The Importance Of Toys

What games aren’t

Definable. That’s one. The world of media is an infinite sphere of infinite dimensions and within it, we’ve laid out a few boundaries and declared them to be meaningful. We decided that if you wrote about news we would call it journalism. And if you printed those words, we’d call that a newspaper. Brilliant!

Really, in real life, you can educate people about what is happening in the world in pretty much any way you like. A poem, a drawing, interpretive dance, machinima, an FPS, billboards or mime. And you can mime about anything you like. Drugs, love, bison, firework safety, trigonometry or the phone-hacking scandal. The need to put things in boxes doesn’t make the boxes real.

I'm on a horse

When you’re seeking to tell a story or play a game or teach someone or sell something, you can take pretty much any combination of things from that gigantic toy-box and make a new thing. Some of those things will stretch the words ‘ill-advised’ further than they were designed to stretch, but some of them will sparkle and glow like hot, buttered diamonds.

Furthermore, when you make a new thing from two old things, the old things don’t just suddenly cease to exist. Largely, media forms don’t change, they grow. When photography happened, it didn’t stop people painting. In fact it probably made painting a lot more interesting, because now there was another, largely better and certainly more convenient way of fulfilling one of painting’s original uses. Now painting was free to go off and examine what it was to paint, rather than do an eerily accurate copy of a big man’s face. This was good for everybody in the whole world.

What games are

So, that said, I want to talk about what games are. I want to do that because I want to talk about what toys are. My favourite definition of games is ‘toys with rules’. It’s my favourite because it’s short and it works. It also ignores the fact that toys already have rules.

oh god how did this get here I am not good with computer

A ball has the rules of physics. If you drop it, it bounces. It doesn’t have rules like ‘if it bounces that high, you win one billion points’ but it does, none the less, have rules. It has intrinsic rules, the rules that define it as a ball. If you get a certain kind of ball and give it to 22 grown-men on a big field, and only let them kick it, add goalposts and a man with a whistle and some casual racism, you have the game of football. And well done you.

The ball is a toy and it has intrinsic rules. Football is a game, that results from adding extrinsic rules to the ball’s intrinsic rules. So we can now say that games are ‘toys with extrinsic rules’. 

To infinity, and beyond

'I'm just a toy. A stupid little insignificant toy.'

This is how we think of toys. We think of toys as childish playthings. Toys are afforded even less social currency and clout than games, and games are rubbish. I collect games and from a distance they look a bit like books, so I can let people come inside my house occasionally. If I had endless shelves of action figures and toy cars, then visitors would either presume that they would never be allowed to leave or, at best, that they would never be coming back.

‘Whoa. Hey. Wait a minute. Being a toy is a lot better than being a...a Space Ranger.’

The thing is, much like gamification’s battle between intrinsic rewards (yay!) and extrinsic rewards (boo!), toys’ intrinsic rules make them fabulously good fun to play with. Game makers - despite being toy makers by default - want to make games. Often times, the game bit, the extrinsic rules bit, overwhelms that first point, that crafting of a supremely awesome toy. Again, like gamification, it’s concentrating on the extrinsic rewards (boo!), not the intrinsic ones (yay!).

Guess I got my swagger back

Toys need to get much more respect than they do. People shouldn’t be so keen to say they are game designers or that they want to make games, and should spend their time making beautiful toys. After all, what would you rather have contributed to the world of games, Zelda or dice? Grand Theft Auto or the pack or cards? In a thousand years, people will still be throwing balls around, they are far less likely to be playing Mass Effect 2.

It’s toys that make play happen, it’s rules that make toys into games. While there’s skill in both, making great toys is vastly under-appreciated. The battle over ‘are games art’ has been won and now they are. But if they are, then toys are an even greater art.

I’m off to change my job title, brb.

TV Platforms, Not TV Programs

Split attention is fine oh look a pretty flower

Recap. People do stuff while the TV is on. They also to do stuff while the radio is on. They have always done this. It used to be books and newspapers and phone calls and bare-knuckle boxing, now it’s probably internets. The thing that has changed isn’t behaviour, it’s the nature of the device that is distracting people from the telly. The interactive nature of that device means that now the telly people can tempt attention back onto their programs, and thus the delicious advertising that pays for the whole kit and caboodle. Two-screen TV is born.

