Raph's Website » MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 2: Mobile Media

MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 2: Mobile Media

November 16th, 2007 (Visited 2575 times) Tags:

I am here at MIT’s Media Lab, at the Bartos Theater, attending Futures of Entertainment 2. I am not going to bother liveblogging the sessions, because the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium: Weblog is doing it already. Worth reading up on.

Warning, the rest of this is muddled, self-contradictory musings as the discussion progresses.

I am listening to the panel on mobile right now, and am struck by how little the phone capabilities come up. The panel has folks from Yahoo, Turner, MTV, and the Media Lab on it. And it’s interesting to see the gap between some of the panelists. MTV is talking about how to push content, and the need to create it first for mobile, and migrate it elsewhere, essentially granting mobile respect as a platform in its own right. Yahoo is basically talking about the reverse; what is of great interest to them is the fact that mobile is creating effectively a distributed geocoded videocamera network.

There’s lots of predictable stuff about how the networks here are a big part of the problem, about the merits and disadvantages of walled gardens, about how interface differences between mobile devices and the Internet make “just put the Web on the phone” hard, and about how far behind the US is in both the tech and the business models. That’s not what is interesting to me… what’s kind of fascinating is seeing the wrestling with what the platform actually is.

Broadcast? Input device? Truly interactive? Synchronous or asynchronous? Examples are mentioned of kids at a restaurant in Korea watching the progress of their friends towards the meeting place, in real time, thanks to GPS — and of Little Bush jumping from mobile to broadcast.

Seems like most media have a little bit of each approach, but they do tend to specialize into being predominantly one sort of thing or another. TV could have been far more interactive from an early stage, but it drifted into broadcast. The Internet could have been more about broadcast, but instead its DNA pushed it in a different direction. The reasons aren’t solely technological, I don’t think; some of it is network effects, some of it is about what businesses succeed early on.

Given the uneven distribution of mobile technologies worldwide, it’s interesting to see such an emphasis on mobile video, when not only do few people use it, but also simply dont have handsets that can do it. Worldwide, most handsets — especially the ones hitting in emerging markets — are low-end, they’re text only. Will it be the hyperwired mobile users in Japan and Korea who drive the overall use of handheld, or will it be India, or Africa, or inland China, by sheer numbers?

I recall being on an E3 panel about MMOs many years ago, and I got a question from some gentlemen from Japan about mobile MMOs. At the time, I said that they just didn’t make sense, which got me a lot of glares and head-shaking from pretty much all the folks in Asia. Part of the reason I said they didn’t make sense was the switch from a mic-centric to a screen-centric experience: having to switch from holding the phone at arm’s length, to put it it to the ear. Well, a few years later, the dominant mode of phone interaction is to have a Lobot-like earpiece, and making the phone very much screen-centric, and my objection looks silly.

And yet… MMOs on phones still only make marginal sense, and it’s still because of context switching. In fact, context switching may be the defining characteristic of the modern mobile device. Switch from slightly subpar voice to text, from awkward text to a map, from an illegible map to a videocamera, from a crappy vidcam to still photos, from blurry still photos to a GPS… at each of these tasks, the dedicated devices are superior. But the mobile device is good enough for most people. As more things, like broadcast TV (currently getting stuffed into mobile phones in Japan, which actually have TV tuners in them now) are added to the device, it may be that mobile ends up being the catch-all, the generalist.

Which makes me think that probably as we think of things like immersive gaming in the real world, ARGs, massively multiplayer geotagged environments, and virtual worlds on the phone, there may be a dedicated device that does it better. Most of these other examples have been of migrating capabilities to the devices. But the interesting stuff that will be the true core use of the devices will be the things that arise from the device — and it will be at its best when the other stuff isn’t there to serve as a distraction, in the way that the best GPSes don’t try to also be TVs but instead try to enhance the experience of geolocation.

There’s also the fact that the Net is shifting strongly away from pesudonymity and towards real identity. Mobile is strongly titled towards this side of the equation, in a way that the Internet isn’t. What does that means for virtual worlds, which so strongly reward identity exploration?

