From The Count of Monte Cristo (published in 1846), two passages which particularly struck me. First, the Count describes his fascination with the telegraph:

“…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.

I keep coming across the idea that games are informing the design of experiences that were traditionally not thought to have anything to with games, and there’s something about the way it’s expressed that’s been really annoying me. All these examples – the design of a new car fuel gauge, Amy Jo Kim calling social network one-upmanship “playful”, or the dystopian world mapped out by Jesse Schell at DICE recently – equate “accumulating points” with “playing a game”. And it’s just not true.

Jesse Schell should know better, actually: his book on game design is a fabulously sensitive journey through the complex and ephemeral things that make a game a game. Maybe I misunderstood his talk. But the thing that no-one’s saying, out of all the people who know better, is that games that depend solely on accumulating points are rubbish games. And there are lots of great games, games that inspire and transport, games that show you a diferent way of experiencing the world, that have nothing whatever to do with points. Points are for people with no imagination.

This is part of a wider tendency for people to overgeneralise when they talk about games, to take one part of it for the whole domain, to imagine that the part that grabs their attention most readily is the defining part. For a while now I’ve been talking and working with people in education who have an interest in games, usually because they see the way players devote their attention and focus to them and imagine that presenting their learning content in a game-like way will lead to that level of engagement being replicated. Frequently, it becomes apparent after a few minutes conversation that they think the game lives in the technology, and that as long as a screenshot looks game-y it’ll magically engage their students. They’re normally wrong, obviously, having never considered the structure of the experience, the careful thought that game designers (good ones) put in to keeping the level of challenge appropriate, or any of the other things that make games so much more than a mode of presentation. People who believe that assigning points to actions make an activity a game are making as large an error.

There are a few sources I can think of for the mistake. Firstly, it’s unavoidably true that points are frequently found in games, and it’s not unreasonable to think that they must be an important feature of games. Points are found in most early games, and when you’re working with a system as simple and limited as those early games, points are a pretty good reflection of what’s going on. There are only a few things to do, and usually one clear aim, and it’s easy to mimic a narrative by coding a repetitive mechanic, tweaking the difficulty and using points to provide a temporal structure (no points = “the beginning of time”, some points = “later”). Certainly there’s no room in a Pac-Man or Space Invaders cabinet for different maps, or new challenges. Points are good for keeping track of simple things, and when you don’t have many complex things they do fine. It’s noticeable, though, that there are fewer games released now that have the accumulation of points as a central mechanic.

The second root that springs to mind is the construction “to game”, in the sense of someone “gaming the system”. Huizinga offers a fascinating exploration of the etymology of play-related words like “game” in Homo Ludens, which makes clear that these words have a complex lineage, and the long history and central importance of our oldest parts of language can lead to misleading similarities. In short, where attributes are ranked numerically, people work to make themsleves appear higher in the ranking through actions that might not be what was being assessed. That is, they maniuplate their score: they game the system, in English. But, although this sense of “game” is related to the sense of “structured playful activity” via the card-tables and stock markets of renaissance Europe, it doesn’t actually mean the same thing. I have an idea that the association of this sense with scores, tables of achievement, ranking and so on makes it easier for people to elide the distinction and think they’re using the same word. But they aren’t, and a system that can be gamed is not necessarily a game. Metaphor is slippery, and hard to keep track of, and here I think it’s misled some people.

The third factor that occurs to me is our deep-rooted compulsive behaviour. People are good at behaving repetitively in search of some kind of chemical reward, whether it’s hammering mistakenly at a traffic-crossing button, or checking email again and again. Game designers are well-aware of this, of course, and make regular use of the principles of irregular reward that keep lab rats pressing buttons and hoping for sugared water: will there be a fuel dump there? Should I try walking into that wall? Using this sort of primal psychology in the service of the wider game seems more justifiable to me, somehow, than basing an entire game round it.