Lou Dobbs, chilling out

As we batten down the hatches and prepare for a slew of two screen programs of wildly variable quality and vision, one of the many questions troubling those producing such content is how to deal with the issue of split attention. Even if your test subjects are engaging with your TV show, their attention is still split, you just have responsibility for both of the things they are looking at.

If we’ve managed to convince you to synchronise what you’re doing with your personal device with what’s happening on the large glowing rectangle on the wall, how do we then artfully sashay your attention from the small screen and back to the large screen? How do we manage your attention across two devices?

SQUIRREL!

Sometimes this isn’t a problem. In most interactive (the show listens and talks back) rather than participatory (the TV just listens) cases, it will make complete sense for you to be looking one way or the other. If there is a quiz, then you will look at the screen with the question on it, look at the screen where you input your answer, then look at the screen which tells you if you were right or not. That’s not managing, that’s just a natural result of the format.

If you are looking at a more participatory format, one where there isn’t a direct, logical reason to look at one particular screen baked into the format from the get-go, then things become a bit more complicated. This is when split attention and managing that split can start to loom large into the sights of producers.

"If we don't move, he can't see us..."

The solution here is to forget about guiding attention and instead to allow that attention to wander. The behaviour you are seeking to piggy-back by making your two screen product in the first place is that of varying, split, wandering attention. So fit your product into that. If people wanted to do one thing at once, they would be doing one thing at once. Two screen will be more about choice and variety than it will be about a carefully curated experience

Let people pick and choose what they want to interact with and when. Watching TV is a largely passive, sit-back experience. If you want people to move beyond that and actively get involved, you need to fit those moments into your overall experience in a way that lets them choose when to get involved and how to get involved.

Actually, you just can’t please all of the people, ever

The fundamental point behind this is that you can’t make a TV show or two-screen experience that’s great for everyone, because you can’t make any product that’s great for everyone. We are all different people with different desires. Well, except that one guy. If you want to make your show more appealing to more people you need to make it more different, to do different things and let people get to the world you’ve created in as many ways as possible.

What good are words when I have no mouth to scream?

Obviously, doing that takes time and it takes money. And you don’t have either of those things. This stuff should be a profit centre, not a cost centre, right? If you want to make plenty of content around your show, let people access it in lots of different ways and hopefully make money doing so, that’s going to require a lot of experimentation, a lot of up-front cost. So what to do?

The logical end-game for that line of thinking is to make your program into a platform. The big successes of our time are not products, they are platforms. They have APIs and they are open to other people adding onto them. Facebook, Twitter and iOS leap out as great examples. None of these companies make any content at all. 80% of all Twitter content is accessed through third-party applications.

Come on in, the water’s mutually beneficial

What is needed is a platform approach to program, to content, to brands. There’s no question that the more ways to access your ‘thing’ the more people will access it and there’s no question that doing that all in house is prohibitively expensive. So don’t do it in house. Open it up. Let anyone who wants to contribute to the world of your ‘thing’ make a ‘thing’ using all of your ‘things’.

Fascinating. Please, do go on.

By allowing access to the inner bits of your program/brand/content to developers and entrepreneurs, you’re exponentially increasing your chance of discovering really great ways to get your audience more engaged or engaging a new audience. Stop thinking that great ideas for your program/brand/content can only come through the laborious and arcane commissioning, tendering, pitching process. Use the good bit of capitalism and let the market decide what a good idea looks like, not a clever person in a room deciding WHAT IS RIGHT and WHAT IS WRONG. That person will never be as smart as everyone.

Not only is this shifting the discovery, the R&D costs and thinking onto others, it’s still letting you benefit from its successes. And via the power of the brand, it’s helping the creators get access to audiences they would never have otherwise managed.

Let your IP free. Create platforms, not content. 

On Telification

I am sorry I said that word, I really am

Gamification is great and all (it isn’t) but it’s all a bit yesterdays news, don’t you think? ‘I remember gamification’ say the elder statesmen of the media world ‘and it was rubbish’ they continue.

Well the problem with it was that it had precisely fuck all to do with games. It was, as Margaret Robertson so eloquently put it, pointsification. Shaving the most insignificant layer of fluff from the exposed flanks of gaming’s prone body and magically exchanging the meaningless word gamification for the meaningless word engagement.