Another thought: software, like media, loves to just spread onto platforms. We now have TV ads on billboards, software in toasters, and so on. So it’s unsurprising that programmability and therefore diversity of apps is going to burgeon on mobile, and it’s unsurprising that media companies want to use it as a distribution platform — they want to use everything as a distribution platform. I mean, hell, they distribute media on the side of coffee cups. So just as we now speak of transmedia, we sort of have to think of trans-software.

And one property of transmedia properties at least today is that the various media that it “transes” across are not created equal — there’s generally a core medium and the others are approached, from a business point of view, as ancillary. One medium is the one where the core creative content originates. How do we think of software? Not that way. Is media getting it wrong in terms of its approach to transmedia? Should media be more like software?

Ah — the guy from Turner just said “voice is the most underappreciated part of mobile.”

[?]
Type in a relevant tag, and click the button, and help organize this blog's information.
[More Help]

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

FoE2 : Mobile Morning wrote on November 16th, 2007 at 9:59 am:

[...] is Raph Koster’s take on the mobile panel. Must say that I agree wholeheartedly with his assertion that ‘the true [...]

Adam Crowe - links for 2007-11-17 wrote on November 16th, 2007 at 4:36 pm:

[...] Raph’s Website - MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 2: Mobile Media “Should media be more like software?” [Commented] (tags: ac transmedia storytelling software performance media content code) Filed in delicious [...]

Reporting Live from MIT's Media Lab - AdPulp wrote on November 17th, 2007 at 7:46 pm:

[...] links to others covering this event: Faris Yakob, John Eckman, Rachel Clarke, Fallon Planning Blog, Ralph Koster and Media Maven. I also posted on today’s session at BFG Blog and put up a Flickr set. Posted by [...]

Worlds In Motion - What Role Will Mobile Play In Virtual Worlds And Media Convergence? wrote on November 19th, 2007 at 11:56 pm:

[...] 2, not liveblogging per se (the MIT Cultural Convergence Consortium is already doing so), but he offers some thoughts on the panels he’s attending — in this case, from a session on Mobile Media: …As more things, [...]

Open Parenthesis wrote on November 20th, 2007 at 2:56 pm:

Content for and from Portable Multi-Platform Network Devices Reporting Live from MIT’s Media Lab Talent Imitates, Genius Steals Fallon Planning Raph’s Website Futures of Entertainment 2: Fan LaborFutures of Entertainment 2: Mobile MediaMedia Maven Cult Media Panel Fan Labor Panel Fan Labor Part 1 Beginnings of FoE2 Media Is Culture and It’s Converging I’ll add others as I find them - or leave a comment. I’m using the tag foe2 for what it

Pasta&Vinegar » Blog Archive » Wrestling with what the [mobile phone] platform actually is wrote on November 20th, 2007 at 11:24 pm:

[...] the notes taken from Raph Koster’s thoughts at MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 2: Mobile Media, I ran across this: “what’s kind of [...]

Pasta&Vinegar wrote on November 25th, 2007 at 3:58 pm:

MIT Convergence Culture Consortium: Weblog wrote on December 3rd, 2007 at 7:57 pm:

at Heavyset. The mobile media panel live blogging from the C3 team is available here, while C3 Consulting Researcher Shenja van der Graaf provides her perspective here. See Raph Koster’s notes on the panelhere, while Isabel Walcott Hilborn provides her take here. Marisa Gallagher also has notes at the Digital Design Blog. Also, see posts from John Eckman, Rachel Clarke, David Burn, Carina Enbody, and Ian Fitzpatrick

Adam Crowe said on November 16th, 2007 at 1:43 pm:

Is media getting it wrong in terms of its approach to transmedia? Should media be more like software?

Software has its preferred ‘core’ run-time environments too!

In transmedia there is a story (’transmedia storytelling’) expressed in words. This is analogous to code in software.

The content of softwares are actions (run-time code).

The content of stories are emotions (run-time words).

If we wanted to get technical, the first transmedium is likely to be thought-into-speech-into-words or text, depending on whether the pen or laptop are closer to hand!

The ‘hot’ TV/televisual medium is perhaps the best in exploding the story outwards into the world. ‘Cool’, more intimate, interactive and immersive mediums (mobile and game devices, etc), are better at imploding the story back ‘into’ the individual and inviting deeper participation.