So none of these are so very important when considering actual games. What’s worrying, what makes it so vital that we clear this up now before it gets out of hand, is that there seems to be a wider enthusiasm for turning a lot of our online gardening into point-accumulation opportunities. People have noticed Xbox achievements; we’re familiar with the race to accumulate friends or followers on new online network tools; prototypical gaming forays into new forms of media (the first Facebook, or GPS, or AR games) tend to use the simplest possible game mechanics in the proof-of-concept stage. These seem to help to convince people of the supposedly increasingly playful nature of society, proof that games have won and that in the near future all our interactions will earn points. And it’s this that’s so worrying, this idea that it’s right our actions in the world should be quantified so thoroughly.

Play is dangerous and subversive. It’s a frivolous, unproductive, trivial waste of resources: these attitudes have been around for a long time (though perhaps not as long as play has). But the last hundred years of industrialisation and standardisation have made it even harder for activity that appears meaningless to be condoned, more difficult to sanction behaviour that seems not to be directed towards a particular goal, more important that effort be directed towards a clearly-defined outcome with economic value. Numbers are a big part of this. Nothing is usable, no information is meaningful, nothing can be recognised or acknowledged without it being quantifiable. Turning human interactions into opportunities to amass scores is just an extension of this way of thinking: ultimately, quantifying our relationships with people, or our driving habits, is something that serves advertisers much more than it serves us. It might be true that we’re finding more ways to award points for more of our activity, but this doesn’t mean that society is becoming more playful. It means that play is becoming more socialised.

Seeing the accumulation of points as the central, defining characteristic of games means we’ve taken the worst bits of games, the parts that we’ve nearly grown out of, the features that speak to the least human and most animal parts of us, and I don’t think we should do that. Computer games originally used points because they had to: with limited memory and little experience in designing games, it made sense to use points. Later, points were a way to reflect progress in a wider narrative, a way of quantifying progress that acted in the service of something larger. Now, it’s possible to design games that offer reward and track achievement through more subtle means than numbers. Chasing numbers is dehumanising and humiliating. Now computers have grown out of having to use scores to track our progress, shouldn’t we?

I’m trying out Chrome for a bit, and liking it enough to get over my dislike of using products from the Man: it’s clean and fast, and seems to do everything I ask it well. It’s like a web butler. But one of the things I’ve noticed about it is that its default homepage is changing the way I browse.

Like Opera, the homepage has nine slots in it, for screenshots of pages you find useful so you can click on them and get going. I like it in Opera, and thought quite hard about which sites I wanted to include (mail and twitter, obviously, and this blog, and work webmail, and a couple of other things). But in Chrome I don’t think I have that choice: it looks at my history and decides which ones I like most.

And as a result I’ve noticed that I spend less time on trivial or just plain uncool sites, in case someone sees my homepage and thinks that what I like. I’m sure that over time my “most visited” will be a genuine reflection of the sites that are most useful to me. But in the meantime, I’m a bit disturbed to find how easily I regulate my behaviour if I think other people will see it.

The title is bigger than this thought: just want to get it down before it flies away. We can, with our location-aware devices and our addressable objects and our ambient interactions and our wireless connections and radio flying around everywhere, rid ourselves of screens and touchpads and styli and become the pointer ourselves. We can play the city with our bodies the way we can play a theremin with our hands: by being in this place and not that one.

When I was in Singapore working with the Zoo using mediascapes, I had a dream of marking out a giant touchscreen interface, with a start button and menus and buttons, on a football field, and using the software to let people become the mouse pointer, opening files by running across real space and clicking buttons by jumping on them (accelerometers in pockets).

I’ve been talking to various people about a game, Resonance, that involves arranging yourself in shapes with other people and casting spells using your bodies as glyphs on the nodes of the pentagram, weaving superstition and magic and the occult together through space and concrete. They’re not talking about exactly the same thing, of course, but Dan Hill and Matt Jones are lumped together by Bruce Sterling as being heralds of a new pervasive urban alchemy, an open sorcery revealed through lumps of plastic and metal. I’m encouraged by the sympathy between Resonance and their more thoughtful perspectives, but I kind of still wish I was the only person making Kircherian links between these technologies and older ways of knowing the invisible. I am rubbish at sharing.