Do you do group discounts?

Of course for real gamification, actually learning from games and applying their sense of agency, loss, learning and self-improvement to anything that stays still long enough, the future is as rosy as it ever was. Those that really understand games are still rare, but they get less rare by the day and their influence will be felt everywhere. Gamification is dead, long-live gamification.

And so to telification. Adding television-like elements to things that are not television. This one can’t possibly get wrongly understood, right?

What this means for television

There are two kinds of broadly interactive television, Participation TV and Interactive TV. 

Participation TV is where the show invites contributions from the viewer, but doesn’t necessarily give anything back. Big Brother and The X Factor both fall into this category, inviting the viewer/player to give their opinion and vote for their favourite, but with no guarantee that their views will be reflected in the show itself. The Million Pound Drop also falls into this category, with the playalong elements, while mentioned as statistics, having no effect whatsoever on the outcome of the show.

This can be seen as the gamification of television. It’s adding game-like thinking to television. In all these cases, the show came first and the game came later. The TV show is by far the most important part of the equation and the game-like elements are there to get the player invested in that show, not to give them a meaningful game-like experience. It works very well, largely because it retains the essential TV experiences of passive, sit-back, almost ambient entertainment. 

Interactive TV is where the show reacts to every viewers input individually. It reflects the players actions back at them and alters their experience of the show accordingly. It is a vanishingly tiny sector of the TV market, in fact the only example I can think of is Dutch show ‘Intuition’. (Disclaimer - we make this show) That is undoubtedly going to change, as more broadcasters decide to take a risk with shows that put the focus on the audience rather than the show itself.

"The Rubik's Cube Show" never got the respect it deserved

This is the telification of games. This is starting with a game and adding in the television elements until you have something that looks enough like a TV show to persuade a broadcaster to pop it on their channel. 

These kind of shows won’t necessarily make for very good television. The problem with making them work is that either the game will make demands of the show which will make the show suffer or the show will make demands of the game which will make the game suffer. Seemingly simple factors such as pacing will be pulled in two totally different directions by the need to provide a good television (slower) or a good gaming (faster) experience.

Getting Interactive TV right will be extremely difficult. It is a whole new type of show and the rewards for getting it right will be vast, but in order to do that, television and game thinking will have to be brought to bear in very even measure. Only teams who can bring a genuine understanding of television and a genuine understanding of games together will be able to make this kind of thing work.

What this means for games

But what if we ignore the television entirely and apply telification to games that intend to remain games? I don’t mean the sort of EA Sports presentationism, where game and TV producers are locked in a dizzying race to make the art of sports presentation so bombastic it literally hurts your face when you look at it. And I don’t mean the idea of episodic content, seasons of content, a ball fumbled so expertly by Valve with their Half Life updates that no-one even knows where it is anymore.

FACT: The Queen is a huge fan of Frankie Boyle

Television has three relevant strengths. It is linear, it is broadcast and it is passive. Games can be linear in the same sense that a single television program is linear, but they are not linear in the same sense that a television channel is linear. Games are broadcast in the sense that many people may be playing the same game on the same server, but not in the sense of many people doing *exactly* the same thing at the same time. And games are passive in the sense of having cut-scenes, but even those bits aren’t truly passive, as you’re actually mashing every single button on the pad at that point, to try and dispel their dreadful interlude. 

These are genuine strengths, do not underestimate them. Television, in case you hadn’t noticed, is a rather popular way of passing the time. How can games take these strengths and use them to forward their own agenda. How do you make linear, broadcast, passive games? And if you could, if you did, would you even call them games anymore?

I think you can and I think we will, but I don’t know what we’ll call them when we get there.

Telification. It’s going to be rad.

How To Learn From Games

The four games you meet in heaven

I’ve spent about a thousand hours a day playing computer games since way before I was born. That’s turned out to be quite useful, not because I work in games but because I don’t. Games have a lot to say and if you don’t make games, you can learn an incredible amount from them. The inverse is true for people who do make games, but hey, those guys are a bunch of nerds, right?

People are different and we can learn from each other

The problem is that there are more games out there than there are stars in the sky, so working out which ones can teach you the most is basically impossible. I’ve already played literally every game ever made, so here’s my break-down of THE GAME that can teach you the most, based on your profession.