Interestingly, software doesn’t have a ‘hot, passive form. We don’t watch software! It is immediately ‘cool’ and interactive.

I’ve tried to understand both software and storytelling in terms of performances:

http://www.adamcrowe.com/2007/11/02/performance-venn

Richard Bartle said on November 16th, 2007 at 3:25 pm:

>I am listening to the panel on mobile right now

When I read that, I thought you were listening to a panel via your mobile phone. That would have been useful.

Richard

Morgan Ramsay said on November 16th, 2007 at 3:34 pm:

So it’s unsurprising that programmability and therefore diversity of apps is going to burgeon on mobile, and it’s unsurprising that media companies want to use it as a distribution platform …

I think the U.S. Army held an event where attendees could use their mobile phones to snap photos of bar codes on displays that would instruct some server somewhere to send them files and more information on whatever was bar coded. That turned the event into a game with attendees running around trying to collect the most data. Mobile phones as bar code readers is considered an emerging technology for special events.

Mike Rozak said on November 16th, 2007 at 3:37 pm:

Don’t forget the midpoint between mobile phones and sub-notebooks, UMPCs (and ilk). Yes, I know Windows-based UMPCs are a failure at the moment.

However, if you squint, a Nintendo DS is a low-cost game-oriented UMPC. How many Nintendo DS’s have been sold? Could you create a MMORPG on a Nintendo DS (UMPC)?

Apple’s iPhone and a few other high-end largish phones aren’t far off from UMPCs.

Wolfe said on November 19th, 2007 at 1:44 am:

When I look at mobile phones through a questionably accurate Chris Crawfordish model of interactivity I find their main weakness to be the “computer listens” stage of the interaction circuit.

Going on from there you can expect the “computer speaks” aspect to have a lot of platform development left to go through, the bandwitdh for interactively engaging data output from the phone is just too low still. The point that appears to be about fully developed is the output of sound, this matches the full bandwitdh of human ears already and is adequate. (If a phone sounds bad today its generally because the quality of the headphone earplugs.)

The least concerning stage becomes the “computer thinks”. But few seems to care a lot about that part anymore anyway.

When the interactive media suffer from bandwitdh shortage the experience will suck. But it will also drive the development of the platform to where it sucks less through iterative development over the years. The mobile industry will not go poof, so someday it will interface well enough to make quality interactive experiences.

I do however think its more likely that someday the Nintendo DS, or a competing ultra-cheap portable device will spearhead the development of interactive entertainment in Africa or inland China. If someone made a portable NES 8bit platform that can play the original game designs from the 80’s and sell if cheap enough you would have an interesting case. It would provide several orders of magnitude better entertainment for a lot less investment than what development of interactive entertainment “games” or whatever products the mobile industry is trying to provide for westerners currently.

The thing here is that those emerging markets dont have the specialist platform yet, so the generalist platform dosnt have much leverage or entry points to the market.

Mmm, now imagine a portable NES 8bit which can charge its battery on some solar power cell, with 10 of the greatest NES hits pre installed. The most important mechanical feature of that is probably robustness.

How many of those would sell in Africa?

Darniaq said on November 20th, 2007 at 8:10 am:

Carrier networks right now seem to be in a mode of justifying the bandwidth they lobbied so hard to get from their shareholders and customers. That hasn’t necessarily improved connectivity on phone calls, and as noted at recent Mobile conferences and reports, the Mobile Games market seems to have plateaued. So they have to find some way of getting those expenses back, and the next logical step is media (music and video). iPod is still a hard nut to crack, so video seems most promising.

But we’re still stuck in this stage of a lot of a good thinking. The iPhone could spawn enough knockoffs to fundamentally rethinking mobile device UI. The gPhone could change some business paradigms. Maybe this’ll mean a bunch of things. Consumers could be more interested in doing more than just making phone calls. A whole bunch of could/maybe/if stuff.

As to MMOs on cellphones, if you strip the game back to its basics of social character development, you can do most of the “Game” itself offline, with occasional server calls and encrypted SMS messages to central environments.

But I don’t think that’s the future. Rather, it’ll be the first big game to offer an integrated experience between PC, console and mobile that’ll justify followers.

In my opinion, anyway