreshing attitudes to public bathing. Of course, we do the same thing, and not just to Sweden: there’s a distance of a couple of thousand miles at which any country is more easily understood through the ways it’s made up than through any actual experience. People in the UK did it with various countries now in the Commonwealth, Americans did it with Japan, and now Singaporeans romanticise Northern European countries and the parts of the culture they like. The Swiss are used in a similar way: the highest quality butchers, embroiderers, dry cleaners and health food suppliers all have “Swiss” in their name. The British aren’t treated the same way, being a much more real part of recent history here.

None of this is a criticism. But all this making up other countries has made it more obvious to me how I choose the parts of England that I miss, how I make up my own country to be nostalgic about. Since I arrived I’ve been listening to Dave Swarbrick and Alistair Anderson, and to groups that imagine their own village more obviously: the Moon Wiring Club, Belbury Poly, the Focus Group and others on the Ghost Box label. When I miss home now, after watching other people construct their own ideas of countries, I feel much more aware that I’m missing somewhere I made up, and take more pleasure in populating it on purpose: old Children’s Film Foundation programmes, Greater London Council lettering on country roadsigns, AA badges, muted, textured countryside, Puffin books and Alan Garner countrysides, morris dancing, public works in rollling hills from Dacorum and Milton Keynes borough councils, long barrows and neolithic landscapes, greaseproof paper and boxes of orange juice, whimsical acts of principled civil disobedience, well-spoken male voices in children’s radio programmes, village flotsam from the Festival of Britain, electronic engineering, and further away the Channel and the North Sea and stories of smuggling and secrecy.

Modern social life is being dominated to an ever-increasing extent by a quality that has something in common with play and yields the illusion of a strongly-developed play-factor. This quality I have ventured to call Puerilism, as being the most appropriate appellation for that blend of adolescence and barbarity which has been rampant all over the world for the past two or three decades
Homo Ludens (1945), p205

Later, he describes “walking in marching order or at a special pace” and “the wearing of badges and sundry items of political haberdashery” as “puerilism of the lowest order”, before remarking that

We have seen great nations losing every shred of honour, all sense of humour, the very idea of decency and fair play.

He was writing in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, and not surprisingly was locked up soon after writing this. Seen from the present-day, a lot of his views seem reactionary and at odds with current orthodoxies: for example, he thought the 18th century represented the pinnacle of civilisation and that the Boy Scouts were a “great innovation”, neither of which are fashionable opinions outside the offices of the Spectator. But there’s something inspiring and noble in this way of calling the Third Reich uncivilised. At around the same time I suppose Wodehouse must have been mocking Spode and his fascistic Black Shorts.

Distinguishing between genuine play and things that merely appear play-like is still important today. I’m grateful that, unlike Huizinga, I don’t have to think very hard about Nazis. But there are still large parts of my life that have been colonised by political and commercial interests who pretend to a kind of playful intimacy — “My Computer”, “the Big Conversation”, the kind of copywriting pioneered by Innocent — and it’s just as vital to call attention to the false nature of this ersatz playfulness.

Russell Davies suggests we need to steal other things from games than leaderboards:

…we’re going to encounter a bunch of crappy sorta-games foisted on us. Those rudimentary game schemes are going to be rolled out by everyone with a rewards card, CRM system, loyalty scheme or something that can be plotted on a graph. And they’re going to be no fun. They’re going to drive us all mad

Caroline McCarthy on “Social-media games: Badges or badgering?”

“Game mechanics,” as this sort of points-and-achievements gimmick is called, is tough to get right: Turning everything into a contest may grab some extra attention at first, but it can easily veer into the annoying

David Hayward at Gamasutra: “System Fatigue”

Mechanics and meta-game systems applied to everyday life are at risk of being so repetitive they never achieve any kind of worthwhile structure, let alone a peak.

Brad Hargreaves on “Cargo Cult Game Design“:

Ultimately, you’re better served by building something from the ground up. Start with the basic principles of psychology and game design and build them into your product at a fundamental level. Otherwise, it’s just an elaborate cargo cult ritual that mimics the process but fails to understand the underlying truths.

And there’s a really comprehensive round-up of critical responses to Jesse Schell’s talk (the one that set me off in the first place) from David Carlton here: “Critical Compilation: Jesse Schell, ‘Design outside the Box’“.

Really cheers me up to see so many people taking the time to respond thoughtfully: makes it easier to make the case that games are interesting not because of the technology or number-crunching, but because they let you play.