It’s extremely important to note that you have to actually play these games. If you just read this and think you’ve learned anything except which game you should play, then you are an idiot. A big stupid idiot. Reading a few words written by another idiot about the most important games in the world is no match whatsoever for actually playing them. You spend more than it costs to buy these games and their accompanying consoles on lunch and stupid shirts in less than a week, so go and put the time in. In exchange, you will be hailed as a genius by your tribe. It’s not a bad deal.

If you work in education, play Way of the Samurai on PlayStation 2

Oh god just please go and play this now, oh god please. Way of the Samurai is half sword fighting game, half choose your own adventure. It’s set in 1878, at the end of the Samurai era. The fighting game is fun and the whole thing is very short. 

It’s arranged into areas and each area presents the player with a dilemma and leaves them to decide how to deal with it. Depending on how they react, the situation in the next area they visit may be affected. Because the game is very short, players can and will play through it several times, getting to see what the effects of their actions truly are from many different perspectives.

Typical Samurai dress circa 1878

The fighting bit is highly enjoyable and the desire to see what else might happen is incredibly high. You learn a great deal about 1870s Japan and you bloody love doing it. Go, now, play, now. You’re wasting your time if you haven’t seen how well this can be done. 

If you work in marketing, play Demon's Souls on PlayStation 3

If you work in marketing then you are interested in gamification. And, if you are interested in gamification, you’ve heard that games people don’t think gamification is worth shit. Well Demon's Souls is the game that will demonstrate exactly what they are talking about, and it will do so with utterly brutal efficiency. 

Demon's Souls is fucking hard. Really, totally fucking hard. It is a game about loss. About losing. About losing over and over and over again, until you win. And when you win, it is the best feeling since that one time when you smoked rainbows while having sex with god, dressed as a unicorn.

What is this, I don't even...

If you want to understand what actual games rather than the operant conditioning machines of Facebook have to offer your profession, you’ll go home and beat yourself against this game until you finally bend it to your will, by which point you will have become an immortal being, a god among men.

Demon's Souls is the opposite of gamification and will teach you more about what gamification can actually offer than any other object in the known universe. Get on with it.

If you work in advertising, play Ridge Racer on Playstation

This one is as effortlessly enjoyable as it is embarrassing to every single person who works in online advertising. As the game is loading, it lets you play Galaga, an ancient 80s arcade shooting game. You play for a few seconds, then the game starts and you play that instead. 

They don't think it be like it is, but it do

It’s incredibly simple and fun. It is the most engaging pre-roll ever made. Literally no piece of pre-roll or interruption advertising has been as good as this was. And it’s been there since 1994, four years before Google existed. Go, get a PlayStation, and play it. Then stop making pre-roll videos, start engaging people through engaging objects and receive a colossal pay-rise and infinite respect from your co-lifeforms.

If you work in television, play Final Fantasy 12 on PlayStation 2

Oh how I envy you. To be able to go back to a time when I hadn’t played Final Fantasy 12 is a regular subject of my thrice-hourly daydreaming sessions. It’s a gigantic, huge, sprawling epic of a game that takes forever to finish. It’s on a scale with watching the whole of The Wire. That was worth doing and so is this.

The reason is that this is a game that basically plays itself. You tell it how you want it to play and it does that. It’s a game that seems to take control away from the player, but actually gives them greatly more, by giving them a position as director rather than actor.

Owls are both passive and interactive

If you want to know how to do passive, sit-back, yet interactive programming, then go and play this game, then have a good long think. Control isn’t just about pressing buttons and seeing a man jump or an enemy die. From the lightest of touches in the rightest of places, you can give people an incredibly interactive experience. Go and learn how. Now.

This is the end bit

I’ve said here before that we all do the same job, that we all need to look outwards, not inwards. Well now you know exactly where to start looking when it comes to games. The time and money you spend on actually playing these games will repay you a thousandfold. I don’t even have a joke to finish off with here. 

Facebook Makes Me Like You

I’m just a big fan of a certain length of paragraph

So Facebook has done another thing. It’s made your history look pretty and let you share all the important and not so important things in your life more quickly, more easily, more accurately and more often. This is terrible news.

See, Facebook is the anti-social network. It concerns itself with the people you already know and the things the people you already know, know. You can’t make friends on Facebook. We’ve all got our privacy options cranked up so far, we’re not even allowed to look at our own profiles, just in case we discover the shocking truth about what we did last summer. 

On Twitter I meet new people all the time. I actively try to make new social connections with people who are interesting to me, and hopefully me to them. And it works. I’ve has three real life meetings in the last two weeks with people I’ve met on Twitter. This has never happened through Facebook.

These little fellows are Twitter

Nothing Facebook has added will make creating those new social connections any more likely. In fact the more data is there for people to see on my Facebook page, the less comfortable I am with letting new people see it. I don’t want to be stuck in my past, I want to reach for my future. You’re only as good as your last gig, right?

Two-facedbook

There are two more nefarious and subtle elements to the lack of new connections on Facebook. Firstly: sharing is boring. If I share music, by listening to music on Spotify, you see me listening to that music and you decide to also listen to that music. We sit there, both listening to that music. We were listening to different music. Now we’re listening to the same music.

One of the best things about the internet was how it let you be weird in private. It let you look at anything you wanted, anything at all, no matter how strange, unsavory, socially unacceptable or simply at odds with your carefully curated public image. The world had been a place of mass-production and mass consumption. There are four cars, which one do you want? There are twelve bands, which one do you want to listen to? Be normal, you have to be normal, we can only do normal. 

This man would never happen on Facebook

Suddenly internets! And we could do weird. We could make content that only a handful of people wanted to see. Demographics could diverge and home in, the logical conclusion being that you would see your own individualised things that were for you. A demographic of one. By making ‘social discovery’ so simple, we make homogenisation a force once again. Listen to what I’m listening to. Watch what I am watching, Read what I am reading. Don’t be different, be the same

More insidious still, the strange choices I do make are also publicised. If you know everything you listen to, watch or read is going to be shared, will you listen to things that don’t fit with your public image? Worse, what if you’re not sure if what you’re listening to, watching or reading is going to be shared or not? What when there’s a little voice at the back of your head reminding you that maybe all your friends will see that you’re being, maybe, not completely the person you claim to be?

Facelessbook

The second, yet more nefarious and subtle element is the feeling you get that you can’t be sure if Facebook is watching you or not. And if Facebook is watching you, Facebook is totally a snitch. A grass. An informer, a tattle-tale, a loud-mouth.

There is a kind of theoretical prison design called a Panopticon. The idea behind it is that the cells are arranged in a circle around a central tower. The guards look out from the central tower and can see into any of the cells at any time. There aren’t enough guards to look into all the cells all of the time, but the prisoners never know whether or not they’re being observed. The idea is that because the prisoners might be being watched at any time, they behave as if they are being watched all the time.

Behold the Panopticon!

Facebook is a social Panopticon. Some of the time, it watches us and we can never be completely sure when. Sometimes, when it watches us, it tells our friends what it saw, and we can't really be sure of that, either. And slowly and subtly we’ll act as if we’re being watched all of the time, because sometimes we are being watched, but we’re never quite sure when.

Who wants to live together?

Facebook anchors us in the past. It encourages to discover things that others have already discovered. It encourages us to find what it is that makes us the same as our friends, not what makes us different, and it does so while sitting outside our house in an unmarked van. Maybe it’s looking at what we’re doing. Maybe it’s listening to what we’re saying. Maybe it’s going through our bins at night. Maybe it’s not, but better safe than sorry. What goes on internet, stays on internet, right?

This image will stay on the internet forever

If this is a good or a bad thing is pretty much moot. It is going to happen, so how do we deal with it? What does it mean? The forces of individuality and conformity have been fighting each other forever, and surely this battle will go on for as long as humans are shuffling around, spoiling things.

Facebook is playing for the conformity team. You can decide how you feel about that for yourselves.

There Is Only One Platform

If you had everything, where would you put it? Everywhere

If you work in media, in entertainment, in journalism, in advertising, in gaming, in TV, then you work with me. You work with me and I work with you and we all work with everyone else. Meet you at reception in five mins and we’ll grab a coffee, k?

If you’re alive, you’ve probably noticed that devices are converging a bit. Most of the stuff you have is a screen and a computer and wifi and an input device. It runs twitter and you can look at cats in dresses and use it to buy a particular sort of hat. Your television might not be like that, but I’d imagine you’re expecting that to happen by about lunchtime. If you’re not, then look forward to a pleasant surprise at about lunchtime.

This hat

Convergence in devices is definitely a thing. The logical next step from the convergence of the device is the convergence of the content on that device. Of course that’s already happening. Advergaming and gamification are games nailed to advertising and marketing respectively. Branded content is video nailed to advertising. Behavioural economics is psychology in a bag with some economics. Interactive TV, when it arrives, will be games and TV, Social TV is TV and social networking. Everything that’s new in the media world is two old things falling very much in love, a trip to Vegas and the long wait for the stork to arrive.

My psychiatrist died. I don’t know how to feel about that

This process is not one that is going to stop. The convergence of things is not going to cease when we’ve added this and that together and made those. We’ll keep adding those together until we end up with them. Then we’ll repeat the whole process until, just like there’s only one basic kind of device, there’s also only one basic kind of content.

This is entirely sensible, because there’s only one platform when it comes down to it, and that platform is the human being. However you choose to get your message to human beings and whatever that message is, what you’re trying to do is get your message to human beings. Everything else is window-dressing.

Even I cannot justify using this image

There is one device, one type of content and one platform, because there’s only one product (or service). Emotions. When you make a thing, you do it because you want people to feel a particular way, think a particular thing and probably give you money because of it. What that thing is and how you make them feel is pretty much irrelevant. 

Let’s just be friends

If we accept that, stripped down to its stockings, the world of media is a bunch of people making other people feel particular ways for money - and we should, because it’s true - then we are on the verge of a rather smashing golden age. A media-scented Renaissance. It’s long been impossible for one person to be at the top of the many scientific fields, but it’s not entirely inconceivable for someone to have a pretty good grasp of pretty much all the major media forms.

Those people are going to make some goddamn amazing things now that canvasses broad enough to hold their ideas are not just possible, not just mainstream, but quickly becoming standard.

This is basically the real life X-Men

So whatever bit of media you work in right now, stop looking at it. Stop right now, turn around and look at any of the others. And keep looking and listening and touching and loving until you know what the other media forms can do better than yours can. Then stop looking at them as different things at all, because really - really - they’re not. I look forward to working with every single one of you.

The Revolution Will Not Be Broadcast

Children are different

Moshi Monsters is a game for children. It’s made by a British company called Mind Candy and run by a man called Michael Acton-Smith. It is a mixture of virtual pets, mini-games, education and social network. You may have heard of it. You may not. You should check it out.

It has 50 million users. More than half of all British children between the ages of 6 and 12 play Moshi Monsters. It has one new sign-up every second and users in 150 countries across the world. It already sells a staggering quantity of soft-toys, clothes, music and magazines off the back of its huge and highly engaged user-base. Its next project is Moshi TV, a version of YouTube for kids. YouTube isn’t really the kind of place you’d want to let your kids wander unsupervised, so Moshi Monsters is going to step up and offer their own take on YouTube specifically designed for children. 

I've had a great evening. This wasn't it

Kids already love YouTube, love the way it puts them in charge of their viewing. Pausing, rewinding, choosing what to watch next, sharing what they’ve seen with their friends. this is how children see TV, this is how they understand TV to work. 

Children are idiots

More than that, young children not only don’t understand why they can’t pause the television, they also don’t understand why the television doesn’t respond to them touching it, like the iPhones they get to play with do. They don’t even understand why they can’t move around the characters in their favourite cartoons, why the content itself doesn’t respond to their input. To a child, interactive TV - interactive to a degree beyond any adult’s wildest imagining - isn’t some future dream, it’s what they expect.

Now it’s fair to point out at this juncture that children are idiots and don’t understand anything. But the world they are growing up in is mind-blowingly different to the world even today’s teenagers grew up in. YouTube launched six years ago in 2005. The iPhone launched four years ago in 2007. Farmville launched two years ago in 2009. The iPad launched a year ago in 2010. The media landscape has changed utterly in the time it takes to make a child and send it to school.

This child looks weird.

Back to Moshi Monsters. It’s not a broadcaster or a production house or a company with any previous experience in television whatsoever that’s bringing that brand-new vision of TV to the children of the world. It’s a game company. They have yet to launch this service, let alone make it a success, but this is only one of hundreds of examples of non-traditional entrants into the TV business. And there will more entering tomorrow than entered today.

Children are terrifying

There’s a time in the future, no-one knows when, where broadcasters make these visions a reality. Between now and then, they are open to disruption. Are broadcasters comfortable with that? It’s not just the obvious giants that are trying to steal their cakes, not just Google or Apple or Microsoft or Facebook whoever. It’s not just the media start-ups, Zeebox or Starling or Tunafish. It’s also start-ups in the general entertainment sphere who have a lot of users and absolutely no pre-conceived notions of how the world of television works.

Children see the world differently and aren’t going to be satisfied with you telling them that ‘it just works that way honey’. That applies just as much to the children of the media world as it does literal children. It’s not the direct attacks that broadcasters should worry about. It’s not about Google wanting to steal your content and put their own adverts by it. It’s about companies not only redefining what broadcasters do, but redefining what content is in the same open-minded flick of the wrist. About taking the entire question, the worries, the concept of entertainment itself, and turning it on its head. 

This is not a metaphor and I am not the dog in the metaphor this isn't

The television program itself is as ripe for reinvention as the way it’s delivered. Today, a child will grow up surrounded by devices and products that are desperate to shape themselves to their needs and entertain them on their own terms. And the speed with which these new, user-focused objects are being produced is increasing, faster and faster every day. Today’s idiot is tomorrow’s customer. Prepare yourself for the rise of the idiots.

Mobile Is About Personal, TV Is About Shared

There are many iPhones, but this one is mine

There’s buzz aplenty in various media worlds about the power of mobile. But the power of mobile isn’t that it’s mobile, it’s that it’s personal. There are certainly a lot of useful things that mobile, personal computers - or phones, as you may know them - can do because they are mobile. GPS, location related offers and services, photography, communications, augmented reality. These things are big and real and will make a bunch of people quite offensively rich. 

However, the bigger and more relevant part of the mobile, personal computer space, is that they are personal and they are computers. There is no mobile internet. There is just the internet. Sure, you have to consider input devices and screen size when making a website useable on mobile phones, and the clever folks out there will add location based stuff where it’s relevant, but the real power of the smartphone is that it belongs to me and is just for me and I can use it whenever I like.

Madam, your pet dog requires immediate medical attention.

The television is not personal, is not mine. I mean, I bought the damn thing, and I spent the price of a shitty car on it, but it’s not mine to do with as I please. It’s a bargaining tool, one which features in regular household debates over the merits of costume dramas and property shows versus hundred hour long Japanese role-playing games and another twenty-seven laps of Le Mans in Gran Turismo.

I would make them eat each other

If I want to play GP Story or Quarrel on my iPhone, then I can do that pretty much whenever I want. And, indeed, aside from tube journeys, the only times I do that are when I’m trying to block out the needlessly jaunty stings of some hideously over-excited screed about how a working-class person has done up their bathroom. 

The television is a shared screen, and when you’re strategising around its place in the living room of the future, that’s the way you should see it. What gets displayed on the television is visible to all. The smartphone’s place in the living room of the future, the bedroom of the future and most importantly of all, the toilet of the future is as a personal screen, with only one set of eyes on it.

But what if Steve Jobs had been a cat?

When you want those two screens to be working together, you need to keep this in mind above all things. The broadly interactive TV shows of the future may well have several people in the same room interacting with them in several different ways at the same time. Or, they may have no-one interacting with them because the people in the room are arguing about which is the best ever episode of Bergerac or what’s the best way to murder Jedward.

I’m not going to keep writing just to stick to a format I invented myself

So those in the TV/games/advertising/can-we-just-admit-these-distinctions-are-growing-more-meaningless-by-the-day/etc businesses should remember that technology doesn’t drive their business, users do. The way a device is used is what defines it, not what it’s designed to do, or what it can do.

Owls about that then?

Your users will have to share whatever is on their TV with everyone else in the room. They can keep whatever is on their smartphone’s screen to themselves. The TV is shared, the smartphone is personal.

As you were.